Poor Mojo's Newswire

But I do know the difference between the Tuaregs, who started the trouble in Mali this go-round and the Islamists (some of whom are Tuaregs as well) who decided to take advantage of it to push their own, very separate agenda. The Tuareg agenda is an independent state that takes in the vast wastelands of the Sahara, centering on northern Mali but including large swathes of-- at least-- Mauritania and Niger. They call it Azawad and declared it an independent state in April after they captured Timbuktu and Gao from Mali's U.S.-trained army. The unique lifestyle they seek to preserve includes their right to hold the darker-skinned Malians in slavery. There are hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in Mali, Niger and Mauritania who are Tuareg slaves. One would think that would be a big story in the coverage of a country few Americans had even heard of before this year, right?

But the West has had a reason for playing down the slavery aspect of the Mali civil war. From the very beginning they hoped to exploit the tensions between the Tuaregs and the Islamists and their two divergent agendas. So, no one wanted to play up painting the Tuaregs as slave-holding villains. The media is too stupid and lazy to report anything much more than what they're spoon-fed, especially from such a remote and physically inhospitable location as northern Mali. So, basically, there has been no coverage of slavery even from the most well-meaning news sources.