Neighbours hit Mali junta with border shutdown

BAMAKO/DAKAR (Reuters) - Mali's neighbours said they were shutting their borders with the West African country on Monday as part of tough sanctions aimed at forcing the leaders of last month's coup to step down.

Leaders of the 15-member ECOWAS grouping also announced they would "activate" the region's standby military force, but it was unclear when any troops would deploy and with what mandate.

The measures came as local Islamists who helped Tuareg separatists seize key northern towns over the weekend began imposing sharia law in the area, ransacking bars and banning Western clothes and music, residents said.

"All the diplomatic, economic, financial and other measures will be applied from today and will remain in place until constitutional order is re-established," Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara said after a summit in Dakar, Senegal.

The closure of borders will suffocate the economy of Africa's third biggest gold miner by cutting it off from the imported fuel on which it depends.

Mali will also be starved of funds from the regional BCEAO central bank which manages the money supply in the West African zone, while individual members of the junta will face travel bans and assets freezes.

"We call on the armed groups to halt their advance towards the south," Ouattara added. He said ECOWAS military chiefs would discuss later this week to "activate" a standby ECOWAS military force but gave no detail on when and how it would be deployed.

Earlier, a top ECOWAS official told Reuters Sunday's pledge by the junta to hand over power had been viewed sceptically.

"Captain Amadou Sanogo and his group are just buying time," Remi Ajibewa, head of political affairs and international cooperation at ECOWAS, said of a pledge to reinstate the constitution and hold elections.

There was no official reaction to the sanctions from the junta but Malians in the streets of the capital Bamako viewed the prospect of a trade embargo with dismay.

"It is a bit severe because the junta has not refused to step down. This is going to hurt ordinary Malians," said 31-year-old local Yaya Kane.

BACKFIRE

The main aim of the coup by disgruntled soldiers was to give the army more power to tackle the two-month-old northern rebellion but it has backfired by emboldening the rebels to make further gains in what is the latest security threat to a troubled region.

Residents in the ancient trading post of Timbuktu said local Ansar Dine Islamists, who alongside Tuareg separatists seized the town on Sunday, had declared they were in control of the former Saharan tourist draw and would impose Islamic law.

In the northern city of Gao, seized by rebels on Saturday, locals said Islamists were ransacking bars and hotels serving alcohol. In Kidal, the third main town of the region, one resident told Reuters music had been barred from radio stations and Western-style clothes had been banned.

"Ansar Dine people have entered the town and they are saying that they are now in control," a tourist guide in Timbuktu, who declined to be named for fear of reprisals, told Reuters.

"They have said they will institute sharia law. I heard that four youths caught destroying and looting Mali energy company property will be beheaded," he added. The report could not be independently verified.

In Gao, 300 km (200 miles) further east, food, fuel and medicines were starting to run out, aggravating a humanitarian plight that worsened with fighting that began in mid-January in a region already hard hit by last year's failed rains.

Aid agency Oxfam said over 200,000 Malians had fled since January, around half into neighbouring countries, and that the refugee crisis could worsen.

A resident in Gao said the town was currently under joint control of Ansar Dine and the separatist Tuareg-led MNLA group, and that some rebels were ransacking the warehouses of aid agencies including U.N. World Food Programme and Oxfam.

"They have destroyed everything including attacking the hospital where there were sick people," said the resident, who also refused to be named.

"The religious guys - Ansar Dine - attacked the hotels and nightclubs saying such places are against their religion."

(Additional reporting by Laurent Prieur in Nouakchott. Adama Diarra in Bamako; Camillus Eboh in Abuja; Writing by David Lewis and Mark John; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)