By Nick Tattersall

NIAMEY, July 15 (Reuters) - When Niger's Tuareg nomads first rebelled in the 1990s they won widespread sympathy in this poor West African state, but their latest attacks risk provoking an ethnic backlash with accusations they now demand too much.

More than a decade after peace deals ended that previous rebellion in the Sahara, fighters from the Tuareg-led Niger Movement for Justice (MNJ) have launched a fresh series of raids in recent months against military and mining targets.

The group has killed 33 soldiers since February and is holding dozens more hostage. This month it kidnapped an executive from a Chinese uranium firm, one of several foreign companies exploring in one of the world's top producers.

The group's leaders, dismissed as drug traffickers and bandits by the government, accuse the security forces of arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings and say they want a fairer share of the region's mineral wealth.

But many residents in the capital Niamey, more than 1,000 km (620 miles) from the northern rebel heartland, say the whole country is poor and support the government's refusal to negotiate.

"People are fed up with hearing Tuareg demands, with the way the Tuareg treat other ethnic groups," said Assane Sidibe, a state electricity company employee shopping in Niamey's market.

"We have at least 10 ethnic groups in this country, what would happen if they all took up arms?" he said.

When the light-skinned Tuaregs launched their 1990 rebellion in revenge for a brutal security crackdown by the black African-dominated government, the rest of the country was also in a belligerent mood.

Protests rocked Niamey as demonstrators took to the streets to demand an end to single-party rule and the Tuareg cause was absorbed into a wider spirit of anti-government solidarity.

But since then, Niger has held multi-party elections and civil society groups have strengthened their hand, even forcing tax cuts from the government with street marches in 2005 and 2006 as food prices soared.

Many Niger citizens are proud of their new-found ability to bring about change peacefully and democratically.

"I say this to the insurgents: watch out, the forces of democracy are not with you as they were in the 1990s," opposition parliamentarian Sanoussi Jackou, himself a Tuareg, said in a televised debate. "The context has changed."

POSITIVE DISCRIMINATION?

The peace deal signed in 1995 by a coalition of five Tuareg rebel groups granted more development for the north, strengthened local government and promised the incorporation of thousands of former fighters into the security forces.

The rebel MNJ says those pledges have not been respected. The region around Agadez, the seat of the 1990s rebellion, is still full of disillusioned, unemployed youths, awash with arms and largely beyond central government control.

But all of Niger is desperately poor. It ranked bottom of the U.N. human development index in 2005 and 2006, has one of the world's highest infant mortality rates and suffers regular droughts which trigger widespread food shortages.

Officials say some 10,000 ex-rebels have been recruited into the army and public administration under the 1995 deal, many of them unqualified, much to the chagrin of the country's estimated 80,000 unemployed graduates.

"In fact there was a sort of positive discrimination (towards the Tuaregs)," said Nouhou Arzika, the head of a coalition of civil society groups.

"But if the government or the president agrees to negotiate this time, the population will take to the streets."

Mohamed Anako, a former rebel leader who was one of the signatories of the 1995 peace deal, has called on Niger citizens not to assume all Tuaregs support the MNJ, fearing reprisals.

Although there are clashes each rainy season in rural Niger between farmers and nomads competing for grazing space, there are generally few ethnic tensions in the former French colony.

Intermarriage between Tuaregs and the largest Hausa ethnic group is common and even in Agadez, some Tuaregs have abandoned their traditional Tamashek language in favour of Hausa.

For some, the MNJ is fuelling resentment against a people whose northern region accounts for more than half the national territory yet who make up less than 3 percent of the population.

Opposition parties and even part of the ruling coalition have called for dialogue with the rebels. But with dozens of his soldiers still captive, President Tandja Mamadou -- himself a military man -- has showed no signs of agreeing.

"It is a humiliation for the army and in Africa humiliation is worse than death," said Sidibe, as market traders nodded in agreement. "No-one can negotiate with a knife to their throat."

(Additional reporting by Abdoulaye Massalatchi)

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