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since low-ranking officers ousted the government on March 22 claiming it had failed to take action on an insurgency in the north.
However the power vacuum played into the hands of the insurgents — a motley crew of Tuareg separatists and radical Islamists — who have captured key towns in the vast arid north virtually unopposed.
As the ancient city of Timbuktu fell Sunday and the bow-tie shaped nation appeared split in two by the Tuareg juggernaut, time ran out for the junta on a 72-hour deadline set by its neighbours to restore democracy or face sanctions.
The 15-state Economic Community of West African States was meeting in Dakar on Monday on whether to close their borders to Mali and cut it off from the regional central bank.
The regional bloc has also warned it has 2,000 troops on alert for a possible military intervention.
The junta on Sunday announced various compromises in a bid to stave off these sanctions, which could bring the landlocked nation to its knees.
Coup leader Captain Amadou Sanogo declared Mali’s constitution “restored” and promised elections in which the junta would not take part.
But, the man who led a band of renegade soldiers who overthrew President Amadou Toumani Toure barely six weeks before he was to step down after a presidential election, also told AFP the junta was “not going anywhere”.
The swift rebel advance in the north sparked panic further south as some citizens saw soldiers fleeing their posts and followed suit.
In Mopti, a town in the centre of Mali on the road from Bamako to the seized town of Gao and rebel-controlled region, hundreds of people took to the road.
Amid the chaos, Paris and Belgium asked their citizens to leave.
ECOWAS’ current chairman, Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara, said Sunday he was worried that Mali was on the brink of being split in two. On Sunday, Tuareg rebels who in mid-January launched a fresh offensive in their decades-old struggle for an independent homeland in Mali’s northern triangle, eased into Timbuktu, facing little or no resistance.
The fabled trading hub — a United Nations world heritage site nicknamed the “pearl of the desert” — was the last major town in Mali’s north not to have fallen into rebel hands.
They had already seized Kidal and Gao, and all three towns had been heavily looted and vandalised, sources said. — AFP.
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