Tiébilé Dramé, a former foreign minister of Mali who was a rare outspoken voice for democracy and human rights in West Africa, died on Aug. 12 in Paris. He was 70.
His son Fodé Maciré said he died in a hospital from stomach cancer.
In a region plagued by coups d’état, dictators, state violence and armed rebels, Mr. Dramé staked out an unusual position by denouncing all of them, whether he was in office or out.
That frankness more often than not earned him exclusion from the inner circle of his country’s troubled politics, although he did have limited spells near the top. In his 20s, he was imprisoned for his views, tortured and exiled. He later became foreign minister, twice, from 1991 to 1992 and from 2019 to 2020. After the 2020 coup in Mali, he was among the rare political figures to say there was no difference between the ruling military and the country’s facade president.
Mr. Dramé followed the classic path of the opposition leader in post-independence African politics. He was by turns an outspoken student union leader in the troubled Mali of the 1970s; the founder of an opposition political party and the newspaper Le Républicain on his return from a first exile in 1991; a minister for the country’s northern desert areas in 1996; and chief negotiator in 2013 in a breakthrough peace treaty with northern rebels.
He was often on the edge of power but never at the center. And that was largely because of an independent voice that distinguished him from others involved in the politics of his impoverished desert country. Diplomats, journalists, rights activists and anyone seeking to understand the cauldron of West African politics through the prism of his native Mali sought out Mr. Dramé.
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