Alpha Oumar Konaré
Alpha Oumar Konaré was the first democratically elected president of Mali, from 1992 to 2002, a historian and archaeologist who had resigned from the dictator Traoré's government in 1980, founded the opposition movement whose demonstrations in March 1991 brought the dictatorship down after the army fired on the crowds and then, under Amadou Toumani Touré, arrested the dictator, and who won the election of April 1992 and served two terms in which Mali was the West's example of an African democracy: a free press, a Tuareg peace sealed by the burning of three thousand rifles in the Flame of Peace at Timbuktu in 1996, a treasury audited, and a president who left when the constitution said. He then chaired the African Union's commission for its first four years. He was born in Kayes in 1946, the son of a teacher, studied history at Bamako and took his doctorate in Warsaw, and worked at the national museum and as minister of youth and culture under Traoré from 1978 until he resigned in 1980 over the regime's treatment of the students' union. Through the 1980s he ran a cultural cooperative, a magazine and the country's first independent radio station, and in 1990 helped found ADEMA, the alliance for democracy that, with the students and the unions, filled the streets of Bamako in the spring of 1991. The killing of some three hundred demonstrators on 22 and 23 March brought the paratroopers under Touré over to the crowd. The transition Touré ran held the national conference, the referendum and the elections of 1992 within fifteen months. Konaré won the second round with sixty-nine per cent and took office in June. His first term made the peace with the Tuareg rebellion of 1990 by integrating its fighters and decentralising the north, took the devaluation of the CFA franc in 1994 and the structural adjustment that followed, and put Traoré on trial, commuting his death sentence. His second term, won in 1997 in an election the opposition boycotted, built roads and schools with the debt relief and prepared the handover, which went in 2002 to Touré, the general who had handed to him. He was chairman of the African Union commission from 2003 to 2008, in the years of Darfur, and has lived in Bamako since through the coups that undid what he built.
- Lived: 1946 CE – ?
- Nationality: Malian
- Roles: president, politician, historian
