The Society for Threatened Peoples has called upon France’s Secretary of State Bernard Kouchner to come clean about the fate of two nomads kidnapped in northern Mali by a combined military action between France and Mauritania against the terrorist organization "Al Qaida in Maghreb” (AQMI) at the end of July 2010. "Paris needs to take responsibility for its actions. Human rights should not be ignored or otherwise compromised in the fight against terrorism,” stated Ulrich Delius, the Africa consultant at the STP. "Now is the time to prevent such attacks on civilians from becoming an everyday reality as they are in Afghanistan and Iraq.” Over the last few weeks the STP has given multiple warnings against the escalating violence in the Sahara.

This past Friday (7.30.2010) the families of the two kidnapped men filed complaints in Timbuktu in northern Mali. According to their attorneys, Cheikna Ould Bollah and Rabah Ould Bammoshi were kidnapped by soldiers from a Mauritanian army unit as it searched through a camp of cattlemen. This army unit was supported both logistically and with soldiers from France.

Because the camp, whose inhabitants were mostly women, was close to the site of an AQMI camp, the soldiers assumed that Bollah and Bammoshi were supporters of the terrorists. Both The family members and a city councillor from Timbuktu maintain that the 16 and 38-year-old men are, however, innocent cattlemen who have nothing to do with the terrorist organization. One of the men is the son of the wealthy and influential business man Noho Ould Ely in northern Mali.

Both of the men belong to the El Wesra ethnic group, a group of Arabic Moors who traditionally live northwest of Timbuktu. After the Tuareg and the Toubou, the Moors are the third largest ethnic minority in the Northern Sahara.

On Saturday the foreign offices in France denied the kidnapping of the two nomads and asserted that no one was detained as part of the military action.

On July 22, 2010, France and Mauritania initiated a secret military mission in northern Mali in order to release Geisel Michel Germaneau, a Frenchman kidnapped by the AQMI, and to demolish camps belonging to the terrorist organization. This action, which was not approved by the government of Mali, killed seven AQMI-fighters and destroyed a camp, but Geisel was not found. A short time later he was murdered by AQMI as retaliation.

Translation: Sophia Chambers