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264 CHAPTER 6The year nineteen hundred and ninety, the 12th of October at two hours took placein Tamanrasset: The closure of the meeting between the Malian delegation (fractionchiefs and Tuareg representatives) and the delegation of the movement called MouvementPopulaire de l’Azawad – MPA (not having any territorial demands). 23Placed casually between brackets, the movement’s envoys had apparentlywritten off the initial goal of the movement: Tamasheq independence. While theOctober meeting had been inconsequential, the Tamanrasset Agreement wasnot. The minutes of the meeting between Malian and Tanekra envoys, whichform the heart of the Tamanrasset Agreement, stated the view taken by bothparties on the conflict. Representing the Malian Government, the Malian Chiefof Staff Colonel Ousmane Coulibaly, ‘After having expressed the wish of theMalian Government to find a lasting solution to the painful situation, stressedthe necessity to preserve national unity and Malian territorial integrity’. 24 Theformulation speaks for itself and needs no explanation. On behalf of the MPAand FIAA, Iyad ag Ghali ‘accentuated the principal reasons that led his movementto take up arms against its country’. 25 Diplomatic and subtle, Iyad agGhali implicitly recognised that his movement had taken up arms against itsown country, a formula which placed the Kel Tamasheq within the frameworkof the Malian state, and thus abandoning Tamasheq nationalist separatistaspirations. If the initial talks between the movement and the chiefly envoys ofthe Government in October 1990 must have been hard to accept for manyfighters, the endresult of the Tamanrasset Agreement was unacceptable to anumber of hardliners. These hardliners remained within the FPLA. Confrontedwith this hard line within the movement, Iyad ag Ghali and other moderatescarried on negotiating under the name MPA: Mouvement Populaire de l’Azawad.The difference with regards to goals and means becomes clear from thenames adopted. Whereas the FPLA stressed its military nature by adopting theterm ‘Front’, the MPA insisted on politics and negotiations by adopting theterm ‘Mouvement’. The idea was that, eventually, if the democratic movementin the South were to succeed in its goals, the MPA could transform itself into apolitical party within Mali. The FPLA, seeing itself as a front, remained focusedon independence to be reached through military action. The FPLA hardlinersdeclared that they had not been represented at the negotiations at Tamanrassetand were therefore not bound by the agreements made.232425Procès verbal de la rencontre entre délégations à Tamanrasset du 10 au 12 octobre1990. Annexed in Boilley, P. 1994: 826-836.Procès verbal de la rencontre entre la Délégation du Gouvernement du Mali et laDélégation du Mouvement Populaire de l’Azaouad et du Front Islamique Arabe del’Azaouad à Tamanrasset, les 5 et 6 Janvier 1991. Personal archive.Ibid.