HISTORICAL DICTIONARIES OF AFRICA
Edited by Jon Woronoff
1. Cameroon, by Victor T. Le Vine and Roger P. Nye. 1974. Out
of print. See No. 48.
2. The Congo, 2nd ed., by Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff.
1984. Out of print. See No. 69.
3. Swaziland, by John J. Grotpeter. 1975.
4. The Gambia, 2nd ed., by Harry A. Gailey. 1987. Out of print.
See No. 79.
5. Botswana, by Richard P. Stevens. 1975. Out of print. See No.
70.
6. Somalia, by Margaret F. Castagno. 1975. Out of print. See No.
87.
7. Benin (Dahomey), 2nd ed., by Samuel Decalo. 1987. Out of
print. See No. 61.
8. Burundi, by Warren Weinstein. 1976. Out of print. See No. 73.
9. Togo, 3rd ed., by Samuel Decalo. 1996.
10. Lesotho, by Gordon Haliburton. 1977. Out of print. See No. 90.
11. Mali, 3rd ed., by Pascal James Imperato. 1996. Out of print. See
No. 107.
12. Sierra Leone, by Cyril Patrick Foray. 1977.
13. Chad, 3rd ed., by Samuel Decalo. 1997.
14. Upper Volta, by Daniel Miles McFarland. 1978.
15. Tanzania, by Laura S. Kurtz. 1978.
16. Guinea, 3rd ed., by Thomas O’Toole with Ibrahima Bah-Lalya.
1995. Out of print. See No. 94.
17. Sudan, by John Voll. 1978. Out of print. See No. 53.
18. Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, by R. Kent Rasmussen. 1979. Out of print.
See No. 46.
19. Zambia, 2nd ed., by John J. Grotpeter, Brian V. Siegel, and
James R. Pletcher. 1998. Out of print. See No. 106.
20. Niger, 3rd ed., by Samuel Decalo. 1997.
21. Equatorial Guinea, 3rd ed., by Max Liniger-Goumaz. 2000.
22. Guinea-Bissau, 3rd ed., by Richard Lobban and Peter Mendy.
1997.
23. Senegal, by Lucie G. Colvin. 1981. Out of print. See No. 65.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
Morocco, by William Spencer. 1980. Out of print. See No. 71.
Malawi, by Cynthia A. Crosby. 1980. Out of print. See No. 84.
Angola, by Phyllis Martin. 1980. Out of print. See No. 92.
The Central African Republic, by Pierre Kalck. 1980. Out of
print. See No. 51.
Algeria, by Alf Andrew Heggoy. 1981. Out of print. See No.
66.
Kenya, by Bethwell A. Ogot. 1981. Out of print. See No. 77.
Gabon, by David E. Gardinier. 1981. Out of print. See No. 58.
Mauritania, by Alfred G. Gerteiny. 1981. Out of print. See No.
68.
Ethiopia, by Chris Prouty and Eugene Rosenfeld. 1981. Out of
print. See No. 91.
Libya, 3rd ed., by Ronald Bruce St John. 1998. Out of print. See
No. 100.
Mauritius, by Lindsay Riviere. 1982. Out of print. See No. 49.
Western Sahara, by Tony Hodges. 1982. Out of print. See No.
55.
Egypt, by Joan Wucher King. 1984. Out of print. See No. 89.
South Africa, by Christopher Saunders. 1983. Out of print. See
No. 78.
Liberia, by D. Elwood Dunn and Svend E. Holsoe. 1985. Out of
print. See No. 83.
Ghana, by Daniel Miles McFarland. 1985. Out of print. See No.
63.
Nigeria, 2nd ed., by Anthony Oyewole and John Lucas. 2000.
Côte d’Ivoire (The Ivory Coast), 2nd ed., by Robert J. Mundt.
1995.
Cape Verde, 2nd ed., by Richard Lobban and Marilyn Halter.
1988. Out of print. See No. 62.
Zaire, by F. Scott Bobb. 1988. Out of print. See No. 76.
Botswana, 2nd ed., by Fred Morton, Andrew Murray, and Jeff
Ramsay. 1989. Out of print. See No. 70.
Tunisia, 2nd ed., by Kenneth J. Perkins. 1997.
Zimbabwe, 2nd ed., by Steven C. Rubert and R. Kent Rasmussen. 1990. Out of print. See No. 86.
Mozambique, by Mario Azevedo. 1991. Out of print. See No.
88.
48. Cameroon, 2nd ed., by Mark W. DeLancey and H. Mbella
Mokeba. 1990.
49. Mauritius, 2nd ed., by Sydney Selvon. 1991.
50. Madagascar, by Maureen Covell. 1995. Out of print. See No.
98.
51. The Central African Republic, 2nd ed., by Pierre Kalck, translated by Thomas O’Toole. 1992. Out of print. See No. 93.
52. Angola, 2nd ed., by Susan H. Broadhead. 1992. Out of print. See
No. 92.
53. Sudan, 2nd ed., by Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Richard A. Lobban
Jr., and John Obert Voll. 1992. Out of print. See No. 85.
54. Malawi, 2nd ed., by Cynthia A. Crosby. 1993. Out of print. See
No. 84.
55. Western Sahara, 2nd ed., by Anthony G. Pazzanita and Tony
Hodges. 1994. Out of print. See No. 96.
56. Ethiopia and Eritrea, 2nd ed., by Chris Prouty and Eugene
Rosenfeld. 1994. Out of print. See No. 91.
57. Namibia, by John J. Grotpeter. 1994.
58. Gabon, 2nd ed., by David E. Gardinier. 1994. Out of print. See
No. 101.
59. Comoro Islands, by Martin Ottenheimer and Harriet Ottenheimer. 1994.
60. Rwanda, by Learthen Dorsey. 1994. Out of print. See No. 105.
61. Benin, 3rd ed., by Samuel Decalo. 1995.
62. Republic of Cape Verde, 3rd ed., by Richard Lobban and Marlene Lopes. 1995. Out of print. See No. 104.
63. Ghana, 2nd ed., by David Owusu-Ansah and Daniel Miles McFarland. 1995. Out of print. See No. 97.
64. Uganda, by M. Louise Pirouet. 1995.
65. Senegal, 2nd ed., by Andrew F. Clark and Lucie Colvin Phillips.
1994.
66. Algeria, 2nd ed., by Phillip Chiviges Naylor and Alf Andrew
Heggoy. 1994. Out of print. See No. 102.
67. Egypt, 2nd ed., by Arthur Goldschmidt Jr. 1994. Out of print.
See No. 89.
68. Mauritania, 2nd ed., by Anthony G. Pazzanita. 1996.
69. Congo, 3rd ed., by Samuel Decalo, Virginia Thompson, and
Richard Adloff. 1996.
70. Botswana, 3rd ed., by Jeff Ramsay, Barry Morton, and Fred
Morton. 1996. Out of print. See No. 108.
71. Morocco, by Thomas K. Park. 1996. Out of print. See No. 95.
72. Tanzania, 2nd ed., by Thomas P. Ofcansky and Rodger Yeager.
1997.
73. Burundi, 2nd ed., by Ellen K. Eggers. 1997. Out of print. See
No. 103.
74. Burkina Faso, 2nd ed., by Daniel Miles McFarland and Lawrence Rupley. 1998.
75. Eritrea, by Tom Killion. 1998.
76. Democratic Republic of the Congo (Zaire), by F. Scott Bobb.
1999. (Revised edition of Historical Dictionary of Zaire, No.
43)
77. Kenya, 2nd ed., by Robert M. Maxon and Thomas P. Ofcansky.
2000.
78. South Africa, 2nd ed., by Christopher Saunders and Nicholas
Southey. 2000.
79. The Gambia, 3rd ed., by Arnold Hughes and Harry A. Gailey.
2000.
80. Swaziland, 2nd ed., by Alan R. Booth. 2000.
81. Republic of Cameroon, 3rd ed., by Mark W. DeLancey and Mark
Dike DeLancey. 2000.
82. Djibouti, by Daoud A. Alwan and Yohanis Mibrathu. 2000.
83. Liberia, 2nd ed., by D. Elwood Dunn, Amos J. Beyan, and Carl
Patrick Burrowes. 2001.
84. Malawi, 3rd ed., by Owen J. Kalinga and Cynthia A. Crosby.
2001.
85. Sudan, 3rd ed., by Richard A. Lobban Jr., Robert S. Kramer, and
Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban. 2002.
86. Zimbabwe, 3rd ed., by Steven C. Rubert and R. Kent Rasmussen. 2001.
87. Somalia, 2nd ed., by Mohamed Haji Mukhtar. 2002.
88. Mozambique, 2nd ed., by Mario Azevedo, Emmanuel Nnadozie,
and Tomé Mbuia João. 2003.
89. Egypt, 3rd ed., by Arthur Goldschmidt Jr. and Robert Johnston.
2003.
90. Lesotho, by Scott Rosenberg, Richard Weisfelder, and Michelle
Frisbie-Fulton. 2004.
91. Ethiopia, New Edition, by David H. Shinn and Thomas P. Ofcansky. 2004.
92. Angola, New Edition, by W. Martin James. 2004.
93. Central African Republic, 3rd ed., by Pierre Kalck, translated
by Xavier-Samuel Kalck. 2005.
94. Guinea, 4th ed., by Thomas O’Toole with Janice E. Baker.
2005.
95. Morocco, 2nd ed., by Thomas K. Park and Aomar Boum.
2006.
96. Western Sahara, 3rd ed., by Anthony G. Pazzanita. 2005.
97. Ghana, 3rd ed., by David Owusu-Ansah. 2005.
98. Madagascar, 2nd ed., by Philip M. Allen and Maureen Covell.
2005.
99. Sierra Leone, new ed., by C. Magbaily Fyle. 2005.
100. Libya, 4th ed., by Ronald Bruce St John, 2006.
101. Gabon, 3rd ed., by David E. Gardinier and Douglas A. Yates,
2006.
102. Algeria, 3rd ed., by Phillip Naylor, 2006.
103. Burundi, 3rd ed, by Ellen K. Eggers, 2007.
104. Republic of Cape Verde, 4th ed., by Richard A. Lobban Jr. and
Paul Khalil Saucier, 2007.
105. Rwanda, New Edition, by Aimable Twagilamana, 2007.
106. Zambia, 3rd ed., by David J. Simon, James R. Pletcher, and
Brian V. Siegel, 2008.
107. Mali, 4th ed., by Pascal James Imperato, Gavin H. Imperato,
and Austin C. Imperato, 2008.
108. Botswana, 4th Ed., by Fred Morton, Jeff Ramsay, and Part
Themba Mgadla, 2008.
109. The Gambia, 4th Ed., by Arnold Hughes and David Perfect,
2008.
110. Mauritania, 3rd Ed., by Anthony G. Pazzanita, 2008.
Historical Dictionary
of Mauritania
Third Edition
Anthony G. Pazzanita
Historical Dictionaries of Africa, No. 110
The Scarecrow Press, Inc.
Lanham, Maryland • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
2008
SCARECROW PRESS, INC.
Published in the United States of America
by Scarecrow Press, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of
The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.scarecrowpress.com
Estover Road
Plymouth PL6 7PY
United Kingdom
Copyright © 2008 by Anthony G. Pazzanita
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission
of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pazzanita, Anthony G., 1959–
Historical dictionary of Mauritania / Anthony G. Pazzanita. — 3rd ed.
p. cm. — (Historical dictionaries of Africa ; no. 110)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8108-5596-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8108-5596-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
eISBN-13: 978-0-8108-6265-4
eISBN-10: 0-8108-6265-4
1. Mauritania—History—Dictionaries. I. Title.
DT554.15.P39 2008
966.1003—dc22
2008018835
⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
To my mother and father
Contents
Editor’s Foreword Jon Woronoff
xiii
Preface to the Third Edition
xv
Reader’s Notes
xvii
Acronyms and Abbreviations
xix
Maps
xxvi
Chronology
xxix
Introduction
1
THE DICTIONARY
21
Bibliography
553
About the Author
589
xi
Editor’s Foreword
With its many straight-line borders, it is fairly obvious that Mauritania
was carved out of Africa by the colonial powers with little concern for
any geographic, ethnic, economic, or other logic. Thus, it is not surprising that it should be difficult to govern and develop the new state,
let alone to create a sense of nationhood. These difficulties have been
shown by periodic bouts of dictatorial rule, only ended by military
coups; recurrent friction among ethnic groups; and an economy that has
gone from bad to worse as the poorer portion of the country—the Sahel—encroaches on the richer areas of the southwest, and hundreds of
thousands of citizens seek refuge in the cities. The best that can be said
(yet this is not little) is that Mauritania has managed to hold together
and largely avoid the temptations of external adventures, except in the
case of Western Sahara.
Still, as a country twice the size of France, and even with a small
population of approximately three million, Mauritania cannot be ignored in the overall African context, for it is one of the crucial links
between North and sub-Saharan Africa, and what happens in Mauritania can have an impact on other countries in the region. To understand
its role and considerably less-than-enviable position, it is necessary to
look back to earlier, occasionally more glorious times of kingdom and
empire. From there its history can better be traced through the colonial
period and into the era of independence. This is done, carefully and
comprehensively, in the chronology. The dictionary section provides a
multitude of entries on significant persons, places, and events, as well
as others describing the ethnic, social, and economic situation. The
broader trends are summed up and analyzed in the introduction. Further
reading can be sought by turning to the bibliography.
This is now the third edition of the Historical Dictionary of Mauritania, and it should be particularly welcome because in the interim very
xiii
xiv •
EDITOR’S FOREWORD
few other publications have appeared on the country, and certainly none
of this scope. Indeed, without it, it is difficult to see how interested readers could find the basic information. This new edition, like the previous
one, was written by Anthony G. Pazzanita, one of the rare specialists
on this corner of Africa, which he has been studying and writing on
for over two decades. Aside from contributing chapters on Mauritania
to the Africa Contemporary Record, among other publications, he has
also recently produced a third edition of the Historical Dictionary of
Western Sahara in this series. Both of these volumes, which are closely
related, remain essential sources on a region that is too little known to
the general public.
Jon Woronoff
Series Editor
Preface to the Third Edition
More than a decade after the appearance of the second edition of this dictionary in 1996, events have compelled a revision and expansion of my
treatment of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. The country witnessed
increasingly authoritarian behavior on the part of President Maaouiya
Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya; a resultant deep discontent on the part of the
general populace; and uneven economic performance, which, although
respectable in the context of the developing world, did not alter the fact
that most Mauritanians live in conditions of desperate poverty. This
situation led directly to a violent attempted coup d’état in June 2003 and
a successful putsch in August 2005, which finally removed President
Ould Taya from office. By mid-2007, the inauguration of the country’s
first fairly elected president, Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdellahi, along with
the election of a parliament far more representative of the population
than had ever been the case before, led to a renewed sense of hope and
anticipation that Mauritania might at last begin to fulfill the promises
of democracy first put forth in the early 1990s after an intense period of
internal and external stress. Finally—in what might turn out to be one of
the more significant milestones for the country since its independence
in 1960—oil deposits discovered off the Mauritanian coast began to
be delivered to world markets in early 2006, immediately posing longstanding and acute questions of financial transparency and equitable
social and economic development that have bedeviled the governments
and peoples of Africa and elsewhere for the past half century. With the
objective of addressing all these events and issues and more, most of
the entries found herein have undergone at least some degree of augmentation, more than 40 entirely new entries have been added, and the
bibliography attempts—as it did before—to make the best of an often
scanty documentary record by the addition of more than 200 sources of
varying length and scope.
xv
xvi •
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
As in the previous edition, I have made a conscious decision not only
to tell the story of Mauritania by means of an analytical (as opposed
to merely descriptive) series of entries, but also to largely confine it to
“modern” Mauritania, that is, to the affairs of the country after roughly
the end of World War II, when the territory first acquired a formal identity of its own within French West Africa and began being prepared by
Paris for independence. To do otherwise, in my opinion, would run the
great risk of blurring the focus of the work by the inclusion of material
only tangentially related to Mauritania as the world comprehends it
presently. I am thus in full agreement with Alfred G. Gerteiny, who, as
one of the very first persons to write on the country in English, faced a
similar dilemma in the mid-1960s and stated that “the history of Mauritania (as an independent entity) does not exist; any attempt to fabricate
it would have necessitated such borrowing from general histories of
North and West Africa as to make the book extra muros.” This is not
to say, though, that the earlier history of what is now Mauritania has
been neglected; many entries dealing with personalities, geographical
locations, and significant events provide considerable coverage of the
successive periods of Berber, Black African, and Arab/Islamic influence and domination.
I would like to thank all those Mauritanians, in many walks of life,
who have over the years taken the time to provide me with information
and insights into the workings of their young and intriguing nation. All
errors of fact and interpretation, however, are solely my own.
Reader’s Notes
In this dictionary, Mauritanians are listed by their first names rather
than by their last, or family names, as this is the normal practice in
Mauritania itself. Thus, for example, the entry for Mohammed Khouna
Ould Heydallah appears under the letter “M,” not the letter “H.” Also,
the words ould and mint (the latter sometimes rendered as bint) in Mauritanian names denote son and daughter, respectively.
The transliteration of personal and place-names from the Arabic
(and sometimes from the French) into English always presents certain
problems, mainly because there are no universally accepted standards
for transliteration from Arabic to English or other languages utilizing
Latin script. For the purposes of this volume, I have attempted to find
a consensus of usages and spellings in the English-language literature, although there are a few variations and anglicized spellings. In
addition, Arabic definite articles (mainly “el-” or “al-”) are included
as part of a particular entry in relation to their place in the alphabet.
The entry for the El-Hor movement, for example, appears under the
letter “E.”
Contrary to my practice in the second edition of this book, most
entries for geographical place-names in Mauritania that were utilized
during the period of French colonial rule, and which were changed
when the country became independent, have been omitted, on the
assumption that the passage of time has rendered these names much
less familiar and less important to the present-day reader. However,
French-originated names for particular places (such as Port Etienne
for Nouadhibou and Fort Gouraud for F’Derik) always appear near the
beginning of the text of the relevant entry.
Distances and measurements in this book are usually expressed in the
metric system, as this is the customary usage in the Islamic Republic
xvii
xviii •
READER’S NOTES
of Mauritania. To assist readers in the conversion of metric units into
English ones, the following equivalents are given:
1 kilometer equals 0.6214 mile (3,280 feet, 10 inches)
1 meter equals 39.37 inches (1.1 yards)
1 centimeter (10 millimeters) equals 0.3937 inch
1 hectare equals 2.471 acres
In order to facilitate the rapid and efficient location of information
and to make this dictionary as useful a reference tool as possible, extensive cross-references have been provided. Within individual entries,
terms that have their own entries are in boldface type the first time
they appear.
Acronyms and Abbreviations
AAU
ABSP
AC
ADB
AIDS
AJD
AJM
ALMAP
AMD
AMDH
AMRS
ANPI
AOF
APP
ARABSAT
ARMS
ATTM
AU
Bacim-Bank
BADH
BALM
Arab–African Union
Arab Baath Socialist Party
Action pour le Changement
African Development Bank
acquired immunodeficiency syndrome
Alliance pour la Justice et la Démocratie
Association de la Jeunesse Mauritanienne
Société Algéro-Mauritanienne des Pêches
Alliance pour une Mauritanie Démocratique
Association Mauritanienne des Droits de
l’Homme
Association des Mauritaniens Réfugiés au Sénégal
Association Nationale de la Presse Indépendante
Afrique Occidentale Française
Alliance Populaire Progressiste
Arab Satellite Telecommunications Organization
Association des Réfugiés au Sénégal
Assainissement Travaux Transport et Maintenance
African Union
Banque Mauritanienne du Commerce et de
l’Investissement
Banque el-Amana pour le Développement de
l’Habitat
Banque Arabe Libyenne-Mauritanienne pour le
Commerce Extérieur et le Développement
xix
xx •
ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS
BAMIS
BASEP
BCI
BCM
BCP
BDG
BED
BHM
BII
BIMA
BMCI
BMD
BNM
BPN
BRGM
ca.
CC
CCHF
CFA
CFCD
CGEM
CGTM
CLTM
CMJD
CMRN
CMSN
CNAN
CNPC
COMACOP
COMAUNAM
Banque al-Baraka Mauritanienne Islamique (also
known as Banque al-Wava Mauritanienne Islamique)
Bataillon de la Sécurité Présidentielle
Banque pour le Commerce et l’Industrie
Banque Centrale de Mauritanie
Bataillon des Commandos Parachutistes
Bloc Démocratique du Gorgol
Bureau d’Études et de la Documentation
Banque de l’Habitat de Mauritanie
Banque Internationale d’Investissement
Banque Internationale pour la Mauritanie
Banque Mauritanienne pour le Commerce International
Banque Mauritanienne de Développement
Banque Nationale de Mauritanie
Bureau Politique National
Bureau des Recherches Géologiques et Minières
circa (about)
Convention pour le Changement
Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever
Communauté Financière Africaine
Coalition des Forces du Changement Démocratique
Confédération Générale des Employeurs de
Mauritanie
Confédération Générale des Travailleurs de
Mauritanie
Confédération Libre des Travailleurs de Mauritanie
Conseil Militaire pour le Justice et la Démocratie
Comité Militaire de Redressement National
Comité Militaire de Salut National
Compagnie Nationale Algérienne de Navigation
China National Petroleum Corporation
Compagnie Mauritanio-Coréenne de Pêche
Compagnie Mauritanienne de Navigation Maritime
ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS
CSA
CUO
DED
DGSN
DNE
ECOWAS
EEZ
EITI
EMIA
ENA
ENFVR
ESAF
FAR
FDUC
FEWS
FGM
FIS
FLAM
FNLM
FPM
FPO
FRUIDEM
FURAM
GBM
GDP
GEMAK
GSPC
HIV
ICFTU
ICJ
• xxi
Commissariat à la Sécurité Alimentaire
Cadre Unitaire de l’Opposition
Direction d’Études et de la Documentation
Direction Générale de la Sûreté Nationale
Direction National de l’Elevage
Economic Community of West African States
exclusive economic zone
Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative
École Militaire Interarmes d’Atar
École Nationale d’Administration
École Nationale de Formation et Vulgarisation
Rurale
Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (of the
International Monetary Fund)
Forces Armées Royales (Morocco)
Front Démocratique Uni des Forces du Changement
Famine Early Warning System
female genital mutilation
Front Islamique de Salut (Algeria)
Forces de Libération Africaine de Mauritanie
Front National de Libération Mauritanien
Front Populaire Mauritanien
Front des Partis de l’Opposition
Front de la Résistance pour l’Unité, l’Indépendance
et la Démocratie en Mauritanie
Front Uni pour la Résistance Armée en Mauritanie
Générale de Banque de Mauritanie pour
l’Investissement et le Commerce
gross domestic product
Guelb Moghrein Mines d’Akjoujt
Groupe Salafiste pour le Prédication et le Combat (Algeria; renamed in 2007 “Al-Qaeda in
the Islamic Maghreb”)
human immunodeficiency virus
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions
International Court of Justice
xxii •
ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS
ICRC
IDB
IFAD
ILO
IMF
INTELSAT
LMDH
Mattel
Mauripost
Mauritel
MAUSOV
MDI
MICUMA
MIFERMA
MINURSO
MND
MNF
MORAK
Nadha
NAFTAL
OAU
OMVS
ONE
ONM
ONT
OPEC
OPT
ORTM
PAGN
PCD
International Committee of the Red Cross
Islamic Development Bank
International Fund for Agricultural Development
International Labour Organisation
International Monetary Fund
International Telecommunications Satellite Organization
Ligue Mauritanienne des Droits de l’Homme
Société Mauritano-Tunisienne de Télécommunications
Société Mauritanienne de Poste
Société Mauritanienne de Télécommunications
Mauritanienne-Soviétique des Ressources Maritimes
Mouvement des Démocrates Indépendants
Société des Mines de Cuivre de Mauritanie
Société Anonyme des Mines de Fer de Mauritanie
United Nations Mission for the Referendum in
Western Sahara
Mouvement National Démocratique
Mouvement National Féminin
Mines d’Or d’Akjoujt
An-Nadha al-Wataniyya al-Mauritaniya
Entreprise Nationale de Raffinage et de Distribution des Produits Pétroliers (Algeria)
Organization of African Unity
Organisation pour la Mise en Valeur du Fleuve
Sénégal
Office National de l’Électricité du Maroc
Organisation des Nationalistes Mauritaniens
Office National du Tourisme
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
Office des Postes et de Télécommunications
Office de Radiodiffusion et Télévision de Mauritanie
Parti de l’Avant-Garde Nationale
Parti de la Convergence Démocratique
ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS
PCDM
PDS
PJM
PKM
PLEJ
PMDE
PMR
PMUC
PNDD
Polisario Front
PPM
PRC
PRDR
PRDS
PRGF
PRM
PRN
RD
RDU
RENAM
RFD
RM
RNRD
RSF
SADR
SALIMAREM
SAMIA
• xxiii
Parti du Centre Démocratique Mauritanien
Parti Démocratique Sénégalais
Parti de Justice Mauritanienne
Parti des Khadihines de Mauritanie
Parti pour la Liberté, l’Égalité et la Justice
Parti Mauritanien pour la Défense de
l’Environnement
Parti Mauritanien pour le Rénouveau
Parti Mauritanienne pour la Unité et le Changement (ex-Cavaliers pour le Changement)
Pacte National pour la Démocratie et la Développement
Frente Popular para la Liberación de Saguia elHamra y Río de Oro
Parti du Peuple Mauritanien
People’s Republic of China
Parti Républicain pour la Démocratie et le Rénouveau (ex-PRDS)
Parti Républicain, Démocratique et Social
Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (of the
International Monetary Fund)
Parti de Regroupement Mauritanien
Parti de la Renaissance Nationale
Rénouveau Démocratique
Rassemblement pour la Démocratie et l’Unité
Rassemblement pour la Rénaissance des NégroAfricains de Mauritanie
Rassemblement des Forces Démocratiques (exUFD)
Radio de Mauritanie
Rassemblement National pour la Réforme et le
Développement
Reporters sans Frontières
Saharan/Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic
Société Arabe Libyenne-Mauritanienne des Ressources Maritimes
Société Arabe des Industries Métallurgiques
Mauritano-Koweitienne
xxiv •
ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS
SAMIN
SAMIP
Sawab
SEM
SIMAR
SIPES
SMAR
SMCP
SMCPP
SMH
SMP
SNE
SNIM
SOCOGIM
SOCUMA
SOFRIMA
SOGETAR
SOMAGAZ
SOMASERT
SOMECOB
SOMELEC
SOMIMA
SONADER
SONELEC
SONIMEX
STC
TVM
UBD
Société Arabe des Mines d’Inchiri
Société Arabe Mauritano-Irakienne de Pêche
The Right Path (political party)
Structures pour l’Education des Masses
Société Industrielle Mauritano-Roumaine de
Pêche
Syndicat Indépendant des Professeurs
d’Enseignment Secondaire
Société Mauritanienne d’Assurances et de Réassurances
Société Mauritanienne de Comercialisation du
Poisson
Société Mauritanienne de Comercialisation des
Produits Pétroliers
Société Mauritanienne des Hydrocarbures
Staff Monitored Programme (of the International
Monetary Fund)
Société Nationale d’Eau
Société Nationale Industrielle et Minière
Société de Construction et de Gestion Immobilière
Société de Cuivre de la Mauritanie
Société Frigorifiques Mauritaniens
Société Générale des Travaux Agricoles et Ruraux
Société Mauritanienne de Gaz
Société Mauritanienne des Services et de Tourisme
Société Mauritanienne de la Commercialisation
du Bétail
Société Mauritanienne d’Électricité
Société Minière de Mauritanie
Société Nationale pour le Développement Rural
Société Nationale d’Eau et d’Électricité
Société Nationale d’Importation et d’Exportation
Société Tunisienne des Communications
Télévision de Mauritanie
Union des Banques de Développement
ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS
UFD
UFP
UM
UMA
UMOA
UN
UNAIDS
UNCTAD
UNDD
UNESCO
UNFM
UNHCR
UNM
UOVF
UPD
UPM
UPSD
USMM
UTM
• xxv
Union des Forces Démocratiques
Union des Forces Progressives
Mauritanian ouguiya
Union du Maghreb Arabe
Union Monétaire Ouest-Africaine
United Nations
Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
Union Nationale pour la Démocratie et le Développement
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
Union National des Femmes Mauritaniennes
United Nations High Commission/Commissioner for Refugees
Union Nationale Mauritanienne
Union des Originaires de la Vallée du Fleuve
Union pour le Progrès et la Démocratie
Union Progressiste Mauritanienne
Union Populaire Socialiste et Démocratique
Union Socialiste des Musulmans Mauritaniens
Union des Travailleurs Mauritaniens
Mauritania: Administrative Regions and Capitals
Mauritania: Major Population Centers and Roads
Chronology
ca. 5000 B.C Neolithic period; Bafour people believed predominant.
ca. 2500 B.C. Initial onset of desertification in Mauritania; savannas
and grasslands give way to deserts in the north.
ca. 500 B.C. Founding of Aoudaghost.
ca. 300 A.D. Start of Berber influence and dominance.
ca. 800 Final defeat of the Bafour by the Berbers; zenith of the Berber
Sanhadja Confederation.
ca. 990 Berbers lose Aoudaghost to the Empire of Ghana led by the
Soninké.
1039
Arrival of Abdallah ibn Yacin in Mauritania.
ca. 1041–1042 ibn Yacin gathers his followers at a ribat (religious
retreat); he organizes the Almoravids.
1054
Capture of Aoudaghost and Sijilmasa by Almoravid forces.
1056
Berbers revolt against ibn Yacin.
1059
Abdallah ibn Yacin killed in battle.
1076 Capture of Koumbi Saleh by the Almoravids and the submission
of the Soninké to Islam.
ca. 1150 Collapse of the northern Almoravid Empire in Spain and
Morocco.
ca. 1218–1280 Arrival of the Beni Hassan in northwest Africa and
their diffusion into Mauritania.
xxix
xxx •
CHRONOLOGY
1644–1674 Char Bobha, or Thirty Years’ War, fought between the
Beni Hassan and the Berbers; Berbers are defeated.
1814 Treaty of Paris recognizes French sovereignty over Senegal and
present-day Mauritania.
1854–1865 Louis Faidherbe is governor of Senegal; expresses an
interest in Mauritania.
1899
France announces its intention to “pacify” Mauritania.
1902 15 December: Xavier Coppolani persuades the rulers of Trarza
to accept French control.
1904 February: Coppolani brings Brakna under the control of
France.
1905 April: Tagant is captured by the French. 12 May: Supporters of
resistance leader Cheikh Ma el-Ainin assassinate Xavier Coppolani in
Tidjikja; French decree outlaws slavery.
1909 9 January: Adrar Campaign is launched by Gen. Henri
Gouraud. 28 July: Ma el-Ainin is defeated by Gouraud in the Adrar.
1920 12 December: Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF), in existence since 1896, includes Mauritania as a constituent part.
1925
Grand Conseil d’AOF is established.
1934
16 April: Last major ghazzi.
1946 26 October: Mauritania is separated administratively from
Senegal and the Conseil General is set up. November: Horma Ould
Babana wins election to the French National Assembly as Mauritania’s
delegate.
1948 February: Formation of the Union Progressiste Mauritanienne
(UPM).
1951 Sidi el-Mokhtar N’Diaye narrowly wins seat in the French National Assembly over Horma Ould Babana.
1952 November: The UPM, headed by Mokhtar Ould Daddah, wins
22 of the 24 seats in the Conseil General elections.
CHRONOLOGY
• xxxi
1956 N’Diaye is overwhelmingly reelected to the French National
Assembly. June: The loi cadre is promulgated.
1957 31 March: Mokhtar Ould Daddah’s UPM wins 33 of the 34
seats in the new Assemblée Territoriale; the interim body convenes on
21 May.
1958 10–24 February: Opération Ouragon, a French–Spanish military campaign against the Army of Liberation is carried out. March:
The construction of Nouakchott, Mauritania’s new capital, begins.
May: Ould Daddah holds the Congress of Aleg. 28 June: Horma Ould
Babana is expelled from the Entente Mauritanienne. 28 September:
Mauritanians vote to join the French Community. 28 November: The
Islamic Republic of Mauritania is formally established.
1959 22 March: The first Mauritanian constitution is approved. 17
May: Elections to the Asseemblée Nationale are won by Mokhtar Ould
Daddah’s Parti de Regroupement Mauritanien (PRM).
1960 19 October: Formal transfer of governmental authority from
France to Mauritania. 28 November: Mauritania achieves full independence.
1961 20 May: Replacement Mauritanian constitution is approved.
20 August: Mokhtar Ould Daddah is elected president without opposition. 4 October: Congress of Unity is held. 27 October: Mauritania
is admitted to the United Nations. 25 December: The Parti du Peuple
Mauritanien (PPM), soon to be the sole legal political party, is established.
1963 16 February: the Treaty of Kayes is signed with Mali. April:
The start of iron ore mining near Zouérate.
1964
28–29 January: Kaédi Conference is held.
1966
January: Start of Arabization policy in the educational sector.
1968 May: Iron ore miners’ strike in Zouérate is put down by force.
30 July: Mauritanian local government is reorganized.
1970 April: King Hassan II of Morocco formally abandons his claim
to Mauritania.
xxxii •
CHRONOLOGY
1972 29 October: The Organisation pour la Mise en Valeur du
Fleuve Sénégal (OMVS) is established.
1973 10 May: Founding of the Polisario Front. 30 June: A new
Mauritanian currency, the ouguiya, replaces the French-backed Communauté Financière Africaine (CFA) franc. October: Mauritania is
admitted to the Arab League.
1974 The El-Hor movement is founded. 28 November: The Société
Anonyme des Mines de Fer de Mauritanie (MIFERMA), a Frenchowned company, is nationalized.
1975 14 November: Spain, Mauritania, and Morocco sign the Madrid
Agreement partitioning Western Sahara.
1976 26 February: Final Spanish withdrawal from Western Sahara.
27 February: The Polisario Front proclaims the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). 14 April: signing of the Moroccan–Mauritanian Conventions. 8 June: Polisario stages the first of two raids on the
capital, Nouakchott, greatly embarrassing the Ould Daddah regime.
1977 1 May: Polisario forces raid and occupy Zouérate. 13 May: President Ould Daddah signs the Moroccan–Mauritanian Defense Committee
agreement. 3 July: Polisario attacks Nouakchott for the second time.
1978 10 July: President Ould Daddah is overthrown in a bloodless
coup led by Col. Mustapha Ould Mohammed Salek; Ould Salek sets
up the Comité Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN) to govern
the country.
1979 6 April: Col. Ould Salek is stripped of most of his powers, and
the CMRN is abolished and replaced by the Comité Militaire de Salut
National (CMSN), which is headed by Lt.-Col. Ahmed Ould Bouceif.
27 May: Ould Bouceif is killed in a plane crash near Dakar. 31 May:
A power struggle within the CMSN results in Col. Mohammed Khouna
Ould Heydallah assuming the army council’s chairmanship. 3 June:
Ould Heydallah ousts Ould Salek as titular head of state and replaces
him with another figurehead, Lt.-Col. Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Louly.
12 July: The Polisario Front resumes small-scale attacks against Mauritania. 5 August: Ould Heydallah’s regime signs the Algiers Agreement
with the Polisario Front, giving up its claim to Western Sahara.
CHRONOLOGY
• xxxiii
1980 4 January: Ould Heydallah formally assumes the Mauritanian
presidency, displacing Ould Louly. December: The new head of state
promulgates a provisional constitution as part of an evident plan to
restore civilian rule.
1981 16 March: A violent coup attempt by the exiled Alliance pour
une Mauritanie Démocratique (AMD) fails. 26 March: The leaders of
the coup attempt, two ex-CMSN members and two junior armed forces
officers, are executed by a firing squad. April: The provisional constitution is scrapped by Col. Ould Heydallah. 9 November: Ordinance
81.234 is issued, reabolishing slavery.
1982 6 February: A coup plot led by former CMRN chairman
Ould Salek is suppressed; he is later sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment.
1983 5 June: The controversial Land Reform Act is promulgated.
12 December: Mauritania adheres to the Algerian–Tunisian Treaty of
Fraternity and Concord.
1984 27 February: President Ould Heydallah formally recognizes
the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic. 8 March: Col. Maaouiya
Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya and other officers are demoted after reportedly
voicing their objections to this move. 12 December: Ould Heydalah is
overthrown in a nonviolent “restructuring “ of the CMSN and replaced
as head of state by Col. Ould Taya.
1985 5 February: The CMSN adopts a Constitutional Charter. 13
April: President Ould Taya restores diplomatic relations with Morocco,
which had been broken off since 1981.
1986 April: The Forces de Libération Africaine de Mauritanie
(FLAM) issues its Manifesto du Négro-Mauritanien Opprimé. 31
August: Partially in response, a hard-line army officer, Col. Djibril
Ould Abdellahi, is reappointed interior minister, replacing a prominent
Halpulaar, Col. Anne Ahmadou Babaly. December: President Ould
Taya holds municipal elections.
1987 Ethnic tension increases throughout the year. October: An
alleged coup plot is uncovered. 6 December: Three Halpulaar junior
officers are executed for masterminding the conspiracy.
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CHRONOLOGY
1988 August–September: A controversial series of deaths take place
at the Oualata prison; those jailed there include intellectuals, former
governmental ministers, and army personnel.
1989 17 February: Mauritania joins the Union du Maghreb Arabe
(UMA). 30 March: An incident between Mauritania and Senegal
involving livestock herders. 8–9 April: Senegalese allegedly attack
Sunko, Mauritania, killing 2 people and taking 13 others captive. 10
April: The prisoners are released. 12 April: André Sonko, Senegal’s
minister of the interior, travels to Nouakchott to meet with his Mauritanian counterpart, Djibril Ould Abdellahi. 18–19 April: Ould Abdellahi
pays a reciprocal visit to Dakar. 21–23 April: Riots break out between
Moorish Arab Mauritanians and Senegalese in Dakar. 24–25 April:
Disturbances spread to Nouakchott and Nouadhibou and target Senegalese nationals. 25 April: Ould Abdellahi broadcasts a strong warning to
the Mauritanian rioters. 27–29 April: An estimated 300 Mauritanians
are killed in Dakar. 29 April–15 May: A massive airlift sends tens of
thousands of Mauritanians and Senegalese back to their home countries.
17–18 May: A Senegal–Mauritania reconciliation meeting in Bamako,
Mali, is unsuccessful. 23 May: The Mauritanian ambassador in Dakar,
Mohamed el-Mokhtar Ould Zamel, is recalled by his government. 3–5
June: A second settlement effort, again in Bamako, also meets with
failure. 28 June: A third meeting, in Rosso, also goes nowhere. 21
August: Senegal and Mauritania announce that diplomatic relations
between them are severed.
1990 4 February: Djibril Ould Abdellahi is removed from his post
as interior minister, and four days later is dismissed from the CMSN
and placed under house arrest in Kiffa, his birthplace. 2 August: Iraq
invades Kuwait, touching off the Gulf Crisis. 4 December: The Ould
Taya government announces it has foiled a coup attempt allegedly directed by Senegal; this, coming at a time of high ethnic tensions, leads
to a virtual massacre of possibly hundreds of mostly Black African
army personnel and other government employees at military installations across Mauritania by the end of the year and extending into early
1991.
1991 January–February: Iraq is attacked by the air and ground
forces of the United States and several other countries. 3 March:
CHRONOLOGY
• xxxv
Driven out of Kuwait, Iraq surrenders to the U.S.-led coalition. 15
April: Rallying from the influence inside Mauritania of the pro-Iraq
Arab Baath Socialist Party (ABSP), President Ould Taya announces
plans for the country’s democratization. 5 June: An illegal political
organization, the Front Démocratique Uni des Forces du Changement
(FDUC), is founded, leading to the arrest and detention of its leaders the
following day. 12 July: A new constitution is approved by Mauritania’s
voters and is formally ratified on 20 July. 22 August: The first legal political party, the Rassemblement pour la Démocratie et l’Unité (RDU),
is formed. 29 August: President Ould Taya’s own political group, the
Parti Républicain, Démocratique et Social (PRDS), is founded.
1992 17 January: Mauritania’s first contested presidential election
is won decisively by Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya. 28 January: A
losing presidential candidate, Ahmed Ould Daddah, announces that his
Union des Forces Démocratiques (UFD) will boycott future elections.
6 and 13 March: As a consequence of the boycott, the PRDS wins
most of the seats in the National Assembly and (on 3 and 10 April) in
the Mauritanian Senate. 18 April: President Ould Taya, now a civilian,
inaugurates the Mauritanian Second Republic. 24 April: Diplomatic
relations with Senegal are restored.
1993 15 June: In a sign of dissent from Ahmed Ould Daddah’s political strategy, the Union pour le Progrès et la Démocratie (UPD) is
founded, with former foreign minister Hamdi Ould Mouknass as one of
its leaders. June: The PRDS-dominated legislature passes a wide-ranging and highly controversial amnesty law immunizing from prosecution
those responsible for the human rights violations committed from 1989
to 1991.
1994 28 January: In municipal elections, the PRDS wins all but 6
of the country’s 208 arrondissements. April: The PRDS wins 16 of the
17 open Senate seats. 6 June: The El-Hor movement defects from the
UFD as the party continues to suffer schisms. 30 September–9 November: Some 60 suspected Islamic fundamentalists in Mauritania are
arrested, charged, convicted, and, after some of them publicly confess
their wrongdoing, are pardoned by President Ould Taya.
1995 21–23 January: In the wake of riots protesting price increases,
UFD leader Ould Daddah, UPD head Ould Mouknass, and six other
xxxvi •
CHRONOLOGY
opposition leaders are arrested on charges of inciting the violence; they
are released on 3 February. 25 January: Breaking a 17-year silence,
former president Mokhtar Ould Daddah speaks by radio to Mauritanians and criticizes President Ould Taya’s regime for its lack of democracy. 10 March: In another major blow to the UFD, the Mouvement des
Démocrates Indépendants (MDI), led by Béchir el-Hassen, announces
its alignment with the ruling PRDS. May: A visiting delegation from the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) says it is satisfied with Mauritania’s
economic performance and announces a program of debt rescheduling.
July: Some of the major opposition parties, including the UFD, UPD,
and the pro-Baathist Parti de l’Avant-Garde Nationale (PAGN), agree
to coordinate their efforts to better challenge the PRDS. 22 August: A
new political party, Action pour le Changement (AC), announces its
formation; one of its members is El-Hor, led by longtime activist and
opposition politician Messaoud Ould Boulkheir. 23 October–10 November: Mauritanian security forces round up more than 100 suspected
Baath Party members and accuse them of acting on behalf of Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq; most are released from detention after two weeks. In
addition, the Iraqi ambassador in Nouakchott is expelled.
1996 1 January: Sidi Mohamed Ould Boubacar, prime minister under President Ould Taya since April 1992, is dismissed and becomes
chairman of the governing PRDS; the new premier is Cheikh el-Avia
Ould Mohamed Khouna. March: The gold mining project operated by
the Mines d’Or d’Akjoujt (MORAK) is terminated after disappointing
yields during 1995. May: Pursuant to discussions held in June 1995,
Israel and Mauritania agree to open “interest sections” in Nouakchott
and Tel Aviv. June–July: Black African refugees in Senegal begin
returning to Mauritania in greater numbers; the United Nations High
Commission for Refugees reports that 7,000–8,000 had departed Senegal by summer; the flow of refugees continues through the end of the
year. Late June: Mauritania and the European Union (EU) sign a new
five-year, $405 million fishing agreement. 11 and 18 October: Elections to the National Assembly are massively won by the PRDS—it
captures 70 of the 79 contested seats. December: Mauritanie Nouvelles, an independent newspaper, is banned for the sixth time since its
founding; it had also been proscribed in March and July for criticizing
the government.
CHRONOLOGY
• xxxvii
1997 January–June: Discontent with the Ould Taya regime erupts
into protests at the University of Nouakchott and other institutions;
a threatened strike by students and teachers results in the arrests of
dozens of persons and the suppression of the secondary teachers’ trade
union. 11 June: Hamdi Ould Mouknass’s UPD party announces that
it is joining forces with the PRDS; Ould Mouknass is then appointed
minister without portfolio by President Ould Taya, a position in which
he continues to serve until his death on 15 September 1999. September: Ould Taya conducts a “purge” of supposed Arab nationalists in
his government. 4–6 September: French president Jacques Chirac
visits Mauritania; the trip is accompanied by fresh restrictions on press
freedom, and Chirac is criticized for making the visit only three months
before the Mauritanian presidential election. December: The Société
Nationale Industrielle et Minière (SNIM), the state mining company,
announces that it exported 11.7 million tons of iron ore during 1997, an
exceptionally high amount; it also wishes to build a new ore concentrator at Nouadhibou with foreign assistance. 12 December: As expected,
President Ould Taya is reelected to a second six-year term, reportedly
receiving 90.25 percent of the votes cast; a prominent political-religious
leader, Mohamed Lemine Ch’bih Ould Cheikh Melainine, however,
obtains nearly one-half the votes in Nouadhibou and one-third in
Nouakchott. 18 December: Prime Minister Ould Khouna relinquishes
his post to Mohamed Lemine Ould Guig of Oualata; a new 22-member
cabinet (with three women) is also appointed, and a regime stalwart,
Col. Ahmed Ould Minnih, becomes interior minister once again.
1998 13 January: Having been banned in autumn 1997 and thus
unable to cover the presidential election, the editor of Mauritanie Nouvelles, Bah Ould Salek, announces he is suspending publication in light
of government censorship. 17 January: Four people, including longtime human rights activist Cheikh Saad Bouh Kamara, are arrested in
connection with their participation in the production of a French television program on slavery in Mauritania; also arrested is Messaoud Ould
Boulkheir, a well-known hartani activist. 5 February: Massive demonstrations take place in support of the antislavery activists and additional
arrests are made. 12 February: All five antislavery defendants are found
guilty by a Mauritanian court and sentenced to 13 months in prison and
fined UM 30,000; the court, during the trial, forbids the introduction of
xxxviii •
CHRONOLOGY
evidence that slavery still exists in the country. 24 March: Seeking to
defuse the massive domestic and international reaction to these convictions, President Ould Taya pardons all the accused. October: Facing
insolvency, the national airline, Air Mauritanie, is forced to dismiss 111
of its 340 employees and return two leased aircraft. 16 October: Col.
Ahmed Ould Minnih is killed in an automobile accident. 16 November:
Prime Minister Ould Guig is dismissed and replaced by his predecessor,
Ould Khouna.
1999 29 January: Municipal elections result in a PRDS victory in
191 of Mauritania’s 208 arrondissements; several opposition groups
boycott the polling, and the government for the first time admits voter
fraud and irregularities and orders revotes in Nouakchott and Tagant
province. April: A well-known magazine, Le Calame, is banned for
three months, in the same month, the minister of education, S’ghair
Ould M’Barek, introduces wide-ranging reforms to Mauritania’s
schools, seemingly putting the brakes on all-out Arabization and putting more emphasis on French, English, and several Black African
languages. May: A dissident faction of the UFD, led by Mustapha Ould
Bédredine, announces it is aligning itself with the ruling PRDS. 3 July:
A French magistrate orders the arrest of Capt. Ely Ould Dah, a Mauritanian army officer on a military exchange program in Montpellier; he
is charged with human rights violations. In retaliation, President Ould
Taya expels all French military personnel from Mauritania and calls
home the rest of the Mauritanian officers visiting France for training.
Summer: Drastic declines in iron ore prices force SNIM to institute
layoffs and other austerity measures. 28 September: The magistrate in
the Ould Dah case orders him conditionally released from jail, ordering him to stay in the Montpellier area. 28 October: In a ceremony in
Washington, D.C., Mauritania establishes full diplomatic relations with
Israel, a step widely condemned both at home and in the Arab/Islamic
world. Early November: The Baathist PAGN group is banned outright
by the government, the first time this has been done since the founding
of the Second Republic in 1992. Mid-November: Mauritania’s ties
with Algeria turn sour as Prime Minister Ould Khouna is unable to meet
President Abdelaziz Bouteflika in Algiers; this causes (or accelerates)
the warming of ties between President Ould Taya and Morocco’s new
monarch, King Mohamed VI. 26 December: Mauritania announces it
CHRONOLOGY
• xxxix
will withdraw from the Economic Community of West African States
(ECOWAS), a pullout that becomes effective one year later.
2000 February: Mauritania expels Hametti Ould Abdelaziz Rabbani,
the chief Polisario Front representative in the country, after he criticizes
Mauritania’s increasingly close ties to Morocco. April: Capt. Ely Ould
Dah violates the terms of his release and returns to Mauritania, reportedly with the assistance of the government. Spring: Mauritania’s quest
for debt relief falls short, as Paris Club debtors vote to forgive only
$80 million (and reschedule another $380 million) out of the $620 million the country believed would be cancelled. 5 June: The “Senegal–
Mauritania incident” begins when Mauritania, claiming that Senegal
was appropriating more than its share of the water resources of the
Senegal River, gives all Senegalese in the country two weeks to leave;
the announcement triggers a mass exodus, and a visit to Nouakchott by
a Senegalese delegation fails to resolve the issue. 7 June: Raising the
stakes in the dispute with Senegal, Mauritanian information minister
Rachid Ould Saleh says Dakar is seeking “regional hegemony” and
that its new president, Abdoulaye Wade, is supporting exiled Mauritanian Black African groups; tens of thousands of Senegalese continue
leaving Mauritania, and the large Mauritanian community in Senegal
also begins to depart. 8–10 June: Intensive mediation in the Senegal–Mauritania dispute is undertaken by Gambia, Mali, and Morocco;
because of this, the Mauritanian interior minister, Dah Ould Abdel
Jelil, states that all the expulsions are now cancelled. 12–13 June: A
summit meeting between Presidents Wade and Ould Taya succeeds in
rapidly defusing the crisis. August: Four Mauritanian newspapers (La
Tribune, Carrefour, Inimich, and Al-Quds), are censored by the interior
ministry. October–November: Israel’s actions against the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza lead to unrest in Mauritania;
Ahmed Ould Daddah’s UFD is accused—without evidence—of having
instigated the protests. 28 October: The government officially dissolves Ould Daddah’s UFD for supposedly having “incited violence”
and campaigned to “discredit the state.” 25 November: The regime
impounds two Mauritanian newspapers (Le Calame and Al-Alam) for
criticizing the country’s ties with Israel and the banning of the UFD.
December: Mauritania’s population reaches an estimated 2.47 million
people.
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CHRONOLOGY
2001 January: The head of the Mauritanian national blood bank, in
a stunning admission, states that fully one-third of all blood donors in
the country tested positive for the HIV/AIDS virus, contradicting prior
estimates that only 1 percent or so of the population was HIV-positive.
January–March: A consortium of foreign companies begins the search
for offshore petroleum deposits; some positive results are achieved at
the so-called Chinguetti-1 drilling site. 8 April: Police arrest former
presidential candidate Mohamed Lemine Ch’bih Ould Chiekh Melainine on charges of conspiring with Libya to overthrow the government.
The detention leads to considerable domestic and international protests;
the court proceedings are later moved out of Nouakchott to the town of
Ayoun el-Atrouss, making it more difficult for outsiders to access the
trial. May: Foreign Minister Dah Ould Abdi visits Israel for talks with
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. June: The authorities announce that primary education will be compulsory for the first time; the minimum age
for marriage is set at 18 years in order to discourage the exploitation of
young girls. 12–14 June: Ould Cheikh Melainine is tried and convicted
on all counts by a Mauritanian court and is sentenced to five years’
imprisonment. June–July: Two more newspapers, L’Eveil Hebdo and
Inimich al-Watan, are seized by the government. 17 July: Former president Mokhtar Ould Daddah returns to Mauritania for the first time since
going into exile in 1980; he is given a warm reception by thousands of
citizens. 10–11 September: King Mohamed VI of Morocco makes a
state visit to Mauritania, the first time a Moroccan monarch has done so;
the trip is cut short by the Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and
Washington. Both King Mohamed and President Ould Taya strongly
condemn the attacks. 19 and 26 October: Elections for the National
Assembly and municipal councils are conducted. The PRDS receives 64
of the 81 parliamentary seats and controls 184 of the 216 local councils;
several additional seats are won by the pro-PRDS, Union pour la Démocratic et la Progrès (UDP), and RDU parties; Action pour le Changement,
however, wins four seats in parliament, and the successor to the UFD,
the Rassemblement des Forces Démocratiques (RFD), gets four more;
the AC also wins four municipal councils (and the RFD, four others);
and opposition groups get a majority (20 of 37 seats) on Nouakchott’s
city council after capturing six of its nine wards. December: President
Ould Taya carries out a major reorganization of the army’s officer corps,
leading to speculation that unrest in the armed forces is growing; among
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other changes, the army chief of staff, Col. Moulay Ould Boukhreiss,
is replaced by Col. Mohamed Ould N’Diayane. Late December: In a
speech to parliament, Prime Minister Ould Khouna castigates Action
pour le Changement, calling it a “racist” organization; he also claims
that its leaders were responsible for the 1989–1990 Senegal–Mauritania
crisis; without mentioning the AC by name, he adds that the group is
currently plotting “fresh crimes” against the state. The four AC deputies
walk out of the National Assembly chamber in protest.
2002 2 January: Action pour le Changement is officially banned; its
leader, Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, tries to appeal the decision, but it is
upheld by a Mauritanian judge on 12 March. July: The case of Ely Ould
Dah is reopened due to a ruling by a French court that he can be tried in
absentia. Summer: Contracts totaling $72 million are awarded to four
companies to construct a long-awaited road between Nouakchott and
Nouadhibou. 25 August: The government denies recognition to Convention pour le Changement (CC), the planned successor to the banned
AC. 7 November: Amnesty International issues a report sharply critical of the Mauritanian government’s attitude on the slavery question,
stating that “anyone escaping from slavery has no legal protection”; the
authorities call this a “gross lie.” December: Mauritania’s agricultural
sector goes into severe decline and the country’s food needs become
acute; an estimated 41,000 citizens need immediate food shipments to
survive. It is also projected that grain production in 2002 and 2003 will
shrink by 24 percent compared to 2001 levels.
2003 March: As the United States prepares to invade and occupy
Iraq, the Ould Taya regime, by now firmly allied with the United States
and Israel, fails to condemn the invasion despite massive public disapproval. 20 April-29 May: Former PAGN political party members are
arrested and detained for their criticism of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and
Mauritania’s ties to Israel. 8–9 June: A major violent coup attempt
against President Ould Taya is mounted in Nouakchott; for two days,
fighting rages around the presidential palace and other government
installations. Reportedly, Ould Taya only narrowly escapes being deposed by a group of disaffected army officers led by Saleh Ould Hanena
and Abderrahmane Ould Mini; troops loyal to Ould Taya, including the
elite presidential guard, suppress the uprising, but at least 15 persons
are killed and 68 others injured. Among the dead are army chief of staff
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Col. Mohamed Ould N’Diayane and five civilians. 10–30 June: President Ould Taya orders the arrests of dozens of army officers and reassigns or dismisses many others. 22 June: A high official of the ruling
PRDS, Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Hamady, is detained on suspicion of
complicity in the coup attempt; several relatives of Saleh Ould Hanena
are also jailed, and Abdelrahmane Ould el-Khour, the commander of
the Mauritanian navy for the previous 15 years, is also forced out of his
post. Early July: It is reported that Prime Minister Ould Khouna had
resigned at the time of the coup attempt and was soon after detained
on suspicion of attempting to seek political asylum in Spain. 6 July:
S’ghair Ould M’Barek replaces Ould Khouna as premier, the first time
a hartani has held that position. 24 August: Mohamed Lemine Ch’bih
Ould Cheikh Melainine is released from prison after serving nearly half
of his five-year sentence. September: A former president, Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah, announces he will be a candidate in the
presidential elections scheduled for 7 November; he is backed by a
coalition of Islamists and secular reformers. Messaoud Ould Boulkheir
also states his intention to run. 3 November: Days before the election,
police raid the home of Ould Heydallah and temporarily detain him and
several family members and supporters for allegedly possessing illegal
weapons and for “plotting against the Constitution.” 7 November: The
presidential election is held, but international observers are not permitted to attend the balloting; as expected, President Ould Taya wins
reelection with 66.7 percent of the votes cast; Ould Heydallah receives
18.7 percent. 9 November: Ould Heydallah is rearrested after alleging
that electoral fraud contributed to Ould Taya’s victory; the regime later
announces that he and 14 others will be placed on trial for conspiring
to overthrow the government. 2–29 December: Ould Heydallah and
his colleagues stand trial; Ould Heydallah and four others are found
guilty and receive suspended five-year prison sentences; four others
receive lesser sentences; all these convictions are upheld on appeal in
April 2004.
2004 31 March–1 April: Four journalists are charged with libel after
they publish allegations of official corruption; an out-of-court settlement is eventually reached. 7 April: Former President Ould Heydallah
and his backers request government certification of a new political
group, known in Arabic as el-hamd (“praise Allah”) and in French as
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the Parti de la Convergence Démocratique (PCD); recognition is denied
by the authorities six days later. 23 May: Another new political party
originating with the supporters of Ould Heydallah, known as Sawab
(“The Right Path”) is set up and wins certification from the government a short time later. July–August: President Ould Taya carries out
a massive reshuffling of his cabinet and arrests some 34 army officers,
dismissing or reassigning certain others. 10 August: The regime announces that a coup plot backed by Burkina Faso and Libya has been
foiled; both governments deny any involvement. 9 October: Saleh
Ould Hanena, the ringleader of the June 2003 coup attempt, is arrested
at Rosso on the Senegalese border. 14 October: Mauritania’s first head
of state, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, dies in Paris. 22 October: Ahmed
Ould Daddah, former president Ould Heydallah, and many others are
accused of providing assistance to the Cavaliers pour le Changement,
the group founded by those believed responsible for the June 2003
uprising. November: Experts warn that some 500,000 Mauritanians
are at serious risk of starvation, after suffering poor harvests and locust
infestations over the previous several months. 22 November: The trial
of Ould Hanena, Ould Mini, Ould Heydallah, Ould Daddah, and 177
other suspected “subversives” opens in Oued Naga, a military barracks
located 50 kilometers east of Nouakchott; the state prosecutor requests
the death penalty for Ould Hanena, Ould Mini, and 15 other defendants.
30 November: In an obvious bid for support, President Ould Taya announces a salary increase of 35 percent for all civil servants, effective
1 January 2005.
2005 January: The government, again seeking to attract popular support, raises the monthly minimum wage to UM 21,000 ($79), an increase
of 400 percent. 15 January: The U.S. Famine Early Warning System
(FEWS) says that in spite of improved harvests in some areas of Mauritania, the food supply situation is still critical, especially in slum areas
on the outskirts of urbanized areas; it notes also that no food assistances
plans are in effect for these areas and that cereal production in Mauritania fell by 44 percent in 2004. 3 February: A verdict is reached in the
trial of the 181 “coup plot” conspirators; Saleh Ould Hanena, Abderrahmane Ould Mini, and two other former army officers are convicted and
sentenced to life imprisonment; 111 others, including Ould Heydallah
and Ahmed Ould Daddah, are acquitted. 29 March: President Ould
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Taya reorganizes his cabinet and announces a 600 percent pay increase
for all its members. Late March: Ould Taya also decrees a 500 percent
increase in defense spending for 2005; at UM 15 billion ($54 million),
this is widely seen as a tactic to secure the army’s loyalty by improving
its aging equipment and abysmal living conditions. Spring: In its Human Development Index for 2005, the United Nations continues to rank
Mauritania poorly (152nd of 177 countries); it states that 42 percent of
the population do not have access to sanitary facilities and that health
standards are deficient, with a severe shortage of physicians; educational
levels are termed low but improving. 25 April–9 May: The government
carries out mass arrests against suspected Islamist militants; these and
other acts are seen by critics as being undertaken to please the United
States. 3 May: Israeli foreign minister Sivan Shalom visits Mauritania
amid tight security and significant public protest. 4 June: At a remote
Mauritanian army outpost at Lemgheity in northern Tiris Zemmour
province, armed militants evidently belonging to the Algerian-based
Group Salafiste pour le Prédication et de Combat (GSPC) kill at least
15 Mauritanian soldiers. 3 August: while President Ould Taya is in
Saudi Arabia attending the funeral of King Fahd, a bloodless coup d’état
overthrows him and installs in his place Director of National Security,
Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall; he heads a new 17-member army governing committee, the Conseil Militaire pour la Justice et la Démocratie
(CMJD). 7 August: Sidi Mohamed Ould Boubacar is reappointed prime
minister by the CMJD; most cabinet members are still associated with
the former PRDS regime. 10 August: Mauritania’s parliament is disbanded and the Second Republic ends, although existing political parties
are not banned. Mid-August: Former President Ould Taya travels first
to Niger and then to Gambia and urges his followers to reverse Col.
Ould Vall’s coup, but, seeing that his departure is accepted by most
Mauritanians, he seeks and receives asylum in Qatar later in the month. 2
September: President Ould Vall allows the SOS-Esclaves organization
as well as another human rights group—the Association Mauritanienne
des Droits de l’Homme (AMDH)—to function openly for the first time;
he also issues an amnesty for all political prisoners (including Saleh
Ould Hanena) and invites all exiles to return home. 11 October: In an
interview, President Ould Vall states that parliamentary and presidential
elections will be held within two years and that neither he nor any CMJD
member will be permitted to stand for public office. 21 October: In a
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further announcement, the military regime says that a constitutional referendum will be held in mid-2006, municipal elections in late 2006, and
parliamentary and presidential balloting in early 2007. 26–30 October:
Seeking advice on the political future of Mauritania, the CMJD sponsors
an unprecedented symposium in Nouakchott; some 500 politicians and
representatives of civil society take part.
2006 17 February: Mauritanian oil production begins at the rate of
75,000 barrels per day, although this drops to about 37,000 barrels per
day by late 2006 and to less than 20,000 barrels per day by late 2007.
25 June: Voters overwhelmingly approve amendments to the 1991
Mauritanian constitution restricting future presidents to two five-year
terms. 19 November: In the first round of municipal and parliamentary
elections held by the military government, Ahmed Ould Daddah’s RFD
wins 12 of the 43 National Assembly seats contested, while the Alliance
Populaire Progressiste (APP) and other groups win 7 more; 24 seats
are awarded to independent candidates, who are thought to represent
traditional tribal or religious interests; 63 percent of municipal council
positions go to opposition parties. 3 December: In the second round
of parliamentary balloting, independents continue to do well, gaining a
total of 38 of the 95 seats in the National Assembly; the Coalition des
Forces du Changement Démocratique (CFCD)—an amalgam of various
opposition groups—gains 41 seats; parties aligned with the former Ould
Taya regime, including the RDU, UPD, and the Parti Républicain pour
la Démocratie et le Rénouveau (PRDR)—the successor to the PRDS,
obtain 13 seats.
2007 January: In senatorial elections, independent candidates win 33
of the 56 total seats, taking advantage of developing splits in the CFCD
coalition. 2 February: The Mauritanian Constitutional Court approves a
total of 20 presidential candidates who will stand in the elections scheduled for mid-March; among them are Ahmed Ould Daddah, Messaoud
Ould Boulkheir, former bank executive Zeine Ould Zeidane, independent candidate Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi, former army
head of state Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah, Mohamed Lemine
Ch’bih Ould Cheikh Melainine, and Saleh Ould Hanena, the amnestied
leader of the June 2003 coup attempt. 11 March: The first round of the
presidential election goes off smoothly; all but 2 of the 20 candidates are
eliminated at this stage, but since neither of the two front-runners—Ould
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Daddah and Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi—wins an absolute
majority, the two men will face one another in a runoff. 19 March:
Messaoud Ould Boulkheir throws his support for president to Ould Abdellahi, thus weakening—by accident or design—the CFCD coalition.
25 March: In the second round of presidential balloting, Ould Abdellahi narrowly defeats Ahmed Ould Daddah, receiving 52.85 percent of
the vote versus 47.15 percent; Ould Abdellahi wins every Mauritanian
province except Inchiri, Trarza, and the City of Nouakchott. 30 March:
The CMJD-appointed cabinet resigns as the military establishment prepares to cede power. 19 April: Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi is
inaugurated president of the new Third Republic; at the same time, the
CMJD is dissolved and Col. Ould Vall retires; most former members of
the governing military committee, however, retain their positions in the
army. 20 April: President Ould Abdellahi appoints Zeine Ould Zeidane,
an economist and strong contender in the March presidential race, as
his prime minister. 28 April: Ould Abdellahi chooses a new cabinet
made up mostly of technocrats, only two of whose members had served
under the prior Ould Taya regime. 11 May: Defeated presidential candidate Ahmed Ould Daddah criticizes the cabinet choices, calling them
“a continuation of past practices.” June: Declining oil revenues, along
with salary increases for civil servants, result in a budget shortfall of at
least $112 million for 2007–2008. 7 June: President Ould Abdellahi
gives up 25 percent of his salary for the duration of the budget crisis and
urges his ministers to do the same; he also pledges to make public all his
financial assets. 9 June: 24 of 25 accused GSPC militants are acquitted
of all charges by a Mauritanian court; only one defendant is convicted in
absentia, the GSPC having since renamed itself “al-Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb.” 29 June: President Ould Abdellahi issues an apology for
past human rights abuses and says the repatriation of the 35,000 or so
remaining Black African Mauritanians who left the country for Senegal
in 1989 and 1990 will be a priority of his government. July: The new
government makes initial moves to facilitate the return of the refugees, a
process expected to take anywhere from 6 to 12 months. 4 August: The
Ministry of the Interior legalizes 13 additional political parties, including the Islamist-oriented Rassemblement National pour la Réforme et le
Développement (RNRD). 9 August: In the first antislavery legislation
since 1981, the National Assembly unanimously adopts a law punishing slaveholders with up to 10 years’ imprisonment; in addition, any
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• xlvii
“cultural or artistic work defending slavery” in Mauritania can also be
punished by up to two years in prison, and it is made a specific offense
for any government official not to pursue slave owners. 26 September:
Samba Thiam, the president of the exiled FLAM organization, holds a
meeting with President Ould Abdellahi at the United Nations in New
York, the first time the government and FLAM have officially spoken
to one another. 13 November: Mauritania and the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) sign an agreement providing
for the “assisted voluntary repatriation” of nearly 24,000 Mauritanian
citizens living in Senegal over a 17-month period; under the accord,
transport, food rations, and basic shelter will be provided to each returnee at an overall estimated cost of $7 million. 13 November: mass
protests over food price increases break out in Aleg, Bogué and other
Mauritanian towns; prices for foodstuffs continue to rise throughout the
rest of 2007 and into 2008, propelled by escalating world food demand
and poor harvests in Mauritania itself. 13 December: President Ould
Abdellahi returns Mauritania to the Friday–Saturday weekend common
in the Islamic world, rescinding the imposition of the Western Saturday–
Sunday weekend by President Ould Taya in April 2005. 24 December:
Four members of a vacationing French family are shot and killed near
Aleg; only one person survives; the assailants are believed affiliated with
“Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” the former GSPC, and are thought
to have fled across the Senegalese border.
2008 5 January: A new political party aligned with President Ould
Abdellahi, the Pacte National pour la Démocratie et la Développement
(PNDD) is founded; several opposition politicians object to the move,
saying that the group risks becoming another PPM or PRDS. 5 January: The Lisbon-Dakar road rally is cancelled due to security concerns
following the Aleg killings, reportedly much to the disappointment
of Mauritanian officials. 11 January: Two suspects in the December
2007 Aleg killings are captured in Guinea-Bissau and are rapidly extradited to Mauritania; reportedly, they admit to being followers of AlQaeda and of perpetrating the Aleg attack as well as the killing of three
Mauritanian soldiers a few days afterward. February–March: Black
Mauritanian refugees in Senegal begin returning back home under the
auspices of the UNHCR. 1 February: At least three gunmen open fire
in Nouakchott outside the Israeli embassy, which was situated next to
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a nightclub; three persons are injured. 18 February: Seven suspects in
the embassy attack are released without charges being filed. 2 March:
Arrest warrants are issued for three suspects in the Israeli embassy attack, only one of whom is a Mauritanian national. 6 May: Zeine Ould
Zeidane is dismissed as Mauritanian Prime Minister; he is replaced by
Yahya Ould Ahmed el-Waghef, the head of the pro-presidential PNDD
political party. 14 May: Prime Minister Ould el-Waghef appoints a
new cabinet; among other changes, Cheikh el-Avia Ould Mohamed
Khouna, a former backer of President Ould Taya, is appointed foreign
minister. 23 May and 12 June: Two reports by Amnesty International
allege that despite the advent of a democratically elected government
in Mauritania, at least several suspected Islamists, arrested on terrorism-related charges, were tortured or otherwise mistreated by security
forces. 3 July: The Mauritanian parliament votes no confidence in
Prime Minister Ould el-Waghef, causing the resignation of the cabinet
appointed on 6 May. 10 July: Responding to the parliamentary noconfidence vote as well as mounting public criticism of his performance, Ould el-Waghef refuses to appoint members of certain opposition parties to a reconstituted cabinet, raising the possibility that President Ould Abdellahi will dissolve parliament and force new elections.
29 July: Approximately 50 PNDD deputies in the National Assembly
demand a special session of parliament to deal with food price increases
and shortages in the country; the Mauritanian Senate also requests an
inquiry into the alleged improper use of public funds by President Ould
Abdellahi’s wife, Khattou Mint Boukhary. 30 July: Ould Abdellahi rejects the call for a special parliamentary session; his supporters begin to
openly complain of military interference in the government. 4 August:
Most of the PNDD-aligned members of parliament announce they are
quitting the party as a gesture of protest, probably at the instigation of
the military. 5 August: Alleging army interference with his regime,
President Ould Abdellahi formulates (and issues early the following morning) a decree dismissing four high-ranking military officers,
including the BASEP commander, Col. Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz. 6
August: a bloodless coup d’état led by Col. Ould Abdelaziz topples
the civilian-led Third Republic, places Ould Abdellahi under house arrest along with ex-Prime Minister Ould el-Waghef and several others;
the new military leader organizes an 11-member Haut Conseil d’État
(HCE) to govern Mauritania. 7–9 August: Most of the international
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• xlix
community condemns the coup, including France, the United States,
the European Union, Nigeria and South Africa; the African Union suspends Mauritania from membership and Paris and Washington cease
supplying all nonhumanitarian aid; the domestic reaction is highly
mixed as some rallies against the army are dispersed by police and
some politicians appear to welcome the army takeover. 10 August: In
his first interview since assuming power, Col. Ould Abdelaziz says that
he and his colleagues intervened to prevent an even worse political and
economic crisis and also to prevent possible infighting within the ranks
of the military establishment; he says the HCE will conduct new elections, but refuses to supply a date or say whether he will be a candidate.
11 August: Former Prime Minister Ould el-Waghef and three other
civilian politicians are freed from detention, although Ould el-Waghef
is rearrested later in the month as he tries to travel to Nouadhibou to
allegedly organize opposition sentiment there. 12 August: Messaoud
Ould Boulkheir, still the Speaker of the National Assembly, strongly
condemns the coup, while RFD leader Ahmed Ould Daddah is thought
to be more favorably disposed to Col. Abdelaziz’s putsch. 14 August:
The HCE, in a clear bid for international acceptance, appoints Moulay
Ould Mohamed Laghdaf, a former Mauritanian ambassador to the European Union, as Prime Minister. 17 August: Col. Ould Abdelaziz, in
his first radio and television address since taking power, castigates the
Ould Abdellahi regime for its “climate of corruption” and “miserable
economic performance” and pledges to organize “free and transparent”
elections as soon as possible. 26 August: In spite of their initial support
for the military coup of 6 August, Ahmed Ould Daddah’s RFD party
and two other opposition groups refuse an offer by the army to participate in a proposed “transitional” Mauritanian government. 31 August:
Prime Minister Ould Laghdaf selects a new 28-member cabinet; the
ministers of defense, economy, finance, and justice are the same as
under the prior Ould Abdellahi regime.
Introduction
MAURITANIA AND ITS PEOPLE
Occupying an area of 1,030,700 square kilometers in northwest Africa
and bordered by Senegal and Mali in the south and east respectively,
Algeria in the far northeast, and the disputed territory of Western
Sahara to the north, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania is one of the
least-known African countries. Although this may be because of its
sparse population of 2.5 million in the year 2000 (and about 3 million in
2008) and the fact that the young nation comprises mostly vast stretches
of desert, it is also the case that Mauritania—admittedly with several
prominent exceptions—has notably escaped the ravages of the violent
interstate and civil conflicts that have so bedeviled Africa and propelled
the affected countries into the popular media. Also, Mauritanian society
possesses quite ancient antecedents and a universal religious faith that
has been practiced over several centuries. These characteristics have
given the country a sometimes fragile but relatively resilient sense of
national identity, which has survived into the 21st century in the face of
powerful political, regional, ethnic/racial, and tribal rivalries since its
independence in 1960. An economy largely centered on the export of
raw materials, a weak agricultural sector, and a harsh climate in most
areas have further added to the challenges confronted by all Mauritanians.
EARLY HISTORY
It is believed that in Neolithic times, when what is now Mauritania
was predominantly grassland, the Bafour, a nomadic group of huntergatherers, held sway over most of the land until the steady encroachment
1
2 •
INTRODUCTION
of the Sahara, caused by climatic shifts as well as by increased human
activity, resulted in their gradual displacement to the south, leaving
behind a fairly extensive archaeological record, along with possibly the
Imraguen fishing tribe, an independent, black-skinned people who continued to inhabit the remote, unspoiled Atlantic coastline of Mauritania
into modern times. The Bafour were eclipsed not only by the insidious
forces of desertification, but also by the arrival of Berbers from North
Africa around the beginning of the Christian era. Over the next several
hundred years, Berbers not only pushed the Bafour aside (in roughly
A.D. 300) but also began a thriving commerce not only among themselves but also with the Black African kingdoms of Ghana and Mali
to the south and east. As inveterate traders, the Berbers soon formed a
geographically sprawling and administratively loose confederation, with
the Sanhadja subgroup taking a dominant role and relegating the Gatala,
Lemtuna, and Messufa to the sidelines. From A.D. 900 to 1000, the
Sanhadja Confederation was at its height, drawing its strength from its
commercial contacts both in the Maghreb and with the cities of Aoudaghost, Koumbi Saleh, and Oualata (among others), and from the growing
sense of unity afforded by Islam.
This stable situation ended in about 990. In that year, the Sanhadja
Confederation lost control of Aoudaghost to the ascendant Ghana Empire, led by the Soninké. Thus weakened, the Berbers were additionally
subjected, beginning in 1039, to the influence of Abdallah Ibn Yacin,
who traveled to Mauritania. In spite of being initially ostracized by
many Sanhadja who wanted little to do with Ibn Yacin’s austere, puritanical Islamic teachings, ibn Yacin organized his followers at a ribat
(religious retreat) over the next few years and then succeeded—in short
order—not only in winning back Aoudaghost from the Soninké (in
1054) but also in capturing Sijilmasa, an important trading city in the
Maghreb, which had been coveted by the Sanhadja. After these events,
the Almoravid Empire (as it became known) expanded at an explosive
rate, eventually encompassing much of North Africa, southern Spain,
and all of present-day Mauritania almost down to the Senegal River.
This process put to flight many Black Africans and led in 1076 to the
capture of the city of Koumbi Saleh by Ibn Yacin’s successors and the
submission of the Soninké to Islam for the first time. Even as all these
conquests were being made, however, strains were beginning to show:
the often-fanatical ways of the Almoravids drove some independent-
INTRODUCTION
• 3
minded Berbers to revolt. The Almoravids, moreover, were unable to
resist the dismemberment of their empire by Christian Spain, which
vanquished Muslim rule there by about 1150, leaving Mauritania practically the only place where Almoravid rule survived, due almost entirely
to the territory’s isolation.
By 1218 or so, a new invader had appeared on the Mauritanian horizon. The Maqil Arabs, a group of warriors and devout Muslims from
the east (and soon to be known as the Beni Hassan), penetrated into
northern Mauritania and disrupted the Berbers’ lucrative caravan trade
by their exactions and rapacity. For reasons of commercial expediency,
apparently, some Sanhadja Berbers formed alliances with the Beni
Hassan, but they never lasted for long, as the Arabs relentlessly pushed
onward to the Atlantic coast of Mauritania, Morocco, and Western
Sahara and then south toward Mali and the Senegal River. Sporadic revolts against the Maqil accomplished little except to inflame the Arabs’
already strong martial inclinations, and by the mid-1600s the situation
had degenerated into open warfare, as the Berbers made what turned out
to be a final attempt to preserve their cultural and political identity. This
period is called the Char Bobha, or Thirty Years’ War, and although
records of it are almost entirely oral recollections and the progress of
the various battles is often only dimly recalled, there is no doubt as to
its outcome—a crushing, humiliating defeat for the Berbers.
By the stringent terms of the Treaty of Tin Yedfad, the vanquished
Berbers placed themselves in a permanently subordinate position to the
hassan, or warrior tribes, and pledged to forever “abandon the sword
for the book.” Some successfully sought to retain some of their status
through religious practice and scholarship and became zawiya (roughly,
“people of the book,” or scholars), eventually becoming renowned for
their learning and non-warlike disposition. The rest of the defeated Berbers became znaga, or vassals, nearly completely dependent on the hassan tribes. In an even less advantageous position were the black slaves
of the hassan, pressed into servitude after having been captured by the
Maqil armies. The result of this violent and divisive period (1644–1674)
was the creation of the outlines of modern Mauritanian society, characterized by pronounced divisions between the Arabo-Berbers (“Moors,”
as they came to be known) and the Black Africans, and by a hierarchical
social order among the Moorish population, with the hassan occupying
the highest position; the zawiya slightly below them; and the znaga in
4 •
INTRODUCTION
a decidedly underprivileged status, a station in life shared by assorted
other occupational groups such as bards, musicians, storytellers, and the
like, who helped give Mauritanian Moorish society its complex, multivariate character.
“PACIFICATION” AND FRENCH COLONIAL RULE
The Moors, as an exceedingly independent, religiously inclined, and
self-conscious group, were naturally suspicious of outsiders such as
Europeans. Indeed, for much of the 17th and 18th centuries, Spanish,
French, Portuguese, and English commercial interests traded with them
regularly, but their own rivalries caused the Beni Hassan to refuse to
grant substantial favors to any of them. Of course, with minimal contacts such as these, the period of early European exploration and penetration did nothing to alter Mauritanian society as it had developed after the end of the Char Bobha. Although France had acquired exclusive
“rights” to Mauritania by the Treaty of Paris in 1814, it was very slow to
exercise them, with the governor of adjacent Senegal, Louis Faidherbe,
being the only colonial administrator of consequence to exhibit any real
interest in the lands north of the Senegal River, mainly in the 1860s.
Mauritania continued to be spoken of by the French authorities dismissively as “le vide” (the vacuum), although its formal name, “land of
the Moors,” meant that France, even at that time, took careful note that
the peoples who inhabited the territory north of the Senegal River were
distinct from the Black Africans in and near the Senegal Valley itself.
December 1899 marked a turning point in Mauritanian history. In
that month, France made a firm decision to penetrate and “pacify” the
hitherto untamed interior of its nominal colony, but its proposed method
for doing so was unusual for the time. From 1900 to 1905 an Algerianborn French administrator of Corsican extraction, Xavier Coppolani,
attempted to secure French domination peaceably, making alliances
with the monastic zawiya against the dominant hassan and following
a skillful policy of setting tribe against tribe and region against region.
In rapid succession, Coppolani managed to get the leaders of Trarza,
Brakna, and Tagant provinces to agree to French “protection,” all the
while keeping an eye on the conquest of the critical Adrar region farther
north. However, Coppolani was assassinated in his home in Tagant’s
INTRODUCTION
• 5
main town, Tidjikja, on 12 May 1905, at the hands of the followers
of Cheikh Ma el-Ainin, a noted anticolonial campaigner throughout
northwest Africa who had become alarmed by Coppolani’s designs on
Mauritania.
The death of Xavier Coppolani threw French policy into disarray for
a few years, but a new French official, General Henri Gouraud, adopted
a much more aggressive strategy early in 1909, when he launched a
military assault on Ma el-Ainin’s forces in the Adrar, defeating them
by July of that year. Thereafter (except for a few desultory raids by
the Moors), Mauritania was taken into France’s sphere of influence,
but Paris did not follow up its military successes in the territory with
any development programs or investment in material or personnel.
Until World War II, Mauritania remained much as it had been since
medieval times and was easily one of the most neglected constituent
parts of Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF), the vast French West
African Federation formed in 1895. The colonial regime, based in St.
Louis, Senegal, did try to discourage slavery, however, and ended the
widespread, destructive and self-perpetuating practice of raids (ghazzis)
by one tribe against another by 1934.
PREPARATIONS FOR INDEPENDENCE
Facing widespread domestic and international opposition to the continued maintenance of its extensive overseas holdings after World War II,
France began as early as 1946 to contemplate giving some form of autonomy to its African colonies. At first, Paris held elections in each AOF
territory for seats in its National Assembly. The election in Mauritania
was won by Horma Ould Babana, a rising young politician dedicated
to working closely with the colonial regime. But Ould Babana chose to
absent himself from the country for much of his term as a parliamentary
deputy, a passivity that, in addition to damaging his political party, the
Entente Mauritanienne, left the way clear for rival interests to form their
own group, the Union Progressiste Mauritanienne (UPM), in February
1948. The UPM succeeded in defeating Ould Babana for reelection to the
French National Assembly in 1951. But regional, tribal, and clan-based
divisions in Mauritania were already glaringly apparent, not to mention a
more basic split: that between the majority Moorish population (whether
6 •
INTRODUCTION
“white” or the black-skinned current or former slaves) and the Black Africans in the Senegal River Valley, who feared being overshadowed by
the Arabs. The person who could—in France’s eyes at least—best deal
with these differences and still steer the country in the direction of what
would become full independence with continued close ties to Paris turned
out to be Mokhtar Ould Daddah, a young, soft-spoken lawyer (then the
only lawyer in Mauritania) who belonged to an eminent zawiya tribe, the
Oulad Berri, from the historic religious center of Boutilimit.
Assuming the leadership of the UPM a year after Ould Babana’s
defeat, Ould Daddah was able to lead the party to a convincing victory
over the Entente and other groups, gaining fully 22 of the 24 seats in
the Conseil Général, a French-sponsored interim advisory body. Five
years later, in March 1957, Ould Daddah’s fortunes remained in the
ascendancy, as the UPM succeeded in winning all but 1 of the 34 seats
in the newly formed Territorial Assembly, an event that occurred in the
wake of French prime minister Guy Mollet’s loi cadre of June 1956,
which conceded the principle of independence within the French community for Paris’s African possessions. Political divisions continued in
the late 1950s, though, based not only on tribal and ethnic factors but
also on ideology, a reflection of the varying attitudes many Mauritanians harbored toward the newly independent Kingdom of Morocco,
which served as a point of attraction for some in the old Entente as well
as in Ahmed Baba Miské’s Mauritanian National Renaissance (Nadha),
founded in June 1958.
THE FIRST THREE DECADES OF INDEPENDENCE
Mokhtar Ould Daddah, after considerable effort, finally overcame
or co-opted all the discordant elements, and thus ensured that by the
time Mauritania emerged as an independent country on 28 November
1960, he led a relatively unified state into the international community
as the world’s first Islamic republic. The then-ruling political group,
the Parti de Regroupement Mauritanien (PRM)—the UPM’s successor from 1958—was fused into still another organization, the Parti du
Peuple Mauritanien (PPM), with Ould Daddah as its leader. Gradually,
Mauritania took the path traveled by many other African countries in
the 1960s: the enshrinement of one-party rule behind a powerful presi-
INTRODUCTION
• 7
dential office. In the case of Mauritania, this began to transpire in the
aftermath of the so-called Congress of Unity in October 1961, which
declared the PPM the sole legal political party, and which reflected
Ould Daddah’s conviction that only he could keep his young, fragile
nation together to face the challenges he strongly suspected were in the
offing.
The Mauritanian state began its existence with (relatively) bright
economic prospects, fortified by vast fisheries off its Atlantic coastline and by enormous iron ore reserves that had been discovered by
French geologists. These two sectors, although they remained largely
under foreign control until the 1970s, soon came to comprise nearly all
of the country’s foreign exchange earnings. Politically, too, the early
1960s were mostly an “era of good feelings” in domestic affairs, with
preindependence differences (temporarily) submerged and with Ould
Daddah and his advisers trying to make the best of a sometimes difficult foreign policy situation, given that Morocco did not relent in its
refusal to recognize Mauritania’s independence until 1970, forcing the
country to rely heavily on France (and Black Africa) for diplomatic and
military support. Beginning in 1966, however, President Ould Daddah
felt sufficiently secure at home and abroad to begin a controversial
policy of “Arabization,” stressing Hassaniyya Arabic as the national
lingua franca and thus alienating many Black Africans, who wanted the
educational system and other aspects of society to remain oriented to
African languages as well as French. Arabization, though, did not alter
Ould Daddah’s other political strategies, although mass-scale nationalist protests in the late 1960s and early 1970s (spearheaded by those who
resented continued PPM rule and who chafed at the country’s continued
close links to France) did result in a series of “radical” domestic and
external policy shifts, among which were the nationalization of the
iron mines and the introduction of a new purely national currency, the
ouguiya. These measures—as well as others—were made possible by
the head of state’s increasingly good relations with the members of the
Arab League, which had finally abandoned their reluctance to recognize
Mauritania and which proved to be a critical source of economic aid.
Consequently, President Ould Daddah’s administration entered 1975 in
a fairly optimistic mood.
In that year, however, Ould Daddah embarked on an extremely risky,
high-stakes venture that would soon cause his downfall and nearly that
8 •
INTRODUCTION
of his country. In November 1975, Mauritania and Morocco jointly
agreed to divide the contested Spanish colony of Western Sahara between them, with President Ould Daddah receiving the southern onethird of the desert territory, which he had long claimed as Mauritania’s
own. Partition, on the other hand, meant ignoring demands for an independent Western Saharan state articulated by the nationalist liberation
movement in the colony, the Polisario Front. So, starting in earnest in
early 1976, Polisario’s highly motivated, Algerian-equipped guerrilla
forces, indignant at the so-called Madrid Agreement, singled out Mauritania for harsh treatment. Polisario forces ranged far and wide throughout the country, disabling the iron mines and driving the economy
virtually to ruin, even twice attacking the capital, Nouakchott. Caught
totally unprepared and increasingly desperate, Ould Daddah increased
the size of his army from 3,000 to 17, 000 men, signed a defense treaty
with Morocco, and embraced France as a source of direct military support and aerial intervention by 1977. None of these measures, however,
succeeded in affecting the military balance or even securing Mauritanian cities and towns from the Polisario Front. Moreover, exposing his
armed forces to a costly and seemingly unwinnable war created frustrations and a feeling of wounded pride on the part of the largely Frencheducated officer corps, prompting them to rise up and overthrow Ould
Daddah’s government on 10 July 1978. They arrested him and set up an
army council, the Comité Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN),
headed by the chief of staff, Col. Mustapha Ould Mohammed Salek.
Mauritania’s new rulers had no common ideology or political strategy
beyond an overriding desire to extricate their country from the Western
Saharan war, but for a variety of reasons this took more than a year to
occur. Only after a series of complex political maneuvers at the highest levels of the regime was a peace treaty with the Polisario Front—
which involved the abandonment of all Mauritanian claims to Western
Sahara—signed, in Algiers on 5 August 1979, by the CMRN’s successor body, the Comité Militaire de Salut National (CMSN).
After the Algiers peace treaty, Mauritania’s direct involvement in
Western Sahara ended, but the problems of peace proved almost as
vexing as those of war. The country’s head of state, Col. Mohammed
Khouna Ould Heydallah, found himself confronted not only with the
complicated and competitive interstate relations of the Maghreb (partly
caused by the Western Sahara conflict), but also with a stricken econ-
INTRODUCTION
• 9
omy, ongoing desertification, poor agricultural yields, and emerging
ethnic tensions. Government corruption also reached pandemic levels
in the early 1980s. Ould Heydallah dealt with these problems at times
imaginatively but also repressively, imprisoning dissidents and instituting some of the more draconian provisions of the Islamic legal code (the
sharia) to enhance, in his view, social cohesion and discipline. But a
reputation for inconsistency, inordinate independence from his CMSN
colleagues, and his apparent closeness to the Polisario Front spelled
the end of the Mauritanian president’s tenure after four years. On 12
December 1984, Ould Heydallah was bloodlessly replaced as CMSN
chairman in a coup d’état led by a fellow senior officer, Col. Maaouiya
Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya.
In the early years of Ould Taya’s presidency, he instituted sweeping
reforms. Corruption was suppressed (at least at first), collegiality became the watchword once again on the governing military committee,
the strictures of the sharia were relaxed and never again reimposed,
and the severed diplomatic relations with Morocco were restored. Most
political prisoners were freed, and the new government made strenuous
efforts to overcome the disastrous legacy of the Saharan war, attempting with some success to restructure the country’s crushing debt burden. All told, Ould Taya’s diligence, professional outlook, and lack of
pronounced ideology served to decompress Mauritania’s political and
social scene in 1985 and 1986.
This favorable situation, however, was not destined to last. In April
1986, a group of mostly exiled Black Africans calling themselves the
Forces de Libération Africaine de Mauritanie (FLAM) issued a forceful
and controversial tract, “The Manifesto of the Oppressed Black Mauritanian,” detailing what the organization considered to be a pattern of
discrimination and hostile acts directed against them by the Moors. While
the degree of actual support for FLAM was uncertain (and the fact that its
membership was thought to be mostly Halpulaars, one of several Black
African groupings in Mauritania—albeit the most numerous—caused observers to doubt the extent of its base), the authorities responded strongly,
dismissing many in the army and civil service who were believed to
support FLAM’s objective of overthrowing President Ould Taya and the
CMSN. Also an irritant during the late 1980s was the increasing level of
activity by the pro-Iraq Mauritanian Baath Party, a phenomenon that was
at first suppressed in much the same way as FLAM. This approach was
10 •
INTRODUCTION
later relaxed due to internal pressures, allowing the Baathists virtually
free rein throughout the governmental apparat. At least one coup plot and
still-parlous economic conditions muddied the waters further. About the
only bright spot in Mauritanian civic life during this period was the municipal elections held in December 1986 as a prelude to eventual civilian
rule, a step that won praise from abroad and produced some surprising
results even through the formation of independent political parties was
still not permitted.
Any hopes of a further opening of the political system, already fading
due to increased ethnic/racial tensions and heightening repression, were
dashed in April 1989. In that month, a series of incidents between Mauritanian and Senegalese livestock herders in the fertile Senegal River
Valley erupted into open intercommunal violence directed against
Mauritanian Moors living in Senegal and—to a lesser extent—against
Senegalese residing in Mauritania’s two largest cities, Nouakchott and
Nouadhibou. Both expatriate groups, hundreds of whom were to perish
in arson and rioting, made significant contributions to each country’s
economic well-being, and the losses suffered by Senegal and Mauritania were all the greater, therefore, when it was agreed by the two states
that an exchange of populations, by land and air, would be the most
effective way of preventing continued strife. Hundreds of thousands
of often-destitute refugees were thus evacuated. Disagreements over
the causes and motivation for the rioting and the extent of official
sponsorship or toleration of the violence quickly soured relations between Senegal and Mauritania. Diplomatic relations were broken off
in August 1989 amid an escalating round of recriminations over border issues, the alleged expulsions of Black Africans to Senegal by the
Ould Taya regime, and an array of other factors. During the following
year, the two countries often verged on all-out warfare. In addition,
the Senegal–Mauritania crisis had highly negative domestic effects.
Relations between black and Moorish Mauritanians suffered another
setback, FLAM activity in the Senegal River Valley increased, and
stories of repression drew strong international condemnation. Interethnic tensions also created an opening for Mauritania’s Baathists, whose
followers used their already privileged position in the bureaucracy to
move the state closer to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and to accelerate the
Arabization program. Mauritania thus became so closely aligned with
Baghdad that when Kuwait was invaded by Iraqi forces on 2 August
INTRODUCTION
• 11
2007, it suffered heavily as a result, with economic aid being withdrawn
by the conservative and oil-rich monarchies, which demanded from
Mauritania—but did not immediately get—unconditional condemnation of the Kuwait takeover. With the world community distracted by
the Gulf Crisis (which resulted in Iraq’s expulsion from Kuwait by a
U.S.-led expeditionary force), human rights conditions within Mauritania degenerated to the point of outright massacres, with possibly
hundreds of Black Africans being killed throughout the country late in
1990 and in the first weeks of 1991.
THE UNFULFILLED PROMISES OF THE SECOND REPUBLIC
One favorable outcome of the Gulf Crisis and war was the discrediting
of the Mauritanian Baath Party and its isolation from its patron, Saddam
Hussein. This, in turn, allowed President Ould Taya to rally to a position of renewed authority and project himself as a democratic reformer.
In early 1991—just after the end of the Gulf War—the head of state
announced plans to promulgate a new and more liberal constitution
(overwhelmingly approved by the citizenry on 12 July 1991) and hold
contested parliamentary and presidential elections for the first time in
the country’s 30-year history. These measures were to be accompanied
by an ostensible loosening of state controls over the news media and
the removal of most limits on the formation of new political parties
and civic groups. In January 1992 Ould Taya, having retired from the
armed forces, was elected president in the face of credible opposition
from Ahmed Ould Daddah, the younger brother of the first Mauritanian
president. The conduct of the election was open to question, however,
and some opposition parties boycotted the subsequent legislative balloting, leading to Ould Taya’s Parti Républicain, Démocratique et Social (PRDS) receiving the great majority of seats in the new National
Assembly and Senate. Maaouiya Ould Taya, in short, came out of the
initial democratization process with nearly as much power as he had
going into it, a fact that was to set the tone for the rest of the 1990s and
beyond.
For the first several years of the Mauritanian Second Republic (that
is, from 1992 to about 1996), a spirit of relative openness prevailed,
and supporters of democracy in the country, although starting to be
12 •
INTRODUCTION
disappointed, did not entirely give up hope. The breach in diplomatic
relations with Senegal was repaired in April 1992 (and relations with
Iraq made more distant at about the same time), and for a time press
restrictions and other forms of arbitrary behavior were not aggressively
engaged in by the new government. The non-PRDS political parties,
although shut out of virtually every institution of the Second Republic,
could nonetheless voice their opinions with little fear of severe repression. But even from the beginning, President Ould Taya’s priorities
were clear. In 1993, he enacted a sweeping amnesty law, immunizing
from prosecution all those state officials who might have engaged
in human rights violations between 1989 and 1991, and by 1994
began—sparingly at first—to detain on a short-term basis a few major
critics such as Ahmed Ould Daddah and Cheikh Saad Bouh Kamara,
the chairman of a semilegal human rights group, the Association Mauritanienne des Droits de l’Homme (AMDH). Also consistent with past
practice, the regime continued to take a hard line with those trying to
critically analyze the slavery question, and during the two years or so
after the installation of the “civilianized” Ould Taya government, some
opposition figures and groups rallied to the side of the ruling PRDS.
The political parties that continued to oppose the president, however,
began to suffer a long series of defections and splits—which badly
damaged their effectiveness—and some groupings were believed to
serve mainly as a vehicle for ambitious personalities, whatever their
ideological leanings.
In the economic field, a significant reorientation took place in the
direction of the “neoliberal” prescriptions of the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) beginning in 1992. Throughout the
decade, Mauritania proved itself a wholehearted follower of the “structural adjustment” programs of the IMF, and in short order agreed to devalue the ouguiya, open the economy to more foreign direct investment
(although the country remained a dismal business prospect in most sectors), curb “excess” government spending, privatize some state-owned
enterprises, and otherwise give up a significant degree of control over
its economic fate in return for additional economic aid and the prospect (only partially realized in the coming years) of forgiveness and/or
generous restructuring of its massive debt load. For several years, to be
sure, structural adjustment, although unpopular with ordinary Mauritanians, did produce notable economic results: the rate of inflation was
INTRODUCTION
• 13
kept down and growth in the country’s gross domestic product (GDP)
often exceeded a respectable 4 percent per annum.
However, the overall Mauritanian economy was still almost entirely
at the mercy of world commodity prices over which it had no control
whatever, and the type of development engendered by the IMF’s policies turned out to be highly uneven, with an apparent “new class” of
entrepreneurs and others taking more advantage of the reforms than
could the population at large, who were still mostly employed (if at all)
in the “informal” economic sector and had to be content with perennial
shortfalls in agriculture and livestock husbandry, as well as uneven
prospects in the fisheries area and the growing problems of urbanization, as Nouakchott and other cities and towns became overcrowded
with new arrivals from Mauritania’s rural zones. This situation—which
became part and parcel of the growing dislike of the government as the
decade progressed—was aggravated by President Ould Taya’s penchant (possibly unmatched by any previous head of state) for engaging
in regional and tribal favoritism in the distribution of business and other
opportunities in the country, mostly revolving around the president’s
home region of Adrar province and his Moorish Semasside tribe, long
renowned for their mercantile instincts.
Around 1996, the authorities abandoned much of their reluctance to
harass even the legal opposition. Press censorship began to affect more
and more independent media outlets (and usually no reason was given
by the powerful interior ministry for the confiscation of newspapers),
short-term detention of political leaders—prominent or otherwise—became more common, and the increasing desire of the Ould Taya regime
to be seen as more friendly to the West in general and the United States
in particular was made apparent in the sharp repression of the Baath
Party by late 1995 and the opening of direct contacts with Israel the
following year. Ties with Libya, always an uncertain policy, were also
basically terminated at about this time. Allegations of electoral irregularities became more credible starting in December 1997, when President Ould Taya was reelected to a second six-year term by a huge margin, although a respected political-religious leader, Mohamed Lemine
Ch’bih Ould Cheikh Melainine, performed respectably in Nouakchott
and Nouadhibou, home to many Mauritanians who were increasingly
educated and unhappy with the prevailing political situation. In parliament, the PRDS continued to exercise its massive hegemony, and
14 •
INTRODUCTION
censorship forced more than one newspaper or magazine to cease publication, unable to recoup the large financial losses that resulted when a
press run was confiscated.
The late 1990s were another turning point. In addition to voter fraud
becoming so obvious that the authorities were forced to admit its existence in municipal elections in January 1999 (which did not remotely
impact the PRDS’s dominant role in the legislative branch), Mauritania
took the momentous step in July 1999 of establishing full diplomatic
relations with Israel, a step that immediately stirred up a hornet’s nest
of dissention, leading in some instances to civil unrest, which in turn set
off another round of press restrictions and the jailing and harassment of
opposition elements. Ould Taya also nearly provoked a full-fledged crisis with Senegal in June 2000 over Dakar’s alleged misuse of the water
resources of the Senegal River, and—less controversially—established
closer relations with Morocco after the death of King Hassan II and
the accession to the throne of his son, Mohamed VI. A longtime close
relationship with Algeria, however, suffered as a result of Algeria’s
displeasure with Nouakchott’s links with Tel Aviv. As if the country
needed any further problems, agriculture fell into a severe slump starting in 1999–2000, with many Mauritanians facing either malnutrition or
starvation if food aid from the outside did not arrive. The 21st century,
in other words, did not begin auspiciously for Mauritania.
The eventual demise of an increasingly stubborn President Ould
Taya could perhaps be dated to April 2001, when police arrested former presidential candidate Ould Cheikh Melainine and charged him
(improbably) with acting on behalf of Libya. Sentenced to five years’
imprisonment a few weeks later after a nearly perfunctory trial, his sentence was not commuted by the head of state, as had been common in
the past; he was obliged to serve over two years of his sentence under
harsh conditions at the remote provincial town of Ayoun el-Atruoss.
Two legal political parties—the pro-Baathist Parti de l’Avant-Garde
Nationale (PAGN) and Ahmed Ould Daddah’s Union des Forces
Démocratiques (UFD) had already been completely banned by the
government in 1999 and 2000. Another party, the increasingly popular
Action pour le Changement (AC), led by Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, a
prominent antislavery activist, suffered the same fate in January 2002,
leaving few in any doubt that President Ould Taya would recognize no
limits on his determination to remain in power, possibly for life. Indeed,
INTRODUCTION
• 15
by this time it was rumored that his closest advisors, seeing that he had
held office for nearly 20 years, had recommended that he retire at the
end of his term in 2003, but he had refused. In another ominous development, it became common knowledge that Ould Taya had neglected
the needs of the military establishment, leading to fresh discontent
where the president could hardly afford it.
On the morning of 8 June 2003, President Ould Taya nearly lost his
job, and quite possibly his life. A group of disaffected former and serving army officers, led by Saleh Ould Hanena, violently attempted to
take power in Nouakchott, killing the chief of staff of the armed forces
as well as more than a dozen other persons and forcing those military
units still loyal to Ould Taya to fight the insurgents for nearly 36 hours
before their uprising was suppressed. The shock felt by Mauritanians
at this development, oddly, was not felt by the head of state, who,
although he foreswore mass repression in the aftermath of the coup attempt, did not change his policies or his attitudes as a result of it. The
presidential elections of November 2003 were blatantly manipulated
by the harassment of certain candidates (notably ex-CMSN chairman
Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah, trying for a political comeback
with the help of Islamists and liberal reformers alike), and a mass trial
in early 2005 of dozens of dissidents and some of the ringleaders of
the June coup plot led inevitably to the desired guilty verdicts against
the most troublesome figures. With Mauritania set to become an oil
exporter in early 2006 for the first time, doubts were raised about how
this new revenue stream would be utilized. The economic record of
Ould Taya’s government (including the provision of false data to the
IMF after 2001) made it clear that this was a matter that needed to be
monitored closely.
THE COUP OF AUGUST 2005 AND
THE BIRTH OF THE THIRD REPUBLIC
While President Ould Taya was in Saudi Arabia attending the funeral of
King Fahd on 3 August 2005, he was removed from office. His national
security director since 1985, Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, peacefully
overthrew the government by seizing the presidential residence and
other key installations in the early morning hours, assisted by some of
16 •
INTRODUCTION
the same army units that had been so instrumental in preserving Ould
Taya’s rule two years earlier. As a consummate regime insider and one
who was implicated in the many abuses of the former regime, Ould
Vall, after setting up a Conseil Militaire pour le Justice et la Démocratie
(CMJD) to govern the country and appointing many PRDS stalwarts
to his new cabinet to reassure the international community, pledged
that his tenure in office would be a short one. Rejecting any official
role for himself or his fellow officers beyond 2007, he stated that his
objective was the installation of a genuinely democratic form of governance, one in which the president—unlike before—would be limited
to two five-year terms and legal safeguards for the individual would
be strengthened. The Mauritanian people having massively backed the
constitutional changes in June 2006, the democratization process—this
time unhindered by repression or press censorship and open to international observers—began in earnest in the autumn of 2006. In late
November and early December, opposition political groups took about
half of the seats in balloting for the reconstituted National Assembly,
with the former PRDS, stripped of its quasi-official role, performing
relatively poorly. Independent candidates not connected with any political party and widely believed to represent traditional tribal, regional,
and religious interests, however, did succeed in gaining an outsize share
of seats, leading to speculation that the outcome, freely arrived at as it
was one the surface, served the interests of the departing army establishment by fragmenting the new parliament and perhaps increasing the
chance a strong head of state could prevail in the matter of contested
legislation.
With the new parliament in place, and with the election results for the
Mauritanian Senate and various municipal councils basically mirroring
those for the National Assembly, the contest for the presidency got underway in February 2007. Astonishingly, 20 individuals were cleared
to stand for election, with a second round of balloting to take place if
no candidate achieved an absolute majority in the initial match-up. The
list of candidates included Ahmed Ould Daddah, Mohammed Khouna
Ould Heydallah, 2003 coup leader Saleh Ould Hanena, longtime Black
Moor politician Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, Mohamed Lemine Ch’bih
Ould Cheikh Melainine, ex-Mauritanian Central Bank president Zeine
Ould Zeidane, and a man who up to this point had remained a relative
unknown in Mauritanian politics: the 69-year-old Sidi Mohamed Ould
INTRODUCTION
• 17
Cheikh Abdellahi, an economist who had spent most of the preceding two decades outside the country after having a falling out with
President Ould Taya in the late 1980s, evidently in a disagreement over
allegedly corrupt activities in the Ministry of Fisheries, which Ould
Abdellahi then headed. From the beginning, Ould Abdellahi seemed
to be very much the CMJD’s favored candidate, as he offered a basically moderate-to-conservative platform that could not fail to reassure
both the armed forces and the Western countries, and had the notable
distinction of being related by marriage to the powerful Arab nationalist officer who headed the presidential bodyguard unit in Mauritania,
Col. Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz. In spite of the atmosphere of freedom
surrounding the voting, Ould Abdellahi’s candidacy and his projected
strong performance at the polls raised many eyebrows.
On 11 March 2007, the first round of the presidential election went
forward without incident. All but Ahmed Ould Daddah and Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi were eliminated from further competition, although neither secured the majority that would have enabled an
outright victory. Ould Abdellahi won nearly 25 percent of the votes,
Ould Daddah a little over 20 percent, and perhaps the most conservative
of all the candidates, Zeine Ould Zeidane, garnered 15 percent. Ould
Boulkheir got just 10 percent, which apparently left him with enough
influence to throw his support, in the fortnight between the first and
second rounds, to Ould Abdellahi, in a move thought by some to be a
quid pro quo for the future head of state’s support for new antislavery
legislation. Ould Boulkheir’s move also had the effect—intended or
otherwise—of weakening the Coalition des Forces pour le Changement
Démocratique (CFCD), a grouping headed by the hartani leader’s own
Alliance Populaire Progressiste (APP). This, along with the military’s
support and the perception that Ould Abdellahi, by his long absence
from Mauritania during Ould Taya’s presidency, stood above the rivalries and feuds of the past, was enough to propel him to victory over
Ahmed Ould Daddah by a five percentage-point margin in the second
round of balloting on 25 March. Ould Daddah accepted his defeat gracefully and pledged to assist the president-elect in any way he could.
True to its promise made in August 2005, the CMJD junta, led by
Col. Ould Vall, relinquished power on 19 April 2007 to President Ould
Abdellahi, the first freely elected civilian leader in Mauritania’s history, who promptly declared the beginning of the Mauritanian Third
18 •
INTRODUCTION
Republic, appointed Ould Zeidane as his prime minister, and staffed his
cabinet mostly with technocrats not strongly affiliated with any political party, causing dissention in some quarters because it was expected
by many that either former presidential candidates who had performed
respectably or representatives of various opposition groups would be
given at least a few positions. And there was always the question of
Ould Abdellahi’s true power base: the military establishment (it was
thought) as well as the heavily traditional and moderately Islamist elements in the Mauritanian hinterland. These speculations were fueled
further by persistent rumors that Col. Ould Vall himself might run for
president at the time of the next scheduled elections in 2012, and by the
fact that nearly all the former members of the CMJD (except for Ould
Vall) retained their posts in the army. This almost guaranteed, in the
context of decades of nondemocratic rule, that they would continue to
exert at least some authority, in more indirect ways.
After only 18 months or so, a verdict on the Third Republic and President Ould Abdellahi’s stewardship is of course impossible to render.
Nevertheless, during the spring and summer of 2007, the new regime
started out with some vigor: new legislation—passed by the National
Assembly unanimously in August 2007—criminalizing the keeping of
slaves; repairs to the frayed Mauritanian–Algerian relationship (and cementing of ties with Senegal as well); and evident plans for the country
to rejoin the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS),
from which the Ould Taya government had withdrawn in 2000. In addition, no political party exercised hegemony in Mauritanian life along
the lines of the PRDS, and freedom of speech and of the press appeared
to have a new lease on life. But equally clearly, the new civilian government was not immune to the problems of its predecessors: a large
budget deficit in the summer of 2007 caused by far lower than expected
petroleum revenues threatened antipoverty programs, the effects of
global climate change were apparently affecting Mauritanian fishermen
at about the same time, and the agricultural sector seemed destined to
go from crisis to relative prosperity back to crisis again. And in foreign affairs, there was always the nagging question of just how close
Mauritania’s relationship with Israel should be, as well as whether, by
allowing the United States to conduct occasional military exercises on
Mauritanian soil, the country might be inviting an increase in Islamist
militancy and terrorism along the lines of the June 2005 Lemgheity at-
INTRODUCTION
• 19
tack as well as the brutal murders of four members of a French family
on vacation in the southern town of Aleg in December 2007. Whatever
the future held, however, the installation of a genuinely open form of
governance could, by bringing diverse points of view to the surface
rather than suppressing them, fortify the young nation to better face the
challenges that doubtless lay ahead, and so make an already essentially
stable Islamic Republic of Mauritania a better place for its people.
THE MILITARY COUP OF 6 AUGUST 2008 AND
THE END OF THE THIRD REPUBLIC
On the morning of 6 August 2008, the short-lived Mauritanian Third
Republic came to an abrupt but not wholly unexpected end when army
units easily and peacefully toppled President Sidi Mohamed Ould
Cheikh Abdellahi and the military establishment once more assumed
power. Col. Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz, the highest-ranking officer in
the country after the retirement of Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall the year
before, became the new head of state, governing Mauritania through an
11-officer High State Council. Although the immediate cause of the
coup was Ould Abdellahi’s attempt to dismiss Col. Ould Abdelaziz and
three other military leaders—a decision that was announced early in the
morning of 6 August and to which the army responded literally within
minutes—the main factors behind the putsch had been developing for
months. President Ould Abdellahi’s apparent reputation for indecisiveness (at best) or insensitivity to the plight of ordinary Mauritanians
(at worst) had, along with adverse economic news and allegations of
high-level corruption, emboldened the country’s parliament to oppose
his policies during the late spring and summer of 2008. Two successive
reorganizations of Mauritania’s cabinet and the appointment of a new
Prime Minister helped very little, as some of the new ministers were
former backers of the discredited 1984–2005 Ould Taya regime while
others were of a technocratic bent that did not inspire confidence as
the country edged ever closer to economic and social chaos. More specifically, Ould Abdellahi’s choice of personnel to lead the all-important
Interior Ministry, as well as his willingness to allow moderate Islamist
political figures to join his government angered the military officer
corps greatly.
20 •
INTRODUCTION
Viewed in retrospect, very little civilian-oriented institutionalization of the government and society of Mauritania took place during
the Third Republic. Traditional regional and tribal loyalties (as well as
the imperative of self-enrichment) took the place of any real attempt to
construct a wide-scale national consciousness and to build centers of
genuine influence outside the military. Even the apparent—and on the
surface laudable—independence of parliament during President Ould
Abdellahi’s term (something unheard of during Maaouiya Ould Taya’s
presidency) amounted to considerably less than might at first have met
the eye, as not only did many deputies act primarily out of parochial
interest, but also wittingly or not allowed themselves to be influenced
inordinately by the army. Ould Abdellahi’s attempting sacking of Col.
Ould Abdelaziz and his colleagues, in fact, was generally conceded to
be the direct outgrowth of the president’s frustration with military interference on the parliamentary scene. The international response to the
August coup was almost universally negative, but the world community
could do nothing to reverse it, particularly when domestic attitudes
were decidedly mixed, with a substantial level of dissent being matched
with the belief that the army stood a better change of addressing the
country’s pressing problems than a divided and quarrelling civilian
regime. One month after the coup, there was the obvious prospect of
further policy shifts (and perhaps new elections) by those now in power,
but it was also clear that the cause of civilian democracy in Mauritania
had suffered a severe and probably long-lasting setback.
The Dictionary
–A–
ACTION POUR LE CHANGEMENT (AC). One of the largest, most
broadly based, and most prominent opposition political parties in
Mauritania during the country’s Second Republic (1992–2005), Action pour le Changement was founded on 22 August 1995. From the
beginning it was led by Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, a well-known
hartani activist, who the year before had pulled himself (as well as
his El-Hor movement) out of Ahmed Ould Daddah’s Union des
Forces Démocratiques (UFD), evidently because of dissatisfaction with that group’s poor electoral fortunes as well as with Ould
Daddah’s reputedly high-handed behavior as party leader. There
were also several other significant components of the AC, including defectors from the UFD and from the Union pour le Progrès
et la Démocratie (UPD), led by former foreign minister Hamdi
Ould Mouknass, and even some Black African militants from the
outlawed and exiled Forces de Libération Africaine de Mauritanie (FLAM). The small Parti du Centre Démocratique Mauritanien
(PCDM) also joined the AC.
From the outset, the AC sought to chart a middle course in Mauritanian politics, attempting to offer a clear alternative to President
Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya’s Parti Républicain, Démocratique et Social (PRDS) while distancing itself from the supposedly
more “radical” UFD and leaving itself open to dialogue with the
ruling party. In the AC’s first electoral test in October 1996, it succeeded in winning a single seat in the PRDS-dominated Assemblée
Nationale, but a few months later Ould Boulkheir and several other
people were arrested and briefly detained on charges that they were
engaged in “suspicious relations” with Col. Muammar el-Qadaffi’s
21
22 •
ACTION POUR LE CHANGEMENT
Libya. Although all the defendants were freed within a week (and all
were acquitted by a Mauritanian court in April 1997), the incident
was an unfortunate harbinger of future events for the party, and
probably contributed to an eventual hardening of attitudes toward
the Ould Taya regime. At about the same time (in February 1997),
the AC formally associated itself with a coalition of opposition
groups—known as the Front des Partis de l’Opposition (FPO)—but
took care to predict at the time (correctly) that the FPO would prove
to be short-lived, given the multiple personalities and divergent political points of view of its constituent members. Along with several
other parties, the AC boycotted the municipal elections held in the
country’s 208 arrondissements on 29 January 1999, saying that there
were few if any guarantees of their fairness and transparency. Action
pour le Changement, along with its coboycotters, thus felt vindicated
immediately after the voting when, in a startling admission by the
government, vote fraud and other “irregularities” forced a new round
of balloting in the capital city of Nouakchott as well as in two districts in the central Mauritanian province of Tagant. Both revotes,
as expected, were won by the PRDS, but the low turnout at the polls
(under 50 percent), coupled with blatant electoral dishonesty, gave
the legal opposition some cause for satisfaction.
The late 1990s marked the end of President Ould Taya’s tolerance
of what was becoming a more credible challenge to his increasingly
authoritarian rule. Although the party remained legal, more and more
AC members (primarily Black Africans but also haratines on occasion) found themselves arbitrarily detained, mistreated, and harassed
by the security forces in what was to become a long series of human
rights abuses committed against Mauritanians not firmly affiliated
with Ould Taya. The presence in the AC’s ranks of ex-FLAM members, as well as other dissident Black Africans and haratines, also
undoubtedly made the repression of the group all the easier for the
regime to rationalize, and President Ould Taya’s visceral dislike of
Messaoud Ould Boulkheir also did not help matters. But the rest of
Mauritanian society evidently was feeling somewhat more comfortable with the AC’s activities by 2001, because on 19 October of
that year, the party managed, against great odds, to win four seats
in the National Assembly as well as to capture virtual control of the
Nouakchott City Council in the municipal elections held at the same
ACTION POUR LE CHANGEMENT
• 23
time. This was all the more striking given the AC’s later announcement that it would attempt to form an opposition bloc in parliament
consisting of itself, the small Front Populaire Mauritanien (FPM; one
seat), and the UFD, which after its October 2000 banning had reconstituted itself as the Rassemblement des Forces Démocratiques
(RFD; three seats), making a total of eight opposition deputies in the
81-seat chamber.
The elected opposition to President Ould Taya had thus been measurably strengthened, and the response of the head of state was harsh.
In a 26 December 2001 speech to the National Assembly, Prime Minister Cheikh el-Avia Ould Mohamed Khouna outlined a blistering
array of allegations against the AC (though without mentioning it by
name). He called the organization “racist” (probably because of its
heavily Black African and haratine membership) and explicitly held
the group responsible for the destructive Senegal–Mauritania crisis
of 1989–1990 (although the party was not of course even in existence
at the time), going on to say that although Mauritania’s relations with
Senegal had since returned to what he called “an exemplary level,”
the AC was busy plotting “fresh crimes” against the state. The AC’s
four deputies walked out of parliament in protest and may have feared
the worst. On 3 January 2002, the government officially banned Action pour le Changement, throwing El-Hor and Ould Boulkheir into
the political wilderness, although the AC’s parliamentary deputies
and municipal council members were allowed to retain their seats
as independents. Although Ould Boulkheir stated that banning the
AC was contrary to the 1991 Mauritanian constitution and pledged
to “continue the struggle” to democratize the country, his appeal to
the courts to reverse the government’s decision was denied in March
2002.
Seeing that Ahmed Ould Daddah’s UFD had, after its proscription
in 2000, successfully relabeled itself as the RFD, Ould Boulkheir
tried a similar tactic in the summer of 2002, when he petitioned the
interior ministry to allow Convention pour le Changement (CC), a
successor to the AC, to function legally. But this too was destined to
fail. On 25 August 2002, the regime refused certification to the CC,
accusing it of “undermining the national unity” and “sowing hatred
and discord,” epithets that fooled virtually no one inside or outside
Mauritania. Unsurprisingly, the hard-line chairman of the ruling
24 •
ADRAR
PRDS, Louleid Ould Weddad, praised the government’s denial of
credentials to the CC, an action that forced Messaoud Ould Boulkheir
and his allies to affiliate themselves with (and to all intents and purposes by 2004, take over) a less well-known opposition group, the
Alliance Populaire Progressiste (APP), thus ending the partially fruitful efforts of Action pour le Changement to present itself as a viable
alternative to the soon-to-be-overthrown President Ould Taya.
ADRAR. Mauritania’s second-largest administrative région (215,000
square kilometers), the Adrar roughly bisects the country, starting
about 250 kilometers inland from the Atlantic coast and extending
eastward, bounded by the provinces of Hodh ech-Chargui, Tagant,
and Tiris Zemmour and ending at the border with Mali. Most of the
Adrar is monotonous desert, with very little rainfall or vegetation,
although several minor mountain ranges and plateaus exist, mainly
around the provincial capital of Atar. The Adrar also includes the
village of Ouadane, a major caravan stop in Almoravid times and
possibly dating from as early as the ninth century A.D. Also of great
interest is the ancient Islamic city of Chinguetti, reached by a road
running east from Atar. Other roads in the province extend west
from Atar toward Akjoujt and eventually the Mauritanian capital
of Nouakchott and also northward to Choum and the twin towns of
F’Derik and Zouérate. According to official government sources,
the Adrar had a population of about 55,000 in 1988 and 69,542 in
2000. Most of Adrar’s inhabitants live in the towns, having been
forced by drought conditions to abandon their historically nomadic
way of life.
In the tribally and regionally based politics of independent Mauritania, the Adrar has held great significance. Until 1978, the region
was noted for its degree of resistance to the policies of the first president, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, who hailed from faraway Boutilimit.
No head of state had his origins in the Adrar until December 1984,
when Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya (born and raised in
Atar) came to power. His regional counterparts were reported to be
influential not only in Mauritania’s armed forces but also in the
country’s economy and civil service, at least until Ould Taya’s overthrow on 3 August 2005.
ADRAR CAMPAIGN
• 25
ADRAR CAMPAIGN (1909). One of the most significant military
efforts made by France to conquer and “pacify” Mauritania, the
Colonne d’Adrar, as it was called, was launched after the basically
successful occupation of such areas as Brakna and Trarza to the
south under the direction of the governor-general of the territory,
Xavier Coppolani. The campaign was also initiated on the heels
of a series of sharp military setbacks for the French at the hands of
the prominent anticolonial leader Cheikh Ma el-Ainin, who urged
an Islamic holy war (jihad) to drive out the French invaders and
force them back across the Senegal River from whence they came.
After the assassination of Coppolani at Tidjikja on 12 May 1905,
French policy went through a period of uncertainty and indecision,
but in late 1907, French forces in Mauritania were placed under
the command of Colonel (later General) Henri Gouraud, who had
previously earned plaudits as a desert campaigner farther east in the
“Soudan” (present-day Mali) and whose instructions were to bring
the Adrar firmly under French control. After making careful preparations, he launched an attack against Ma el-Ainin’s forces on 9 January 1909 and quickly captured the key town of Atar. Due to French
overconfidence, overextension of supply lines in the trackless desert
wilderness, and a lack of effective cooperation with sympathetic
tribes, however, Gouraud’s forces soon lost the initiative to Ma elAinin’s highly motivated warriors, who promptly counterattacked
and inflicted great losses upon the colonial army. A futile series of
skirmishes and small engagements extended into June 1909, with
each side making gains and suffering reverses. This stalemate led
many French administrators to doubt the wisdom of the campaign.
But just when it looked as though Gouraud would be unsuccessful,
he hit upon a strategy borrowed from Coppolani, his predecessor: He
would occupy the palm groves in the province, which produced dates
that the Moorish tribesmen needed to survive, and thereby provoke
a frontal engagement that would divert Ma el-Ainin’s attention away
from the Chinguetti area, which would then be occupied as well.
This phase of the operation worked almost precisely as planned, and
by 28 July the battle that Gouraud had hoped for materialized. By this
time, Ma e-Ainin’s sons, el-Oueli and Hassena, were in command
of the resistance, aided by the Emir of the Adrar, Ould Aida. In the
26 •
AFRIQUE OCCIDENTALE FRANÇAISE
“battle of the palm groves,” they were routed and pursued north to
Idjil, where the destruction of their forces was completed. The Adrar
was now firmly in the hands of the French and would remain “pacified” for the next half century.
AFRIQUE OCCIDENTALE FRANÇAISE (AOF). The Federation
of French West Africa, organized in 1895, was the basic instrument of French colonial rule in the region, with all of its territorial
components becoming independent in 1960. At first made up of five
territories, the number grew to eight on 4 December 1920, when
Mauritania and two other colonies were included after the effective
completion of the military “pacification” efforts in those areas. In
addition to Mauritania, AOF included Côte d’Ivoire, Dahomey (since
1975 known as Benin), Guinea, Niger, Senegal, the Soudan (Mali),
and Upper Volta (since 1983 known as Burkina Faso).
AOF was not organized democratically, nor did it have any legislative bodies before 1946. Headquartered in Dakar, Senegal (from
which the Mauritanian colony was also run), the West African Federation was led by a governor-general (commissaire de gouvernement), who enjoyed near-absolute power, because he was answerable
only to the president of the French Republic in Paris, who appointed
him to a five-year term. A lieutenant governor presided over each
individual colony and possessed supervisory power over each cercle
within the territory, with the commandant of each cercle (almost
always a European) in turn overseeing the largely indigenous town
and rural authorities. In 1925, a Grand Conseil (Grand Council)
was set up in Dakar as a consultative body, organized along corporatist lines, with primarily European interest group representatives
such as civil servants and military officers among its 40 members.
The Grand Council, though, was purely an advisory panel, with real
powers continuing to reside with the governor-general, who, in fact,
likely acquired even more influence than was intended due to the
rapid turnover of subordinate personnel in Dakar and the frequent
changes in the composition of the Second French Republic. Mauritania’s place in AOF was essentially the same as that of the other
colonies in the federation, the only significant differences being the
lack of a capital for the territory (it was governed first from Dakar
and then from St. Louis, Senegal); the high profile of the French
AFRIQUE OCCIDENTALE FRANÇAISE
• 27
military establishment in the ranks of the colonial government due to
the recency of the “pacification”; and the innovative use by France
of traditional tribal, especially zawiya, Mauritanian authorities as a
means of indirect rule.
Following the end of the Second World War, during which the
federation had fallen to the Nazi-controlled Vichy regime but whose
African soldiers contributed massively to the Free French cause, the
new Third Republic decided, as a mark of gratitude, to reorganize
AOF and give it a slightly more democratic cast. On 25 October 1946,
a decree opened the Grand Council to wider participation, although
the franchise was still restricted and the council’s role remained entirely consultative. In addition, a Conseil du Gouvernement was set
up in Dakar that resembled an actual legislature, with five members
representing each of the eight colonies of the federation (for a total of
40), assisted by a Permanent Commission to oversee the work of the
governor-general and by a variety of other administrative and conflict
resolution bodies. Each AOF territory could also for the first time
elect delegates to the French National Assembly in Paris.
For Mauritania, the 1946 reforms were particularly significant. Not
only was the territory now separated administratively from Senegal,
but it was also awarded its own Conseil Général and was given representation in the Council of Government and a seat in the National
Assembly. The General Council was at first an advisory organ that
each colony possessed, but from these bodies would emerge experienced politicians, such as Mauritania’s Mokhtar Ould Daddah,
who would often play major roles in their countries’ affairs. For the
moment, however, most power continued to be held by the French
governor-general.
Growing anticolonial sentiments among the native populations of
AOF, coupled with the outbreak of a violent war for independence in
Algeria in 1952, convinced Paris that at least some autonomy would
have to be granted to its West African possessions. Consequently,
the General Councils were renamed Assemblées Territoriales in
1952; suffrage for the legislative and other AOF elections was gradually made universal; and an orderly release from French control was
eventually negotiated with leaders such as Ould Daddah, who could
be counted on to remain close to France after its departure. Beginning on 1 August 1960 (when Dahomey became independent), AOF
28 •
AGRICULTURE
rapidly began losing the component parts that had made it one of
the largest colonial governments in the world, and on 28 November
1960, when the Islamic Republic of Mauritania became independent,
AOF finally passed into history.
AGRICULTURE. The history of the agricultural sector in Mauritania
is one of seemingly endless disappointment and human hardship, with
a relatively few flush seasons being far outweighed by shortages of
essential foodstuffs in other years, and which brought the country to
the brink of wide-scale famine by the early 21st century. The greater
part of the problem lies in the fact that of Mauritania’s vast land mass
of 1,030,300 square kilometers, only about 14 percent is considered
suitable for the growing of crops, and only a fraction of that amount
was in productive use at any given time. In addition, the inexorably
expanding Mauritanian population bears some of the blame for the
worsening food situation over the years, and the concurrent (and
drought-induced) process of urbanization brought fewer and fewer
benefits to those facing malnutrition, as the sheer numbers of these
relocated persons (most notably in the capital city, Nouakchott) made
attempts at relief more and more problematic. Significant fluctuations in the climate of the area—which, of course, affects the amount
of rainfall most places in the country receive as well as aggravating
the desertification problem—are also critical factors in explaining
why Mauritania will probably never even approach self-sufficiency
in food in the indefinite future, and why international aid programs
will always be pivotal to the survival of the young nation.
Because northern and eastern Mauritania is almost entirely desert,
crops can only be grown in a fairly narrow belt along the southern
border, in the provinces of Assaba, Brakna, Gorgol, Guidimaka,
the southern reaches of Hodh ech-Chargui and Hodh el-Gharbi,
and Trarza. There, the quantity of rainfall is generally enough, and
the Senegal River floods sufficiently, that sorghum, barley, rice,
corn, and millet can be grown and harvested in amounts that make
farming (as well as the rearing of livestock) a viable enterprise. In
nearly every other area of Mauritania, the only agriculture to be
found is in and near several oases, mostly in the régions of Adrar
and Tagant, where dates, gum arabic from acacia trees, and some
corn can be profitably raised. The great weakness here, as elsewhere,
AGRICULTURE
• 29
is the severe shortage of serviceable water resources; in the north,
the near-total absence of rain during most periods makes the drilling
of wells a necessity.
From the time of Mauritanian independence in 1960, agriculture
has steadily declined in importance as a percentage of the country’s
gross domestic product (GDP), falling from 50 percent of the total
in 1960 to an estimated 3 percent in 1985, propelled downward not
only by the rise of the mining and fisheries sectors, but also by the
encroachment of the Sahara on previously arable hectarages, poor
governmental management of water and other resources (as well as a
neglect of agriculture generally throughout the 1970s), and a succession of droughts. Moreover, starting in the mid-1970s, the Senegal
River began to seasonally overflow its banks much less than had previously been the case, and poor rainy seasons that hit the country at
the same time often yielded as much as 40 percent less precipitation
than had been expected. By 1980, Mauritania produced only 24,000
tons of cereals, necessitating the importation of upward of 80,000
tons from abroad, putting grave strains on the national budget as well
as scarce foreign exchange reserves. The response of the Mauritanian
government, then headed by Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah, was twofold. First, it asked for (and mostly received) massive
food aid, primarily from Europe, North America, other Arab states,
and the World Food Programme (WFP) of the United Nations (UN).
Second—and controversially—it assumed a more active role in farming and its allied activities, with the two main state agriculture-related
agencies, the Commissariat à la Sécurité Alimentaire (CSA) and
the Société Nationale pour le Développement Rural (SONADER),
providing subsidies and price supports to farmers and directly assuming control over some storage, distribution, and marketing functions.
But these steps could not arrest the downward spiral of crop yields;
the rural zones of Mauritania still received only about 10 percent of
total government expenditure, rainfall was still disappointing, and
price subsidies tended to discourage production. Finally, the CSA
and SONADER became the targets of allegations of corruption by
the early 1980s, adding to a general feeling of malaise.
The “restructuring” of the Mauritanian military regime on 12
December 1984, which deposed Ould Heydallah and installed Col.
Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya in his place, did bring about a
30 •
AGRICULTURE
significant reorientation of the state’s resources in the direction of
agriculture, albeit without truly lasting effects. Almost overnight, investment in rural areas more than quadrupled (to 42.1 percent of the
total budget, with 36.5 percent of all monies going toward agriculture), the CSA and SONADER were reorganized and corrupt and/or
incompetent personnel were dismissed, and subsidies were gradually
phased out over the next few years. The government also encouraged
the substitution of rice for other crops, because it was less sensitive
to the vagaries of climate and was less difficult to harvest. President
Ould Taya also made an increased effort to collaborate with Mali
and Senegal through Mauritania’s membership in the Organisation pour la Mise en Valeur du Fleuve Sénégal (OMVS), with a
number of hoped-for improvements, including new dams at Diama
and Manantali, projected to add 150,000 hectares of cultivable land.
However, these OMVS projects were highly susceptible to the political situation in the region, as was proven during the 1989–1990
Senegal–Mauritania crisis and (for a much shorter period of time)
during the Senegal–Mauritania incident of June 2000. In addition,
the Land Reform Act of 5 June 1983, which appropriated for governmental use “dead” or fallow lands in the Senegal River Valley,
led to persistent allegations that land tenure regulations were being
altered in favor of the country’s dominant Beydane Moors at the
expense of the non-Arab Black African community. The problem of
the Mauritanian haratines (“Black Moors”) was also a factor here, as
they also urgently desired good farmland.
Political considerations aside, agriculture rebounded smartly by
the late 1980s, as increased rainfall brought a harvest of 165,000 tons
of cereals in 1987 and 183,600 tons in 1989–1990. This was still below the country’s overall requirements but remarkable for a sector of
the Mauritanian economy that had been all but written off just a short
time earlier. Soon, farmers in the Senegal Valley were selling their
produce at market rates, ignoring the remaining official production
quotas and subsidies that had originally been instituted by President
Ould Heydallah and helped further by the elimination of the (widely
circumvented) food export monopoly of the Société Nationale
d’Importation et d’Exportation (SONIMEX). But in a pattern that
would repeat itself in the following two decades, the 1992 harvest—
after three record-setting years—fell to 84,000 tons of cereals, and
AGRICULTURE
• 31
while the 1993, 1994, and 1995 growing seasons gave rise to greater
confidence about the future of agriculture, the food supply deficit
for the country sometimes went as high as 27,000 tons of cereal, an
amount that would be—not for the first time and certainly not for the
last—made up by donations from overseas, including from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). Ominously, by
early 1996 the total hectarage of cultivated land in Mauritania was
reportedly shrinking because of perennially substandard water management practices, and by 1997 the cereal deficit had risen to 115,000
tons. The town of Tidjikja and its environs suffered a staggering 77
percent drop in cereal output in 1997 compared to the previous year,
and nationwide, production was down by at least one-half. Anywhere
from 30 to 50 percent of crops were being lost due to locusts, graineating birds, or other natural predators.
The 1998 growing season brought about some recovery in Mauritanian agriculture, and by April 1999 the cereals deficit had been
reduced to an estimated 71,000 tons, with that year seeing a 28
percent rise in cereal output (to 250,000 tons) and a 60 percent increase in yields of millet and sorghum over 1998. In May 1999, the
government announced a $102 million plan to irrigate and otherwise
rehabilitate 13,000 hectares of land for agricultural purposes, but,
taking some of the shine off this prospect, some experts stated that
at least 200,000 hectares of land in Mauritania would have to be
“processed” in a similar way for the country to approach food selfsufficiency. In any case, agriculture was already headed on a downward slope, which was to lead to near-catastrophe by 2002. Yields for
2001 were down 9 percent from the year 2000, and in January 2002
a series of unusually intense storms in Brakna, Gorgol, and Trarza
provinces destroyed 40 percent of the grain crop, many vegetable
fields, and 80,000 head of livestock. Worse yet, 7,000 people were
rendered homeless. Later in 2002—for the country did not and probably could not recover quickly from these reverses—it was reported
that 33 percent of the rice crop and 18 percent of the cereals yield
had been lost, and the resulting higher prices for food were making
survival a daily challenge for many citizens. The Senegal River was
also flooding far below its regular level. A projected 38,000 tons of
cereals and 14,000 tons of other foodstuffs were urgently needed to
ward off mass starvation, and grain production was set to decline to a
32 •
AGRICULTURE
five-year low, as the cereals deficit skyrocketed to 157,000 tons and
400,000 people needed emergency food aid in order not to starve to
death, all according to the U.S. government’s Famine Early Warning System (FEWS). March 2002 also brought the additional bad
news that the Société Générale des Travaux Agricoles et Ruraux
(SOGETAR), charged with carrying out improvements to land in the
Senegal River Valley and an early target for the Ould Taya regime’s
privatization efforts in 1996, had been forced into dissolution due to
the failure of its private investors to provide their 40 percent share of
the company’s working capital.
In the exploding shantytowns surrounding Nouakchott as well as
certain other Mauritanian cities and towns, food insecurity was rampant by 2006, with the proximity of the capital’s populace to food
delivery points not providing the advantage it once did because of
the sheer numbers affected. The effects on the public health situation
were disastrous, and for a significant period (from 2003 to late 2005)
some one million persons were considered to be in a state of acute
need of international food aid, although this number had declined
to 400,000 or so by early 2006, assisted by better harvests during
2005—203,000 tons versus 116,000 tons in 2004. Some 1.9 million
people in Mauritania (out of an estimated population of 3 million)
were still classified as living in a “food-insecure” environment, and
the southeast of the country (the two Hodh provinces, essentially)
was especially hard hit. The capabilities of the Mauritanian government itself, meanwhile, were being exposed as highly inadequate,
with the CSA and SONADER seemingly reverting to their ineffectual 1980s role.
Locust swarms in Mauritania, although an omnipresent problem
in all of West Africa and in parts of Arab North Africa, also had
drastic ramifications for Mauritania’s agriculture starting in the mid1990s. By 1995, for example, locusts had affected fully one-third of
the country’s total cultivable land area, and the authorities had only
two fixed-wing aircraft, one helicopter, and six vehicles with which
to spray fields with insecticide. Some international assistance was
eventually forthcoming and the problem was lessened. However, in
February 2004, a huge locust swarm was detected in Adrar and Tiris
Zemmour provinces in northern Mauritania, fed, ironically, by the
plentiful rainfall, which had generated increased optimism about crop
AHMED BABA MISKÉ
• 33
yields only a short time before. Little or no insecticide was immediately available to control the locusts, and when the swarm descended
on the country’s arable zones, some 500,000 hectares were put at risk
of crop failure. On one memorable day, locusts denuded Nouakchott
of all its greenery, with even the grass in its soccer stadium being
eaten by the voracious creatures. The problem grew steadily worse
during 2004, with 40 percent of livestock pastureland being damaged
or ruined; the affected lands totaled 1.6 million hectares. By 2005,
some reduction in locust swarms was evident, but water and fodder
for livestock continued to be quite scarce, programs to supply seeds
to needy farmers were having only limited success, and it looked
very much as though the Mauritanian agricultural situation would
transition from one crisis to another indefinitely.
AHMED BABA MISKÉ (ca. 1933– ). A prominent Mauritanian
political personality in the country’s preindependence period and a
somewhat unpredictable figure in later years, Ahmed Baba Miské
was born in the northern Adrar and was a member of the Ahel Berikallah, a Moorish tribe found in both Mauritania and neighboring
Western Sahara. He attended both primary and secondary schools in
Mauritania, but then studied at the University of Dakar and also in
France for a time.
Upon Baba Miské’s return to Mauritania in the late 1950s, he became an early opponent of the country’s ascendant leader, Mokhtar
Ould Daddah, whom he considered too pro-French and traditionalist
and out of touch with the “radical” nationalist currents then prevalent in developing countries. He was one of a core group of young
Mauritanians who felt excluded from influence within the Parti
de Regroupement Mauritanien (PRM), an organization created
through a fusion of several other groups at the Congress of Aleg in
May 1958, an event that further consolidated Ould Daddah’s position as Mauritania’s foremost politician and the one most trusted
by France. Two months after the Aleg convention, a PRM meeting
expelled Baba Miské and other youth leaders from the party due to
their vocal criticism of Mokhtar Ould Daddah. On 25–26 September
1958, at Kaédi, Baba Miské founded An-Nadha al-Wataniyya alMauritaniya (Nadha), in which he held the post of secretary-general.
Nadha called on the citizens of Mauritania to reject membership in the
34 •
AHMED BABA MISKÉ
French Community after independence, urged a rapprochement with
Morocco, and appeared to favor Moorish Mauritanians at the expense
of the Black Africans of the Senegal River Valley, a stance that cost
it considerable popular support.
Under the pretext of discovering corruption in Nadha’s ranks,
Ould Daddah banned the party’s activities on the eve of the 1959
elections to the Assemblée Territoriale. A limited campaign of
Nadha-inspired bombings and other acts of violence followed, and
Baba Miské was arrested and imprisoned from May 1960 to February 1961 in the remote eastern province of Hodh ech-Chargui. After
his release, he became reconciled with President Ould Daddah and
took an active role in the Congress of Unity of October 1964, which
merged Nadha, two other groups, and the PRM into a new Parti du
Peuple Mauritanien (PPM), in which Baba Miské became secretary. Although allied with Ould Daddah at this point, Baba Miské
quickly built up a separate power base within the PPM, which the
head of state believed might make him a threat. Ould Daddah’s
response was in effect to banish Baba Miské to the United States to
serve as Mauritania’s ambassador in Washington and the country’s
permanent representative to the United Nations between 1964 and
1966. After being recalled in 1966, he was arrested on corruption
charges and after one month in prison was found not guilty. Soon
thereafter, Ahmed Baba Miské went into exile, mainly in Paris, for
the next 12 years, during which he founded the magazine Africasia.
Baba Miské’s sympathies took another turn in 1974–1975, when
he publicly opposed President Ould Daddah’s plan to annex Western
Sahara in cooperation with Morocco’s King Hassan II. In an open
letter to the PPM’s Fourth Congress (which, as expected, endorsed
Ould Daddah’s Saharan policy without demur), he warned the delegates of the dangers posed by Moroccan “expansionism,” fearing
that Mauritania itself would be next in line for conquest once King
Hassan had digested Western Sahara. Around the time of the Madrid
Agreement of November 1975, he moved to Algiers and promptly
joined the Polisario Front, a nationalist group that advocated the
creation of an independent Saharan Arab Democratic Republic
(SADR) in the disputed territory. Grateful to have such a respected
person on its side, the front made him a spokesman and elected him in
August 1976 to its political bureau, a group of high-ranking Western
AHMED OULD BOUCEIF
• 35
Saharans. However, after his old adversary, Mokhtar Ould Daddah,
was overthrown by the Mauritanian armed forces on 10 July 1978,
Baba Miské found the prospect of reentry into Mauritania’s political
scene irresistible. Having evidently fallen out with the Polisario Front
(he was not reelected to the political bureau at the organization’s
Fourth General Popular Congress in September 1978), he journeyed
to Mauritania for the first time since 1966 and tried to reestablish his
political credentials. It was a difficult endeavor; in December 1980
he was arrested by the country’s ruling military junta (then headed
by Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah) and charged with
complicity in an alleged plot by Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar elQadaffi, to unseat the Mauritanian leadership.
Ahmed Baba Miské was released on 3 March 1981 and quit
politics for a short time to attend to various business interests. But
in February 1984, he dissented from Ould Heydallah’s decision to
confer full diplomatic recognition on the SADR, and probably for
this reason he was again arrested (on 24 April) and imprisoned. He
remained jailed until 16 December 1984, when he was amnestied
(along with dozens of other political prisoners) by Col. Maaouiya
Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, who had bloodlessly deposed Ould Heydallah a few days before. Once freed, Baba Miské praised Ould Taya’s
more neutral stance on the Western Sahara conflict, then bowed out
of the Mauritanian political spotlight. He evidently retained at least
some affinity for the Western Saharan independence goals of the
Polisario Front, and suggested in the summer of 2007 that he might
return to Mauritania to help form a political party to support the
policies of President Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi, who
became the country’s first freely elected head of state in April of that
year. In 2008, he reportedly still resided in Paris, where he served as
an official of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO).
AHMED OULD BOUCEIF (1934–1979). The second military leader
of Mauritania and also the one with the shortest tenure in office,
Ahmed Ould Bouceif was born in Kiffa and joined the embryonic
Mauritanian armed forces in 1962 as an infantryman. He later attended the officer training academy in Saumur, France. Thereafter
he held a series of increasingly responsible positions in the army,
36 •
AHMED OULD BOUCEIF
and along with his colleagues, was drawn into military operations
against the Polisario Front in the early stages of the Western
Sahara conflict in late 1975. Mauritania was already feeling the
severe effects of Polisario’s attacks by 24 June 1976, when Ould
Bouceif was appointed army chief of staff by the civilian president,
Mokhtar Ould Daddah. Several months later, he was given command of all Mauritanian forces in the vast northeast of the country,
where his responsibilities centered on the vital iron ore mining town
of Zouérate and the garrison farther north at Bir Moghrein. His appointment as commander, however, did not result in the abatement
of the destructive activities of the Polisario Front, which by this time
had devastated Zouérate and crippled Mauritania’s railway carrying
iron ore to the Atlantic coast for export. In common with many in the
army and elsewhere, he began to see the Saharan war as a pointless
and harmful exercise.
Ahmed Ould Bouceif therefore fully supported—although he apparently did not directly participate in—the military coup d’état of
10 July 1978 that toppled President Ould Daddah and placed Col.
Mustapha Ould Mohammed Salek at the head of the ruling officers’ council, the Comité Militaire de Redressement National
(CMRN). In the new CMRN-appointed Conseil des Ministres,
Ould Bouceif became minister of fisheries and energy, a post he
held until 6 April 1979. On that date, Ould Salek was forced to cede
most of his power to Ould Bouceif, who became prime minister of
a new governing group, the Comité Militaire de Salut National
(CMSN), though Ould Salek remained the titular head of state. Although the rationale for this bloodless palace revolution was military
frustration with Ould Salek’s Western Sahara policy (which had
still not extracted Mauritania from its war with the Polisario Front),
Ould Bouceif, during April and May 1979, followed essentially the
same course as his predecessor, attempting to conclude a “global”
peace treaty among all the parties involved, directly or indirectly, in
Western Sahara.
On 27 May 1979, less than two months after assuming power,
Ould Bouceif, along with several other members of a Mauritanian
delegation to a West African summit conference, were killed in a
plane crash near the international airport at Dakar, Senegal. It was
reported that the plane carrying Ould Bouceif to the conference was
AHMED OULD DADDAH
• 37
attempting to land in a severe sandstorm against the advice of the
control tower. Ould Bouceif’s death touched off a short and intense
power struggle within the CMSN, with another Western Saharan war
veteran, Lt.-Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah, assuming
most of the reins of power on 3 June 1979.
AHMED OULD DADDAH (1943– ). One of Mauritania’s best-known
opposition politicians, and also one of the most divisive, Ahmed
Ould Daddah was born in Boutilimit. He was the younger brother
of the country’s future first president, Mokhtar Ould Daddah.
After receiving his primary education in his hometown, he attended
secondary school in Dakar, Senegal, at the prestigious Lycée Van
Vollenhoven, then traveled to Paris, where he received a degree in
economics from the Faculté de Droit et Sciences Économiques de
Paris in about 1967. Once back in Mauritania, he began work as an
economic and financial counselor to President Ould Daddah from
1967 to 1968, and then became executive secretary to the Organisation des États Riverains du Sénégal from August 1968 to March
1971, laying the foundation for what would later become the Organisation pour la Mise en Valeur du Fleuve Sénégal (OMVS). For
the next two years (from March 1971 to March 1973), Ahmed Ould
Daddah served as the director-general of the Mauritanian state trading agency, the Société Nationale d’Importation et d’Exportation
(SONIMEX), and between June 1973 and May 1978 occupied the
critical post of governor of the Banque Centrale de Mauritanie
(BCM). In one of Mokhtar Ould Daddah’s last cabinet reshuffles
before he was deposed by the armed forces on 10 July 1978, he
named his brother minister of finance, effective 30 May. But after the
10 July coup, Ahmed Ould Daddah was arrested by the new military
governing council, the Comité Militaire de Redressement National
(CMRN), and placed in detention for two years. In 1982, he was
permitted to leave Mauritania, and for the next decade he lived in
exile, becoming a prominent figure in international banking circles,
serving as the World Bank’s representative in Bangui, Central African Republic.
After Mauritania’s head of state, Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed
Taya, announced in April 1991 that the country’s political affairs
were henceforth to be liberalized and that multiple political parties
38 •
AHMED OULD DADDAH
would be permitted to function for the first time since independence,
Ould Daddah decided to return to Mauritania and oppose President
Ould Taya in the country’s first-ever presidential elections that could
be contested, scheduled for January 1992. Upon his taking up residence in the country in late 1991, it became apparent to most onlookers that he would be the only real challenge to Ould Taya’s Parti
Républicain, Démocratique et Social (PRDS), although two other
candidates had also declared their intention to run for the nation’s
highest office. On the campaign trail in December 1991 and January
1992, Ould Daddah attacked President Ould Taya’s administrative
and human rights record and called for the legalization of Islamic
political groups, something the incumbent head of state refused to
countenance. The PRDS, for its part, referred to Ould Daddah as the
West’s “whipping boy,” presumably a reference to his employment
by Western-dominated international financial institutions unpopular
with many Mauritanians. The PRDS also had superior organization
and funding compared to the party backing Ould Daddah, the Union
des Forces Démocratiques (UFD). On 17 January 1992, Ahmed
Ould Daddah garnered about 33 percent of the total presidential votes
cast, a respectable figure but one that did not come close to the 62
percent officially favoring Ould Taya.
Smarting from his rebuff in the presidential election, which he
claimed (with some supporting evidence) was marred by fraud
and other irregularities, Ould Daddah—in a fateful step for the
opposition—announced that the UFD would boycott the elections to
the Assemblée Nationale and the Senate, the two chambers of the
new Mauritanian legislative branch. Other opposition groups followed suit, and as a result, in February and March 1992 the PRDS
swept both houses, leaving the UFD with no seats and ensuring that
President Ould Taya would face few obstacles to implementing his
economic and other policies. Casting about for a new strategy in the
wake of this severe (and at least partly self-inflicted) setback, the
UFD appointed Ahmed Ould Daddah its “coordinator” in August
1992. Frustration with the UFD’s poor fortunes, though, did not
lessen, and on 20 February 1993, a group of disgruntled members,
led by former minister of foreign affairs Hamdi Ould Mouknass,
defected from the party to create a new “centrist” organization, the
Union pour le Progrès et la Démocratie (UPD). Ould Daddah, fac-
AHMED OULD DADDAH
• 39
ing the first of what would be many challenges to his leadership of
the UFD, agreed in July 1993 to abandon (temporarily, as it turned
out) his boycotting strategy, but the UFD-Ere Nouvelle, as it was
henceforth known, performed badly in municipal and senatorial elections held in January and April 1994 respectively, winning just a few
local council seats and a single place in the Senate, the latter being in
the southern town of Kaédi, where Ould Taya was disliked because
of widespread disruptions and human rights abuses in the late 1980s
and early 1990s.
After this further electoral reverse, the UFD continued to lose
ground. Terming Ould Daddah’s leadership of the party “too passive,” the El-Hor organization, made up of haratines (ex-slaves)
led by Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, decided to leave the group along
with other UFD backers. On 11 September 1994, Ahmed Ould
Daddah, in what was widely thought to be a remedial measure, was
formally elevated to the secretary-generalship of the UFD, but the
fortunes of the party continued to decline, to a point where President
Ould Taya felt he could get away politically with detaining both
Ahmed Ould Daddah and Hamdi Ould Mouknass, from 21 January
to 3 February 1996, after a series of riots over bread price increases
took place, mainly in Nouakchott and Nouadhibou. It was universally believed, however, that neither man had any role in instigating
these disturbances. At about the same time, matters were made worse
for Ahmed Ould Daddah by statements made in exile by his brother,
former president Mokhtar Ould Daddah. The former head of state,
in a series of newspaper interviews, criticized the lack of democracy
in Mauritania and called for more unity among the often-splintered
opposition. However well-intentioned these statements might have
been, they created the perception that the UFD’s affairs were being
influenced or dictated from outside the country by a man who had not
lived in Mauritania since 1980, and once more damaged Ahmed Ould
Daddah’s credibility. Finally, a grouping that until then had stayed
close to the UFD, Béchir el-Hassen’s Mouvement des Démocrates
Indépendants (MDI), founded in the late 1980s, bolted from the
party. El-Hassen, in explaining the move, said that the opposition had
reached an “advanced state of implosion” and that collaboration with
Ould Taya and the PRDS was now a preferable course of action to
remaining with Ould Daddah. Privately, the MDI’s leadership found
40 •
AHMED OULD DADDAH
Ahmed Ould Daddah’s leadership of the UFD high-handed and polarizing, a reflection of what some Mauritanians saw as his negative
personality traits.
On 22 August 1995, a new political party was formed that confirmed
the UFD’s inferior position. Action pour le Changement (AC), led
by Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, soon eclipsed the UFD as Mauritania’s
primary opposition party, and from 1996 to 2000 the basic weakness
of the non-PRDS parties, coupled with some questionable moves by
Ould Daddah, reduced his fortunes almost to the vanishing point.
On 11 October 1996, for example, the UFD did field candidates for
several National Assembly seats, but withdrew two of them (who had
survived the first round of voting) from the runoff balloting, ensuring
that the party would lose to the well-financed PRDS. In mid-1997, the
venerable Mouvement National Démocratique (MND) threatened
to pull out of the UFD, but for the moment remained in the fold. This,
however, was but a portent of things to come: In August 1998, after
Ould Daddah had welcomed into the UFD certain pan-Arabist members of the Alliance Populaire Progressiste (APP) who had earlier
broken with President Ould Taya, a key party leader, Mustapha Ould
Bédredine, broke with his boss and set up his own group, also—and
confusingly—known as the UFD. Henceforth, to keep matters straight,
Ould Daddah’s party was labeled the UFD(A) and Ould Bédredine’s
the UFD(B). By this time, of course, neither group had any chance of
amassing anywhere near the degree of backing necessary to challenge
President Ould Taya’s increasingly repressive rule.
In October 2000, Ahmed Ould Daddah suffered perhaps his most
severe setback to date. In that month, the Ould Taya regime officially
banned the UFD(A) from operating, saying the group had acted
against the interests of the country since its inception and was thus
“subversive.” The banning of the UFD boded ill for the future of the
ostensibly more democratic Mauritanian Second Republic, but Ould
Daddah did succeed in circumventing the ban in July 2001, when
a substitute grouping led by one of his remaining allies, Mohamed
Mahmoud Ould Ematt, received governmental certification to organize as the Rassemblement des Forces Démocratiques (RFD), a
party Ould Daddah, no doubt for the sake of appearances, did not join
until a few months later. Running under the RFD banner (albeit after
another round of sniping with Mustapha Ould Bédredine), Ahmed
AHMED OULD DADDAH
• 41
Ould Daddah decided to run for president for the first time since
1992, although he must have harbored few illusions of success. In
the tumultuous presidential balloting held on 7 November 2003—as
the primary opponent of President Ould Taya, former head of state
Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah, went in and out of detention on various flimsy charges—Ould Daddah collected only 46,687
votes, or 6.6 percent of the total, which did not even approach Ould
Heydallah’s 18.7 percent, let alone Ould Taya’s officially reported
66.7 percent. Meager consolation for the RFD was provided, however, by the party’s capture of a single seat in the Mauritanian Senate
in elections held on 9 April 2004.
This was the final electoral success of the RFD and Ahmed Ould
Daddah under the Second Republic. In late 2004, Ould Daddah and
dozens of others went on trial for alleged antistate activities, along
with Saleh Ould Hanena and other alleged planners and participants
of the violent coup attempt of 8–9 June 2003, which nearly removed
President Ould Taya from power and exacerbated an already tense
political situation, even though no member of the legal opposition
was thought to have had a hand in the uprising. In February 2005,
Ould Daddah and most of his fellow defendants were acquitted of
all charges, but before the RFD could meaningfully regroup, Col.
Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, acting to allay fierce and growing dissatisfaction with the regime, peacefully overthrew Ould Taya in the
coup d’état of 3 August 2005, installed a government headed by the
Conseil Militaire pour la Justice et la Démocratie (CMJD), and
made a pledge (which was honored) to return Mauritania to civilian
rule by 2007.
In preparation for new parliamentary and presidential elections
starting in late 2006, the RFD and Ould Daddah announced their
plans to fully participate in the process. In the parliamentary elections of 19 November and 3 December 2006, the RFD performed
better than it and the UFD ever had under President Ould Taya,
capturing 12 of the 43 National Assembly seats that were contested,
although this did not match the totals compiled by either independent
candidates or the 11-party Coalition des Forces pour le Changement
Démocratique (CFCD). Still, it was highly promising—all the more
so because it was obvious that no one party (such as Ould Taya’s
PRDS) would exert an outsized role in the new parliament—and
42 •
AHMED OULD DADDAH
Ould Daddah had high hopes of becoming president in 2007. The
polling for the legislative branch was nearly uniformly praised by
observers as free and fair, and there was every prospect that the
presidential election would be likewise. In the presidential election,
the first round of which was held on 11 March 2007 and in which
20 candidates participated, Ahmed Ould Daddah garnered 153,252
votes (20.69 percent), more than all the other hopefuls except for the
economist-turned-politician Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi, who got 183,726 votes, 24.80 percent, in a crowded field. Since
neither Ould Daddah nor Ould Abdellahi achieved the absolute majority that would have obviated the need for a second round of voting,
both candidates prepared for the final phase of the election by trying
to gain as many endorsements as possible from other political parties and from presidential candidates who had been eliminated. Here,
Ould Daddah fell short. Although Saleh Ould Hanena and some
Black African politicians decided to throw their backing behind the
RFD leader, Ould Abdellahi was successful in gaining the support of
another respectable vote-getter, Zeine Ould Zeidane, a conservative
economist who had served a short time earlier as chairman of the
Central Bank, and—most damaging for Ould Daddah—from Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, who, although officially part of the CFCD
grouping of which Ould Daddah was by now nominally a part,
decided to use his not-inconsiderable influence on behalf of Ould
Abdellahi, reportedly in exchange for strong antislavery legislation
should Ould Abdellahi become president. Whatever the actual agreements made, when the final phase of the election was conducted on
25 March, Ould Daddah lost the vote by a narrow margin, winning
only the provinces of Inchiri and Trarza in addition to the City of
Nouakchott, although Ould Abdellahi’s margin of victory in another
important region, Dakhlet-Nouadhibou, was very slight. All told,
Ahmed Ould Daddah received 333,185 votes (47.15 percent) to Ould
Abdellahi’s 373,520 votes (52.85 percent).
Unlike prior occasions, on which Ould Daddah had protested the
results of elections by alleging irregularities of various kinds, the
veteran opposition politician accepted his defeat with good grace,
meeting Ould Abdellahi shortly after the election and promising his
support as Mauritania stood poised on the brink of an end to military
rule and the inauguration of the Third Republic with a purely civil-
AHMED OULD MINNIH
• 43
ian government. There was some disappointment on Ould Daddah’s
part, though, when Ould Abdellahi announced his cabinet shortly
after assuming office: rather than including anyone from the opposition, the new head of state chose to appoint relatively unknown men
of a technocratic bent, led by Zeine Ould Zeidane as prime minister.
Perhaps stung by being basically left out of the new regime, Ould
Daddah commented that the selection of Ould Abdellahi’s ministers
was “reflective of past practices” a comment that was if nothing else
a strong indication that Ahmed Ould Daddah would remain a prominent presence on the Mauritanian political scene for the foreseeable
future.
AHMED OULD MINNIH (1944–1998). One of Mauritania’s most
versatile and highest-ranking officers in the country’s armed forces,
Ahmed Ould Minnih was born in Boutilimit and received a primary
education there before going on to secondary schools in Rosso and
Nouakchott. Electing to become an officer in the newly organized
Mauritanian army, he was seconded to two of France’s most wellregarded military academies, the École Militaire de Cavalérie at Saumur and the military school at St. Maxen. Upon receiving his commission, he returned to Mauritania and was successively given field command of several units. Around 1970, he achieved distinction as chief
of the deuxième bureau (intelligence corps) under Mauritania’s army
chief of staff, holding that position until 1972. In that year, he traveled
to Algeria, where he was Mauritanian military attaché at the country’s
embassy until 1975. In 1975, about the time Mauritania’s involvement in the Western Sahara conflict was beginning, Ould Minnih
went home and was assigned to various military regions, including
the critical sector headquartered at Bir Moghrein. As the Western
Saharan war was winding down as the result of the seizure of power
by the Comité Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN) on 10
July 1978, Ould Minnih was appointed governor of the administrative
région of Tagant. Then, in April 1979, at the time of intense factional
infighting within the ranks of the ruling junta, he was instructed to
leave Tagant and take up the leadership of the Army Engineering
Corps. After the CMRN was replaced by a new military council, the
Comité Militaire de Salut National (CMSN), on 6 April 1979, Ould
Minnih, though still holding the rank of captain, became a member of
44 •
AHMED OULD MINNIH
the ruling body while continuing with his responsibilities both in the
field and administratively. In August 1981, in a major promotion, he
was appointed foreign minister by the CMSN chairman at the time,
Lt.-Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah, and was also promoted to major. He remained head of the foreign ministry even after
Ould Heydallah was displaced on 12 December 1984 by a CMSN
colleague, Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, and was credited
with restoring Mauritania’s foreign relations to a more evenhanded
state after the perceived excesses of the Ould Heydallah years.
Ould Minnih held the foreign ministership until December 1986,
when he was appointed army chief of staff at a time of severe difficulties with the army’s loyalty and reliability, concerns heightened
with the discovery within the officer corps of backers of the outlawed
Black African opposition group, the Forces de Libération Africaine
de Mauritanie (FLAM), as well as supporters of the pro-Iraq Arab
Baath Socialist Party (ABSP). In this troubled environment, his
move into the army’s top position was interpreted by some analysts
as an attempt to restore the armed forces’ professionalism, since Ould
Minnih was not identified with any of the country’s major tribal or
regional cliques. By now a lieutenant colonel, he remained chief of
staff throughout the worst phases of the Senegal–Mauritania crisis of 1989–1990, when open warfare between the two states was
considered a distinct possibility. After the crisis with Senegal had
abated, and after the Gulf Crisis of 1990–1991, Ould Minnih was
appointed minister of the interior by President Ould Taya, overseeing that key government department as Mauritania took the first steps
toward democratization and contestable elections, which were held
in early 1992. On 18 April 1992, concurrent with the inauguration of
Mauritania’s Second Republic by Ould Taya, Ould Minnih became
minister of defense, the only serving military officer in the cabinet.
His selection also marked the first time in several years that the defense portfolio had been separated from the presidency. He served
as minister of defense until 21 February 1995, when he took up
another prominent position, that of secretary-general to the office of
President of the Republic. Another cabinet reshuffle on 18 December
1997 had Ould Minnih resuming his old post as interior minister, but
on 12 July 1998 he left the ministry again, this time leaving the post
to Dah Ould Abdel Jelil and resuming the secretary-generalship of
AHMED SALEM OULD SIDI
• 45
the presidency. On 16 October 1998, in a major blow to President
Ould Taya’s government, Ahmed Ould Minnih was killed in an automobile accident. His place as head of the presidential office was
taken by a former (and future) prime minister, Sidi Mohamed Ould
Boubacar.
AHMED SALEM OULD SIDI (ca. 1938–1981). After choosing a
career in Mauritania’s embryonic armed forces in his youth, Ahmed
Salem Ould Sidi rose to the rank of commandant (major) in time to
become actively involved in the Western Sahara conflict as commander of the garrison at Dakhla starting in January 1976. Soon
afterward, Ould Sidi became head of the country’s new military
academy, the École Militaire Interarmes d’Atar (EMIA). Then,
after the 10 July 1978 coup d’état that deposed President Mokhtar
Ould Daddah, he became a member of the new army-led government, the Comité Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN),
under the overall leadership of Col. Mustapha Ould Mohammed
Salek. In addition, in late 1978 and early 1979 he held the post of
minister of supply and transport, although he left this position in a
cabinet reshuffle on 3 June 1979. However, as a sign of continued
favor with the ruling junta, he was appointed second vice president
of the reorganized military council, the Comité Militaire de Salut
National (CMSN), after having had the uncertain distinction of
presiding over a brief but fierce power struggle after the death of
Prime Minister Ahmed Ould Bouceif on 27 May. The new CMSN
leader, Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah, soon thereafter
assigned Ould Sidi to negotiate—and on 5 August 1979, to sign—the
Algiers Agreement with the representatives of the Polisario Front,
formally ending Mauritania’s involvement in Western Sahara and
leaving Polisario and Morocco to continue their struggle alone.
Ould Sidi soon became disenchanted with the CMSN and its policies (including its increasingly pro-Polisario tilt on the Western Sahara
issue), and he left the government in the spring of 1980 and moved to
Morocco, where he joined a coalition of various opposition groupings,
the Alliance pour une Mauritanie Démocratique (AMD) and publicly urged that Mauritania continue a close working relationship with
Morocco’s King Hassan II, in concert with another prominent exiled
officer, Lt.-Col. Mohammed Ould Bah Ould Abdel Kader. In early
46 •
AID, INTERNATIONAL
1981, he secretly moved back inside Mauritania as one of the key
AMD figures in a plot to overthrow the CMSN and Ould Heydallah.
On 16 March 1981, a violent coup attempt was staged in the center of
Nouakchott but was suppressed by loyal army units. Ould Sidi was
captured, and on 26 March he and three others, including Ould Abdel
Kader, were executed by a firing squad.
AID, INTERNATIONAL. At no time since gaining its independence
from France in November 1960 has Mauritania been anything other
than completely dependent upon the financial and in-kind assistance
of outside benefactors. With few sources of income other than a mining sector predominantly oriented to the extraction of iron ore and
fisheries that have produced highly variable returns, and an impoverished population often at the mercy of uncertain agricultural yields,
virtually the entire Mauritanian economy has at one time or another
benefited from outside help. Moreover, as much as one-third or more
of the total national budget has been accounted for by foreign aid,
even when the (usually one-time) revenues from the government’s
privatization programs are excluded and the effects of an additional
long-term debt load are disregarded. Aid has taken many forms,
whether dispensed as cash grants, preferential loans, direct technical
assistance, or multilaterally based aid such as that underwritten by
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
France—and later the European Union (EU)—was the largest
source of aid to Mauritania, helping to equip the armed forces; assisting Mauritanian children in their educational pursuits; improving
access to electricity and water resources throughout the country;
constructing and maintaining roads to connect widely spaced cities,
towns, and villages; and augmenting various port facilities, such
as those in Nouadhibou and the capital, Nouakchott. French doctors and other health care providers have always been present in
Mauritania’s hospitals and clinics, the small network of airports has
been similarly assisted, and in the mid-1990s Paris provided funds to
upgrade the Mauritanian civil registry to ensure the proper registration of voters in national and local elections. The Federal Republic
of Germany has also been a significant aid donor, as well as Spain;
they provided bilateral aid in the form of grants and loans for social
welfare as well as improvements to the fishing sector. German assis-
AID, INTERNATIONAL
• 47
tance in printing/publishing, however—including aid to the country’s
independent newspapers—was reduced for a time in the late 1990s
as concerns mounted over censorship and the harassment of opposition political parties. Some additional aid from both Madrid and
Berlin was forthcoming for the purposes of reequipping the perennially weak Mauritanian navy, and the state mining company, the
Société Nationale Industrielle et Minière (SNIM), has at various
times been the recipient of money from France, Spain, and Germany
for major improvements to iron ore processing facilities, as well as
to the Port Minéralier near Nouadhibou.
Beginning in the 1970s, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) also
generously donated monetary and other aid for Mauritania’s economic
development. The PRC supplied its own workers and materials for the
construction of the Friendship Port near Nouakchott during the 1980s
and also built a massive conference hall on the north side of the capital
a decade later. An Olympic-sized sports stadium was also erected by
Chinese manpower on Nouakchott’s outskirts. The PRC’s assistance
reportedly was highly popular amongst ordinary Mauritanians because
of its tangible and practical nature, and Beijing was also quite willing on occasion to forgive past indebtedness and make new loans on
highly preferential terms. Among other Asian countries, only Japan
had a significant bilateral aid program for Mauritania, its assistance
going to the fisheries sector, health care, and the supply of drinking
water as well as direct shipments of rice during times of drought. In a
highly symbolic move in March 1994, Japan announced it would donate the equivalent of 3.8 million ouguiyas to construct a new library
in the holy city of Chinguetti to preserve irreplaceable Islamic manuscripts, some of which dated to the ninth century A.D. In 1996, Tokyo
forgave a loan of nearly 2 billion yen that it had extended to SNIM in
1979 to help the firm recover from the effects of the Western Sahara
conflict, and two years before it had made a massive investment in
Mauritanian agriculture, health, fisheries, and water supplies, totaling
another 2 billion yen. Multilateral assistance to Mauritania—that is,
provided by international financial consortia as opposed to individual
countries—was dispensed by the World Bank, the African Development Bank (ADB), the Islamic Development Bank (IDB), the Arab
Fund for Social and Economic Development (AFSED), the Arab
Monetary Fund (AMF), the EU, and the Organization of Petroleum
48 •
AIDS/HIV
Exporting Countries (OPEC); together, they accounted for billions of
dollars from the 1980s through the early years of the 21st century. On
a cultural note, Spain agreed to provide $1.6 million to rehabilitate
several historic Mauritanian villages in the late 1990s, including the
remote southeastern town of Oualata.
Although it has been essential, outside aid has had some drawbacks. Aside from the obvious tendency of external loans to cumulate
until they amount to a huge debt burden (which has already happened
to Mauritania), agricultural assistance, for example, would have the
effect of undercutting the country’s farmers and possibly exacerbating food shortages if economic incentives to raise and harvest crops
were not maintained. Other forms of aid also have the same effect, as
was made clear in 1998 when cement shipments from Japan as part of
its aid program rendered indigenous cement production facilities uneconomical because foreign supplies were equal to nearly one-third
of the total demand for cement in Mauritania’s construction sector,
with a resultant decline in domestic demand and price. However, the
direct adverse impact of international aid, has been fairly limited, and
given the country’s economic situation and expanding population, a
continued reliance upon outsiders has been inevitable.
AIDS/HIV. The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which, along
with its disease counterpart, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome
(AIDS), has had such catastrophic effects in sub-Saharan Africa and
elsewhere, by 2008 manifested itself only to a limited extent in Mauritania, although several worrisome trends were evident. Just one of
many health-related challenges the population of the country faced,
HIV and AIDS were virtually unknown until 1988, when the first
five cases were reported to the World Health Organization (WHO), a
number that climbed—slowly at first—during the following several
years until it reached 103 in 1995 and 98 in 1996, the last year for
which statistics were displayed in the 2004 edition of the Epidemiological Fact Sheets on HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Diseases,
published by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS
(UNAIDS). Given a Mauritanian population estimated at slightly
under 3 million in 2004, this translates into an adult HIV infection
rate of between 0.3 and 1.1 percent, far below that recorded for most
of Africa south of the Sahara and even somewhat lower than the rest
AIDS/HIV
• 49
of Arab North Africa; that is, roughly 7,000–10,000 persons were
HIV-positive. The HIV infection rate in children remained basically
unknown by the beginning of the 21st century, but was commonly
believed to be low.
The late 1990s passed without significant attention being paid
to the HIV/AIDS problem in Mauritania, but on 2 December 2000
(not coincidentally, World AIDS Day), the head of the Mauritanian
national blood bank stunned most observers by stating that one out
of three blood donors in the country was HIV-positive, which contradicted previous data and immediately triggered a round of intense
soul-searching on the part of the government and populace alike, including a lengthy televised debate in the Senate in January 2001 and
the enlistment of Islamic leaders to encourage the use of condoms
and other safe sexual practices. It was generally agreed that in Mauritania (no differently than in the rest of Africa and elsewhere), a reluctance to speak openly of sexual matters in general and HIV/AIDS
in particular was not only hindering prevention on an individual level
but also the formulation of an effective anti-AIDS strategy. Moreover, the same sexually conservative climate in the country meant
that neither the WHO nor UNAIDS was able to extract much information regarding other sexually transmitted diseases, much less any
data on sensitive questions such as early adolescent pregnancies, the
incidence of homosexuality, frequency of condom use, or the ages
of partners engaging in sex for the first time. Geographically, HIV/
AIDS in Mauritania was thought mainly to be an urban phenomenon,
with the capital, Nouakchott, reporting the preponderance of cases
along with the coastal economic center of Nouadhibou, the latter
city having an exceptionally high transient population owing to its
relative prosperity and large port facilities. There was also believed
to be a greater prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Gorgol, Guidimaka, and
Trarza provinces than in other locations.
By the early 21st century, the incidence of HIV infection and
full-blown AIDS was still estimated to be low—UNAIDS stated that
62 adults in June 2004 were receiving antiretroviral drug treatment,
whereas 790 adults needed such therapy in 2003—but the social
implications of the epidemic remained formidable, particularly in
light of Mauritania’s taboo-laden culture and poor health care infrastructure. Mauritanian women (and by extension their children) were
50 •
AIR FORCE
especially thought to be at greater risk, not only because of their subordinate social position but also because of the possibility that HIV
could be spread by the use of nonsterile instruments when female
genital mutilation (FGM) was practiced. An estimated 2,500–8,300
women were infected with HIV by late 2003, and—ominously—
1,100 to 3,300 children were believed to have lost both parents to
AIDS. Two other significant vectors for the spread of HIV had also
appeared by 2002 in Mauritania: the growing number of prostitutes
(“sex workers”) in the country’s cities and towns, obviously reluctant
to speak openly about either their occupation or sexually transmitted diseases, and the growing population of refugees or migrants in
places such as Nouadhibou, who were utilizing Mauritanian territory
as a transit point for illicit travel from sub-Saharan Africa to the
Canary Islands or Europe proper. Both were thought to be liberally
infected with the AIDS virus, although the national mining company, the Société Nationale Industrielle et Minière (SNIM), took
the lead in 2000 in distributing free condoms at its health facilities in
northern Mauritania and providing free voluntary HIV testing to its
1,500 employees. But reportedly the majority of SNIM’s workforce
did not avail themselves of these services.
By 2008, some changes in the attitudes of ordinary Mauritanians
toward HIV and AIDS could be discerned. With the assistance of
the French Red Cross, a new AIDS testing and treatment center
was opened in Nouakchott in December 2004, offering counseling,
inpatient and outpatient services, and antiretroviral drugs supplied
from abroad. In addition, public campaigns against the disease were
being mounted in the capital as well as in the countryside, featuring
speeches by health workers and graphic displays of safe sex practices. But sex workers and migrants still largely remained in the shadows, and although the overall rate of HIV infection in Mauritania
was not thought to exceed 2 percent of the population, the success or
failure of the anti-AIDS effort would depend on making awareness,
discussion, testing, and treatment a less delicate subject, as well as
expanding access to condoms and bringing hitherto-marginalized
social groups into the mainstream.
AIR FORCE. The smallest component of the Mauritanian armed
forces, the air force in 2008 had only about 250 men assigned to it,
AIRLINES
• 51
and its combat and transport capabilities were minimal. Approximately
five Britten-Norman BN-2 Defender ground-attack/counterinsurgency
aircraft were available for use; these were twin-turboprop planes with
a top speed of 170 miles per hour and were armed with a variety of
underwing rockets and guns. Two other Defenders were lost to either
enemy fire or accidents during Mauritania’s involvement in the Western Sahara conflict (1975–1979), and they were eventually replaced
with three additional aircraft: two Cessna FTB-337 Skymaster Milirole
planes supplied by the United States in the early 1990s, and a single
Basler T-67 close air support craft. In the important area of maritime
surveillance (including surveys of Mauritania’s fishing grounds), the
navy could call upon the services of two Piper Cheyenne II patrol
planes with a range of over 1,500 nautical miles and an ability to stay
aloft for up to seven hours at a time.
The air force’s transport arm was even less robust. By the late 1990s,
evidently, there existed two Cessna F-337 Skymasters, one Gulfstream
II executive-type jet, and one remaining DeHavilland DHC-5D Buffalo turboprop; another Buffalo transport crashed shortly after takeoff
in May 1998 from the eastern town of Néma, killing 29 Mauritanian
soldiers who were reportedly part of an honor guard accompanying
President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya on a visit to the region.
In another tragedy that illustrated the accident-prone character of the
Mauritanian air force, a U.S.-built McDonnell-Douglas DC-9 transport refitted by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) crashed into
the sea off Nouadhibou in early April 1996, causing the deaths of six
crew members who had been conducting a training flight. Only two
persons—the pilot and a Chinese instructor—survived the crash. The
air force was usually commanded by a colonel in the armed forces
(the highest rank attainable), and mainly utilized the country’s small
network of civilian airports.
AIRLINES. Since independence in 1960, airline services in Mauritania
have been severely constrained by a lack of finance, a shortage of potential passengers in many of the country’s outlying locations even in
light of a poor road network in those areas, and undeveloped airports.
The Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott, with an airport located approximately four kilometers east of the city center, serves as the hub for virtually all international and domestic services. The most consistent and
52 •
AIRLINES
heavily utilized services have been the Paris–Nouakchott and Dakar–
Nouakchott routes, the latter operating daily using aircraft both from
Air Sénégal and Mauritania’s national carrier, Air Mauritanie. Flights
to Dakar were suspended for about two years during the 1989–1990
Senegal–Mauritania crisis, and the route to Paris was served by Air
France six days per week and also by Air Afrique, a West African regional operator which, plagued by heavy debts, poor passenger counts,
and mismanagement, was liquidated in 2000. Nouakchott also hosted
thrice-weekly fights to the Canary Islands operated by Air Mauritanie,
and Nouadhibou, the country’s economic capital, could be reached
from the Canaries twice a week. Spain’s national airline, Iberia, also
had a history of serving Nouadhibou from Las Palmas. Other airlines
that sometimes operated out of Nouakchott airport during the 1980s
and 1990s included Air Algérie (to Algiers), Royal Air Maroc (to
Casablanca), and Libyan Arab Airlines (to Tripoli), although the latter was discontinued in 1992 after Libya was subjected to an aircraft
embargo by the United Nations.
The history of domestic air services in Mauritania has been
even more uneven and trouble-prone than that of the air force. Air
Mauritanie acquired two Fokker F-28 twin-jet aircraft in the early
1980s (each with a seating capacity of 110 persons) for its internal
and international services, but one Fokker was lost in a disastrous
crash near Tidjikja on 1 July 1994, in which about 95 deaths were
recorded. From that point onward, the carrier’s fortunes declined rapidly, as it was obliged to lease a replacement for the lost Fokker from
the Kingdom of Swaziland at an exorbitant $5.5 million per year to
cover its routes. In the summer of 1996, Air Mauritanie purchased
two French-made ATR-42 turboprop planes with $25 million from
France’s international aid agency. From 1996 to 1998, though, the
airline went deeper into debt, and in October 1998, 111 of the company’s 340 employees were fired and the two ATR-42s were returned,
leaving Air Mauritanie with the single remaining Fokker F-28 as
well as one similar craft leased from Mali. Domestic flights became
virtually nonexistent (except for thrice-weekly flights from Nouakchott to Nouadhibou), with tourists and others desiring to reach the
interior required to charter their own aircraft, some of them operated
by Mauritania’s state iron ore extraction firm, the Société Nationale
AIRLINES
• 53
Industrielle et Minière (SNIM). Until 1998, Air Mauritanie was
robust enough to operate from Nouakchott to Nouadhibou on a daily
basis, to Atar and Zouérate three times per week, to Kaédi, Kiffa,
Sélibaby, and Tidjikja twice a week, and once a week to the remoter
towns of Ayoun el-Atrouss and Néma.
As part of the Mauritanian government’s privatization plans for
the country’s economy, formulated during the late 1990s, Air Mauritanie was sold to a consortium of private interests (both indigenous
and foreign) in May 2000, with the state retaining a 35 percent share.
Even this move was fraught with difficulty, however, as the carrier’s
$5 million debt made it unattractive to investors, and Air Afrique,
which picked up a 32 percent stake in the firm as part of the transaction, itself entered bankruptcy soon afterward. The newly privatized
airline, still unable to operate any appreciable services beyond Nouakchott, Nouadhibou, Dakar, and the Canaries, was able to procure two
Boeing 737 jets from a French airline, and by 2007 was using these
two planes for all its regular routes. Privatization also allowed other
nonstate carriers to enter the market. In late 2001, a new Mauritanian
airline, Mapeco, began flying once a week from Nouakchott to Dubai
in the United Arab Emirates, but its status in 2008 was not clear.
Despite the fact that it was one of the oldest parastatal companies
in Mauritania and as such being the object of a significant amount
of national pride, Air Mauritanie was liquidated by a Mauritanian
court on 17 January 2008, its two aircraft having been seized in Paris
in early September 2007 after the firm’s nonpayment of some $2.7
million in debts, paralyzing the carrier. Stepping into this void starting on 7 November 2007 was a new airline, Mauritania Airways,
which set about providing services from Nouakchott to Nouadhibou,
Zouérate, Dakar, Paris, Bamako, Casablanca, Abidjan, and Conakry
on at least a twice-weekly basis with a single Airbus A320, with
additional aircraft anticipated to be purchased later. A 51-percent
majority of the company was owned by Tunis Air (the Tunisian
government’s national airline), with 39 percent being owned by Mohamed Ould Bouamatou, a Mauritanian businessman. The remaining
10 percent of Mauritania Airways was held by the government of
Mauritania, the last vestige of a once-thriving state involvement in
the air transport sector.
54 •
AIRPORTS
AIRPORTS. By 2008, Mauritania possessed an improved system of
airports, although only four—at Nouakchott, Nouadhibou, Néma,
and Atar, the latter being upgraded in 2001—were suitable for international traffic using wide-bodied aircraft. Nouakchott’s original
airport, built around the time of the country’s independence from
France, was cramped and inconvenient to travelers. After some
delays, a new terminal was opened on the same site in May 1993,
improved runways were built, and better air traffic control was provided for the several airlines (as well as the Mauritanian air force)
that utilized it regularly. In late 2001, in a surprising development, it
was announced that the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in partnership with the Assainissement Travaux Transport et Maintenance
(ATTM)—a civil engineering concern wholly controlled by the state
mining company, the Société Nationale Industrielle et Minière
(SNIM)—would construct an entirely new Nouakchott-area airport
in the vicinity of J’reida, a location on the Atlantic coast some 25
kilometers north of the capital city and the site of an important barracks of Mauritania’s armed forces. Reportedly, the new facility
would include a runway some three kilometers in length (putting it
in a league with some of the world’s largest airports), and preparation
for construction had begun by early 2002. It was unclear why Mauritania should have felt the need for such a massive installation—even
taking into account the growing tourist trade—leading to speculation
that some sort of military purpose was envisaged for the future.
In order to tie the remote province of Hodh ech-Chargui more
closely to the rest of Mauritania, the airport at Néma, the main population center there, was upgraded, primarily with West German assistance, and reopened in 1981. The country’s other cities and towns
had airports as well, including Akjoujt, Aleg, Ayoun el-Atrouss,
Bir Moghrein, Boutilimit, Chinguetti, F’Derik, Kaédi, Kiffa,
Rosso, Sélibaby, Tidjikja, and Zouérate. In addition, the towns of
M’Bout and Maghama in Gorgol province, as well as a few other
locations, had usable airports, although some were of doubtful reliability and were only irregularly used.
AKJOUJT. Virtually the only population center of consequence in
Mauritania’s administrative région of Inchiri (of which it is the capital), Akjoujt is situated roughly halfway between the country’s capital,
ALGIERS AGREEMENT
• 55
Nouakchott, and the city of Atar to the northeast. Akjoujt was also
the site of Mauritania’s only copper mine, which originally operated
between 1970 and 1978. From 1992 to 1996, the town also witnessed
a gold mining endeavor, using the tailings of the old copper mine, and
in 2004–2005 a Canadian firm, First Quantum Minerals, reactivated the
mine site for the purposes of extracting both copper and gold deposits.
ALEG, CONGRESS OF (May 1958). Following the promulgation
of the loi cadre by France in April 1957, and even before, several
political parties were formed in what was to become independent
Mauritania. Sharp differences, partly but not exclusively based
on regional and tribal factors, quickly made themselves apparent,
much to the anxiety of both Paris and the territory’s rising political
figure, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, who led the Union Progressiste
Mauritanienne (UPM), a grouping that attempted to accommodate
Mauritanians of all persuasions. In May 1958, at the instigation of
Ould Daddah, a meeting of all political groups was held at Aleg, the
provincial capital of Brakna. At the congress it was agreed that to
preserve national unity during the independence process, the UPM,
the Bloc Démocratique du Gorgol (BDG), and a section of the
country’s first party, the Entente Mauritanienne, would merge and
form a new organization, the Parti de Regroupement Mauritanien
(PRM), with Mokhtar Ould Daddah as its secretary-general. This
was a blow to the pro-Moroccan pan-Arab elements within the territory, though, and within a few months they, along with other youth
leaders and militant nationalists, formed a new opposition party, AnNadha al-Wataniyya al-Mauritaniya (Nadha).
ALGIERS AGREEMENT (5 August 1979). A bilateral agreement
signed in the Algerian capital between Mauritania’s governing Comité Militaire de Salut National (CMSN) and the Polisario Front,
this treaty finally extracted Mauritania from its calamitous involvement in the Western Sahara conflict, which had begun in late 1975
with the partition of the former Spanish colony between Mauritania
and Morocco. The period leading up to the signing ceremony was
marked by a great deal of temporizing at the highest levels of the
Mauritanian military regime, causing frequent changes in personnel
and intense power struggles.
56 •
ALGIERS AGREEMENT
Widespread dissatisfaction with the conduct and effects of the
Western Saharan war within Mauritanian society and within the
country’s armed forces culminated, on 10 July 1978, in the overthrow of President Mokhtar Ould Daddah and his replacement by a
council of military officers, the Comité Militaire de Redressement
National (CMRN). The CMRN’s first chairman, Col. Mustapha
Ould Mohammed Salek, believed that only a “global” peace agreement among all the states of northwest Africa and France would
suffice to end the conflict. The reasons for this were simple. Despite
a unilateral Polisario cease-fire with respect to Mauritanian targets
proclaimed shortly after the July coup, Mauritania was still host to
9,000 Moroccan troops stationed there pursuant to the arrangements
of the May 1977 Moroccan–Mauritanian Defense Committee.
This made for a very delicate situation, and the CMRN (and later the
CMSN) feared that any conciliatory move toward the Polisario Front
would cause Morocco’s King Hassan II to retaliate.
For a time, Ould Salek doggedly pursued his comprehensive
peace idea, but in April 1979, with the Mauritanian economy still
a shambles and Polisario’s patience wearing thin, he found himself
divested of most real power by Lt.-Col. Ahmed Ould Bouceif. After
Ould Bouceif’s death in a plane crash a few weeks later (on 27 May),
Lt.-Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah came to the fore, and
after some hesitation—and a renewal of armed actions by Polisario—
negotiations were begun, which resulted in the Algiers Agreement
after only a few days. In relevant part, the treaty read as follows:
The Islamic Republic of Mauritania solemnly declares that it does not
have, nor will it ever have, any territorial or other claims on Western
Sahara. The Islamic Republic of Mauritania has decided definitely to
abandon the unjust war of Western Sahara according to the modalities agreed in common accord with the representative of the Saharan
people, the Polisario Front.
The Polisario Front solemnly declares in the name of the Saharan
people that it has no, and will never have any, territorial or other claims
on Mauritania.
There was more, however. Ould Heydallah secretly agreed to convey the Mauritanian share of Western Sahara, which it called Tiris
el-Gharbia, directly to the Polisario Front within seven months of
the agreement. But as soon as the pact was signed and Mauritania
ALLIANCE POUR UNE MAURITANIE DÉMOCRATIQUE
• 57
began to withdraw, King Hassan took no chances: his troops at once
occupied Tiris el-Gharbia, including its main settlement of Dakhla,
and Morocco formally annexed it a few days later. In spite of this,
Morocco did remove its soldiers from Mauritania proper by early
1980 and did not challenge the continued Mauritanian control of the
small Western Saharan outpost of La Guera, strategically located
opposite the country’s economic center, Nouadhibou.
ALLIANCE POUR UNE MAURITANIE DÉMOCRATIQUE
(AMD). The coup d’état of 10 July 1978 that deposed the civilian government led by President Mokhtar Ould Daddah was not
welcomed by all segments of the Mauritanian elite. Some were in
favor of a continued alignment with Morocco’s King Hassan II
and opposed any attempt by the country to relinquish its share of
Western Sahara, a segment of territory known as Tiris el-Gharbia.
Others found themselves more generally disenchanted with the ruling
armed forces councils as time went on, seeing Mauritania’s foreign
relations posture as inordinately sympathetic to Algeria and the other
“radical” states of the Arab world. Furthermore, the consolidation of
power by Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah in January
1980 meant that the pro-Moroccan and other dissident elements
found themselves in definite eclipse. Various opposition movements
were then formed, and in May 1980 in Paris, they agreed to form
the Alliance for a Democratic Mauritania. The nominal leader of
the organization was a prominent left-wing Mauritanian politician,
Mustapha Ould Obeidrahmane.
From the beginning, the AMD was an unwieldy, fractured grouping. Aside from having only a very general platform of action—
merely the institution of multiparty government after the removal
of the governing Comité Militaire de Salut National (CMSN)—it
suffered from the handicap of being composed of widely disparate
interests, ranging all the way from those who wanted to make Islam a
more prominent part of daily life (such as former CMSN member and
air force officer Col. Mohammed Ould Bah Ould Abdel Kader) to
the Marxist-inclined Parti des Khadihines de Mauritanie (PKM),
Ould Obeidrahmane’s organization now attached to the AMD. Later,
another demoted and self-exiled former CMSN member, Lt.-Col.
Ahmed Salem Ould Sidi, cast his lot with the AMD from his new
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home in Morocco. Some backing also came from the exiled head of
state himself, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, although he reportedly soon
became disillusioned with the degree of factional infighting within
the group’s ranks. The AMD quickly set up offices in Dakar, Paris,
and Rabat, and received some funding from the conservative Gulf
monarchies, which shared the AMD’s suspicions of the Ould Heydallah regime. Rounding out the alliance’s membership was a small
number of haratines as well as some adherents of the pro-Iraq Arab
Baath Socialist Party (ABSP).
Less than a year after the formation of the AMD, the group attempted to overthrow Ould Heydallah and the CMSN. Dissident
army officers, led by Ould Sidi and Ould Abdel Kader, infiltrated
Mauritania from Senegal and mounted a violent uprising on 16
March 1981. Considerable fighting raged around many government
buildings in Nouakchott, and approximately eight people were
killed before troops loyal to the incumbent military regime crushed
the rebellion. Ould Sidi and Ould Abdel Kader were captured and
executed by a firing squad within a few days. For his part, Ould
Heydallah publicly accused King Hassan of being the mastermind of
the attempted putsch and broke off diplomatic relations with Rabat
in retaliation. The CMSN chairman also did not hesitate to put pressure on the governments of France and Senegal to restrict the AMD’s
activities, a move that met with some success and had the effect of
further weakening an already shaky patchwork of quarreling groups.
Faced with the near collapse of the AMD, many of its members
remained in exile until Ould Heydallah’s successor, Col. Maaouiya
Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, issued a general amnesty in late 1984 and
invited them to return to Mauritania and join his government if they
so chose. This offer was accepted by several key AMD members,
including Ould Obeidrahmane, who occupied a post for a short time
(1992–1993) on the Mauritanian Conseil des Ministres.
ALMORAVIDS. A powerful yet relatively short-lived religious
movement in the 11th century A.D., the Almoravids (also called
murabitun) united the Sanhadja Berber population of modern-day
Mauritania and converted them to the strict Malekite Sunni Islam
that characterizes the country today. After their successes in Mauritania, the Almoravids went on to conquer vast stretches of North
ALMORAVIDS
• 59
Africa and southern Spain, converting their inhabitants (often forcibly) to the Muslim faith. Disunity and outside pressures soon forced
the northern Almoravid Empire out of existence, but in Mauritania its
imprint was considerably deeper.
Around 1035, the leaders of the Gadala, one of the three component groups of the Sanhadja Confederation, returned from a pilgrimage (hajj) to the holy city of Mecca accompanied by Abdallah Ibn
Yacin, a Muslim theologian who agreed to travel to Mauritania after
the Gadala leaders had convinced him that the superficial attachment
of the Sanhadja to Islam needed rectification. Back home, however,
many Gadala resented Ibn Yacin’s authoritarianism and austere faith
and requested that he leave. Consequently, Ibn Yacin and his followers, by about 1041, constructed a ribat, or religious retreat, the location of which is unknown but is believed by some historians to have
been on the island of Tidra on Mauritania’s Atlantic coast. A year or
two later, having recruited many disciples from the nomadic tribes
of the area (and accumulating a large supply of weapons), the Muslims under Abdallah Ibn Yacin rapidly forced the Gadala, Lemtuna,
and Messufa tribes to embrace Islam and abandon their “heretical”
and animist ways. A decade later (in 1054), Almoravid power was
enhanced immeasurably by the capture of the Maghrebi trading city
of Sijilmasa and by the conquest of Aoudaghost, the most important
commercial outpost of the Kingdom of Ghana, a key component of
which was the Soninké. With this pair of successes, Ibn Yacin gained
control of both ends of the lucrative north–south caravan trade routes,
but the social implications of the Almoravid ascendancy were less
clear, as only two years later (in 1056) both the residents of Sijilmasa
and the Gadala Berbers rose in revolt against Ibn Yacin, who was
killed in a battle near Rabat, Morocco, in 1059, despite the crushing
of the uprising by Ibn Yacin’s successor, Abu Bakr Ibn Omar, and
his cousin, Youssuf Ibn Tasfin.
These revolts, coming so soon after Almoravid rule had been instituted, amply illustrated the lack of cohesion in ancient Mauritanian
society and the intense resentment of those (especially the Gadala)
who perceived that fanatical insiders were intent upon destroying
their independent way of life. But Ibn Omar and Ibn Tasfin carried
their campaign to Morocco, invading it and founding Marrakesh in
1062, sacking Fez and northern Morocco a few years later (1069). At
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the same time, the Almoravid Empire was threatened from another
quarter. The Lemtuna and Messufa, hitherto some of the most reliable followers of Islam, began fighting among themselves. Dismayed
at this, Ibn Omar decided that while Ibn Tasfin was busy in Morocco,
he would launch a jihad (Islamic holy war) against the still-powerful
Kingdom of Ghana and the Soninké in order to distract the attention
of the two warring tribes. For the next 14 years the war raged on,
ending with the defeat of Ghana and the capture of the great trading
city of Koumbi Saleh. The Soninké submitted to Islam for the first
time.
On the surface, Abu Bakr Ibn Omar’s strategy of uniting his subjects by rallying them against a traditional external foe was successful, but events in Morocco and Spain belied any claims to real unity.
Owing to the long distances and poor communications between
Mauritania and Morocco, Ibn Tasfin went his own way while Ibn
Omar was engaged against Ghana, following up his conquest of Morocco with the occupation of western Algeria in 1082 and crossing
into Muslim Spain in 1086, where he seized Andalucía by 1091 (Ibn
Omar having been killed in Tagant in 1087 while quelling another
insurrection). These actions had the effect of dividing the already
loosely organized Almoravid Empire into two parts, northern and
southern. While Mauritania in the south remained relatively peaceful in the early part of the 12th century, the opposite was the case in
Morocco and Spain. After Ibn Tasfin’s death in 1106, things went
from bad to worse for the Almoravids. Spain rebelled against Islam
in 1144 as part of the Christian reconquista, and in 1147 Marrakesh
was abandoned. By 1150, the northern portion of the empire was in
a state of collapse, but Almoravid rule in Mauritania lasted a while
longer due to its geographical isolation. A century later a group of
Arab invaders from the east, the Beni Hassan, entered the country
and eventually (by 1674) wiped out most remnants of Almoravid
and Berber civilization in the Char Bobha, or Thirty Years’ War.
The main historical contribution of the Almoravid period was its
importation of Malekite Sunni Islam to the entire population, producing a remarkable degree of religious unity and enabling Mauritania,
centuries later in 1960, to declare independence as the world’s first
Islamic Republic.
AN-NADHA AL-WATANIYYA AL-MAURITANIYA
• 61
AN-NADHA AL-WATANIYYA AL-MAURITANIYA (NADHA).
The Mauritanian National Renaissance (or Awakening) Party was
founded in the politically unsettled aftermath of the Congress of
Aleg, which was held in May 1958 under the aegis of the country’s
foremost politician and future president, Mokhtar Ould Daddah.
The congress, which fused two groups, Ould Daddah’s Union Progressiste Mauritanienne (UPM) and the smaller Entente Mauritanienne, resulted in the formation of an entirely new organization, the
Parti de Regroupement Mauritanien (PRM). The outcome of Aleg
did not please everyone, however, as some of the younger and more
radical PRM cadres were upset by some of Ould Daddah’s conservative policy stances. In July 1958, the PRM held its own congress
at Nouakchott, and the split became formal, as the dissenting rank
and file were expelled from the party after having had their policy
proposals soundly defeated by the rest of the membership. The PRM
outcasts then met at Kaédi on 25–26 September 1958 and officially
formed Nadha; it was Mauritania’s first opposition political party
specifically conceived as such. The secretary-general of the party was
Ahmed Baba Miské. In the view of some commentators, Nadha’s
platform was closer in content and style to the nationalistic currents
then sweeping the African continent than that of the more cautious
PRM. Nadha rejected Mauritanian participation in the French Community, insisted on total and immediate independence from Paris,
and called for rapprochement with Morocco, which many took as
a sign that the party was in effect endorsing the “Greater Morocco”
concepts enunciated by Mohammed Allal el-Fassi, which favored
federation, if not outright integration, with the Rabat monarchy.
Although the formation of Nadha was intended to unify various
strands of opposition to the PRM and Mokhtar Ould Daddah, the
pan-Arab views of the party frightened many Mauritanians, particularly Black Africans in the Senegal River Valley, who saw Nadha
as solely oriented toward the country’s Moorish inhabitants. As a
consequence, the ethnic divide widened rather than narrowed. In
spite of this, Nadha did score some impressive gains in popularity,
with substantial funds for its activities coming from Morocco as well
as from businessmen in Mauritania. By May 1959, however, the
fortunes of the group were in steep decline, as factional infighting as
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ANNE AHMADOU BABALY
well as allegations of corruption gave the PRM-dominated government a pretext to ban all political activity (except that conducted by
the PRM itself) on the eve of the 17 May elections to Mauritania’s
first Assemblée Nationale. In the polling, the PRM won all 40 seats
and left Nadha in the wilderness and outlawed. Extremists in the now
fractured party mounted a campaign of violence and civil disobedience in Nouakchott and Atar during May 1960, which resulted in
Ould Daddah placing five Nadha leaders (including Ahmed Baba
Miské) in detention in the remote eastern province of Hodh echChargui. They were held there until February 1961, three months
after Mauritania achieved full independence.
Despite the rough treatment Nadha had received at the hands of
Mokhtar Ould Daddah, the remnants of the party responded favorably
to calls from the head of state to put aside old differences and work
together to strengthen the institutions of the infant state. Ahmed Baba
Miské and his colleagues actively campaigned on Ould Daddah’s behalf before the country’s first presidential election and were rewarded
when Ould Daddah emerged victorious by being included in the first
postindependence national cabinet. In October 1961 Nadha, along
with the dominant PRM and several other groups, agreed to merge
at the Congress of Unity and to form the Parti du Peuple Mauritanien (PPM), which soon established itself as Mauritania’s only legal
political organization.
ANNE AHMADOU BABALY (1942– ). A Halpulaar from the Senegal River Valley, Anne Ahmadou Babaly decided on a career in the
Mauritanian armed forces in his youth and attended a succession
of prestigious French military academies, including the artillery and
infantry school at Montpellier and the École Supérieure Intendance
Militaire de Paris, receiving his diploma in the early 1970s. Although
his direct military involvement in the Western Sahara conflict was
evidently limited, he was a supporter of the army uprising of 10 July
1978 that deposed Mauritania’s civilian president, Mokhtar Ould
Daddah, and was a full member of the first army junta, the Comité
Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN), serving there until
its replacement by a new ruling group in 1979, the Comité Militaire
de Salut National (CMSN). Having attained the rank of commandant (major), he served for a short time as the CMSN’s comptroller-
ANNE AHMADOU BABALY
• 63
general, but on 3 June 1979 he was named minister of supply and
transport by the ascendant CMSN chairman, Lt.-Col. Mohammed
Khouna Ould Heydallah. He occupied that position until 11 April
1980, when he was given expanded responsibilities due to his post’s
being combined with the Ministry of Equipment. In February 1983
he was shifted to the Ministry of Planning and was simultaneously
promoted to lieutenant colonel, making him one of the highest-ranking black Mauritanian army officers. A little over a year later, however (in March 1984), he was dismissed from the cabinet by Ould
Heydallah, reportedly because of his reservations about the head of
state’s abrupt recognition, on 27 February, of the Polisario Front’s
government-in-exile, the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic
(SADR). But in July 1984, he was restored to favor and made minister of mining and energy, a more critical cabinet position.
According to some observers of Mauritanian affairs, Anne Ahmadou Babaly at about this time began to conspire with a fellow CMSN member and longtime friend, Col. Maaouiya Ould
Sid’Ahmed Taya (who had also just been demoted from his job as
minister of defense by Ould Heydallah) to overthrow the somewhat
erratic military leader. As a result, Babaly was one of the prime movers of the bloodless palace coup that replaced Ould Heydallah with
Ould Taya on 12 December 1984. Babaly became minister of finance
in the reorganized Conseil des Ministres, occupying that post until
April 1985, when he took over the key portfolio of minister of the
interior from its previous occupant, Lt.-Col. Djibril Ould Abdellahi.
The following year, though, his Interior Ministry position made him
vulnerable to accusations of laxity when the militant Black African
group, the Forces de Libération Africaine de Mauritanie (FLAM),
became more active. In the atmosphere of intense suspicion that surrounded FLAM’s emergence, Djibril Ould Abdellahi was able to
win back the Interior Ministry for himself, sending Babaly to the
lesser post of minister of commerce and transport on 31 August
1986. About five weeks later (4 October), Babaly was ousted from
the cabinet entirely and lost his seat on the CMSN six days after that.
This was reportedly due to the council’s belief that he was personally
sympathetic to FLAM’s objectives.
Restored to private life, Babaly lived quietly until 28 October 1987,
when he was arrested and accused of complicity in an alleged coup
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attempt said to have been planned for 22 October by FLAM-oriented
army officers. Soon afterward he and 50 others were placed on trial
before a special tribunal of military officers at the J’reida barracks
north of Nouakchott. Considering the political climate prevailing
in Mauritania at the time and the rampant abuses of human rights
that were taking place, Anne Ahmadou Babaly was indeed lucky;
he was acquitted of all charges on 3 December 1987, one of the few
officers to be thus exonerated. In early 1989, Babaly was partially
rehabilitated by the CMSN, being made manager of Mauritania’s
state insurance company, the Société Mauritanienne d’Assurances
et de Réassurances (SMAR). He occupied this position until SMAR
was liquidated by the government in February 1994.
AOUDAGHOST. The great trading and political capital of the Sanhadja Confederation and later of the Almoravid Empire, Aoudaghost is believed by historians and archaeologists to have been first
inhabited around 500 B.C., when long caravans of horses bound for
Morocco passed through. The increasing use of the camel as a means
of transport brought the town further prosperity in the third century
A.D. In the eighth century, Islam quickly took root in what is now
Mauritania, imported from the east mainly by the Lemtuna Berbers,
who gained control of the caravan routes between the Kingdom of
Ghana (dominated by the Soninké) and the city of Sijilmasa. From
the eighth century to ca. 990 A.D., the Sanhadja Confederation exercised unchallenged sway over Aoudaghost, but around 990 the town
was captured by the Soninké in an attempt (which was successful
for only 50 years) to cement their own political control. In 1054,
the Almoravids, a fiercely Islamic movement led by Abdallah Ibn
Yacin, seized Aoudaghost from the Ghanaians and began a century
of Almoravid rule. The town is described during that period (the
11th century) as having between 5,000 and 6,000 inhabitants, several
mosques, and extensive agricultural activity around its perimeter,
supported by an impressive irrigation system. But Aoudaghost began
to decline in importance after the collapse of the Almoravid Empire
around the year 1200, and in the ensuing years trading patterns began to shift away from the traditional caravan routes and toward the
coastal zones, where the first commercial contacts with Europeans
were being made. Modern researchers have found that as the area
ARAB BAATH SOCIALIST PARTY
• 65
became part of the Mauritanian Sahara, sand began to cover parts
of the town, which was progressively rebuilt until its abandonment
around 1700. Its ruins are accessible by means of an unimproved
road running about 40 kilometers northeast of Tamchekket, a settlement located in the région of Hodh el-Gharbi.
ARAB BAATH SOCIALIST PARTY (ABSP). The Arab Baath (Renaissance) Socialist Party was founded in Damascus, Syria, in 1947
by two Arab intellectuals, Michel ‘Aflaq and Salah al-Din Bitar. It
advocated, among other things, pan-Arab unity and resistance to the
colonial rule then prevalent in North Africa and the Middle East.
Despite the fact that branches of the Baath Party were established in
many Arab capitals (including Amman and Cairo), the party came to
power only in Syria (in 1963) and Iraq (in 1963 and again from 1968
to 2003), in the process undergoing a permanent schism between the
Iraqi and Syrian “regional commands.” After Iraq and Syria came under Baathist domination, few if any other Arab countries had a Baath
Party presence except, curiously, Mauritania, which (alone among
North African states) acquired a pro-Iraq branch of the organization
in 1979 or 1980. The Mauritanian Baathists, drawn exclusively from
the Moorish segment of the country’s society, were not a significant
political force in the beginning because their patron, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, was nearly completely preoccupied with his
country’s seemingly endless war with Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran.
The Mauritanian Baathists also had very little popular following;
indeed, they were often feared for their secretiveness and exclusivist
pan-Arab feelings, which threatened to further alienate Mauritania’s
substantial Black African population, situated mainly (but not exclusively) in the Senegal River Valley.
The president of Mauritania from 1980 to 1984, Col. Mohammed
Khouna Ould Heydallah, had little real difficulty with the Baath. He
dealt with them as he did with most of the other discordant elements
in the country, by alternately harassing, detaining, and releasing the
party’s members, moves that were sometimes followed by the promotion of some of the involved persons to positions of responsibility,
by way of cementing their loyalty to the regime. A tougher approach
could be discerned, however, in October 1982, when 11 Baathists
were convicted of conspiring to overthrow Ould Heydallah. All were
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sentenced to between 10 and 12 years’ imprisonment, including a
well-known Baath Party leader, Mohammed Yehdih Ould Breideleil. As it turned out, the defendants served only a little more than
two years behind bars; they were amnestied by Col. Maaouiya Ould
Sid’Ahmed Taya, a prominent military officer who displaced Ould
Heydallah on 12 December 1984 and began his rule by freeing many
political prisoners. For a time, little more was heard from the Baath,
but this situation only lasted into 1987, as the country’s unsettled
economic and ethnic situation worsened and gave pan-Arabists a
chance to increase their influence in many areas of Mauritanian life,
including within the armed forces and inside (and close to) the governing Comité Militaire de Salut National (CMSN).
However, Baath Party cadres had to undergo another period
of repression. In September 1987 (and again in July 1988), many
Baathists—including Ould Breideleil—were arrested, tried, and
convicted on a variety of charges, most prominent among them
being what amounted to espionage on behalf of Baghdad. In the
army, the specter of the pro-Iraq Baath Party insinuating itself into
Mauritania’s most important institution was too much for President
Ould Taya and his cautious and nationalistic colleagues. Hence,
nearly every Baathist sympathizer in the army was dismissed by
early 1988, particularly in the officer corps. But the Baath Party
seemed to take these measures in stride, having been trained by
their Iraqi supporters to survive in exactly such an environment,
and organized all ABSP activity into tight-knit cells into which only
dedicated, high-quality militants would be allowed. Consequently,
the Baathists were a substantial force in the county’s politics more
by virtue of their organization and discipline than as a result of support from ordinary Mauritanians.
By the middle of 1989, despite the repressive steps taken against
them by the CMSN, the Baath Party managed to effect a sea change
in Mauritanian domestic politics and in its foreign relations alignments. Helped by Saddam Hussein’s perceived victory over Iran
in that year and by Iraq’s availability as a dependable source of
economic aid, military hardware, and technical expertise, the Mauritanian regime had come to rest by 1989 firmly in the orbit of that
faraway Arab state, as the benefits of friendship with Iraq proved
too enticing for the CMSN to resist. Visits by Iraqi emissaries soon
ARAB BAATH SOCIALIST PARTY
• 67
became commonplace, and various government positions, notably those in the sensitive area of education, went increasingly to
Baathists or their sympathizers. In a tense racial situation, moreover,
the ABSP was Mauritania’s most fervent supporter of Arabization,
considered by black Mauritanians as well as many outside observers
to be detrimental to interethnic relations in the country.
The Baath Party’s influence was destined to reach even greater
heights after April 1989, the month in which a series of intercommunal disturbances began that ignited the Senegal–Mauritania crisis
and nearly brought the two nations to war over their treatment of
each other’s nationals. Baathists took full advantage of the crisis by
exerting more pressure on President Ould Taya and his government
to move closer to the Iraqi camp and further Arabize the country.
Baathists were reinstated into the armed forces and civil service at
a rapid rate, and Ould Breideleil, who was released from prison in
December 1989, was by the middle of 1990 appointed to the post of
executive secretary of the CMSN, making him the highest-ranking
civilian in the entire regime. The ABSP may also have had some
role in orchestrating the dismissal of the powerful (and anti-Baathist)
minister of the interior, Col. Djibril Ould Abdellahi, in February
1990.
In the view of some, Mauritania was well on its way to becoming
a satellite of Iraq, and the Baath Party might well have consolidated
its position further, were it not for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990. Overnight, the political equations both inside
Mauritania and outside the country underwent a massive reversal.
Although Mauritanian public opinion was strongly pro-Iraq, these
feelings were duplicated throughout North Africa and were not a reflection of Baathist influence. In fact, Baath Party influence sharply
declined during the 1990–1991 Gulf Crisis, which ended in an Iraqi
defeat on the battlefield and in its ejection from Kuwait, largely discrediting its Mauritanian backers. In addition, more neutralist figures,
among them President Ould Taya himself, were able to use the Gulf
situation to regain a greater degree of influence. After the end of the
Gulf War in March 1991, the Mauritanian Baath Party largely went
into eclipse. The Baath Party did not field any candidates under its
banner for the multiparty elections that were held in early 1992 (and
indeed held no seats in the country’s bicameral parliament throughout
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ARAB BAATH SOCIALIST PARTY
the 1992–2005 period), and suffered a telling blow when Ould Breideleil, long one of the leading ABSP leaders, left the organization
to become a prominent member of the ruling Parti Républicain,
Démocratique et Social (PRDS).
From 1991 to the end of the Mauritanian Second Republic in
August 2005, the ABSP appeared to have only a minor presence on
the country’s political stage, yet the period was not wholly devoid
of interesting developments. An officially registered, Baath-oriented
political party, known variously by its Arabic name, attali’a (Vanguard) or its French appellation, the Parti de l’Avant-Garde Nationale
(PAGN), existed with little evident popular support, and even this
tiny group was soon reported to be riven with internal dissension. On
23 October 1995, police arrested dozens of suspected Baathists (including Ould Breideleil), and the government resurrected old charges
of PAGN members allegedly acting as agents for Iraq. Arrests of
supposedly pro-Baath army officers were also carried out, and the
Iraqi ambassador to Mauritania was ordered to leave the country,
further degrading the poor state of relations between the two former
allies. All the arrested persons were soon released, however, and in
late 1995, only minor jail sentences and small fines were handed
down to the defendants. These punishments were also voided by a
Mauritanian court in January 1996. In a bid for a political comeback,
on 27 January 1997, the PAGN agreed with several other opposition
parties to join the so-called Front des Partis de l’Opposition (FPO),
but this gambit failed dismally, as both Baathists and Arab nationalists were subjected to more repression by Ould Taya in that year, with
no electoral benefits for either the PAGN or the rest of the opposition.
Matters only got worse as the decade progressed. When the PAGN
(like most other non-PRDS parties) vehemently denounced President
Ould Taya’s decision in July 1999 to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel, some of its members were harassed and jailed, and
in November of the same year, the PAGN achieved a dubious distinction when it became the first (but not the last) political party of
the Second Republic to be banned outright by the government, once
again based on the widely disbelieved charge of plotting against the
regime on behalf of Saddam Hussein.
In the early 21st century, the Baath Party’s fortunes continued to
decline. Some former PAGN members tried to regroup under the
ARABIZATION POLICY
• 69
banner of an unofficial organization, the Parti de la Renaissance
Nationale (PRN)—also known as Nouhoud, its Arabic name—and in
early 2003 tried to galvanize public opinion behind its strong opposition (shared by practically everyone else in Mauritania) to the U.S.
invasion and occupation of Iraq. But this only earned the ABSP more
attention from the by-now pro-United States Ould Taya government,
and in late May 2003 nine PRN leaders were arrested and imprisoned
for “forming an unauthorized association” and “reconstitution of a
political party after its dissolution.” But the penalties meted out to
these Baath Party leaders were reportedly not severe, and in the runup to the November 2003 presidential election (unsurprisingly won
by President Ould Taya), some Baathists threw their support behind
the incumbent, perhaps as a tactic to avoid further repression.
ARABIZATION POLICY. The term used to describe the Mauritanian
government’s gradual shift away from its early alignment with Black
Africa in the direction of the states of the Arab League—where its
foreign relations and domestic arrangements basically remained at
the beginning of the 21st century. Arabization was a largely unofficial policy in that no single law expressly provided for its application in all areas of Mauritanian life. However, the preference that
successive regimes exhibited for Arabic language and culture could
be seen primarily in the field of education and—according to critics
of the policy—in the effects of otherwise-neutral legislation such as
the Land Reform Act of 5 June 1983, which allegedly discriminated
against those black Mauritanians who did not belong to Arab civilization.
Arabization’s beginnings can be traced to the numerical preponderance of Moorish Mauritanians in the country, but it also received
an impetus from the diplomatic recognition Mauritania started to
receive in the mid-1960s from Arab states, which eased its isolation. This improving external climate was accompanied by domestic
change. In January 1966, President Mokhtar Ould Daddah decreed
the exclusive use of Hassaniyya Arabic as the sole medium of instruction beyond the primary level. Although this move was protested
by blacks, who preferred to be taught either in French or in their own
native tongues, the policy was continued under later Mauritanian
governments, albeit at a slower pace during the 1980–1984 tenure
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of Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah as head of state. In
other areas of the country’s life, such as land reform and the implementation of the Islamic sharia, there was still a decided preference
for the Arab point of view. On another level, blacks complained that
Moors were being given favored treatment out of proportion to their
numbers in employment by state enterprises, the civil service, and
the armed forces, and that—in the eyes of the country’s primary
black nationalist organization after the early 1980s, the Forces de
Libération Africaine de Mauritanie (FLAM)—this amounted to a
conscious policy of “marginalization.” Discriminatory enforcement
of other purportedly neutral laws and regulations was also alleged
throughout the 1980s.
In foreign affairs, the admission of Mauritania to the Arab League
in 1973 was a milestone along the road to orienting the country toward the Arab Maghreb and the Middle East, a trend reinforced by
Mauritania’s need for financial and other development aid from the
wealthier Arab countries. The seal on this Arabist proclivity was set
in February 1989, when, along with Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and
Tunisia, Mauritania became a member of the Union du Maghreb
Arabe (UMA). Still, Mauritania continued to earmark considerable
funds for the encouragement of agriculture and animal husbandry
in the southern régions of the country; was the only predominantly
Arabic-speaking member of the Economic Community of West
African States (ECOWAS); and—with Mali and Senegal—played a
very active role in the workings of the Organisation pour la Mise en
Valeur du Fleuve Sénégal (OMVS), although the latter organization
was oriented mainly toward equitably developing and sharing scarce
water resources among the three member nations.
The Arabization process in Mauritania reached a high point during the late 1980s, with some advances and retreats evident after
that time. Due to the increasing influence exerted after 1987 by the
pro-Iraq Arab Baath Socialist Party (ABSP) on the government of
President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, more and more key
positions in government ministries, the civil service, and the army
went to Baathists or their sympathizers, particularly in the sensitive
areas of education and culture, and moreover at a time when FLAM’s
higher profile inside Mauritania went virtually hand in hand with
the outbreak of the Senegal–Mauritania crisis of 1989 and 1990.
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After the Iraqi defeat in the Gulf Crisis of 1990–1991, though, Baath
Party influence quickly ebbed, as President Ould Taya struggled to
restore equilibrium to the country and consequently slowed the pace
of Arabization. During the Mauritanian Second Republic (1992–
2005), the signs of Arabization were mixed, as the country withdrew
from ECOWAS in 1999–2000 (although this may have been done
for reasons only indirectly related to ethnicity) and always treated
Black African dissidents more harshly than Moors, especially suspected FLAM militants or those blacks affiliated with what became
Mauritania’s main opposition political party from 1995 to 2002,
Action pour le Changement (AC). On the other side of the coin, the
then-minister of education (and future prime minister), S’ghair Ould
M’Barek, announced in April 1999 a substantial revamping of the
country’s critical educational sector, putting somewhat less emphasis
on Arabic and slightly more on French and the several Black African
languages spoken in Mauritania, although the latter would apparently
henceforth be taught at the university level only. These educational
reforms (which were implemented beginning in autumn 1999) produced more Arab nationalist than Black African dissent, although—
viewing Mauritanian affairs as a whole in 2008—the basic thrust of
the long-standing Arabization policy seemed destined to continue for
the foreseeable future, no mater which type of government—civilian
or military—held the reins of power.
ARAB LEAGUE. After more than a decade of ostracism from intraArab affairs, caused in large part by Morocco’s claim to all of Mauritania, the latter finally joined the League of Arab States in October 1973,
after King Hassan II modified his territorial ambitions and established
diplomatic relations with the government led by President Mokhtar
Ould Daddah in April 1970. Arab League membership was also the
culmination of Ould Daddah’s realignment of Mauritania’s foreign
relations away from sub-Saharan Africa and toward the Maghreb and
the Middle East. President Ould Daddah’s decision to join the Arab
League, however, was not universally well-received at home. Some
black Mauritanian citizens protested the move, seeing it as potentially
shortchanging their interests relative to the country’s Moors. In spite of
these feelings, successive Mauritanian governments—whether military
or civilian—maintained a fundamental orientation toward the Arab
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world, due not only to ethnic affinity but also in an effort to attract
much-needed financial assistance from the oil-rich Gulf monarchies.
An additional step away from Black Africa was taken in 1999–
2000, when President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya decided
to pull Mauritania out of the mainly sub-Saharan African Economic
Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a move that
aroused intense controversy even among some Moorish Mauritanians. As far as the Arab League itself was concerned, Mauritania’s
interactions with the organization proceeded uneventfully until
October 1999, when the country became only the third Arab state to
establish full diplomatic ties with Israel. A group of “radical” Arab
countries, led by Libya and Syria, briefly tried to have Mauritania expelled from the Arab League, but due to perennial differences among
the league’s member states, this did not happen.
ARMED FORCES. When Mauritania became independent in November 1960, the country had no army of its own. For a variety of reasons,
not least of which were a lack of finance and a paucity of trained officers from the politically dominant Moors, the formation of a purely
indigenous force (aside from police and paramilitary units) had to
be deferred for a year. In October 1961, Mauritania began to field a
1,000-man army known as the First Infantry Battalion. The personnel
of this unit were spread thinly throughout the country’s vast territory
and served as little more than an internal security force, with almost
no capability against an external foe. The former colonial power,
France, continued to station its own troops on Mauritanian soil until
1966 to take care of any outside threat, although President Mokhtar
Ould Daddah ended their presence in that year as part of his gradual
realignment of Mauritania’s foreign relations.
Between 1961 and 1976 the size of the armed forces never exceeded 3,000 troops, a tiny number even by African standards.
This number included, in fact, several hundred men assigned to the
air force and navy, the latter founded in January 1966 and based
mainly in Nouadhibou. Although the army was patterned after its
French counterpart, and officers received training at France’s military academies (notably those at St. Cyr and St. Maxen), it remained
internally oriented through the mid-1970s and saw action on very
few occasions, mostly to disperse demonstrations and put down
ARMED FORCES
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strikes in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the economically vital
iron ore industry. These tasks were undertaken in conjunction with
Mauritania’s other security forces, primarily the National Guard
and the Gendarmarie Nationale, and often involved considerable
violence and some loss of life. President Ould Daddah, it was widely
believed, kept the size of the army small in order to lessen the possibility of a coup d’état.
The Mauritanian security outlook was totally transformed beginning in November 1975, when Ould Daddah joined with Morocco’s
King Hassan II and the Spanish government in signing the Madrid
Agreement, which partitioned Spain’s colony of Western Sahara between Mauritania and Morocco. The treaty gave Mauritania control
over Tiris el-Gharbia, an arid slice of desert (one-third of the area
of Western Sahara) abutting the country’s northernmost administrative régions. President Ould Daddah believed that his takeover of the
Sahara would engender little opposition from the native inhabitants
of the territory (often known as Saharawis), but he was soon proved
to be mistaken. Starting in late 1975, the armed forces of the proindependence Polisario Front mounted sustained military attacks
on Mauritanian targets, in particular its iron ore extraction facilities
and the critical railway line connecting the mines to Nouadhibou.
Mauritania’s army was completely outgunned and unprepared from
the beginning, and soon few areas of the country were immune from
Polisario’s depredations. To hold onto Tiris el-Gharbia and defend
Mauritania proper, Ould Daddah was obliged to massively increase
the army’s size; its personnel grew from 3,000 at the start of 1976 to
12,000 a year later, climbing again to 17,000 by the start of 1978. An
unpopular conscription law was enacted by an obedient Assemblée
Nationale, and recruiting drives in the countryside were stepped up,
with many haratines, Halpulaaren, and other Black Africans being
inducted into the enlisted ranks, a development that exacerbated the
young nation’s latent racial tensions, because the new arrivals were
usually officered by Moors. Moreover, the war in Western Sahara
was widely disliked by most Mauritanians: many Moors felt ties of
kinship with the Saharawis, and the Black Africans saw the conflict
as a faraway “Arab war” that could only be to their own detriment.
As a result, morale in the army plummeted rapidly from 1976 to the
middle of 1978.
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The combat performance of the Mauritanian armed forces during the Western Sahara conflict was mixed. Individual units often
fought well in situations where they directly confronted Polisario
formations, and there were some excellent officers, such as Commandant (Major) Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah, who distinguished himself during the first Nouakchott raid by the Polisario
Front in June 1976 by reacting quickly to intelligence on their movements (partly supplied by the air force) and then inflicting a severe
defeat on Polisario in Inchiri province, in the process killing the
front’s charismatic leader, El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed. The Mauritanian army also acted imaginatively in attempting to protect the vital
mining town of Zouérate. A wide, deep trench was dug around the
entire settlement, which shielded it from capture until 1 May 1977,
when the moat was circumvented by Polisario, which then occupied
Zouérate for several hours. The Zouérate raid placed in high relief
the inordinate dependence of enlisted men and noncommissioned
officers on their superiors, as Ould Heydallah, the commander of the
area’s forces, was away on business in Nouakchott at the time and
the entire garrison surrendered without firing a shot. Some observers
ascribed this and other disasters to a lack of training and a defective command structure, but the real problems for Mauritania were
numbers, mobility, and motivation. The small number of men in the
armed forces was simply at a loss to defend a vast area with widely
spaced population centers against an extremely mobile adversary
whose morale only increased as Mauritania’s declined. Air support was virtually nonexistent, and logistical backup in the Saharan
wilderness, never an easy matter even in peacetime, was stretched
beyond the breaking point. Constant reshuffling of commanders and
Defense Ministry personnel by President Ould Daddah did nothing
to improve morale, and immediately after the debacle at Zouérate, he
moved even closer to King Hassan by agreeing to form a Moroccan–
Mauritanian Defense Committee on 13 April 1977, a pact that gave
Morocco the authority to station its Forces Armées Royales (FAR)
in almost every significant Mauritanian town except the capital. This
move upset many Mauritanians, not least the more nationalistically
inclined officers such as the chief of staff, Col. Mustapha Ould Mohammed Salek, whose relations with President Ould Daddah were
already strained and who resented being placed in a subordinate posi-
ARMED FORCES
• 75
tion relative to Morocco. The country was then obliged to call upon
France for military help of a far more significant kind: In December
1977, Opération Lamantin, a series of French air strikes against
Polisario forces near the Zouérate-Nouadhibou railway, was carried
out, inflicting great losses on the Saharawi nationalists but without
altering the parlous state of Mauritania’s own defenses.
On 10 July 1978, the Mauritanian armed forces ceased to be merely
a defensive force and became the country’s governing institution. A
bloodless coup, led by Col. Ould Salek, unseated the Ould Daddah
regime and instituted direct army rule in the form of the Comité Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN), a group of high-ranking
officers who often had little in common with one another politically
but who shared an overwhelming desire to extract their nation from
its ruinous involvement in Western Sahara. A definitive peace with
the Polisario Front, however, took a year to achieve, as there were
still 9,000 Moroccan troops inside Mauritania in 1978. The attitude
of France, which opposed a separate agreement with Polisario, also
had to be considered. But while Ould Salek and his CMRN colleagues temporized over the following nine months, the quality of the
army in the field deteriorated almost to the vanishing point, as there
was a great deal of anticipation in the ranks that no further fighting
would take place and that demobilization was around the corner.
Also, the officer corps’ newfound preoccupation with politics and
state administration left no time for leadership activity in the field,
so overall readiness hit bottom by early 1979. After several reorganizations of the military government in April and June 1979—which
involved establishing a new Comité Militaire de Salut National
(CMSN) to replace the CMRN—and spurred on by a (short-lived)
resumption of attacks by Polisario in July 1979, the de facto CMSN
leader, Lt.-Col. Ould Heydallah, signed a treaty with the front on 5
August 1979. The Algiers Agreement called for the abandonment of
Mauritania’s claim to Tiris el-Gharbia and was swiftly consummated,
to the immense relief of virtually all the country’s citizens.
Even before the Algiers peace treaty, roughly half the army was
disbanded, with the number of soldiers falling from 17,000 to about
7,500 in July 1980. A limited reequipment effort was begun, and
civic action programs were inaugurated by Ould Heydallah, under
which soldiers would assist farmers and workers in an attempt to
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integrate the army into civilian life. Military officers continued
to govern Mauritania until April 1992, however, and the political
character of the army command, coupled with a pressing need to
allocate scarce resources elsewhere, caused the force to remain illequipped for combat throughout the 1980s and into the early 21st
century. The life of a Mauritanian officer (or even an enlisted man)
was not a tranquil one in the 1980s, even without the stresses of war:
the announcement of failed coup plots and other conspiracies was a
constant reality and often resulted in the arrest, detention, or even, in
a few cases, execution of those believed by the CMSN to be allied
with either France, Libya, Morocco, or, as the Senegal–Mauritania
crisis of 1989–1990 heated up, the Dakar government of President
Abdou Diouf. In 1986, there was a wholesale purge of Black African army personnel suspected of being sympathetic to the nascent
armed opposition movement, the Forces de Libération Africaine
de Mauritanie (FLAM), and about a year later, another group of
officers was cashiered for their supposed affiliation with the pro-Iraq
Arab Baath Socialist Party (ABSP), although many of them were
rehabilitated beginning in 1988 as the country’s alliance with Saddam Hussein deepened.
Despite these events, the army did what it could to defend Mauritania’s territory, extensively patrolling the Western Saharan border
from its base at Inal (soon to become infamous as the site of massive human rights abuses by the regime) to prevent either Morocco
or Polisario from trespassing and possibly drawing the country back
into renewed involvement in the still-unsettled dispute. In the Senegal River Valley, the army’s role was far more controversial, as it
was charged with preventing Senegalese forces, FLAM militants,
or other non-Mauritanians from attempting to cross the border.
To fulfill this mandate, army units, some reportedly made up of
haratines and augmented by thousands of reservists called up during the conflict with Senegal, operated from bases at Aleg, Kaédi,
and Rosso, maintaining, in the opinion of international observers,
a repressive atmosphere and holding certain towns, such as Bogué
in Brakna province, in the grip of virtual martial law. There were
also Mauritanian army bases in the far north—including at Bir
Moghrein—tasked with keeping watch on Western Sahara, and
there was an important army facility, the barracks at J’reida, located
ARMED FORCES
• 77
about 25 kilometers north of Nouakchott, although troop levels in
and around the capital were kept low due to its great distance from
the nearest international frontier. As might be expected, headquarters staff were located in Nouakchott, as were detachments of the
National Guard, the Gendarmarie, and—crucially for the regime
in power—the Bataillon de la Sécurité Présidentielle (BASEP),
although all of these were under the control of the Ministry of the
Interior, not the Defense Ministry.
The roughly 15,000 men serving in Mauritania’s ground forces in
2008 were divided into 15 infantry battalions, 3 artillery battalions, 4
batteries of antiaircraft troops, and a single paratroop battalion along
with an engineer company and an armed reconnaissance squadron.
There were also two battalions using mainly camels for transport
and stationed in remote northern areas. Rounding out the total were
a varying number of headquarters, medical, and support personnel,
which performed functions found in most armies, such as logistics,
signals, and quartermaster. Administratively, Mauritania’s territory
was divided into five military regions (a sixth was abolished shortly
after the end of the Western Saharan war), the commanders of which
were answerable to the army chief of staff (chef d’état major) in
Nouakchott, who reported first to the minister of defense and then
to the president of the republic (from December 1984 to August
2005, Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya; from August 2005
to April 2007, Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall; and after April 2007
a civilian, Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi), who under the
constitution was commander-in-chief of all of Mauritania’s armed
forces. The officer rank structure was fairly conventional, with the
noncommissioned ranks of sergent to adjudant-chef being the equivalent of staff sergeant to sergeant major in Western armed forces, on
up to commandant (major) and lieutenant colonel and full colonel,
the latter being the highest rank of any active Mauritanian officer,
who also made up a preponderance of CMRN/CMSN members from
1978 to 1992 and nearly all the members of Mauritania’s governing
junta from August 2005 to April 2007, the Conseil Militaire pour
le Justice et la Démocratie (CMJD). In addition, a colonel usually headed the air force and the navy and was also in charge of the
country’s military academy, the École Militaire Interarmes d’Atar
(EMIA).
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The equipment and weaponry possessed by the Mauritanian army
from the 1990s to the first decade of the 21st century were rudimentary and mirrored the force’s small size, limited means, and shifting
missions. There were approximately 35 Soviet-built T-54 and T-55
tanks supplied by Iraq during its period of friendship with Mauritania in the late 1980s, 20 AML-60 and AML-90 armored fighting
vehicles purchased from France, and perhaps two dozen Saladin and
Saracen light armored vehicles from Great Britain. Artillery mostly
consisted of 75 to 80 105mm and 122mm towed guns, and there were
a variety of mortars and recoilless guns intended for an antitank role,
in addition to 50 units of the French Milan antitank missile system.
The antiaircraft capability was modest and was made up of several
dozen ZU-23-2 and M-1939 guns from the former Soviet Union, a
few other antiaircraft guns from France and elsewhere, and Russianmade SAM-7 and SAM-9 missiles. A considerable number of Land
Rover, Berliet, and Mercedes-Benz Unimog trucks were also on the
army roster for transport purposes, because resupply by air was usually not possible due to the tiny size of the air force and the army’s
widely spaced garrisons.
As far as cooperation with foreign military forces was concerned,
Mauritania had a long-standing training relationship with France
(broken off between 1999 and 2002 over the so-called Ould Dah
affair, in which a Mauritanian officer was arrested in France and
charged with human rights violations), Spain, and the United States.
The relationship with the United States grew in importance after
2002 as President Ould Taya cemented his pro-Western foreign
policy orientation, which reportedly involved (by 2005) U.S. Special
Forces instructors stationed at the EMIA military school in Atar
and perhaps in other locations. The overall military budget hovered
throughout the 1990s at roughly 5.7 billion ouguiyas yearly (about
$23.6 million), and was not increased until the last months of Ould
Taya’s rule, when a massive UM 15 billion ($54 million) was to be
allocated for the army in 2005 and thereafter, probably using some of
the state’s anticipated revenues from oil exports.
Beginning in the late 1990s, it became common knowledge in
Mauritania that, despite the head of state’s own military background
and the reality that the army was one of the country’s few real
national institutions, the armed forces’ conditions of service and
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• 79
equipment were decaying rapidly. The chief of staff, Col. Moulay
Ould Boukhreiss, made an official visit to the People’s Republic of
China (PRC) in June 1998, apparently to discuss military collaboration and reequipment, but little if anything was done afterward, and
soon several shadowy groups of officers and men made their presence known on the Internet and in print, complaining that conditions
in the army were virtually subhuman, and in a few cases pledging
to overthrow the Ould Taya regime. In December 2001, Ould Taya
carried out a sudden reshuffling of the army’s top commands. Along
with Ould Boukhreiss being given the largely honorific position
of brigadier-general in the retired reserves and being replaced by
Col. Mohamed Lemine Ould N’Diayane, several officers, including
some in military intelligence, were reportedly arrested on suspicion
of antigovernment activities. These developments, along with Ould
Taya’s deepening unpopularity with the populace at large, were by
no means reassuring to those who continued to hope that the 1992
advent of the Mauritanian Second Republic would have impelled
the army to permanently remove itself from the political arena, but
the coup attempt of 8–9 June 2003, mounted by a group of disaffected officers led by Saleh Ould Hanena, Abderrahmane Ould
Mini, and Mohamed Ould Cheikhna, put these aspirations to rest, as
the attempt took over 24 hours to quell, killed Col. Ould N’Diayane
and over a dozen other persons, and only barely failed to unseat
President Ould Taya. In the aftermath of this highly traumatic event,
reorganizations within the military establishment became nearly
regular occurrences, and over the following two years it became
impossible for outside observers—as well as most Mauritanians—to
ascertain whether genuine coup plots were being uncovered (and
a wide variety of countries and individuals received the blame
for these supposed plans) or Ould Taya was seeking simply to
keep the army off balance and prevent another serious challenge
to his increasingly authoritarian leadership. Adding to the overall
uncertainty, the army also had to contend with a deadly attack on
its remote Lemgheity garrison in the far northern reaches of Tiris
Zemmour province in early June 2005, in which at least 15 soldiers
were killed and a like number wounded. The attack was allegedly
carried out by an Algeria-based Islamist terrorist organization, the
Groupe Salafiste pour le Prédication et de Combat (GSPC), and was
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evidently meant as retaliation for President Ould Taya’s recent measures against “militant Islam” inside Mauritania itself.
Just a few weeks after the Lemgheity raid (on 3 August 2005),
Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, acting in concert with over a dozen
like-minded senior army officers, overthrew President Ould Taya
while he was outside the country. There was no violence as the army
took possession of key state facilities in Nouakchott, and most of
Mauritania’s citizens, weary of Ould Taya’s repression and favoritism, applauded the action. The new junta pledged from the beginning
that it would not hold power for longer than two years (a promise that
was kept, as it relinquished power to a reconstituted National Assembly and an elected civilian president, Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh
Abdellahi, in April 2007), but the August coup was a clear indication
that the armed forces had once more established themselves as the
kingmakers of modern Mauritanian politics.
ARMY OF LIBERATION. An anticolonial guerrilla force, which
included various Mauritanian politicians among its supporters,
the Army of Liberation (known in Arabic as the Jaich at-Tahrir)
received its strongest impetus from the independence of Morocco
from France on 2 March 1956. This event caused many Moroccans
(particularly those from the south of the country), inhabitants of the
Spanish colony of Western Sahara, and some Mauritanians to focus
their attention on those areas that were still under European rule.
Although the Army of Liberation was for the most part composed of
Berber peasants from the Rif Mountains, some residents of Mauritania who were, for one reason or another, opposed to the generally
conservative policies of Mokhtar Ould Daddah, were also represented. In particular, one of the country’s first indigenous elected officials, Horma Ould Babana, after losing elections in Mauritania in
1952 and 1956, traveled in the summer of 1956 to Morocco, where he
founded the Front National de Libération Mauritanien (FNLM),
an element of the Jaich at-Tahrir.
Usually, Army of Liberation members espoused the “Greater Morocco” aspirations of the veteran Moroccan politician Mohammed
Allal el-Fassi. In practice, this meant that the Army of Liberation’s
military campaign (which began in mid-1956) not only would be
directed against the French and Spanish colonial powers, but also
ARMY OF LIBERATION
• 81
would have the long-range goal of affiliating Mauritania and Western
Sahara more closely with Morocco, with complete integration an objective held by many. One of the Army of Liberation’s largest attacks
took place on 15 February 1957, when a French force was ambushed
in the northern Adrar region near the Algerian border, causing much
loss of life. The attackers, significantly, fled back into Western Sahara, which was being used as a “safe haven” by the irregulars.
The Spanish suffered the greatest number of reverses in the lowkey, hit-and-run war in the desert reaches of Western Sahara; even
the city of Smara in the northeastern portion of the colony was abandoned to the guerrillas in July 1957. The French, too, were deeply
anxious. The military attacks of the Army of Liberation had created a
climate of insecurity in northern Mauritania, where immense deposits
of iron ore were awaiting extraction by a French-dominated mining
consortium, the Société Anonyme des Mines de Fer de Mauritanie
(MIFERMA). More generally, the Army of Liberation was a threat
to Paris’s plans for the country’s autonomy, to be followed by full independence under the decidedly Francophile Mokhtar Ould Daddah,
who himself felt under pressure from the guerrillas. In addition,
Morocco’s king, Mohammed V, who had previously supported some
of the irregulars’ activities, felt increasingly uncomfortable with their
presence in his country, terming them “uncontrolled.”
The Spanish continued to suffer further military setbacks all
through 1957 in Western Sahara, which in turn caused the French
still more consternation, because Madrid’s forces were not able to
even defend themselves, let alone prevent attacks on Mauritanian
targets. As Gaston Cusin, the high commissioner of Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF), said on 28 February 1957, “the Spanish
authorities in Rio de Oro (Western Sahara) have given us their full
cooperation in the recent Mauritanian events, but they have only been
able to do so to the extent of their military means which are very
limited.” Both Paris and Madrid realized that this situation could not
continue indefinitely, and they decided at the end of 1957 to take
swift and decisive military action.
After extensive planning, Opération Ouragon, a massive FrenchSpanish counterinsurgency campaign, swung into execution on 10
February 1958. With 14,000 troops (5,000 French, 9,000 Spanish),
it succeeded by virtue of concentrated firepower in clearing Western
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Sahara and northern Mauritania of Army of Liberation fighters, who
were forced into headlong retreat. By 24 February—that is, in two
weeks’ time—the operation ended with French control of its Mauritanian territory preserved and Spain enjoying similar fruits of victory
next door in its “Saharan province.”
Opération Ouragon was the death knell for the Army of Liberation. Internal dissension, already evident between the younger and
more radical leaders of the organization and the older tribesmen who
made up the guerrillas’ rank and file, grew steadily worse following their military defeat, which left thousands destitute in southern
Morocco. In addition, Mohammed V’s government was steadily
bringing southern Morocco under royal control, ending the Army of
Liberation’s freedom of movement. In return for laying down their
weapons and submitting to Moroccan rule, the former irregulars were
offered the chance to enlist in Morocco’s regular army, the Forces
Armées Royales (FAR), as well as other incentives such as land and
employment, offers that were nearly always accepted.
ARRONDISSEMENT. The smallest unit of local government in
Mauritania, known as “administrative posts” under the constitution of 20 May 1961. On 30 July 1968, the administrative posts
were renamed arrondissements as part of a reorganization of the
government by President Mokhtar Ould Daddah, although the
relatively small areas covered by each (usually a town, village, or
settlement and its environs) stayed essentially the same. A varying
number of arrondissements made up a département, the next highest step up the administrative ladder, which in turn were combined
to form régions, of which there were 12 in Mauritania, along with a
special district encompassing the capital city, Nouakchott. Always
of limited significance due to the country’s highly centralized form
of governance, they made up most of the 208 electoral units in the
Mauritanian Second Republic (which was inaugurated on 18 April
1992 and terminated by the coup d’état of 3 August 2005), and also
in the Third Republic, which was instituted on 19 April 2007 at the
end of a temporary period of direct military rule.
ASSABA. A Mauritanian administrative région covering 37,000 square
kilometers in the south-central portion of the country, in 1977 Assaba
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• 83
had a population of about 129,000 people, a figure that had greatly
increased by 2000, to at least 242,265. Assaba has a short border with
Mali in the south of the province along the Karakoro River and is one
of the relatively few areas of Mauritania whose climate can support
agriculture. Assaba has been connected to the rest of the country
since the 1970s by the Trans-Mauritanian Highway (the so-called
Route de l’Espoir), but its only large town is Kiffa, which had over
75,000 people in the early 21st century.
ASSEMBLÉE NATIONALE. (1) Known in Arabic as al-Jamiyya alWataniyya, Mauritania’s first National Assembly, or parliament, was
elected by universal suffrage on 17 May 1959, replacing a former
representative body, the Constituent Assembly. All 40 seats in the
unicameral Mauritanian legislature were won by candidates belonging to the Parti de Regroupement Mauritanien (PRM), headed by
Mokhtar Ould Daddah. Officially, the National Assembly existed
as a coequal branch of the government (along with the judiciary and
the executive branch), but in practice, the powers of parliament were
sharply circumscribed, with President Ould Daddah retaining nearly
plenary authority over national defense and foreign relations as well
as complete control over his Conseil des Ministres. Moreover, Ould
Daddah was not necessarily obliged to accept contrary votes or resolutions by the National Assembly. He could, for example, circumvent
a legislative vote against his annual budget merely by putting forth
an interim budget, which possessed an equivalent legal effect. In
another tactic, the president flooded parliament on more than one occasion with proposed laws, each of which had to be voted on before
the National Assembly could put forward any bills of its own. This,
more than any other factor, effectively stifled the independence of
the parliament.
On 25 December 1961, one year after the attainment of Mauritanian independence and two months after the so-called Congress of
Unity that amalgamated the PRM and other political parties into a
single organization, the Parti du Peuple Mauritanien (PPM), the
PPM was proclaimed the sole legal party in the country, putting an
end to a rather brief experiment in multiparty democracy. With all
other parties outlawed, the PPM’s monopoly in the National Assembly was assured, although it would be a few years before the
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last stirrings of independent initiative from PPM members were
squelched and national policy deliberations put firmly into the hands
of the Bureau Politique National (BPN), a handpicked group of
Ould Daddah loyalists. Thereafter, the Mauritanian legislative branch
became a somnolent, wholly symbolic body, serving simply as a rubber stamp for presidential decisions. From its original membership of
40, the National Assembly grew in size to 50 in 1971 and 78 by 1975.
Along with the PPM itself, the Assemblée Nationale was dissolved
on 10 July 1978 under one of the first edicts issued by the Comité
Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN), a group of officers
from Mauritania’s armed forces who had overthrown President
Ould Daddah earlier that same day.
(2) After 14 years without a parliament, Mauritanian voters elected
a new National Assembly on 6 and 13 March 1992 as part of a major reform of the country’s political order, undertaken by President
Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, who had decisively triumphed in
Mauritania’s first contestable presidential election on 17 January. The
new parliament, like its legislative counterpart, the Senate, owed its
official existence and authority to the Mauritanian constitution of 20
July 1991, approved two weeks earlier in a popular referendum. The
balloting for the National Assembly—like virtually all presidential,
legislative, and municipal elections held over the next 13 years—was
marred by allegations of voting fraud that significantly favored Ould
Taya’s own political group, the Parti Républicain, Démocratique
et Social (PRDS), at the expense of other parties such as Ahmed
Ould Daddah’s Union des Forces Démocratiques (UFD). Assisted
by the UFD’s boycott of the legislative vote, the PRDS unsurprisingly won 67 of the 79 seats in contention, with the rest going either
to nonboycotting parties or independent candidates.
Throughout the 1992–2005 period, the PRDS’s strength in the Assemblée Nationale did not drop below approximately 90 percent of
the total number of seats, which, combined with a similar situation
in the Senate and on the country’s municipal councils, meant that
President Ould Taya never faced a serious challenge to the enactment
of his political, economic, or social programs, including embracing
the “structural adjustment” measures advocated by the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), the passage of a wide-ranging amnesty law
shielding from prosecution those suspected of complicity in the hu-
ASSEMBLÉE NATIONALE
• 85
man rights abuses of the late 1980s and early 1990s, reforms to the
educational sector, and proposals to privatize certain state-owned
companies. Only once—from October to December 2001—did the
Ould Taya government face the possibility of genuine legislative
opposition, when the influential Action pour le Changement (AC)
political party captured several additional seats in the parliament and
essayed the prospect of a coalition with smaller non-PRDS groups
and antiregime independent deputies. But President Ould Taya, by
this time firmly on the road to constructing a highly authoritarian
state, resorted to the simple expedient of banning the AC outright on
3 January 2002, ensuring that for the remainder of his presidential
tenure the legislature could not exercise its constitutional prerogatives, including its nominal authority to declare war, ratify treaties,
and oversee state finances and the activities of the cabinet. The
Assemblée Nationale, one of the major institutions of Mauritania’s
Second Republic, continued its existence until 3 August 2005, when
it was disbanded by order of the Conseil Militaire pour la Justice
et la Démocratie (CMJD), a group of army officers that had just
toppled President Ould Taya’s government, to considerable popular
acclaim.
(3) As promised by the leader of the CMJD, Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, when he assumed the Mauritanian presidency, direct
military rule ended by early 2007; the parliamentary elections of
19 November and 3 December 2006 were followed by the presidential election of 11 and 25 March 2007, the latter being won by
Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi, a respected 69-year-old
economist. The parliamentary balloting of late 2006 was notable on
several counts. First, the former ruling political party, the PRDS—by
now rechristened the Parti Républicain pour la Démocratie et le
Rénouveau (PRDR)—succeeded in electing a drastically reduced
number of deputies. Two other pro-PRDS parties, the Rassemblement pour le Démocratie et l’Unité (RDU) and the Union pour le
Progrès et la Démocratie (UPD), also did poorly. Second, Ahmed
Ould Daddah’s former UFD—by this time known as the Rassemblement des Forces Démocratiques (RFD)—captured 14 seats in the
reconstituted National Assembly, far more than it ever had during
Ould Taya’s Second Republic. Third, and quite possibly most important, independent candidates (that is, those not affiliated with any
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ASSEMBLÉE TERRITORIALE
political party) garnered no fewer than 24 parliamentary seats in the
first round on 19 November and went on to win another 14 places in
second-round voting held on 3 December. In the opinion of a good
many observers, this development not only showed the weakness of
the “formal” political parties in the rural areas of Mauritania (most
of the independents were from the countryside), but also underscored
the continuing strength of “traditional” tribal, clan, and regional
interests (including, it was believed, moderately Islamist elements)
in those same rural zones of the country. Finally, the great number
of independent deputies in the first National Assembly of the Mauritanian Third Republic meant that voting coalitions on important
pieces of legislation might well be a more fluid affair, as it was not
readily predictable where the many nonaffiliated deputies might
align themselves, and a head of state such as President Ould Abdellahi might find it more problematic to propose (or parliament itself
to enact) laws with which either the party-aligned or independent
members disagreed. This, in the opinion of some, was precisely the
result Col. Ould Vall and the CMJD wanted, as it fragmented the
parliament and made it more difficult for the National Assembly to
construct a united front, which the still-powerful armed forces might
find not to their benefit.
ASSEMBLÉE TERRITORIALE. The successor body to the Conseil
Général under French colonial administration, the unicameral Territorial Assembly was established in 1952 and was designed as an
interim legislative chamber, with circumscribed powers, that would
facilitate the transition to independence in close association with
Paris. Elections to the new assembly were held in 1952, and the results marked the beginning of the rapid ascent in the political fortunes
of the future president of Mauritania, Mokhtar Ould Daddah. His
Union Progressiste Mauritanienne (UPM) won 22 of the 24 seats,
while the two others went to the country’s first political party, the
Entente Mauritanienne. After a period of several years, during
which several political realignments took place, new elections to the
Territorial Assembly were held on 31 March 1957, resulting in another sweep for the UPM, which captured all but one of the 34 seats
in the chamber. Despite this overwhelming victory, Mokhtar Ould
Daddah attempted to include as many political tendencies as possible
ASSOCIATION DE LA JEUNESSE MAURITANIENNE
• 87
in the new Mauritanian government, which was formed on 21 May.
In May 1958, he felt sufficiently secure in his own position that he
persuaded several smaller parties to merge with the UPM at the Congress of Aleg and form the Parti de Regroupement Mauritanien
(PRM). On 28 November 1958, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania
was formally proclaimed (although full independence was not to happen until two years later), and the Territorial Assembly was replaced
by a new body, the Constituent Assembly.
ASSOCIATION DE LA JEUNESSE DU PRM. A small yet influential political party and youth organization made up of those Mauritanians who chose not to affiliate themselves with the radical, panArab group known as An-Nadha al-Wataniyya al-Mauritaniya
(Nadha), founded by Ahmed Baba Miské in September 1958. The
group was made up of both black and Moorish Mauritanians who
wanted a more broadly based yet still nationalistic party to represent
them. The formation of the Youth Association of the Parti de Regroupement Mauritanien (PRM) occurred in a rather roundabout
manner. Those members of the earlier Association de la Jeunesse
Mauritanienne (AJM) who had chosen to join hands with Mokhtar
Ould Daddah’s PRM party after that group had been founded at
the Congress of Aleg in May 1958 found themselves in the political
wilderness two months later when they were expelled from the PRM
for their “radical” sentiments and their desire for more pluralism in
Mauritanian public life. Some former AJM members decided to join
Nadha, but the party’s pro-Arab and anti-French platform did not
attract everyone; consequently, the remaining moderate elements
elected to join the PRM and open its membership to Black Africans
and Moors alike.
ASSOCIATION DE LA JEUNESSE MAURITANIENNE (AJM).
The Association of Mauritanian Youth, the country’s first political
party designed specifically to attract young people, was formed out of
a schism with the older, more conservative leaders of the Union Progressiste Mauritanienne (UPM), which had defeated Mauritania’s
very first political grouping, the Entente Mauritanienne, in territorial legislative elections in November 1952. Younger, more radical
elements of the UPM, despairing of the pro-French orientation of the
88 •
ASSOCIATION MAURITANIENNE DES DROITS DE L’HOMME
party’s leader, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, broke with the party at the
UPM congress held at Rosso in November 1955, and the AJM was
formally established a few days later. Although staunchly anticolonialist, the AJM lacked a clear platform and never broadened its base
of support; in fact, many AJM leaders were assertively pan-Arab, limiting the group’s appeal to black Mauritanians. In the 1956 elections
to the Conseil Général, the AJM lost badly, polling only 585 votes.
Thereafter, the party’s fortunes went into steep decline, with some
AJM cadres joining the pan-Arab An-Nadha al-Wataniyya al-Mauritaniya (Nadha) and others of a more moderate stripe forming their
own organization, the Association de la Jeunesse du PRM.
ASSOCIATION MAURITANIENNE DES DROITS DE
L’HOMME (AMDH). The Mauritanian Human Rights Association, founded in 1986 and led for some years by a prominent hartani,
Cheikh Saad Bouh Kamara, was perhaps Mauritania’s most wellknown indigenous human rights group. Although the 1984–2005
government headed by President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya
refused to accord official recognition to the AMDH on the ostensible
grounds that, being composed of so many haratines and Black Africans, it was organized purely along ethnic lines, the group waged a
long and only partially successful struggle against slavery and official
abuses. This was a perhaps inevitable situation given the considerable
powers of the state’s security organs, the lack of civilian oversight of
the police, and the overall weakness (and proregime sentiments) of
the judiciary and much of the rest of the Mauritanian legal system.
The Ould Taya government, perhaps because it was not willing to
endure the international and domestic condemnation that would ensue
if it attempted to close down the AMDH entirely, nonetheless exerted
strong pressure upon it. For example, Cheikh Saad Bouh Kamara and
several other AMDH members were arrested and placed on trial in
January 1998 for having cooperated with a French television station
in producing a documentary on Mauritanian slavery. Although most
of the charges were subsequently dismissed and no one connected to
the affair served more than a few weeks in detention, it brought into
high relief the AMDH’s precarious legal position.
Undeterred, the organization sought to intervene as best it could in
a number of politically charged court cases between 1995 and 2005,
ATAR
• 89
including the periodic harassment of opposition leader Ahmed Ould
Daddah, cases involving escaped slaves, the 2001 prosecution of the
political-religious leader Mohamed Lemine Ch’bih Ould Cheikh
Melainine, and the matter of the accused plotters of the coup attempt of 8–9 June 2003, who stood trial in early 2005 along with
dozens of other dissidents. In what some commentators took as a
sign of the democratic intentions of the post-August 2005 military
government led by Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, it was announced
by the new regime in September 2005 that the AMDH, like another
human rights group, SOS-Esclaves, would henceforth be allowed to
function openly.
The AMDH, as a nongovernmental organization (NGO), was not
to be confused with the similarly named Ligue Mauritanienne des
Droits de l’Homme (LMDH), which was solely a creature of the
Mauritanian government and was headed by a legal counselor to the
president of the republic.
ATAR. One of the most important population centers in Mauritania
and the capital of the administrative région of the Adrar, Atar had
a reported population of 24,021 in 2000, a figure that had increased
rather modestly from 16,326 in 1976, before droughts and the process
of desertification had compelled many nomadic inhabitants of the
Adrar to move there, where they were often forced to subsist on relief
supplies donated by outside organizations. Atar remains a significant
oasis in the midst of the country’s unrelieved Saharan expanses and
supports extensive date palm groves as well as some agriculture
and livestock. Historically, the city was a major resting point and
commercial center for the caravan routes that dated back to antiquity, particularly those whose destination lay in Morocco, hundreds
of kilometers to the north. Atar consists of an older core area, the
ksar, surrounded by a newer quarter with more modern buildings. In
the early 20th century, the city was a crucial objective of the French
colonial “pacification” effort; the primary goal of Xavier Coppolani,
who was assassinated in Tidjikja in May 1905, was the conquest of
Atar as the linchpin of the surrounding countryside. After the death of
Coppolani, it was left to his successor, Colonel (later General) Henri
Gouraud, to enter the city during his Adrar Campaign of 1909 and
claim it as a French possession. Until Mauritania’s independence in
90 •
AYOUN EL-ATROUSS
November 1960, Atar continued to host a substantial French military
presence as well as an elaborate fort on the city’s outskirts. In 1976,
at the height of the Western Sahara conflict, Mauritania established
(near the old French fort) the École Militaire Interarmes d’Atar
(EMIA) as the country’s center for the training of officer candidates for its armed forces. Mauritania’s head of state from 1984 to
2005, Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, was a native of Atar, as
is another well-known political and religious figure in the country,
Mohamed Lemine Ch’bih Ould Cheikh Melainine. Reflecting the
city’s importance, Atar is connected to Nouakchott, the national
capital, by an improved road extending some 500 kilometers to the
southwest, and it also has an airport with regular service, which was
upgraded to international standards in 2001.
AYOUN EL-ATROUSS. The administrative center of Mauritania’s
Hodh el-Gharbi région, Ayoun el-Atrouss had an officially reported
population of 12,000 in 1977, a number that remained remarkably
stable over the next quarter century, with 11,867 inhabitants being
counted by a 2000 Mauritanian census. The town is located 200 kilometers east of Kiffa on the Trans-Mauritanian Highway (Route de
l’Espoir), a relatively high-quality road extending from the capital of
Nouakchott to Néma. The town is also an important center for commerce not only for the Western Hodh itself but also for Mali, whose
border lies about 100 kilometers to the south. Possessing a Sahelian
climate, it supported some agriculture as well as livestock. Ayoun
el-Atrouss also gained notoriety between 2001 and 2003 as the place
where a prominent critic of the Mauritanian government, Mohamed
Lemine Ch’bih Ould Cheikh Melainine, was tried and imprisoned
under harsh circumstances.
–B–
BAIE DU LÉVRIER. (1) The name given by the French colonial
government to the present-day Mauritanian administrative région of
Dakhlet-Nouadhibou, an area that encompasses about 22,000 square
kilometers and whose center is the city of Nouadhibou.
BAMBARA
• 91
(2) Also known as Dakhlet-Nouadhibou, and occasionally called
Greyhound Bay in some publications, the Baie du Lévrier is one
of the largest natural harbors on the entire West African coast, and
the only such harbor in Mauritania. Formed by the Cape Blanc
peninsula (now known as Ras Nouadhibou), which extends about
50 kilometers and is shared by Mauritania and a small portion of
Western Sahara—including the tiny settlement of La Guera—the
bay is about 43 kilometers long and 32 kilometers wide at its broadest point. Because of its sheltered location, it has been independent
Mauritania’s prime area of economic activity and commerce, not
only supporting a major fisheries industry but also the place where
iron ore shipments, carried from inland locations over the country’s
only railway line, are loaded onto ships at the Port Minéralier, 10
kilometers south of Nouadhibou. The Baie du Lévrier features an
absence of strong currents along with favorable prevailing winds,
with very few storms that would adversely affect shipping. However,
shallow water in much of the bay has always made it necessary for
Mauritania’s mining company, the Société Nationale Industrielle
et Minière (SNIM), to spend considerable time and money dredging
the ship channels. With additional iron ore deposits discovered during the early 1990s promising to keep the Port Minéralier busy well
into the 21st century, SNIM undertook a study of needed modifications to the loading areas and shipping terminals and carried out some
7.2 million euros’ worth of improvements by 1998. By early 2003,
additional enhancements had became necessary, and the European
Union (EU)—in any case the destination of most of SNIM’s iron
ore products—granted 49 million euros to the rehabilitation of the
ore loading facilities on the Baie du Lévrier, with this work nearing
completion in 2006.
BAMBARA. One of Mauritania’s smallest Black African groupings,
the Bambara have been estimated to number only about 10,000,
concentrated almost exclusively in the eastern régions of Hodh echChargui and Hodh el-Gharbi. Most other Bambara live in adjacent
Mali. In common with their more numerous Black African counterparts, notably the Halpulaaren and the Soninké, they are mostly
sedentary farmers and herders of livestock.
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BANKING SYSTEM
BANKING SYSTEM. After a long period of instability during the
1980s and early 1990s, Mauritanian banks appeared to have achieved
a degree of stability by the early 21st century, with the prospect of
continued expansion in the sector, due primarily to the strong economic growth triggered by the commencement of petroleum exports
in early 2006. Moreover, the days of direct state intervention (as
opposed to regulation) in banking seemed to be over, as the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) recommended
the continued privatization of banks in Mauritania, with the exception of the Banque Central de Mauritanie (BCM), the country’s
currency-issuing bank, and a few cases in which the government
held minority shares in banking enterprises. By 2008, there were
additional banks appearing on the Mauritanian scene, some capitalized by fellow Arab League states such as Kuwait, Libya, and Saudi
Arabia.
A seeming abundance of capital in the late 1970s and early 1980s,
however, did not prevent Mauritanian banks from experiencing severe difficulties, caused by a great number of underperforming loans,
poor fiscal management, and a general downturn in Mauritania’s
overall economy, for which the country’s involvement in the Western Sahara conflict was partly to blame. A prime example of this
(and one in which the BCM was forced to draw on its own scarce
resources for rescue purposes) occurred on 24 June 1993, when the
Union des Banques de Développement (UBD), formed by a 1987
consolidation of two weaker institutions, closed its doors after running up $30 million in losses on unwise lending decisions, some
involving real estate. In addition, two major institutions, the Banque
Internationale pour la Mauritanie (BIMA) and the new Banque Nationale de Mauritanie (BNM), initially with a 50 percent government
ownership stake, had been liquidated by 1995. By 1999, only one
bank, the Banque de l’Habitat de Mauritanie (BHM)—which, as its
name suggests, was oriented toward the housing sector—still had
majority (in the BHM’s case, 60 percent) state ownership.
After the turbulence that engulfed Mauritanian banking in the
1980s and early 1990s, new banks were slow to establish themselves
until late in the decade. In September 1999, a new bank, 68 percent owned by indigenous investors and the rest by private French
and Belgian interests, was set up. The Banque pour la Commerce
BANKING SYSTEM
• 93
et l’Industrie (BCI) had an initial capital stock of $2.5 million and
stated that it would attempt to extend as much credit as it could to
small businesses, always a mainstay of an economy in which the formal wage-earning sector was minuscule. In March 2002, the Banque
Mauritanienne du Commerce et de l’Investissement (Bacim-Bank)
was opened, billing itself as a full-service institution, entirely privately owned, and with a capitalization of 1 billion ouguiyas (about
$2.7 million at the time). In early 2006, the growth in banking accelerated still more, with the prospect of oil revenues motivating at
least two European banks, BNP Paribas and the Dutch-based ING,
to establish branches in Mauritania, a significant step because no
European or North American bank had hitherto had any presence in
the country whatever. Moroccan banking interests were reportedly
actively interested in doing business in Mauritania by 2007, and
French and Dutch interests sought in 2006 to open the first Mauritanian investment bank. To be known as the Banque Internationale
d’Investissement (BII), it was projected to be 30 percent owned by
the European Investment Bank (EIB) and have a comparatively robust capital base of UM 4 billion ($15 million).
There were several other banking institutions in Mauritania by
2008. A large bank that had existed since the 1970s, the Banque
Mauritanienne pour le Commerce International (BMCI), had been
fully privatized in the 1990s and was evidently in good health, and
the Banque al-Wava Mauritanienne Islamique—formerly known
as the Banque al-Baraka Mauritanienne Islamique (BAMIS)—was
under 50 percent Saudi ownership and conducted business according to Islamic principles; namely, it did not charge or pay interest as
it is understood in the West. The Chinguetti Bank, an outgrowth of
the Banque Arabe Libyenne-Mauritanienne pour le Commerce Extérieur et le Développement (BALM), was still 51 percent owned by
the Libyan government in 2004 despite Mauritania’s fairly frequent
diplomatic clashes with Tripoli over the years, and another housing-oriented concern, the Banque el-Amana pour le Développement
de l’Habitat (BADH), was located in the country as well. Finally,
the Générale de Banque de Mauritanie pour l’Investissement et
le Commerce (GBM) was set up in 2003, with 70 percent private
Mauritanian ownership and the remaining 30 percent in the hands of
various private Belgian bankers. All of these banks were located in
94 •
BANQUE CENTRALE DE MAURITANIE
the central business district of Nouakchott, the national capital, and
a few institutions also had branches in various other populated locations such as Nouadhibou.
In spite of all these new lending institutions, Mauritania’s banks
will probably always face many of the difficulties that accompany an
economy heavily dependent on the export of resources such as iron
ore and other minerals in addition to its newly found oil reserves.
Unstable agricultural and fisheries sectors and poor prospects
for industrial development, when added to this mix, make future
nonperforming loans all too likely. To help guard against this eventuality, in 1995 the Mauritanian government—again, on the recommendation of the IMF—enacted new and stricter requirements for all
of Mauritania’s banks. A minimum capitalization of UM 500 million
(then about $3.7 million) was decreed, loans to a single borrower
were limited to 10 percent of total bank equity (although it could be
25 percent if the borrower were another institution or group of investors), and a reserve fund of 100 percent of the bank’s capital had to
be maintained. Finally, real estate holdings, as well as those in the
stock of companies (perennial loss leaders in the past) were limited
to 75 percent of total bank assets in order to reduce exposure to catastrophic losses. One of the first banking institutions to fall afoul of
these regulations was the privately held Bacim-Bank, which in October 2007 had its operations temporarily frozen by Kane Ousmane,
the BCM’s governor, apparently for failing to minimize its exposure
to questionable “insider” loans; that is, money advanced to persons
or groups connected to the bank’s managers by family, tribal, or political ties. The BCM’s actions, evidently, prevented a “run” on the
institution, and a recovery plan for the bank was being formulated by
the first quarter of 2008.
BANQUE CENTRALE DE MAURITANIE (BCM). Opened in 1973
and operated through the Ministry of Finance, the Central Bank of
Mauritania was established by President Mokhtar Ould Daddah
after he withdrew the country from the French-dominated monetary
consortium, the Communauté Financière Africaine (CFA). The
BCM was charged with the distribution and pricing of the national
currency, the ouguiya (UM), and also supervised the lending activities of the other (public and private) components of the Mauritanian
BATAILLON DE LA SÉCURITÉ PRÉSIDENTIELLE
• 95
banking system. In addition, it functioned as a lender of last resort
for both indigenous and foreign-owned banks should they encounter
difficulties with their loans. After several very troubled years during the 1980s, in which the BCM was saddled with a large number
of nonperforming loans and had its working capital depleted by 50
percent due to its obligation to keep other Mauritanian banks open,
it changed course from about 1990 onward, accepting the advice
of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
that it should henceforth participate less in day-to-day banking and
monetary policy but at the same time more stringently oversee the
functioning of the banking sector. By 2007, the greater privatization
of banks, coupled with a growing money supply that stood in 2002
at UM 27,078,000, and a governmental policy—again instituted at
the urging of the IMF—of allowing the ouguiya to freely gain or
lose value relative to other world currencies, kept the BCM critical
to the Mauritanian economy. Headquartered in the national capital,
Nouakchott, it also had four branches elsewhere in the country.
BATAILLON DE LA SÉCURITÉ PRÉSIDENTIELLE (BASEP).
The Presidential Security Battalion of Mauritania was composed of
at least several hundred men during the 1990s and the early 21st
century and was an elite and specially equipped unit of the National
Guard, which, like the National Guard itself, was answerable to
the Ministry of the Interior and was thus separate from the regular
Mauritanian armed forces. During the presidency of Maaouiya
Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya (1984–2005), BASEP was charged with the
protection of the head of state, his family, offices, and residence, and
reportedly was heavily staffed with President Ould Taya’s Moorish tribal kinsmen, the Semassides of the province of Adrar. As far
as training and equipment were concerned, BASEP was evidently
far superior to the rest of the army and collaborated with most of
Mauritania’s military allies, including France, the United States,
and (until 1991), Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Although the Presidential
Security Battalion played a substantial role in defeating the coup
attempt of 8–9 June 2003 led by Saleh Ould Hanena, it did not
constitute an obstacle to the assumption of power by Col. Ely Ould
Mohamed Vall, who peacefully overthrew President Ould Taya on
3 August 2005. On the contrary, its commander, Col. Mohamed Ould
96 •
BENI HASSAN
Abdelaziz—like Ould Vall a member of the Oulad Bou Sbaa tribe, a
Moorish hassan grouping—was involved in the plot from its inception, was critical to its fairly smooth execution, and went on to hold
the second-ranking position on the Conseil Militaire pour la Justice
et la Démocratie (CMJD), Mauritania’s governing body between
August 2005 and April 2007.
After the inauguration of President Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh
Abdellahi, a democratically elected civilian leader, on 19 April
2007, the CMJD was dissolved, but Col. Ould Abdelaziz retained his
position as BASEP commander throughout the short and increasingly
contentious existence of the Mauritanian Third Republic. In the political tumult that characterized the final weeks of Ould Abdellahi’s
presidency, his supporters in Mauritania’s parliament began to
openly accuse Col. Ould Abdelaziz and his colleagues of interfering
in the workings of the government in spite of the fact that the BASEP
chief was distantly related to Ould Abdellahi by marriage. In what
turned out to be a final gambit to retain his influence, Ould Abdellahi,
early in the morning of 6 August 2008, sacked Col. Ould Abdelaziz
and three other senior officers, precipitating the military coup d’état
of a few hours later, which abolished the civilian regime and elevated
Col. Ould Abdelaziz to the Mauritanian presidency as the head of an
11-officer Haut Conseil d’État (HCE).
BENI HASSAN. A prominent grouping of Arab warriors, the Beni
Hassan, also called the Maqil Arabs, succeeded in the period from
the 14th to the 17th centuries A.D. in overcoming all resistance, passive as well as active, to their domination of present-day Mauritania.
After the decline of the Almoravid Empire starting in the late 11th
century, a succession of other dynasties, some Berber but others
controlled by Black Africans, exercised their sway over the region,
notably the Mali and Songhai Empires, the Songhai being defeated
by a Moroccan force in the 16th century. After this, the way was
open for the Beni Hassan, thought to have originated in Yemen, to
migrate south and west, having already caused most of the western
Maghreb to submit to their rule. The Berber groups, mostly the Sanhadja, bitterly resisted the Beni Hassan invaders, who were noted for
their nearly fanatical adherence to Islam and for the destruction they
BENI HASSAN
• 97
left in their wake. In addition, the Beni Hassan skillfully made (and
broke) a series of alliances with the Sanhadja Berbers to further their
own ends.
A century later—that is, by about 1600—the Beni Hassan had
pushed most black Mauritanians southward to the Senegal River Valley, usually impressing into slavery those left behind. The Berbers
then made what turned out to be one final effort to throw off the
yoke of the invading Beni Hassan, the Char Bobha, or Thirty Years’
War, which lasted from 1644 to 1674 and ended in the total defeat
of the Berbers. The Berbers were then, by the terms of the Peace of
Tin Yedfad, forced to submit permanently to the victors, “giving up
the sword for the book.” Some of the vanquished Berbers became
zawiya, or religious tribes, thereby preserving considerable social
status, and many others became znaga, or tributaries, forced to pay
an exacting and humiliating form of “protection” known as horma.
Soon after the end of the Char Bobha, the term hassan became the
generic term for those tribes that occupied the highest position in the
fast-developing Moorish social hierarchy, although the process of
intermarriage and fusion with Berber and other tribes continued into
the 19th century. Interestingly, in the Adrar region some resistance
to the hassan continued into the late 1800s, just before the period
of French penetration and “pacification.” But by then the victory of
the Beni Hassan over the Berbers was well-nigh complete, achieved
as much by weight of numbers and religious piety as by skill on the
battlefield.
By the 20th century, most if not all the Moors in the territory of
Mauritania considered themselves Arabs, not Berbers, and nearly
all spoke Hassaniyya Arabic, the name deriving from the Beni Hassan themselves, which included some Berber elements. The rigid
hierarchy established by the hassan tribes in the 16th century gave
Mauritania much of its sociological character and remains valuable
in analyzing the country in the postindependence period. Before
then, however, the French, most prominently Xavier Coppolani
and his successors, weakened the hold of the hassan tribes by using
the French Army to displace the Arab warriors and simultaneously
encouraged the ascendancy of the zawiya tribes, whom the French
authorities called marabouts.
98 •
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BERBERS. The first of many outside occupiers of modern-day Mauritania whose existence and activities can be discerned from the
historical record, Berber groups established domination over great
portions of the territory from ca. 300 to 800 A.D., when they were in
turn displaced by Black Africans belonging to the Ghana, Mali, and
Songhai Empires, as well as Arab groups migrating from the northern
Maghreb. Like their Arab conquerors, the Berbers arrived in Mauritania from the north, seeking pastureland, trading opportunities, and
freedom from the constant internecine strife in other Maghrebi territories. By the eighth century, they had completely displaced their
predecessors, the Bafour, leaving only (it is thought) the Imraguen
fishing tribe as a trace of that earlier period. The Berbers, however,
were not a united group; they were divided into the Gadala, Lemtuna,
and Messufa. The Lemtuna were economically and politically dominant, controlling a thriving commerce that extended to the far north
of Africa to the Senegal River, where they traded with the Ghana
Empire at its capital, Koumbi Saleh. From their own cosmopolitan
capital, Aoudaghost, the Lemtuna governed Mauritania along with
the Gadala and the Messufa, forming the loosely knit but powerful
Sanhadja Confederation, whose activities were greatly facilitated by
the introduction of the camel to the desertified region and by the
slow spread of Islam, which acted as a unifying force amid strong
tribal differences.
As a political entity, the Sanhadja Confederation was highly
decentralized, with the main lines of division existing between the
nomadic elements, who operated the lower levels of the caravan
trade and were often fiercely independent, and the ardently Muslim
(and sedentary) merchants, who managed the commercial sector. At
its apogee around 900–1000 A.D., the Sanhadja Confederation controlled a vast network of trade routes, extending from the Maghrebi
city of Sijilmasa in the north to Koumbi Saleh and Aoudaghost in
the south, and taking in such towns as Chinguetti and Oualata as
well as Ouadane and Tichit. The institution of slavery had its origins
under Berber rule, as the pre-Islamic Bafours and other black groups
who had not fled south earlier were put to work in salt mines near
Sebkhet d’Idjil and in a variety of agricultural ventures. Salt, gold,
copper, ivory, and cloth (as well as the slaves themselves) were actively bought and sold.
BEYDANE
• 99
The relatively disorganized political character of the Sanhadja
Confederation, as well as the Berbers’ uneven adherence to Islam,
opened the way for their downfall starting in about 1039. Devout
Gadala tribesmen making the hajj to Mecca brought back with them
a Berber holy man, Abdallah Ibn Yacin, who believed in an uncompromising and austere brand of the Muslim faith that attracted
many followers. After suffering some initial reverses, notably when
the Gadala rejected his teachings, Ibn Yacin led his supporters into
battle against the Gadala in 1042, vanquished them, and forced them
to submit to Islam in short order. Having defeated the Berbers, the
Almoravids went on to capture Aoudaghost, Koumbi Saleh, and Sijilmasa and instill a greater degree of unity into Mauritanian society
than had previously existed. This rapid succession of victories, however, did not mean that Berber culture was totally eradicated, and it
enjoyed a renaissance beginning in the early 12th century, when the
Almoravid Empire went into decline. But in the Char Bobha, which
was fought between 1644 and 1674, the Sanhadja Berbers were finally completely routed at the hands of the fierce Arab invaders from
the north, the Beni Hassan. Despite this, some Berber place-names,
linguistic usages, and traditional practices survive in modern Mauritania. Some experts describe present-day Mauritanian civilization as
“Arabo-Berber,” at least insofar as the country’s Moorish population
is concerned.
BEYDANE (variant: Bidan). A word meaning “white” in Hassaniyya
Arabic, used interchangeably with the words “Moorish” or “Arab” to
describe persons who, as a general rule, used Arabic as their lingua
franca, possessed “Caucasian” features, and adhered to a historically
nomadic way of life in Mauritania’s Saharan zone. Many observers,
however, considered this description far from comprehensive due to
the frequency of intermarriage and especially the sense of cultural
identification of black-skinned haratines with their former “white”
Moorish slavemasters. Since the mid-1980s at least, the term has
assumed considerable political significance. Some black Mauritanians, particularly those sympathetic to the Forces de Libération
Africaine de Mauritanie (FLAM) and who felt that the country’s
political arrangements discriminated against them, spoke openly of
the “Beydane system” and “Beydane domination,” which in turn led
100 •
BIR MOGHREIN
to protests by Moors that the term was being converted into a racially
charged epithet.
BIR MOGHREIN. One of Mauritania’s remotest towns, known as
Fort Trinquet until the country’s independence from France in November 1960, Bir Moghrein was situated in the far northeast of the
administrative région of Tiris Zemmour, about 400 kilometers from
Zouérate. Its population in 2000 was only 2,761. Owing to its exposed location, the settlement was the scene of considerable military
activity during the Western Sahara conflict in 1975–1979.
BLOC DÉMOCRATIQUE DU GORGOL (BDG). A small preindependence political party dominated by Halpulaaren from its
namesake administrative cercle, the Gorgol Democratic Bloc was
founded in 1957. It opposed any federation or union with the Arab
countries of the Maghreb, particularly with Morocco, which had
already articulated a territorial claim to all of Mauritania. The BDG
also advocated close ties to Black African states such as Senegal
after the attainment of Mauritanian independence. In the elections to
the Assemblée Territoriale held on 31 March 1957, the party did
poorly, obtaining only 5,125 votes of a reported total of 272,474,
an indication that its base of support was quite narrow. Nevertheless, when Mauritania’s future president, Mokhtar Ould Daddah,
formed a new cabinet on 13 January 1958, he was careful to include
one of the bloc’s representatives. This appointment, however, did
not improve the BDG’s fortunes, and at the Congress of Aleg held
in May 1958, the Gorgol Democratic Bloc, along with several other
groupings, ceased to exist. In their place, a new Parti de Regroupement Mauritanien (PRM) was set up, with Ould Daddah as its
leader.
BOUMEDIENNE, HOUARI (1927–1978). As the president of Algeria from June 1965, when he led a bloodless coup d’état that removed
the country’s first leader, Ahmed Ben Bella, until December 1978,
Houari Boumedienne played a key role in the shaping of Mauritania’s
domestic policies and foreign relations strategies. The two countries
shared one common attribute: opposition to the Moroccan government’s territorial claims to Mauritania, an attitude that kept King
BOUMEDIENNE, HOUARI
• 101
Hassan II from recognizing Mauritania’s independence until 1970,
a decade after its release from French colonial rule. Boumedienne extended assistance to Mauritania almost as soon as he assumed power,
taking a liking to President Mokhtar Ould Daddah’s increasingly
nationalist, nonaligned policies. He encouraged Ould Daddah to distance himself from France and provided the economic aid that was
instrumental to Mauritania’s decision in 1973 to withdraw from the
Communauté Financière Africaine (CFA) and issue its own currency, the ouguiya. In addition, Algerian investments in the fisheries and petroleum sectors were increased in the early 1970s. Houari
Boumedienne was also pleased by Ould Daddah’s nationalization in
late 1974 of the Mauritanian iron ore extraction industry and with
the country’s increasing orientation toward the Arab Maghreb and
the Middle East. The Algerian leader also had a hand in reconciling
Mokhtar Ould Daddah and King Hassan starting in 1969, paving the
way for the establishment of diplomatic relations between Morocco
and Mauritania in April 1970.
Algerian–Mauritanian relations were excellent by 1975 but were
soon to undergo a precipitous decline. Although Houari Boumedienne was content to give verbal support to Mauritania’s claim to the
adjacent territory of Western Sahara, he rapidly shifted gears by the
end of the year. Faced with President Ould Daddah’s willingness to
accept for his country one-third of Western Sahara while allowing
Morocco to annex the remainder, Boumedienne responded by giving all-out support to Western Sahara’s proindependence liberation
movement, the Polisario Front. He gave Mauritania one final opportunity to disengage itself from its embrace of King Hassan. On 10
November 1975, Boumediene met for five hours with President Ould
Daddah at Béchar, Algeria, and warned his fellow head of state that
if he participated in the takeover of Western Sahara, Algeria would
give such strong backing to the Polisario guerrillas that Mauritania’s
armed forces would be unable to defend its borders. Ould Daddah
had already made up his mind, however, and went on four days later
to sign the Madrid Agreement, by which Western Sahara was partitioned.
During the following two years, Ould Daddah must have had many
occasions to recall Houari Boumedienne’s words at Béchar. Mauritania severed diplomatic relations with Algiers after Boumedienne
102 •
BOUTILIMIT
extended recognition to Polisario’s state-in-exile, the Saharan Arab
Democratic Republic (SADR) on 6 March 1976, and soon found
itself singled out by the Western Saharan nationalists as the weaker
of its two adversaries. Polisario attacks devastated many areas of the
country and brought the state close to complete ruin. Suffering from
an incurable illness, Boumedienne observed with satisfaction the
downfall of Mokhtar Ould Daddah on 10 July 1978 and his replacement with an armed forces council led by Col. Mustapha Ould Mohammed Salek, the Comité Militaire de Redressement National
(CMRN). But before Mauritania had definitively extricated itself
from the Western Sahara conflict and made peace with Polisario,
Houari Boumedienne died on 27 December 1978, leaving it to his
successor, Chadli Benjedid, to reestablish ties with Mauritania after
it signed the Algiers Agreement on 5 August 1979.
BOUTILIMIT. A town located in the administrative région of Trarza
about 150 kilometers southeast of Nouakchott, the Mauritanian
capital, Boutilimit had a population of 22,257 in 2000. Both before
and after the country’s independence, Boutilimit had a significance
out of proportion to its size, as it was traditionally a center of Islamic
learning in West Africa by virtue of its substantial zawiya (marabout)
presence, and the fact that it hosts one of the largest and most comprehensive libraries of Islamic manuscripts and books in the entire
region. Building on its religious heritage, the Institute for Higher Islamic Studies was founded in Boutilimit in 1961. The town was also
the birthplace of Mokhtar Ould Daddah, a member of the Oulad
Berri marabout tribe, Mauritania’s foremost preindependence political personage, and also the country’s first president, holding office
from November 1960 to July 1978. Ahmed Ould Minnih, a military
officer and a member of the Mauritanian cabinet from the mid-1980s
until his death in 1998, also hailed from Boutilimit.
BRAKNA. Covering 35,000 square kilometers in Mauritania’s southwest and roughly bisected by the Trans-Mauritanian Highway (Route
de l’Espoir), the administrative région of Brakna had, according to a
2000 government census, a population of 247,006, substantially more
than in 1988 (197,157) and 1977 (approximately 151,000). With the
provincial capital located at Aleg, it was a stronghold of black Mau-
BUDGETS
• 103
ritanian farmers and livestock herders, although it, like many other
areas of the country, suffered greatly from the process of desertification. In the 1980s, significantly, there was an influx of Moorish
Mauritanians from the north into Brakna, attracted by the promise of
government support in establishing agricultural enterprises pursuant
to the controversial Land Reform Act of 5 June 1983. Also due to
its large Black African population, Brakna experienced considerable
tensions during and after the Senegal–Mauritania crisis of 1989 and
1990, with Bogué and certain other towns near the Senegal River
being effectively closed to outsiders and under virtual martial law.
Mauritania’s elected civilian president since April 2007, Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi, is a native of Brakna.
BUDGETS. The increasing needs of a growing Mauritanian population, administrative inefficiencies, and inconsistent sources of
revenue caused by the country’s dependence on exports have historically made budgets among the most vexing matters successive
Mauritanian governments have faced. After roughly a decade and
a half (1960–1975) of reasonably healthy finances resulting from
the extraction and export of iron ore (and coupled with a not-yet
urbanized population that did not exceed one million), the civilian government headed by President Mokhtar Ould Daddah was
obliged, beginning with its 1975 involvement in the Western Sahara
conflict, to go massively into debt to external lenders and to greatly
increase expenditure on the armed forces. In 1976, military spending shot up 33 percent, and by the following year, fully 60 percent of
total revenues were going to the army. At the same time—and also as
a direct result of the Saharan conflict—the export of iron ore through
the northern city of Nouadhibou declined precipitously, after the
Polisario Front attacked key installations relating to the mining
sector, including the long and vulnerable railway line connecting
Nouadhibou to Zouérate. By 1978, loans, grants, and other forms of
international aid accounted for one-third of the entire Mauritanian
budget, a figure that remained depressingly consistent over at least
the next two decades.
Outside assistance, however, could not salvage the Ould Daddah
government, and after his overthrow by the armed forces on 10 July
1978, the country’s new military rulers slashed expenditures by over
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BUDGETS
30 percent and drastically reduced the number of personnel in the
army, a task made less difficult by the Algiers Agreement with the
Polisario Front in August 1979, under which Mauritania relinquished
all claims to Western Sahara and began to once more reap the benefits of reliable iron ore exports. One legacy of the Western Saharan
war that could not be easily overcome, however, was the extraordinary load of debt the country had incurred to outside lenders. By the
early 1980s, debt service payments consumed some 40 percent of all
export earnings, accounting for a crushing 138 percent of the entire
Mauritanian gross domestic product (GDP) by 1983. In this fiscal environment, austerity measures were the order of the day, and deficits
usually ran into the billions of ouguiyas annually. The head of state
from 1980 to 1984, Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah,
made a concerted effort to cut these deficits, freezing civil service
staff levels and salaries and attempting to reduce imports, the latter being highly problematic given the parlous state of Mauritania’s
agricultural sector at the time. In addition, highly variable prices
for iron ore on world markets, managerial problems in the important
fisheries area, the inordinate costs associated with various industrial
development schemes, the perceived need to keep military spending
relatively high, and the necessity for the county to import all its petroleum at the time made these efforts largely unsuccessful.
Ould Heydallah’s bloodless ouster by Col. Maaouiya Ould
Sid’Ahmed Taya on 12 December 1984 brought with it a new approach to budgetary problems, yet many of the same difficulties
reappeared later in the decade. A great deal more public money was
soon being spent on agriculture and livestock in the Mauritanian
countryside, but other programs were either severely cut back or
eliminated entirely, as the Ould Taya regime focused its attention on
extracting greater efficiencies from the country’s highly centralized
bureaucracy. By 1989, fully 71 percent of the budget was directed
to that end. International creditors, in turn, agreed to reschedule and
restructure Mauritania’s heavy debt payments, and in 1986 and 1987
the national budget achieved balance. But the twin shocks of the
1989–1990 Senegal–Mauritania crisis and the sharp (if temporary)
rise in world oil prices during the Gulf Crisis (August 1990 to March
1991), threw Mauritanian finances into disarray once more, with the
country unable to make its debt repayments on time, much less meet
BUDGETS
• 105
its other fiscal targets. In all probability, it was this situation (along
with a highly troubled racial-ethnic environment inside Mauritania)
that impelled President Ould Taya to make preparations to end
military rule in early 1991 and set up the ostensibly more democratic
institutions that became known as the Second Republic.
The financial-budgetary picture saw a great deal of innovation,
improvisation, and reform from 1992 to 2005 when Ould Taya was
governing the country as a civilian leader, but the young nation could
not readily shake off its structural economic shortcomings. President
Ould Taya, along with Sidi Mohamed Ould Boubacar, an internationally respected economist who served as his prime minister in the
early 1990s, emphatically steered Mauritania toward an “orthodox”
fiscal policy in line with the recommendations of the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), including—as time
went on—the privatization or outright shutdown of certain stateowned companies, a willingness to allow the ouguiya to gain or
lose value relatively freely on world currency exchanges, and other
measures to encourage direct foreign investment and the growth of an
indigenous business sector. Taxes were also raised (with collection
procedures also being improved, although not to the level customary
in the West), and public spending was cut by 10 percent for a short
period, with the result that additional debt relief was approved by the
IMF starting in 1993, along with continued grant-based assistance
and concessionary loans. These measures, however, did not alter the
fact that by 1996 Mauritania’s debt was still a stunning 205.6 percent
of its GDP, making it one of the five most indebted countries in the
world, and that the continuing lack of substantial debt forgiveness
meant that the government had even less to spend in critical areas
such as health care, education, and investments in the road network,
water resources, and other infrastructure. And in spite of the probusiness measures and reductions in expenditure, Mauritania still ran
a deficit of UM 7 billion ($43 million) in 1994, which amounted to
4.5 percent of its total GDP.
From the late 1990s to the first decade of the 21st century, national
budgets repeated the pattern of nearly uncontrolled administrative
expenses, the often-dire needs of a growing (and impoverished)
populace, and uncertain revenues primarily derived from the extraction of raw materials and fishing. Some fiscal restraint was evident
106 •
BUDGETS
in 1997, when Mauritania entered into a UM 11 billion fisheries
deal with the European Union (EU); the country chose to place
three-quarters of this sizeable sum into a “rainy day” fund for future
contingencies, leaving only UM 4 billion to be spent at that time. But
from 1998 to 2001, administrative expenses continued to increase
(civil service salaries were hiked 20 percent in the latter year), and
the Ould Taya government, possibly seeking to head off additional
public discontent, showed more willingness to increase investment
in key infrastructure such as electricity, water, the road system, and
other areas. Assisting this strategy, international aid accounted for a
whopping 38.7 percent of the national budget in 1998—which enabled the regime to carry out a 13.4 percent increase in investment
spending—but if this situation could ever have been called favorable, it ended in 2002, when deteriorating agricultural conditions
necessitated very high levels of food imports, and declining iron ore
prices meant that the most important Mauritanian parastatal firm, the
Société Nationale Industrielle et Minière (SNIM), fell into arrears
on its tax payments to the government, exacerbating an already poor
situation. Some projects were cut back or eliminated, but from 2003
to 2005, most budgets showed considerable red ink.
It was evident—and not just in hindsight in the view of most
observers—that the coup attempt of 8–9 June 2003, in which
President Ould Taya barely escaped being overthrown, ended most
attempts at fiscal restraint for the next two years. In November 2004,
all civil servants got a 35 percent raise in their meager salaries, in what
was universally seen as an effort by Ould Taya to essentially purchase
their loyalty. In January 2005, the regime extended this tactic to the
general population, decreeing an extraordinary 400 percent increase
in the country’s monthly minimum wage, to UM 21,000 ($79). Two
months later, the spending binge continued, with all cabinet ministers
getting a 600 percent raise and military spending (which had remained
stagnant for over a decade, leading to severe discontent among army
personnel) being increased 500 percent over the year before, to UM
15 billion (some $54 million at the then-current exchange rate). As
could be expected, the budget went further into deficit, and inflation—
which during the 1990s had been for the most part tamed—was over
12 percent by early 2006. In instituting these enormous new administrative and other expenses (which were not repealed after Ould Taya’s
CERCLE
• 107
August 2005 overthrow and soon led to unfavorable comments by the
IMF), the increasingly despised head of state was in effect borrowing
against Mauritania’s future oil revenues, which did not begin to come
on line until April 2006 and showed every sign of resembling those
from the iron ore and fishing sectors, owing to fluctuating prices on
the international market and uncertainties over the total recoverable
quantities of Mauritania’s offshore deposits. Unless oil revenues were
to be overwhelmingly plentiful in the coming years (and by mid2008, the country was producing only about 20,000 barrels per day,
presenting the new government, headed by President Sidi Mohamed
Ould Cheikh Abdellahi, with a budget deficit of at least $112 million), it was nearly certain that the basic structure of the Mauritanian
economy would not change in the foreseeable future, with mostly
negative budgetary impacts.
BUREAU POLITIQUE NATIONAL (BPN). Established in 1963 as
the leadership body of Mauritania’s ruling Parti du Peuple Mauritanien (PPM), the political bureau consisted for the most part of
PPM members who had distinguished themselves by their loyalty
to the country’s president, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, and provided
the dedicated personnel he needed to execute national polices. The
emergence of the National Political Bureau also marked the end of
any meaningful intraparty democracy because of its close ties to Ould
Daddah, and it was also used on occasion to bypass the Mauritanian
legislature, the Assemblée Nationale, whose cooperation the head of
state could not always take for granted. In 1964, the obedient BPN
declared Mauritania a one-party state, a decision enshrined in an
amendment to the country’s 1961 constitution in 1965.
–C–
CERCLE. Mauritania’s primary unit of regional administration under
both French colonial rule and in the eight years following independence in 1960, the cercles were established by the Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF) as an instrument for securing the centralized
authority of the government over the Mauritanian hinterland. Each
cercle had a large geographic base, often covering tens of thousands
108 •
CHAR BOBHA
of square kilometers. By 1947 there were 9 such units, and there
were 11 at the time of Mauritania’s release from French control. A
12th cercle, Tiris Zemmour, was created by the regime of President
Mokhtar Ould Daddah out of the northern Adrar area. Under the
Mauritanian constitution of 20 May 1961, Conseils Locaux were to
be the governing bodies of these territorial divisions, but in practice
they had little authority, as the Nouakchott government headed by
Ould Daddah held the reins of real power. On 30 July 1968, in a
sweeping reorganization, the cercles were abolished and replaced
with 12 administrative régions and one special district encompassing
Nouakchott.
CHAR BOBHA (1644–1674). Often referred to as Mauritania’s Thirty
Years’ War, the Char Bobha was fought, ultimately unsuccessfully,
by the Berber-dominated Sanhadja Confederation against the invading Beni Hassan, who had reached the Maghreb from their starting
point in Yemen by the end of the 17th century A.D. Reacting to the
disruption of their long-established caravan trading routes in the
north, particularly in the Adrar, the Sanhadja, led by the Berber imam
(Islamic holy man) Nasr ed-Din, tried to resist the Arab advance and
reclaim Berber predominance in the region, which had long been on
the wane. The Sanhadja proved to be no match for the Beni Hassan,
who possessed a more warlike disposition than their adversaries,
and who had in any case honed their fighting skills in prior North
African campaigns noted for their destructiveness. Defeated on the
battlefield, the Sanhadja were compelled by the peace treaty of Tin
Yedfad to permanently “abandon the sword for the book” and place
themselves at a social level below that of their Arab conquerors—that
is, as znaga or vassals. The most learned (and religious) Berbers over
time became marabouts, or zawiya, and so ranked below only the
hassan tribes in overall status. At least among the Moors, the social
structure of present-day Mauritania can in great measure be traced to
the outcome of the Char Bobha.
CHEIKH EL-AVIA OULD MOHAMED KHOUNA (1956– ). A
native of the village of Amourj in the eastern Mauritanian province
of Hodh ech-Chargui, Cheikh el-Avia Ould Mohamed Khouna
received a primary and secondary education in the nearby town of
CHEIKH EL-AVIA OULD MOHAMED KHOUNA
• 109
Néma before attending a lycée in Mauritania’s capital, Nouakchott,
receiving his degree in 1978. Then, between 1978 and 1982, he traveled to Morocco, where he received an advanced degree in agricultural science. Returning to Mauritania, Ould Khouna, from 1982 to
1995, occupied a series of increasingly responsible positions in the
country’s civil service, including an 8-year term (1984-1992) as director of the fisheries-related parastatal company, the Société Mauritanienne de Commercialisation du Poisson (SMCP). Ould Khouna
first joined the country’s Conseil des Ministres under President
Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya on 21 February 1995, when he
was appointed minister of fisheries and maritime economy. Less than
a year later (on 3 January 1996), he was elevated to the prime ministership, replacing Sidi Mohamed Ould Boubacar, who then assumed
the post of chairman of the ruling Parti Républicain, Démocratique
et Social (PRDS). In December 1997—just after Ould Taya had been
decisively reelected to a second six-year term as head of state—Ould
Khouna, in a surprise move, relinquished the premier’s office to the
relatively unknown Mohamed Lemine Ould Guig, an attorney and
law professor also from Hodh ech-Chargui. He then took up the important position of secretary-general to the Mauritanian presidency,
but from 12 July to mid-November 1998 (at a time of great instability
in Mauritania’s cabinet), he served as foreign minister after the previous incumbent, Mohamed el-Hacen Ould Lebatt, was inexplicably
dismissed from the job after only three months’ service.
When he left the Foreign Ministry in November 1998, Ould Khouna
was reappointed prime minister, and faithfully helped to formulate and
execute the policies of President Ould Taya, taking an active part in international conferences during that time, particularly when Ould Taya
himself was for one reason or another unable or unwilling to attend.
Ould Khouna’s evident inability to secure an audience with Algerian
President Abdelaziz Bouteflika in Algiers in the summer of 1999, just
after Mauritania’s establishment of full diplomatic relations with Israel,
marked the drastic deterioration of what had hitherto been an excellent
bilateral relationship that had existed for over two decades. On the
domestic front, it fell to Ould Khouna to deliver a blistering speech on
the floor of the Assemblée Nationale in late December 2001 against
an opposition political party, Action pour le Changement (AC), the
prelude to the group’s banning a fortnight later.
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CHINGUETTI
It is possible, however, that Ould Khouna by this time had begun
to harbor serious doubts about some of President Ould Taya’s actions, because it was reported that just after the unsuccessful coup
attempt of 8–9 June 2003, which nearly toppled the Mauritanian
head of state, Ould Khouna had been detained for sympathizing with
the coup plotters, allegedly after he had attempted to seek political
asylum in Spain. (Whether he tried to do this by flying to Spain or the
Canary Islands or taking refuge in the Spanish embassy in Nouakchott was not made clear.) In any case, by 7 July, S’ghair Ould
M’Barek, formerly the minister of education, had been appointed
premier, and Ould Khouna did not thereafter occupy any cabinetlevel position in the country until May 2008, when, in a surprising
political comeback, he was once again appointed Foreign Minister
as part of a reshuffle of the Council of Ministers carried out by the
newly selected Prime Minister, Yahya Ould Ahmed el-Waghef. But
after only three months, the military coup d’état of 6 August 2008
resulted in the demise of the short-lived Mauritanian Third Republic
led by President Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi, who was
overthrown and imprisoned by Mauritania’s new head of state, Col.
Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz.
CHINGUETTI. One of Mauritania’s oldest and best-known towns,
Chinguetti (known in Arabic as Shinqit) was believed to have been
founded in about the third century A.D. as an important caravan stop
and commercial center for the Berber Sanhadja Confederation, which
controlled large parts of present-day Mauritania until the Almoravid
conquest in about 1076. Under Almoravid rule, Chinguetti remained
a prominent trading center and also acquired a lasting reputation as a
preeminent location for Islamic scholarship. By the 16th century it was
considered the seventh holiest place in all Islam. Mauritanian Muslims
seeking to make the arduous pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca would often
use Chinguetti as their starting point for the long journey eastward.
Also in the 16th century, a large mosque was constructed of native
rock, with five distinctive pinnacles atop its minaret, each pinnacle
surmounted by a single ostrich egg—apparently a symbol of fertility.
With the reorientation of trade routes away from the town and
toward other routes that offered more convenient access to the
European-controlled coastal areas of the Maghreb, Chinguetti became
CLIMATE
• 111
a relative backwater. However, as one of the main settlements of the
Adrar and a famed religious center, it continued to host a substantial
collection of Koranic manuscripts (about 1,300), as well as other
written materials that dated to the founding of the town. During the
period of French domination, a newer quarter of Chinguetti sprang
up, mostly concentrated around a fort that was used by the French
Foreign Legion and situated across a usually dry wadi from the old
town. In the late 20th century, Chinguetti’s decline accelerated despite its designation as a World Heritage Site by the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
The process of desertification threatened to overwhelm not only
its buildings but also its ancient manuscripts, which were in many
cases irreplaceable. To combat this deterioration, the Mauritanian
government, the World Bank, and various other international aid
donors launched a $5 million program in 1999 to examine and preserve the thousands of papers located in Chinguetti’s libraries (as
well as those in the nearby village of Ouadane, also a World Heritage
Site). A census conducted in the year 2000 counted only 4,711 people
in Chinguetti. The town could be reached by a marginally improved
road extending about 80 kilometers eastward from Atar, the provincial capital of the Adrar.
CLIMATE. Although Mauritania is two-thirds desert, its climate
shows significant regional variation, with temperature and rainfall
patterns falling into distinct zones. Hot and dry conditions give way
to a relatively more humid and temperate environment from north to
south, with tropical weather prevailing along the Senegal River Valley. In addition, the 754-kilometer Atlantic coastline of Mauritania
has a distinct climate all its own.
The Saharan zone is by far the most prevalent in the country,
covering virtually all of the administrative régions of Adrar,
Dakhlet-Nouadhibou, Inchiri, northern Tagant, Tiris Zemmour,
and northern and eastern Trarza. Here rainfall is less than 150mm
per year, and some localities, notably F’Derik, Nouadhibou, and
Zouérate, often go for months or even several years with no detectable rainfall. Temperatures are extremely high during the day and at
night during the summer months, with the only relief occurring during nighttime hours from October to March, when readings below 20
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CLIMATE
degrees Celsius are not uncommon. The hivernage or rainy season
is confined to a three-month period between July and September,
making any semblance of agriculture an impossibility, with the only
exceptions being a few wadis and oases, particularly in the environs of
Atar, where dates and gum Arabic are cultivated with some success.
The Sahelian zone encompasses approximately the area from
the southern fringe of the Saharan zone to about 20–30 kilometers
north of the Senegal River; that is, along the isohyet line delineating a rainfall of 150mm annually. Mauritanian provinces falling
within this climatic area include southern Trarza, Assaba, Brakna,
southern Tagant, and certain parts of Hodh ech-Chargui and Hodh
el-Gharbi. This zone is distinguished from its Saharan counterpart
primarily by its slightly lower average temperatures, as well as by
its longer hivernage, which runs from June to October, with rainfall
often reaching 250mm or more. These relatively wetter conditions
are sometimes sufficient to support limited wild vegetation as well
as to make possible some agriculture and livestock herding. Animal husbandry was especially prevalent on the Tagant plateau until
droughts and the process of desertification destroyed the grasslands
and savanna upon which the herders depended. The Sahelian zone
has suffered more from desertification than the other climatic regions
of Mauritania since the 1970s, primarily due to its greater exposure to
the Saharan zone, which allows the desert to encroach upon hitherto
fertile areas. This trend, unfortunately, continued into the early 21st
century, as the country appeared to be constantly threatened with
large-scale famine. Average temperatures in the Sahelian Zone range
between 16 and 21 degrees Celsius, lower than the stifling heat of
the Sahara but still high enough to make the prevailing wind, the
harmattan, quite uncomfortable, particularly when it throws up fine
desert sand and produces the irifi, a sandstorm that reduces visibility
for hours and disrupts most human activitiy.
The Senegal River Valley (Chammama) zone is the most humid
and tropical area of Mauritania, comprising a narrow belt running
from the north bank of the river to 30–50 kilometers north. The administrative régions of Gorgol and Guidimaka and extreme south
Brakna and Trarza fall within this zone. Even with rainfall levels
that are highly variable from year to year, these areas remain the
country’s best-watered, as they can boast of usually 400–600mm of
COMITÉ MILITAIRE DE REDRESSEMENT NATIONAL
• 113
rain annually, enough to support sedentary agriculture and substantial
animal herds. The hivernage lasts nearly half the year (from May
through September), and high temperatures usually fluctuate between
35 and 45 degrees Celsius during the day.
The coastal (littoral) zone is found only in the vicinity of Mauritania’s Atlantic coastline. It is the country’s most temperate area,
affected by the moderating trade winds from the Canary Islands,
which lessen the impact of the brutal harmattan. At the same time,
however, the zone is quite humid, the irifi is a constant threat, and
rainfall is minimal, amounting to only about 30mm per year (and
often much less) in Nouadhibou, and 150mm or so in Nouakchott,
the Mauritanian capital.
COMITÉ MILITAIRE DE REDRESSEMENT NATIONAL
(CMRN). In early July 1978, the chief of staff of the Mauritanian
armed forces, Col. Mustapha Ould Mohammed Salek, asked
for—and received—permission to move troops into the country’s
capital, Nouakchott, ostensibly to guard against an attack on the
city by the highly mobile guerrilla fighters of the Polisario Front,
with whom Mauritania was embroiled in combat over possession
of Western Sahara. The request was reasonable—Polisario had already mounted two prior Nouakchott raids, in June 1976 and July
1977—but in the early dawn of 10 July 1978 Ould Salek, assisted by
a substantial number of colleagues in the officer corps, led a coup
d’état that seized all governmental installations and overthrew (and
arrested) President Mokhtar Ould Daddah, Mauritania’s head of
state since 1960. There was no bloodshed. An 18-member Military
Committee for National Recovery assumed supreme power over the
country, with Ould Salek as chairman.
The officers who made up the CMRN had little by way of a common ideology or political program, but all shared one overriding
objective—the extrication of Mauritania from the Western Sahara
conflict, which had inflicted catastrophic damage on the economy,
exposed its population centers to Polisario attacks, and even kindled
racial tensions between Moorish Mauritanians and their Black African counterparts. A few days after the coup, Ould Salek stated that
the CMRN’s primary objectives were to achieve a settlement of the
Saharan war, “which is commensurate with the supreme interests of
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COMITÉ MILITAIRE DE REDRESSEMENT NATIONAL
the Mauritanian people in agreement with the sister Moroccan kingdom”; to preserve Islamic ethics and practices; and to liberalize both
the exclusionary political system and the strapped economy. The first
harbingers were good; encouraged by the downfall of its nemesis,
Mokhtar Ould Daddah, the Polisario Front declared an immediate
unilateral cease-fire. The military takeover was also welcomed by
many of Mauritania’s citizens, who believed that an expeditious
peace agreement could be reached by the CMRN, followed by an
economic rebound.
But a settlement proved very difficult to achieve. Ould Salek
preferred to construct a “global” or comprehensive peace treaty that
would involve Morocco’s King Hassan II, Algeria, and France as
well as Mauritania and Polisario, thus sparing the new junta the
prospect of signing a separate agreement with the Western Saharan
nationalist group and antagonizing Morocco, which at this time still
had 9,000 troops in Mauritania under the auspices of the Moroccan–Mauritanian Defense Committee. Due to a variety of factors,
as well as to factional dissention within the CMRN itself, this sort of
settlement proved impossible to carry out. Secret contacts between
the ruling council and the Polisario Front led nowhere, and for many
months the CMRN appeared stricken and adrift. Domestically, the
situation was even worse. The economy still needed a massive infusion of cash and confidence, the level of indebtedness to foreign
countries and institutions was staggering, and disputes over the Arabization of the educational system reared their head by the end of
1978. Anti-CMRN protests were also staged for the first time.
On 17 March 1979 Col. Ould Salek, faced with persistent criticism of his stewardship of the country, set up a National Consultative
Council to “reopen” the political system and facilitate eventual civilian rule. But the composition of the body, 87 Moors and 17 Black
Africans, led some black Mauritanians to decide that they were not
sufficiently represented. Around the same time, Ould Salek persuaded
the rest of the CMRN to grant him plenary powers, transforming him
into a virtual dictator and fracturing the junta’s carefully cultivated
reputation of collegiality. Soon after this (on 30 March), all 17 black
Mauritanians on the National Consultative Council resigned in protest over “unequal racial representation” in the government, further
heightening tensions. On 6 April 1979, Ould Salek was stripped of all
COMITÉ MILITAIRE DE SALUT NATIONAL
• 115
but his titular position as head of state in a sudden “rectification,” led
by a rival officer, Lt.-Col. Ahmed Ould Bouceif, who became prime
minister. The CMRN was abolished and replaced by a new 13-member Comité Militaire de Salut National (CMSN).
COMITÉ MILITAIRE DE SALUT NATIONAL (CMSN). The
Military Committee for National Salvation was established on 6
April 1979 as the result of an intense power struggle in the ranks
of the senior members of the Mauritanian armed forces over the
inability of the former junta, the Comité Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN), to successfully extract the country from
the Western Sahara conflict, which had begun in late 1975 under
the civilian presidency of Mokhtar Ould Daddah. The CMRN
leader, Col. Mustapha Ould Mohammed Salek, faced a delicate
situation, not knowing what Mauritania’s ally, Morocco, would do
if he unilaterally signed a peace agreement with the Polisario Front
and agreed to withdraw from Tiris el-Gharbia unconditionally.
Economic and social difficulties also made themselves apparent, and
by 6 April, Ould Salek found himself deprived of all but his nominal
position as head of state and replaced as prime minister by Lt.-Col.
Ahmed Ould Bouceif, one of Ould Salek’s primary opponents. The
CMRN was abolished, and a new ruling council, the CMSN, was set
up, with 13 members and a set of internal guidelines that reserved
to it nearly unlimited powers. Even as the CMSN established itself,
however, it was evident that some members were more influential
than others. Ould Bouceif’s power, for example, seemed constrained
by his powerful minister of defense, Lt.-Col. Mohammed Khouna
Ould Heydallah, who was thought to be less opposed to a separate
peace treaty with Polisario. Ould Bouceif found himself outmaneuvered within the CMSN by Ould Heydallah on several occasions.
The CMSN’s frustration grew as Mauritania’s inability to exit from
the Western Sahara dispute began to weigh even more heavily on the
country’s economy.
Mauritania’s internal predicament received another severe shock on
27 May 1979, when Ould Bouceif was killed in a plane crash near Dakar, Senegal, as he was arriving at a West African summit conference.
Within the CMSN, the scene was undoubtedly one of some drama
over the next several days, as the factions inside the council jostled for
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COMITÉ MILITAIRE DE SALUT NATIONAL
domination. Four days later, on 31 May, Ould Heydallah succeeded in
assuming the prime ministership while keeping the defense portfolio,
ousting the powerless official president, Ould Salek, and installing
another figurehead, Lt.-Col. Mohammed Mahmoud Ould Louly,
in his place. A new government was announced on 3 June 1979, with
14 members, 9 of whom were military officers and 5 of whom were
black Mauritanians. After some continued hesitations—and a brief
resumption of military attacks by Polisario—the Algiers Agreement,
a peace treaty with the Western Saharan nationalist group, was signed
on 5 August. Under the treaty, Mauritania agreed to leave Tiris elGharbia.
For Mauritania, the Western Sahara conflict was essentially over,
but there was to be little respite from other problems. In the four years
following 4 January 1980, when Ould Heydallah assumed full power
as head of state (sending Ould Louly into retirement), he began to act
in a more dictatorial manner, consulting his CMSN colleagues less
and less after some of them vocally dissented from his policies. He
also had a habit of reshuffling his cabinet every few months, made
appeals to populist sentiments by instituting some of the harsher
provisions of the Islamic sharia in 1980 (including public floggings
and amputations), and apparently allowed corruption in public life to
become virtually institutionalized. On the economic front, droughts,
continued desertification, and falling prices for Mauritania’s commodity exports were pushing the country’s people to the point of
despair.
The final straw for the other military officers on the CMSN may
have come on 27 February 1984, when, fulfilling a pledge he had often
made, Ould Heydallah extended formal recognition to the Polisario
Front’s government-in-exile, the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). The head of state had evidently acted wholly on his own,
angering many of his colleagues, who were concerned that Morocco’s
King Hassan II would retaliate against Mauritania after this step had
been taken. Ould Heydallah—characteristically—responded to this
criticism by jailing some and demoting others, notably his influential
minister of defense, Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, who
was soon shifted back to his old post, that of army chief of staff. To
the other members of the governing council, Mauritanian politics
were becoming dangerously unbalanced, with their advice spurned or
COMITÉ MILITAIRE DE SALUT NATIONAL
• 117
ignored. A group of officers led by Col. Ould Taya peacefully ousted
Ould Heydallah from the presidency on 12 December 1984 while he
was away at a Franco–African summit conference in Burundi. The
coup was welcomed by many Mauritanians.
Once he assumed power as the new head of state, Ould Taya
moved quickly to restore the collegial, consensus-based character of
the CMSN. The exercise of arbitrary power, so common under Ould
Heydallah, ended for a time as Mauritania’s society and politics went
through a period of decompression. But as the decade wore on, the
problems inherent in military government reasserted themselves, not
least of which were the rise of factions in or near the CMSN who
responded readily to outside pressure groups and did those groups’
bidding in a manner largely closed to public scrutiny. For a narrow,
parochial governing body such as the CMSN, administering the affairs of an impoverished state susceptible to external shocks as well
as internal conflicts (often based on tribal affiliation or ethnicity,
particularly in the late 1980s), this situation assumed a much greater
significance than it might otherwise have had, because the council’s
secret proceedings and lack of democratic debate resulted in fairly
rapid shifts in Mauritania’s domestic policies and foreign relations
posture. One prominent example was the great sway exerted over
the CMSN from 1986 to 1990 by Col. Djibril Ould Abdellahi, the
minister of the interior, who was thought to be almost as powerful as
Ould Taya himself. Moreover, at around the same time (from 1988
to 1990), the CMSN found itself vulnerable to the activites of the
Arab Baath Socialist Party (ABSP), closely aligned with Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq. Baath Party influence eventually led to a full-scale
“tilt” by Mauritania toward Baghdad and may have temporarily
overshadowed Ould Taya and the rest of his nonideological counterparts. Mauritania’s alignment with Iraq also caused the country
grave embarrassment and hardship during and after the Gulf Crisis
of 1990–1991, but Iraq’s defeat on the battlefield after it invaded
Kuwait permanently diminished Baathist power in Mauritania.
From that time on the CMSN’s days were numbered, as Ould
Taya, faced with strong pressures from inside and outside the country, decided to phase out military government in favor of a civilian regime elected by universal suffrage within the framework of
a new constitution approved by the voters in July 1991. Despite
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Ould Taya’s statements to the contrary, there were few illusions
that the armed forces of Mauritania would completely cease to play
an important role in the Mauritanian Second Republic, which was
inaugurated on 18 April 1992 with Ould Taya as head of state, having officially retired from the army a short time earlier. As it turned
out, military rule had not been banished from the country for good.
The regime of President Ould Taya revealed itself by the late 1990s
to be a dictatorship in all but name, and when, on 3 August 2005,
Ould Taya was himself overthrown, it was the army that did so, once
more organizing a military junta, this time calling itself the Conseil
Militaire pour la Justice et la Démocratie (CMJD), which held
power until April 2007.
COMMERCE. The Mauritanian people have a long history of commercial activity with neighboring territories. As early as the 9th century A.D., the Sanhadja Confederation, dominated by the Berbers,
controlled the lucrative north–south caravan trading routes, which
connected the Maghreb with Black Africa. The displacement of the
Sanhadja Berbers by the Almoravids starting in the early 11th century caused commercial life to expand further, encompassing salt,
gold, carpets and handicrafts, as well as slaves. The outposts of Aoudaghost, Koumbi Saleh, and Oualata were especially important
to this trade, as was the city of Sijilmasa in modern-day Morocco.
Mauritania’s trade routes proved remarkably durable because of its
relative isolation from the outside world until the onset of French
“pacification” efforts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By far
the greatest amount of commerce the country conducted at the time
of its independence in 1960 was with Mali and Senegal. As might
be expected, France provided imports of consumer goods not as yet
manufactured in any nearby state.
The largely informal cross-border trade with Senegal (and to a
lesser degree Mali) proved of incalculable benefit to the economy of
the young nation of Mauritania in the early years of the postcolonial
era and also largely eluded effective regulation. Difficulties with
levying taxes and import duties on this commercial activity were
part of the reason that the country’s first president, Mokhtar Ould
Daddah, relied mostly on iron ore exports and fisheries to fill his
foreign-exchange coffers, as both iron and fish were in demand in
COMMERCE
• 119
European and other markets. Fishing was engaged in by both largescale and small-scale operators, with highly variable results over
the years owing to a host of factors, including poaching by foreign
fleets, corruption, a poor infrastructure in Mauritania itself (including transport and processing facilities), and the gradual depletion of
fishing grounds by the early 21st century due to overuse and possibly
climate change. Seeking to subject at least some of the trading activity in his country to governmental oversight, in 1966 President Ould
Daddah created a state agency, the Société Nationale d’Importation
et d’Exportation (SONIMEX), tasked with serving as the primary
import-export point for the livestock and agricultural sectors in
particular. But the independent ways of the farmers and herders of
Mauritania frustrated any attempts at central control just as they
had in antiquity, and SONIMEX gradually became less and less
important to the country’s overall welfare. The official SONIMEX
monopoly (never fully observed in any case) came to an end in the
late 1980s after the accession to power of Col. Maaouiya Ould
Sid’Ahmed Taya. All told, private trading networks—often operated by women—were of invaluable assistance in sustaining Mauritania during its all-too-frequent times of difficulty. Another major
factor favoring the continuation of active commerce was the fact that,
from independence to the early 21st century, the country was heavily
dependent on imports of necessities, including foodstuffs, transportation equipment, petroleum (until 2006), and even basic construction
materials.
By 2008 most Mauritanians, if employed at all, worked in the informal sector of the economy, but this did not mean that commerce
with other nations was stagnant or contracting. Mauritania had greatly
enlarged the number of its trading partners beyond France and other
Western European countries to include Japan, the People’s Republic
of China (PRC), and the oil-rich states of the Gulf. Formal trade with
sub-Saharan Africa, however, was probably adversely affected by the
decision of the Ould Taya regime in 2000 to withdraw from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a decision
his democratically elected successor, President Sidi Mohamed Ould
Cheikh Abdellahi, evidently reconsidered. And as far as the budgetary aspects of Mauritanian commerce were concerned, the country,
after running a continuous trade surplus from 1960 to 1975, saw red
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ink on its trade ledgers for nearly every year after that, as involvement in the Western Sahara conflict, a rising population generating
a greater demand for goods, variable commodity prices for iron ore
and other products of the country’s mining industry, unaccounted-for
cross-border activities, and a cloudy agricultural picture (necessitating costly food imports) all militated against a return to a favorable
balance of trade for more than short periods of time.
COMMISSARIAT À LA SÉCURITÉ ALIMENTAIRE (CSA).
The Food Security Commission of Mauritania was formed in 1982
through the merger of two organizations by the government of Col.
Mohamed Khouna Ould Heydallah. It was set up at a time of enormous changes in the country’s social and economic life, most notably
the migration of a significant part of the Mauritanian population from
rural areas to larger cities and towns such as the capital, Nouakchott.
This process of urbanization, which was impelled by droughts and
the ongoing process of desertification in the countryside and was
accompanied by the near-collapse of agriculture, meant that by the
early 1980s, fully 90 percent of the country’s food had to be imported
from overseas, usually from Europe and North America. To administer the distribution of these foodstuffs effectively and the marketing
and pricing (and in some cases, the processing) of food, the CSA,
a wholly government owned organization, maintained a system of
several dozen warehouses in most Mauritanian provinces for the
storage of cereals and grains, which would be gradually released at
subsidized prices. The large stocks of international food aid donated
by foreign countries would also be distributed by the CSA, but the
overall management of this aspect of Mauritania’s food network was
vested in the Société Nationale d’Importation et d’Exportation
(SONIMEX), and even then a wide variety of traders continued to
operate outside governmental control. The CSA/SONIMEX system
of guaranteed minimum prices for producers and price ceilings for
consumers evidently functioned remarkably well for a time; for several years no one was reported to have starved to death in Mauritania,
although the rate of malnutrition was undoubtedly high.
The CSA, however, soon became the subject of allegations of corruption, many of which centered on the activities of the friends and
associates of President Ould Heydallah. Shortly after Col. Maaouiya
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• 121
Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya deposed Ould Heydallah in a coup on 12 December 1984, he dismissed the director of the CSA and reorganized
the agency. In 1985, the CSA began paying farmers 40 percent more
for the produce they sold to the government in order to provide an
incentive for increased production and to discourage informal trading
at the expense of critically needed food supplies for the populace at
large. By 1990, further reforms had taken place in the food sector.
The CSA’s direct marketing and distribution efforts were largely
abandoned, the rice and cereal mills operated by the CSA and by
the Société Nationale pour le Développement Rural (SONADER)
were privatized, and many food price subsidies were eliminated.
Warehousing and price stabilization activities, however, continued to
be performed by the CSA, and it still attempted to collect and distribute food assistance during periods of crop shortages. In the summer
of 1992, for example, the CSA delivered the news that upward of 30
percent of all Mauritanian livestock had perished due to drought and
that at least 60,000 tons of emergency grain would be needed to ward
off malnutrition in many locations throughout the country. And from
2001 to 2004, the CSA was once more moved to urgent action due to
near-famine conditions in Mauritania. It admitted in November 2002
that its efforts to collect 322,000 tons of emergency cereal donations
from abroad had not been successful.
COMMUNAUTÉ FINANCIÈRE AFRICAINE (CFA). The African
Financial Community is a French-dominated common market and
currency zone, which from 1960 to 1973 included Mauritania, utilizing the CFA franc as its regional standard medium of exchange. The
CFA tightly linked the economies of France’s former African colonies to the policies and fortunes of the Paris banking establishment,
but also held out the promise of a fixed exchange rate and guaranteed
convertibility with other major world currencies. In the early 1970s,
Mauritania’s head of state, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, who until that
time had been a supporter of his country’s membership in the CFA
and the French Community, perceived that these monetary arrangements were unsatisfactory from Mauritania’s perspective. Therefore,
as part of the nationalistic measures Ould Daddah was carrying out in
his foreign relations posture, an extraordinary congress of the ruling
Parti du Peuple Mauritanien (PPM) in June 1972 decided that the
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country should leave the French Community and adopt its own currency. With financial assistance from a variety of sources, including
Algeria’s president, Houari Boumedienne, on 30 June 1973, Mauritania was able to secede from the African Financial Community (and
its associated body, the West African Monetary Union), abolish the
use of the CFA franc, and issue its own medium of exchange, the
ouguiya.
COMMUNES. Established under the Mauritanian constitution of 20
May 1961, the communes replaced the former Conseils Locaux of
the French colonial period as the basic tool of local administration in
the country in the immediate postindependence era. Between 1961
and 1963, communes for both urban and rural areas of Mauritania
were set up under President Mokhtar Ould Daddah. The urban
communes had elected mayors from 1961, and were established in
the capital, Nouakchott, as well as in Bogué in the Senegal River
Valley cercle of Brakna. Other urban communes were located in
Atar, Kaédi, and Rosso; later on, communes were set up on an experimental basis in Ayoun el-Atrouss, F’Derik, and Nouadhibou.
Despite the fairly elaborate nature of these locally based governing
organs, they remained of little real significance, as the Mauritanian
governmental system, closely patterned after that of France’s, was
highly centralized and the local and regional bodies served primarily as a “transmission belt” between the capital and the populace.
Because of a lack of resources and trained personnel, moreover, the
communes soon shrank even further in importance and were abolished in 1968, with the rural bodies going first (on 4 March) and
the rest following by the end of the year. Effective 30 June 1968, all
local administration was revamped, with the cercles being renamed
régions, the sous-préfectures redesignated départements, and the
limited functions of the former communes transferred, for the most
part, to arrondissements, the smallest units of local governance in a
still-centralized Mauritanian polity.
COMMUNES INDIGÈNES. One of the more interesting institutions
of French colonial rule in Mauritania, the communes indigènes were
low-level, locally based advisory bodies (with no real authority),
composed of tribal chieftains and other traditional figures who car-
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ried out French policy and also served to communicate information
concerning local conditions to the government of Afrique Occidentiale Française (AOF) based in Dakar, Senegal. As such, these
assemblies were a departure from the usual French practice of direct
colonial administration, resembling instead Great Britain’s system
of indirect rule. This was probably an appropriate way of dealing
with a proud and independent-minded Mauritanian people who had
always resisted the imposition of centralized rule, but the communes
indigènes also helped to prevent coordinated opposition to the French
from emerging, because of their success in harnessing the loyalties of
at least some of the populace. Their use was thus essentially a “divide
and rule” tactic.
COMMUNICATIONS. Somewhat in the manner of other aspects
of Mauritania’s infrastructure, such as the road and electricity networks, the radio, telephone, and television systems were highly undeveloped well into the 1990s before undergoing substantial improvements. Until around 1990, there were only about 6,700 telephone
receivers in the capital, Nouakchott, and although phone services
were available in Nouadhibou and several other outlying locations
in the country, vast areas of Mauritania still had no public phone
facilities. In 1993–1994, a $27 million project to add 13,000 landline
receivers in Nouakchott was pursued by Alcatel, a French corporation, with funding supplied by a Kuwait-based consortium. Matters
essentially rested at this point until early in the year 2000, when the
government-owned Office des Postes et Télécommunications (OPT)
was split in two as part of the regime’s privatization efforts. The
first company, the Société Mauritanienne de Poste (Mauripost), was
intended to remain permanently in the hands of the government, but
the main telephone service provider, the Société Mauritanienne de
Télécommunications (Mauritel), was 49 percent owned by a group
of both Mauritanian and foreign private investors (including at first
the U.S.-based Harris Corporation), while the state retained a 51percent stake. Then, as prospects for the first cellular phone service
in the country increased, Mauritel, in a $28.5 million transaction in
May 2000, sold the rights to construct and operate the mobile phone
system to Tunisie-Télécom. In October of that year, the first cell
phone call was made, and Mauritel announced that it had an initial
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50,000 subscribers in Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, with expansion
to other populated zones in Mauritania to follow within a short time.
In 2001 and 2002, ownership patterns of Mauritel underwent further
changes. In April 2001, 54 percent of the firm was sold to Morocco’s telecommunications company, beating out two other bidders,
Portugal’s telecom provider and the French conglomerate Vivendi.
As an indication of the evident business opportunities some saw in
the Mauritanian wireless phone sector, Maroc-Télécom, which had
purchased its share of Mauritel for $48 million, saw the value of the
company as a whole rise from $72 million just before the sale to an
extravagant $130 million immediately afterward. In June 2002, the
Moroccan firm divested itself of 17 percent of its Mauritel holdings
to a group of indigenous Mauritanian businessmen, including a local multimillionaire, Abdellahi Ould Noueigued. At the same time,
another 3 percent of the company was sold to two other Mauritanian
investors. By 2006, Mauritel claimed it had some 500,000 cellular
and landline subscribers throughout Mauritania, but it had begun to
face competition as early as 2001. In that year, an entirely private
concern based in Tunisia, the Société Mauritano-Tunisienne de Télécommunications (Mattel), was set up, offering cell phone service in
Nouakchott and 10 other locations. It had a reputed 400,000 subscribers by 2006, although this number was widely regarded with skepticism. In any case, the Mauritel/Mattel duopoly was not destined to
continue for much longer, as a new operator, Chinguetel, announced
plans to begin operations in December 2006 from 150 base stations.
It paid a reported $107 million for its license, and would, like Mattel,
offer mobile phone services only.
Radio and television in Mauritania underwent a somewhat similiar
evolution between 1996 and 2008, but here, as with the country’s
struggling independent newspapers, political considerations often
overrode economics, as a majority of the country’s population
still could not read or write by the early 21st century and were thus
wholly dependent for news on the broadcast media, all of which
were tightly held by the state. Mauritania had no indigenous TV station until 1984, which was also about the time it connected to both I
NTELSAT (International Telecommunications Satellite Organization) and ARABSAT (Arab Satellite Telecommunications Organiza-
COMMUNICATIONS
• 125
tion), the latter comprising the member countries of the Arab League.
In the early years, France provided ground stations to support I
NTELSAT and ARABSAT links to Europe, and in November 1996,
President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya personally inaugurated
the so-called DOMSAT network, which linked most of Mauritania
to television and radio broadcasts in the outside world. Money for
DOMSAT (the total cost for the project being $16 million) was
provided by the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development
(AFSED) and included a limited number of satellite telephone links,
mainly for official use. Unlike the Mauritanian telephone service,
the radio and television sector was excluded from privatization, and
opposition political parties, which had been entirely barred from
presenting their views on the state-run stations until the late 1990s,
often complained that the air time they were allotted was perfunctory, with the ruling Parti Républicain, Démocratique et Social
(PRDS), being given whatever opportunities it wanted to perpetuate
its political monopoly under the ostensibly more pluralistic Second
Republic. For reasons that are unclear, the state’s broadcast media
authority, the Office de Radiodiffusion et Télévision de Mauritanie
(ORTM), was split in the late 1990s into two new concerns: Radio de
Mauritanie (RM) and Télévision de Mauritanie (TVM). This, however, brought no change to the stringent oversight of the radio and
television sector by the Mauritanian Interior Ministry. The environment for external satellite broadcasts was likewise restrictive. In late
2000, the Ould Taya government forced Radio France Internationale
(RFI) to cease beaming its programs into Mauritania on account of
its allegedly “negative” coverage, and in November of the same year
the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera TV station, after hosting commentators
who criticized Mauritania’s foreign relations (including, crucially,
its recognition of Israel in July 1999), was also asked to stop broadcasting into the country. Both stations, however, resumed their
broadcasts after the military coup d’état of 3 August 2005 overthrew
President Ould Taya with the promise of the removal of censorship
on all media outlets.
In contrast to the relative ubiquity of telephone, television, and radio services in Mauritania by the early 21st century, Internet services,
which first made their appearance in the country in the late 1990s, had
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penetrated very little, with services being nearly nonexistent outside
of Nouakchott and Nouadhibou and with Mauritel holding a virtual
monopoly on the sector at fees far beyond the reach of most citizens.
Only about 3,000 Internet subscribers existed in the entire country by
2006, and because most Mauritanians could not afford to purchase a
computer, Internet cafés were popular, with customers able to view
websites, send and receive e-mail, and socialize with their peers at
various locations. Here, too, the heavy hand of government censorship intruded, as the authorities required that each café owner keep a
record of all websites accessed and e-mail sent and received, sending
a distinctly chilling message to the populace. One operator was arrested in March 2001 for failure to maintain such records. The Ould
Taya government, like so many others in the developing world, was
wary of the possibilities of this new medium. The government could
not have been reassured by the fact that certain political events, such
as Foreign Minister Dah Ould Abdi’s controversial meeting with
Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon in Tel Aviv in May 2001 and the
arrest and detention of opposition leader Mohamed Lemine Ch’bih
Ould Cheikh Melainine the month before, were both thoroughly
covered in various Internet outlets, while garnering practically no
mention in the censored print and broadcast media.
COMPAGNIE MAURITANIENNE DE NAVIGATION MARITIME (COMAUNAM). The Mauritanian Maritime Navigation
Company, established in 1973, operates the country’s merchant
vessels out of the ports of Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, with destinations mainly in Europe and West Africa. The firm also handles
some stevedore and other onshore functions, as well as freight
forwarding, although some of these activities were removed from
COMAUNAM’s purview during the 1990s as part of privatization.
Since approximately the early 1980s, 51 percent of COMAUNAM
was owned by the Mauritanian government, with a 49-percent stake
held by the Algerian shipping parastatal, the Compagnie Nationale
Algérienne de Navigation (CNAN). According to the London-based
Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, there were 146 vessels flying the Mauritanian flag at the end of 2005, but the small size of these ships could
be deduced from the fact that their combined displacement was only
49,300 gross tons.
CONSEIL DES MINISTRES
• 127
CONSEIL DES MINISTRES. Mauritania’s first governing cabinet was invested by the country’s foremost political personality,
Mokhtar Ould Daddah, on 21 May 1957, after the organization
he founded, the Union Progressiste Mauritanienne (UPM), won
a decisive victory over its opponents in the March 1957 elections to
the Assemblée Territoriale. Although this particular cabinet was
subordinate to the French colonial authorities, the 22 March 1959
and 20 May 1961 constitutions of Mauritania accorded the Council
of Ministers an important day-to-day role in the operation of the government. In particular, cabinet members were always to serve purely
at the pleasure of the president (something that remained true into
the 21st century) and were tasked with the supervision of the various
ministries, which comprised the foundation of the state.
From the time of independence, successive Mauritanian cabinets
were made up of supporters of President Ould Daddah’s Parti du
Peuple Mauritanien (PPM); various officers of the armed forces,
which held power from July 1979 to April 1992; or President
Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya’s Parti Républicain, Démocratique et Social (PRDS), during the Second Republic (1992–2005).
Throughout these periods, the shifting of particular ministers from
one post to another in relatively short order was a recurrent phenomenon, caused, in the opinion of many observers, not so much by a
rise or fall in a minister’s political standing (although that certainly
occurred) as by shortages of qualified personnel, which necessitated
frequent reshuffling to make the best use of the country’s administrative talent. Therefore, the careers of persons such as Hamdi Ould
Mouknass, who served President Ould Daddah as foreign minister
for a full decade (1968–1978) without interruption; Hasni Ould Didi,
a long-serving minister of education; and a few others during the
presidency of Maaouiya Ould Taya were very much the exception.
Under the Comité Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN;
1978–1979) and the Comité Militaire de Salut National (CMSN;
1979–1992), the two military councils that ruled Mauritania for
nearly 15 years, serving armed forces officers sometimes doubled as
ministers (although during the Second Republic only Col. Ahmed
Ould Minnih did so, intermittently from 1992 until his death in
October 1998), although a high level of civilian participation in most
cabinets was maintained.
128 •
CONSEIL DES MINISTRES
The coup d’état of 3 August 2005, which peacefully deposed
President Ould Taya and replaced him with a temporary Conseil
Militaire pour la Justice et la Démocratie (CMJD) led by Col.
Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, resulted in the swift replacement of many
cabinet members, although the presence of a good many PRDS
stalwarts was disquieting to certain Mauritanians, who hoped for a
cleaner break with the increasingly repressive and unpopular Ould
Taya regime. The CMJD, like its predecessor army committees, occupied a position superior to the Council of Ministers, but after the
transition to civilian rule on 19 April 2007, the cabinet once more
became solely responsible to the president of the republic pursuant
to the Mauritanian constitution of 20 July 1991.
The full roster of the postcoup Mauritanian cabinet, which left office on 30 March 2007, two weeks before the end of direct military
rule, was as follows:
President of the Republic and
Chairman of the Military
Council for Justice and
Democracy
Prime Minister
Ministers
Civil Service and Employment
Communications
Culture, Youth, and Sports
Economic Affairs and
Development
Energy and Petroleum
Equipment and Transport
Finance
Fisheries and Maritime
Economy
Foreign Affairs
Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall
Sidi Mohamed Ould
Boubacar
Mohamed Ould Ahmed
Jekkou
Cheikh Ould Ebbe
Mehla Mint Ahmed
Mohamed Ould Abed
Mohamed Ali Ould Sidi
Mohamed
Bâ Ibrahima Demba
Abdellahi Ould Souleymane
Ould Cheikh Sidiya
Sidi Mohamed Ould Sidina
Ahmed Ould Sid’Ahmed
CONSEIL DES MINISTRES
Health and Social Services
Higher Education and Scientific
Research
Interior, Posts, and
Telecomunications
Justice
Literacy and Islamic Guidance
Mining and Industry
Primary and Secondary
Education
Rural Development and
Environment
Trade, Manufacturing, and
Tourism
Water Resources
Secretary-General of the
Government
Governor of the Banque
Centrale de Mauritanie
• 129
Saadna Ould Baheida
Nagi Ould Mohamed
Mahmoud
Mohamed Ahmed Ould
Mohamed Lemine
Mahfoud Ould Bettah
Yahya Ould Sidi el-Moustaph
Mohamed Ould Ismail Ould
Abeidna
Cheikh Ahmed Ould
Sid’Ahmed
Sileye Gandega
Bâ Abderrahmane
Ely Ould Ahmedou
Habib Ould Hemett
Zeine Ould Zeidane
Following the parliamentary elections of 19 November and 3
December 2006 and the presidential election of 11 and 25 March
2007 (the latter balloting being narrowly won by Sidi Mohamed
Ould Cheikh Abdellahi), Mauritania’s Third Republic was inaugurated on 19 April 2007, with Ould Abdellahi as head of state and
Zeine Ould Zeidane as his prime minister. A week later (on 28 April),
Ould Abdellahi and Ould Zeidane announced their choices for the
first cabinet of the new civilian-led government. In spite of speculation by Mauritanians and outsiders alike that at least a few ministers
would be politicians who had either proven themselves at the polls or
in other ways, the new president instead appointed a Council of Ministers composed almost entirely of technocrats like Ould Zeidane,
which keenly disappointed some people such as opposition leader
Ahmed Ould Daddah, who soon complained that the selection process for the cabinet was “a continuation of past practices” under Ould
Taya, although only Limam Ould Teguedi, the minister of justice,
was a holdover from that period. Another factor noted by many was
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CONSEIL DES MINISTRES
the ethnic composition of the new cabinet. The clear majority were
Beydane Moors, with haratines and especially non-Arab Black Africans a distinct minority. There were also two women on the Third
Republic’s first cabinet, heading the Ministry of Education and the
newly created Ministry of Women, Infants, and the Family.
The roster of the Council of Ministers, installed on 28 April 2007,
was as follows:
President
Prime Minister
Ministers
Agriculture
Civil Service
Culture and Communications
Decentralization and Land
Management
Defense
Economy and Finance
Education
Employment
Fisheries
Foreign Affairs
Health
Infrastructure, Urban Planning
and Housing
Interior
Islamic Affairs and Primary
Education
Justice
Petroleum and Mining
Commerce and Industry
Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh
Abdellahi
Zeine Ould Zeidane
Corréra Issagha
Aziz Ould Dahi
Mohamed Vall Ould Cheikh
Yahya Ould Kebd
Mohamed Mahmoud Ould
Mohamed Lemine
Abderrahmane Ould Hamma
Vezzaz
Nebhou Mint Mohamed Vall
Cheikh el-Kébir Ould Ch’bih
Assane Soumaré
Mohamed Salek Ould
Mohamed Lemine
Mohamed Lemine Ould
Raghani
Mohamed Ould Bilal
Yall Zakaria
Ahmed Vall Ould Saleh
Limam Ould Teguedi
Mohamed el-Mokhtar Ould
Mohamed El-Hacen
Sid’Ahmed Ould Raiss
CONSEIL GÉNÉRAL
Tourism and Traditional
Handicrafts
Transport
Water, Energy, and Information
Technology
Contacts and Relations with
Parliament
Women, Infants, and the Family
Youth and Sports
Secretary-General of the
Government
Governor of the Banque
Centrale de Mauritanie
• 131
Bâ Madine
Ahmed Ould Mohameden
Oumar Ould Yahi
Mohamed Mahmoud Ould
Brahim Khlil
Fatimetou Mint Khattri
Mohamed Ould Ahmed Ould
Yerg
Abdellahi Ould Limam Malek
Kane Ousmane
CONSEIL DU GOUVERNEMENT. An institution based in Dakar,
Senegal, between 1925 and 1946 with the responsibility of assisting
the governor-general of Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF),
the Council of Government played a major role in administering the
territory that would become Mauritania, although its authority was
always firmly subordinate to the governor-general himself, appointed
by, and answerable only to, the president of the French Republic
in Paris. The council consisted of 40 members, among whom were
representatives of each AOF territory (eight including Mauritania),
high judicial and army officials, and selected tribal chieftains and
others chosen for their loyalty to France. The Conseil du Gouvernement held only one plenary session each year, primarily to discuss
budgetary and administrative matters, although it did have a Permanent Commission to oversee the regular work of AOF and recommend policies to the plenary session. By decree of 25 October 1946,
however, the council found most of its authority transferred to the
Grand Conseil d’AOF, which also had 40 members and was also
subordinate to the governor-general in Dakar, now bestowed with the
additional title High Commissioner of the Republic.
CONSEIL GÉNÉRAL. The Conseil Général was a bicameral legislative body of a largely consultative nature, put in place as a result of
the administrative separation of Mauritania from Senegal following
132 •
CONSEIL MILITAIRE POUR LA JUSTICE ET LA DÉMOCRATIE
the 1946 promulgation of the Constitution of the Fourth French
Republic, which had the effect of decentralizing the authority of the
colonial governmental structure, Afrique Occidentale Française
(AOF). In Mauritania, the General Council had 24 members in two
houses. One chamber had purely French nationals, while the other
was composed of French subjects (whether French or Mauritanian)
who were eligible for election if they were in possession of their legal
rights. Both houses were elected for five-year terms, but their competence to govern was severely restricted by the fact that they could
not discuss “political” questions in any of the two mandatory yearly
sessions; the deputies were instead to concern themselves only with
local administrative and budgetary matters. The General Council sat
in St. Louis, Senegal (the “capital” of Mauritania until the founding
of Nouakchott over a decade later), and had a Permanent Commission to facilitate its work between sessions, as well as various other
adjudicatory and advisory panels, which, like the Council itself, had
very little real power. In 1952, the General Council was renamed the
Assemblée Territoriale.
CONSEIL MILITAIRE POUR LA JUSTICE ET LA DÉMOCRATIE (CMJD). The 17-member Military Council for Justice and Democracy was formed in the immediate aftermath of the coup d’état
of 3 August 2005, which peacefully deposed the highly unpopular
incumbent head of state, President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya,
and replaced him with his director of national security, Col. Ely Ould
Mohamed Vall. The new Mauritanian leader declared that the CMJD
would be purely a “transitional” regime pending amendments to the
constitution of 20 July 1991 and new parliamentary and presidential
elections scheduled to take place in late 2006 and early 2007. Ould
Vall also asserted that neither he nor any other CMJD member would
be permitted to run for president in the 2007 election, and that although
Mauritania’s Assemblée Nationale and Senate had been dissolved,
the 1991 constitution was still in force and the country’s existing political parties were not banned. In spite of this, however, the CMJD,
like the two military committees that had governed the country from
1978 to 1992, was entitled to exert nearly unlimited powers over the
citizenry, as the Mauritanian armed forces were, in the opinion of
nearly all observers, one of the state’s few effective institutions.
CONSEIL MILITAIRE POUR LA JUSTICE ET LA DÉMOCRATIE
• 133
When the names of the 17 members of the CMJD were announced
on the same day as the successful 3 August coup, it was not surprising that aside from Col. Ould Vall, none of the membership was
well-known outside of Mauritania, although it was common knowledge that Col. Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz—reputedly a keen Arab
nationalist—was the commander of the elite Bataillon de la Sécurité
Présidentielle (BASEP), a critical military unit that was deeply involved in removing President Ould Taya. All CMJD members (with
the exception of one who was a captain in the Mauritanian navy) held
the rank of colonel, the highest rank attainable in the armed forces,
and two of them were physicians in the army’s medical corps. As was
the case during the prior period of military rule from 1978 to 1992,
the CMJD, acting almost at once, appointed a civilian Conseil des
Ministres to oversee the day-to-day functions of the government.
The CMJD remained in place until its dissolution on 19 April 2007,
when, following the parliamentary elections of 19 November and
3 December 2006 and the presidential election of 11 and 25 March
2007, the military officially retired to its barracks. Col. Ould Vall
handed the presidency to a civilian, Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh
Abdellahi, and retired from the army. Most of the other CMJD
members, though, retained their posts in the armed forces, leading
to widespread speculation that the military establishment would continue to exert a prominent—if indirect—role in Mauritanian affairs
in the future.
The members of the Military Council for Justice and Democracy
from August 2005 to April 2007, along with their positions in the
military hierarchy (if known), were as follows:
President: Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall
Members:
Col. Abderrahmane Ould Boubacar (deputy army chief of staff)
Col. Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz (commander of the Bataillon de la
Sécurité Présidentielle)
Col. Mohamed Ould Cheikh Mohamed Ahmed
Col. Ahmed Ould Bekrine
Col. Sogho Alassane
Col. Ghoulam Ould Mohamed, M.D.
Col. Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh el-Alem
134 •
CONSEILS LOCAUX
Col. Négri Félix
Col. Mohamed Ould Magane
Col. Mohamed Ould Mohamed Znagui (commander of the military district of Nouakchott)
Col. Kane Hamedine, M.D.
Col. Mohamed Ould Abdi
Col. Ahmed Ould Amine
Col. Taleb Mustapha Ould Cheikh
Col. Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mohamed Lemine
Capt. Isselkou Ould Cheikh el-Wely (commander of the Mauritanian navy)
CONSEILS LOCAUX. Under the constitution of 22 March 1959 of
the soon-to-be independent Islamic Republic of Mauritania, conseils
locaux were established to ensure the functioning of the country’s administration at the level of the 12 cercles, later renamed régions. The
local councils were the middle-level governing bodies in Mauritania,
below the central authority in Nouakchott but above the communes,
which were smaller institutions encompassing both rural and urban
areas. In actual practice, the local councils had limited influence, as
the Mauritanian head of state, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, retained the
highly centralized French system of government. The local councils
were abolished in 1968 as part of a governmental reorganization.
CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY. A transitional legislative chamber
established after the proclamation of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania on 28 November 1958, the Constituent Assembly replaced the
prior legislature, the Assemblée Territoriale, although its powers
and membership were almost the same. From the beginning, the
Constituent Assembly was dominated by Mokhtar Ould Daddah’s
Parti de Regroupment Mauritanien (PRM), which had won 33 of
the 34 seats in the Territorial Assembly in elections held in March
1957. Immediately after it convened, the new assembly was put to
work drafting a constitution for the soon-to-be independent Mauritanian state, but in reality it completely lacked the expertise required
to perform such a task, and instead simply accepted, by a unanimous
vote on 22 March 1959, the constitution of 1959, the country’s first,
CONSTITUTIONAL CHARTER
• 135
which had been written by a small group of French jurists in cooperation with Ould Daddah and a few of his closest aides. Barely two
months later, on 17 May 1959, elections were held for the parliament
of independent Mauritania, the Assemblée Nationale, and the Constituent Assembly was dissolved.
CONSTITUTIONAL CHARTER (9 February 1985). Two months
after the overthrow of Col. Mohamed Khouna Ould Heydallah as
Mauritania’s head of state, the country’s ruling body, the Comité
Militaire de Salut National (CMSN), led by Col. Maaouiya Ould
Sid’Ahmed Taya, without consulting public opinion, promulgated
an interim Constitutional Charter intended to serve as Mauritania’s
organic governing document until its eventual replacement. Along
with several ordinances that supplemented its provisions, it survived
until 20 July 1991, when a new democratic constitution was overwhelmingly approved by the Mauritanian electorate, paving the way
for the formation of multiple political parties, contestable presidential and parliamentary elections, and the advent of the Second
Republic on 18 April 1992.
The Constitutional Charter amounted to a set of procedural rules for
the CMSN, regularizing its affairs and legitimizing, after a fashion,
its dictatorship over Mauritanian life. Under Article 3 of the Charter,
the CMSN was given nearly unlimited power over national policies,
foreign relations, and oversight of the country’s civil service. The
only limits on its authority were with respect to those areas that were
outside the regular legal system and fell instead under the purview
of Islamic courts applying the sharia. Henceforth, the CMSN would
consist of persons nominated to it and would include a Permanent
Committee, made up of all members who were posted to the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott. It would meet every two weeks, or more
often if decreed by the president of the republic. The president, for
his part, was empowered (per Articles 11 and 12) to make all appointments to the government outside of the CMSN and to dismiss them
at any time. Finally, the Constitutional Charter stipulated that the
CMSN outranked the ordinary state bureaucracy supervised by the
Conseil des Ministres and had the last word as to whether criminal
charges could be lodged against any CMSN member.
136 •
CONSTITUTION OF MAURITANIA (22 MARCH 1959)
CONSTITUTION OF MAURITANIA (22 March 1959). Two years
before gaining full independence from France, Mauritania’s Constituent Assembly, a body completely dominated by Mokhtar Ould
Daddah’s Parti de Regroupement Mauritanien (PRM), met to draft
a constitution for the embryonic state. However, the politicians who
made up the assembly (all but one of whom were PRM loyalists) were
not qualified for this task, so the Constituent Assembly did little but
discuss and approve, by a unanimous vote held on 22 March 1959, a
draft constitution that was the work of French colonial advisors and
legal experts as well as some of Ould Daddah’s aides.
Mauritania’s first constitution closely mirrored that of the French
Fifth Republic. Islam and basic human rights were to form the foundation of the new state, and Article 2, while affirming Islam as the
country’s religion, stated that freedom of religion would be guaranteed. Further articles stated that Arabic would be the national language
and French the official one (this being a concession to Mauritanians of
Black African extraction), that universal suffrage would be the rule,
and that political parties would be allowed as long as they did not
question the unity of the country and adhered to democratic principles.
As for the structure of the government, the most important actors were
the prime minister and the Assemblée Nationale. The parliament
would select the prime minister, and he would appoint a Conseil des
Ministres to preside over the state bureaucracy. The 1959 constitution
also reiterated that the practice of slavery was forbidden, affirming a
1905 French decree to that effect. The document also provided (in a
fairly imprecise fashion) for local government in the form of cercles
and sous préfectures. The 1959 constitution remained in effect for
the short time Mauritania had left to it as a French colony, and a few
months after its accession to independence, on 28 November 1960, a
new constitution, similar in some respects but with important differences, was promulgated on 20 May 1961.
CONSTITUTION OF MAURITANIA (20 May 1961). Following
Mauritania’s independence from France on 28 November 1960, the
country’s leader, President Mokhtar Ould Daddah, continued his
efforts to not only unite a series of disparate interests in the new nation, but also consolidate his own position. In May 1961, the head
of state proposed to replace the original constitution of 22 March
CONSTITUTION OF MAURITANIA (20 MAY 1961)
• 137
1959 with a new one, which he believed would be better suited to
Mauritanian realities. On 20 May, the recently convened Assemblée
Nationale, the country’s parliament, approved a new draft constitution, an unsurprising move since the chamber was entirely dominated
by Ould Daddah’s Parti de Regroupement Mauritanien (PRM).
There was no popular participation.
Although there were some similarities between the 1961 document
and the one it replaced, it contained critical differences. The president
of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, the constitution provided, was
the head of the state and of government and commander-in-chief of
the Mauritanian armed forces. He had the unlimited power to select
and dismiss his Conseil des Ministres, to name ambassadors, and to
declare war and ratify treaties with other countries. Legislatively, the
president’s authority was immense. He had the power to propose legislation that would take precedence over those measures put forward
by the National Assembly, a prerogative Ould Daddah was later to
effectively employ, in 1963 and 1964, to curtail parliament’s initiative by proposing dozens of bills that had to be given priority, thus
preventing the legislature from proposing its own laws. In the alternative, the head of state could bypass the legislative branch entirely
by submitting proposals directly to the people via a referendum. The
president was to be elected to a five-year term, indefinitely renewable.
Even the limited powers vested in the National Assembly were, in
practice, whittled away in the coming months and years. In October
1961, a first step toward Mokhtar Ould Daddah’s complete domination of the Mauritanian political scene was taken at the Congress
of Unity, where the remaining political groups not already under
the sway of the president, along with the PRM, were merged into a
new Parti du Peuple Mauritanien (PPM), which quickly became
a virtual “vanguard” party with limited opportunities for internal
dissent. This evolution away from democracy was continued at the
Kaédi Conference of January 1964, in which the PPM’s leadership
organ, the Bureau Politique National (BPN), was made subservient
to President Ould Daddah’s wishes. The 1961 constitution then lost
whatever little meaning it had, because in the next year (1965) it was
amended to make the PPM the sole legal political party, ignoring the
detailed amendment procedures set forth in the document. In 1968,
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CONSTITUTION OF MAURITANIA (20 JULY 1991)
another series of amendments was undertaken, this time relating to
local government and the designation of Hassaniyya Arabic as the
official language of Mauritania as part of Ould Daddah’s Arabization policy. Constitutional procedures were again disregarded. And
although Ould Daddah did stand for reelection for president at fiveyear intervals (in 1966, 1971, and 1976), it was meaningless, because
non-PPM candidates were barred and the incumbent was unopposed.
By now nothing more than a hollow shell, the constitution of May
1961 remained nominally in effect until 10 July 1978, when it was
abolished by order of the Comité Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN), a group of army officers who had earlier that day
overthrown President Ould Daddah in a bloodless coup d’état.
CONSTITUTION OF MAURITANIA (20 July 1991). After the cancellation of the constitution of 20 May 1961 by Mauritania’s armed
forces government on 10 July 1978, the country went for the next 13
years without a formal governing document, although in December
1980 the Mauritanian head of state, Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould
Heydallah, did promulgate a provisional constitution, only to retract it after a serious coup attempt against his regime in March 1981.
In December 1985, the country’s second governing military council,
the Comité Militaire de Salut National (CMSN), tried to introduce
some formal legality by issuing a Constitutional Charter under the
auspices of the CMSN’s chairman at the time, Col. Maaouiya Ould
Sid’Ahmed Taya, but the charter was little more than a unilateral
statement of the ruling committee’s prerogatives and internal operating procedures, which were virtually unchecked. Particularly in the
destructive aftermath of the Senegal–Mauritania crisis of 1989–
1990 and the Gulf Crisis of 1990–1991, Mauritania’s strained social
and political situation urgently required new institutions that would
have at least the semblance of popular legitimacy, and the country’s
lack of a constitution could no longer be ignored.
Only a matter of weeks after the conclusion of the Gulf War, and
at a time when Mauritania was still suffering the severe political and
economic effects of that conflict, President Ould Taya announced
on 15 April 1991 that a draft constitution would be submitted to the
voters for their approval, something that had never happened in the
country’s 31-year history. In spite of the fact that the document—
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which included fully 103 articles—was presented to the electorate
without the possibility of comment on its specific provisions, a referendum was held on 12 July 1991, in which the “constitutional project” was overwhelmingly endorsed. According to the government,
97.9 percent of those who voted cast “yes” ballots, with a reported
turnout of 85.3 percent. After its approval and formal ratification by
Ould Taya on 20 July, a transitional period went into effect, with the
CMSN continuing to exercise authority until the basic institutions
of what became known as the Mauritanian Second Republic were
established, a process that was concluded on 18 April 1992.
The new constitution of Mauritania fatefully continued the country’s tradition of investing the executive branch with considerably
greater authority than the legislative or judicial departments. The president of the republic, pursuant to Article 25, appointed and presided
over the Conseil des Ministres (cabinet) and thus directed the general
policy of the state. Under Article 30, the powers of the head of state
in foreign relations and defense were nearly all-encompassing, with
some exceptions: A declaration of war was required to be approved
by parliament (Article 58), and treaties with foreign powers (which
the president, acting alone, could ordinarily sign and ratify) required
the assent of the legislature when budgetary matters were affected,
the boundaries of the country were altered, or the rights and duties
of Mauritania’s citizens were altered by the document. In domestic
affairs, the powers of the president were also considerable. He could
dissolve parliament pursuant to Article 31, although this was forbidden when the head of state declared a “state of siege and emergency”
during a severe internal crisis or external threat (Articles 39 and 71).
On any matter of his choosing, the president could circumvent the
legislature by recourse to a popular referendum (Article 38) and had
veto power over bills passed by the legislative branch (Article 70).
The president, required to be a Muslim under Article 23, was elected
to a six-year term by direct and universal suffrage, originally with no
limits on reelection (Articles 26 and 28).
The Mauritanian legislative branch had a structure that was relatively uncommon in Africa and the Middle East. It was bicameral,
with both an Assemblée Nationale, elected by popular vote, and a
Senate, chosen indirectly by the municipal councils in each of the
country’s 12 administrative régions as well as in a separate district
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encompassing the capital, Nouakchott. The existence of a Senate
was an attempt to guarantee a minimum level of representation to
every part of Mauritania, irrespective of population density. The
legislature had extensive authority in budgetary matters (Article 68)
and in the general financial oversight of the state. It also had the use
of ostensibly independent commissions to assist its work.
Aside from detailing the responsibilities and powers of the president and the legislative branch, the 1991 constitution, after declaring
Islam to be the state religion (Article 5), guaranteed to all Mauritanians basic civil rights such as freedom of speech, travel, assembly, and
association (Article 10). It also prohibited torture and other extralegal
actions against the individual (Article 13), but provided, sweepingly,
that “treason, espionage, and going over to the enemy as well as all
infractions committed with prejudice to the security of the State shall
be punished with all the rigor of the law” (Article 18). Article 15
accorded explicit protection to private property, which was long a
fundamental characteristic of Mauritanian society. And in a concession to the concerns of the country’s sizeable Black African population, Fulani, Soninké, and Wolof were declared to be, along with
Arabic, “national languages,” although Article 6 proclaimed Arabic
to be Mauritania’s official language. A revamped legal system, an
Economic and Social Council, a Constitutional Council, and a High
Islamic Council were also set up.
From its 1991 origins until the end of the Ould Taya regime in
August 2005, the constitution of Mauritania was either honored in the
breach or never had many of its provisions tested due to the force of
circumstances, the most obvious being the near-total domination of
parliament by the head of state’s Parti Républicain, Démocratique
et Social (PRDS), which precluded the exercise of legislative independence. In addition, the legal guarantees of due process and freedom from harsh treatment were more or less continuously flouted,
particularly from about 1998 onward, when reports of human rights
abuses grew steadily more frequent. The government was also able to
enforce an onerous system of newspaper censorship through Article
11 of the 1991 Press Code, which gave the Ministry of the Interior
broad power to review and restrict the flow of information that roused
its objections, and in May 1997 a threatened walkout by teachers in
the educational sector was forcibly dealt with despite the constitu-
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tion’s formal endorsement of the right to strike. Prominent politicians, too, found their latitude for speech and action circumscribed,
as the regime engaged in increasingly frequent arrests and (when
outright mistreatment would have been unacceptable internationally)
trials in which even the rudiments of fairness were disregarded. It
was the inordinate scope of executive power in Mauritania (a feature
imported from France), more than any other factor, that prevented the
constitution from serving as at least a reference point for those who
desired greater oversight of the police and other security organs. As
a result, the country bore an increasing resemblance to a dictatorship
by the early 21st century.
After a long period of escalating public dissatisfaction with President Ould Taya (who was reelected in 1997 and 2003 under increasingly controversial circumstances), the coup d’état of 3 August 2005
finally dislodged him and allowed his director of national security,
Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, to assume power as the head of a
new military governing body, the Conseil Militiare pour la Justice
et la Démocratie (CMJD). Unlike what had occurred after the July
1978 coup, however, the constitution was not formally abolished
(although the legislature was disbanded and many of its provisions
became dead letters), as the CMJD repeatedly proclaimed that its rule
was to be “transitional” and not in any case to extend beyond 2007,
pending the installation of a civilian, democratic government. The
1991 constitution, however, was to undergo modification. Seeking
to prevent a head of state from holding office for long periods (21
years in the case of Ould Taya, 18 years for his civilian predecessor,
Mokhtar Ould Daddah), the CMJD put forward several proposed
amendments to the document on 19 April 2006. Most important (under Article 26 and 28), the president of the republic’s term in office
would be reduced from six years to five, with a limit of two terms. In
addition, under Article 27 any president would be barred from holding a position of leadership in a political party and also could not
hold any other public office or private employment during his tenure.
Any Mauritanian citizen could stand for the presidency, provided he
or she was at least 40 years of age (but no older than 75); election, as
before, would be by direct popular vote, with a run-off election conducted between the two leading candidates if no one person received
an absolute majority of the ballots cast. Mauritania’s Constitutional
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Council would be given added responsibilities with respect to the
certification of candidates, the holding of elections, and the verification and proclamation of results.
On 25 June 2006, the proposed constitutional amendments were
approved massively by the Mauritanian people. Although the CMJDsponsored referendum was greeted with skepticism by some disaffected former supporters of President Ould Taya as well as by certain
Black African activists, voter turnout was a respectable 75 percent
in most areas of the country, and it was reported that 96.97 percent
of those who voted approved the changes to the constitution. With
the results believed authentic by observers from the United Nations
as well as by the African Union (AU), Col. Ould Vall was clearly
pleased that the first phase in his planned transition to civilian rule
had gone smoothly. Later, when the Mauritanian Third Republic
was inaugurated on 19 April 2007 under a new civilian president,
Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi, the 1991 constitution,
as amended, was thus still Mauritania’s organic law, but it plainly
remained to be seen whether it would at last achieve genuine effect
in a young nation with no real tradition of civil liberties, political
pluralism, or separation of powers.
CONVENTION POUR LE CHANGEMENT (CC). The banning
by the Mauritanian government, on 2 January 2002, of one of the
most influential opposition political parties in the country, Action
pour le Changement (AC), left the group’s leader, Messaoud Ould
Boulkheir, and his colleagues in the political wilderness. Attempting to regroup, Ould Boulkheir, by early summer 2002, sought to
organize Convention for Change as basically the same group as the
AC under a slightly different name. This tactic had worked once
before; after the October 2000 banning of Ahmed Ould Daddah’s
Union des Forces Démocratiques (UFD), a group closely mirroring the UFD, the Rassemblement des Forces Démocratiques
(RFD), which did not at first include Ould Daddah as a member,
had succeeded in gaining governmental certification to operate. But
in an apparent illustration of the intense dislike President Maaouiya
Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya harbored for Ould Boulkheir (as well as
an indication of the political threat the AC may have posed to the
head of state), the CC was formally denied permission to organize
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by the Interior Ministry on 25 August 2002. In issuing its decision,
the government stated that the CC would “undermine national unity
and the unity of the Mauritanian people” and would “incite violence,
racism and intolerance,” rhetoric that came as no surprise, since the
Ould Taya regime had used almost precisely the same language to
denounce and proscribe the AC just a few months earlier.
COPPER. Mauritania’s extraction of the copper ore deposits in its territory has a long and somewhat checkered history, extending from the
1950s into the early 21st century. Although commercially exploitable
reserves of copper had been known to exist in the country since the
early 1930s, it was not until 1970 that mining operations could finally
begin, only to cease after eight years for a variety of technical and
financial reasons. Even at the height of production in the early 1970s,
copper never contributed as much to the Mauritanian economy as the
massive iron ore reserves located near the town of Zouérate.
The first attempt to marshal the necessary resources to extract
copper ore, the location of which had been pinpointed at a site called
Guelb el-Moghrein, a few kilometers west of the town of Akjoujt in
the administrative région of Inchiri, came in 1953 when a Frenchdominated consortium, the Société des Mines de Cuivre de Mauritanie (MICUMA), was organized with $1.6 million in operating capital. But MICUMA never got off the ground due to several factors:
the difficulty in refining copper ore with the level of technology then
current; the distance of the Akjoujt mines from the nearest water
resources needed to supply the mine (the closest was Bennichab,
over 100 kilometers distant); and finally, the daunting problem of
transporting the ore from Inchiri to the Atlantic coast, which was not
helped by the refusal of the (also French-run) iron ore company, the
Société Anonyme des Mines de Fer de Mauritanie (MIFERMA),
to consider extending its railway line to Akjoujt to handle copper
shipments. The estimated amount of copper involved—32 million
tons—looked promising, but no progress was made in preparing to
exploit it until after Mauritanian independence in November 1960,
when improvements in refining techniques and the construction of a
port facility near Nouakchott made it possible to consider restarting
the endeavor. In April 1963, after the Mauritanian government had
discussed the matter with MICUMA shareholders, a new company,
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called the Société de Cuivre de la Mauritanie (SOCUMA), was set
up with $10 million in capital and a mostly Canadian (55 percent)
and Mauritanian (25 percent) ownership. After SOCUMA submitted
its final report on the potential of the mine site, however, various
disputes amongst the shareholders resulted in the company’s dissolution in late 1965.
In 1967, the Société Minière de Mauritanie (SOMIMA) was
formed, with heavy foreign participation and with only a minority
(22 percent) stake held by the Nouakchott government. SOMIMA
proved more successful in its preparations than its two predecessors;
helped by the presence of a transshipment port at Nouakchott, an
improved road from Inchiri, and a water pipeline from Bennichab,
it was able to begin open-pit mining operations at Akjoujt in 1970.
Over the next few years, production increased steadily, rising to a
peak of 28,982 tons taken out in 1973. But the quality of the ore
was low, the large deposits of gold thought to accompany the copper did not immediately materialize, and world prices for copper had
begun to decline. Technical problems also became apparent, and in
1975 President Mokhtar Ould Daddah shut down SOMIMA in
frustration, nationalizing the company (as he had already done with
MIFERMA) and putting it under the control of the newly formed
iron ore parastatal, the Société Nationale Industrielle et Minière
(SNIM). About a year later, SNIM resumed operations at the Inchiri
mine and ran it at a loss until 1978, when it was closed for a second
time. Still another attempt to revitalize the copper mining sector was
made in 1981, when a mostly Arab-owned consortium known as the
Société Arabe des Mines d’Inchiri (SAMIN) made plans to reopen
the mine and extract 65,000 tons of ore annually, but the necessary
funding was not obtained, leaving it to a SNIM subsidiary, Mines
d’Or d’Akjoujt (MORAK), to extract gold from the tailings pile at
the Akjoujt site from 1992 to 1996.
SNIM, however, divested itself of most of its stake in the mine by
about the year 2000, selling an 80 percent share to First Quantum
Minerals Ltd. of Canada. In mid-2004, First Quantum stated that it
hoped to extract 30,000 tons of copper ore per year from the Inchiri
mine (along with 50,000 troy ounces of gold) after it finished building a new (and presumably more efficient) extraction and refining facility there by 2006. The fortunes of the Mauritanian copper industry
COPPOLANI, XAVIER
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appeared to have received yet another lease on life: in October 2006.
First Quantum was able to begin small-scale production at Akjoujt,
obtaining 1,650 tons of copper ore (and 2,800 troy ounces of gold)
per month by early 2007. These production figures were far below
expectations, and after a variety of regulatory hurdles had been overcome, the firm began full-scale operations on 22 February 2007 at a
ceremony presided over by Mauritania’s “transitional” military head
of state, Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, two months before he left
office. It remained to be seen whether the Akjoujt mine in the hands
of First Quantum would prove any more successful than in those of
its many predecessors.
COPPOLANI, XAVIER (1866–1905). One of the great personalities
of the period of French penetration and colonization of West Africa
in the late 19th century, Xavier Coppolani was Corsican by birth, but
was raised in Algeria, which had been under French domination since
1830. By virtue of his long residence in North Africa, he became fluent in Arabic and possessed an extensive knowledge of Islam from
a fairly early age. He first acquired diplomatic and political-military
experience in the French territory of “Soudan” (present-day Mali),
where he managed to bring the traditionally independent tribes of
the area into cooperative arrangements with France. But his most
important achievements were yet to come. In response to a request
by France’s prime minister in 1901 to study various methods of
bringing West Africa under colonial administration, Coppolani proposed doing so without resort to wholesale violence. He advocated
“peaceful pacification,” followed by, as he put it, “ cooperation with
financial rewards, or resistance with military consequences.” Although elements of a “divide and rule” strategy could be discerned
here, Coppolani’s plan was relatively enlightened for its time. He
sought to replace the domination of the hassan tribes, which had
existed since the end of the Char Bobha in 1674, with greater influence by the zawiya, or monastic religious tribes, who constituted the
second—but still privileged—tier of Moorish society, with the idea
that they would then find it “easier to spread the word of Allah.” He
calculated that once the hassan (warrior) tribes had been vanquished,
peace would reign in Mauritania, the seemingly endless ghazzis
and reprisals would cease, and collaboration with the French would
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ensue. Coppolani also felt that indirect rule by France would be appropriate for the Mauritanian people, as he appreciated the fiercely
independent character of the nomadic Moors and believed that very
little should be done to disturb their ancient way of life. In place of
the warrior tribes, French military power would be substituted, which
would in turn presumably invoke a grateful response on the part of
the less advantaged castes, including the znaga.
Upon arrival in Mauritania in 1902, Xavier Coppolani quickly set
to work, taking time to cultivate some of the most respected zawiya
tribes and reportedly winning converts to his plans among the more
conservative tribal leaders, who—as the contemporary accounts had
it—were impressed by his low-key personality and religious erudition. He offered them peace, security from the ghazzis, and expanded
commercial opportunities in return for submitting to France. His
efforts first bore fruit in Trarza, as both the major leaders there,
Cheikh Sidiya Baba of the Ould Berri monastic tribe and Cheikh
Saad Bouh, were won over by Coppolani’s entreaties. In the case of
Saad Bouh, the results were especially worth obtaining, for he held
great spiritual sway not only over Trarza but also in the Tagant region as well as the Senegal River Valley, on which the French had
already set their sights.
For all his ostensibly humane tactics, though, Coppolani was not
adverse to using intertribal disputes among Tagant’s inhabitants to
secure a complete agreement in February 1903, after which time
he moved to establish French administrative centers protected by a
contingent of seasoned French colonial soldiers. This did not work.
After Coppolani tried to conquer more areas (notably the Adrar),
Trarza revolted before the end of the year, and although the uprisings were put down by early 1904, they served as a warning sign that
“pacification,” at least by nonmilitary means, would not necessarily
guarantee long-term French control. Still, during a spell of home
leave in France (May–October 1904), Coppolani managed to convince his government that his policies should be extended to Adrar,
Tagant, and possibly Brakna and Gorgol. These plans were to prove
far more difficult to realize, in large measure due to the emergence
of an uncompromisingly anticolonial religious leader, Cheikh Ma
el-Ainin, whose influence extended from northern Mauritania into
present-day Western Sahara and southern Morocco. Ma el-Ainin had
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already been petitioned by other tribes that felt threatened by French
incursions to join with them to drive the French back across the
Senegal River. In the meantime, Coppolani set out to pacify Tagant
by purely military means, in conjunction with the deliberate implantation of suspicions among rival or even allied tribes. Thus, despite
a serious reversal for the French on 24 March 1905, when the Ould
Berri forces of Cheikh Sidiya Baba were routed by troops loyal to Ma
el-Ainin, the occupation force finally reached Tidjikja, the center of
Tagant’s commercial and religious life, on 1 April.
Coppolani soon arrived in the town to plan his next campaign, into
the Adrar, where Ma el-Ainin’s strength was even more pronounced.
But before he could begin to carry out his plans, Xavier Coppolani
was assassinated while sleeping in his bed in Tidjikja on 12 May
1905 by a small group of men who apparently acted on behalf of Ma
el-Ainin. Coppolani’s death was a significant encouragement to the
anti-French resistance, and it threw Paris into a period of uncertainty
regarding its objectives in Mauritania. It would be left to Coppolani’s
successor as governor-general of the territory, Col. Henri Gouraud,
to complete the task of subduing the Adrar in July 1909. See also
ADRAR CAMPAIGN.
COUP ATTEMPT (of 8–9 June 2003). By the early summer of 2003,
dissatisfaction with the Mauritanian government headed by President
Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya had nearly reached fever pitch.
Reports of widespread corruption and favoritism in the country’s
historically weak economy, coupled with the head of state’s repression of virtually every dissenting voice, had come together to largely
render the officially pluralistic Second Republic a dead letter. In
addition, Mauritania’s foreign relations situation was particularly
fraught with controversy. President Ould Taya, fresh from having established full diplomatic relations with Israel in July 1999 to
general popular disgust, aligned himself firmly with the “war on
terror” conducted by U.S. president George W. Bush, failed to utter a word of criticism of the United States when it invaded Iraq in
March 2003, and was perceived—rightly or not—to be acting wholly
at Washington’s behest when he ordered the arrest and detention
of dozens of suspected followers of militant Islamic groups. Even
the country’s secular political parties called for their release. In
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truth—and this was commented upon at the time as well as being
clear in retrospect—there existed no peaceful or constitutional way to
bring Ould Taya’s presidency to an end. The president himself gave
every indication that he intended to govern Mauritania for the rest of
his life, had pressured and outmaneuvered the opposition to such an
extent that it was totally ineffectual, and, most critically, maintained
an iron grip on the national security organs. With few functioning
institutions beyond the purview of the state, shadowy and anonymous
elements in the armed forces issued warnings of their intentions beginning at least in the late 1990s. These statements seemed to dwell
not only on the poor condition of the Mauritanian economy and political scene, but also on Ould Taya’s evident neglect of the military
since 1992, leading to low morale, subhuman living conditions for
many personnel, and low and antiquated equipment levels.
Taking matters into their own hands and carrying out a conspiracy
that had apparently been in the planning stages for some months, a
group of approximately 30 Mauritanian officers, led by former Captain Saleh Ould Hanena, Commandant (Major) Abderrahmane Ould
Mini, and air force commander Mohamed Ould Cheikhna, commandeered an armored brigade, elements of the depleted air force (and
also possibly the navy, a perennial hotbed of antigovernment sentiment), and an infantry unit based in Nouakchott, and violently assaulted the most important installations of the regime at 4:00 a.m. on
8 June 2003. According to reports, the insurgents succeeded in capturing the presidential palace and compound in short order along with
the state radio and television station and the army’s headquarters, all
of which were located within a kilometer of one another near downtown Nouakchott. In the course of taking the central army barracks,
the chief of staff, Col. Mohamed Lemine Ould N’Diayane (an Ould
Taya loyalist), was killed, becoming the highest-ranking casualty of
the coup attempt. Ould Hanena and his followers opened the doors of
the capital city’s prisons, freeing many inmates, including Mohamed
Jamal Ould Mansour, the former mayor of Nouakchott’s ‘Arafat
arrondissement and a suspected Islamist. President Ould Taya himself, though, proved elusive, having apparently slipped away from
his residence early on 8 June and retreated with loyal army units to
another location. There were also reports—never confirmed—that he
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took refuge in either the U.S. or French embassy in Nouakchott, each
located only a short distance from the presidential “Brown House.”
By midday on 8 June, it appeared that Ould Taya’s government had
in fact been toppled, state radio and television had ceased broadcasting, and cabinet ministers were nowhere to be found.
But after a somewhat slow initial response (something that would
have major repercussions after the suppression of the plot), the rest of
the security apparatus swung into action. In particular, the elite Bataillon de la Sécurité Présidentielle (BASEP), as well as the independently structured National Guard and Gendarmarie Nationale,
fought back hard, gradually retaking the presidential residence and
offices, the radio station, and key army camps during the afternoon,
evening, and night of 8 June. Most residents of the capital stayed off
the streets out of fear. By the morning of 9 June, the coup attempt
had been mostly defeated, although gunfire continued to be heard
in Nouakchott throughout the day. Taking no chances, BASEP and
the Gendarmarie systematically destroyed every tank and armored
vehicle they could find, mindful that it was an armored unit that had
begun the uprising. Ould Hanena’s group never had the opportunity to issue a public statement of its motivations or intentions, but
many of the plotters (including the ringleaders) managed to escape
and take refuge in neighboring countries. Dozens of persons were
injured, and at least 15 were killed, and the assistance of army units
from outside Nouakchott (mainly from Aleg, Atar, and Rosso) was
required to suppress the coup attempt. All told, it had been a very
close call for President Ould Taya; some citizens considered the
uprising their equivalent of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks
on the United States; and, fearing the uncertainties that would have
followed the successful overthrow of Ould Taya, most were grateful that the uprising had been put down. The outspoken opposition
leader, Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, however, along with the exiled
Forces de Libération Africaine de Mauritanie (FLAM), publicly
wished that it had succeeded, and many others privately agreed that
the coup attempt was the direct result of years of political exclusion
and popular frustration.
Looking tired and ill at ease, President Ould Taya appeared on
national television on the afternoon of 9 June. Congratulating those
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members of the armed forces who had remained loyal to him, the
president said that “the patriotic forces beat this plot that aimed to
end the process of development and emancipation,” and added that
because an armored unit on Nouakchott’s southern outskirts had gone
over to the rebels, “time was necessary to destroy the divison tank
after tank.” Ould Taya said little about the identities of those involved
in the revolt (although suspicion was already beginning to center on
Ould Hanena and his colleagues), but would later blame the attempt
on Islamist elements, a claim that was immediately greeted with disbelief both at home and abroad. Some observers felt that, if anything,
Ould Hanena’s sympathies lay with the secular Arab Baath Socialist
Party (ABSP). At any rate, the president’s accusations against the
Islamists were inconsistent with the thoroughgoing purge of many
of the security departments he carried out in the following days and
weeks. The civilian Conseil des Ministres was also reshuffled, and
the country’s prime minister at the time of the coup attempt, Cheikh
el-Avia Ould Mohamed Khouna, was detained for a short period,
allegedly after he attempted to leave Mauritania to seek political asylum in Spain after the failure of a revolt that he may have welcomed.
To replace the slain Col. Ould N’Diayane, a new army chief of staff,
Col. Hedi Ould Sadigh, was appointed, and Ney Ould Abdelmalek,
the chief of the national poice—an agency known as the Direction
Générale de la Sûreté Nationale (DGSN)—was fired, reportedly
due to his “passivity” in the face of the rebellion. He was replaced
by Col. Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Deh. The head of the Mauritanian
navy, Col. Abderrahmane Ould el-Khour, was cashiered a week later,
and a similar shakeup was also carried out at the Mauritanian foreign
intelligence agency, the Direction d’Études et de la Documentation
(DED), whose chief, Col. Mohamed Welad Ould Hamidoun, was dismissed. A loyal BASEP commander, Col. Mohamed Ould Abdi, was
appointed head of Nouakchott’s military region.
Although President Ould Taya did not resort to mass repression
in the aftermath of the failed coup, he did reach into the ranks of
the civilian population in the summer of 2003. The governor of the
province of Dakhlet-Nouadhibou was arrested, as was the chairman
of the Supreme Court and the secretary of state for women’s affairs.
A close relative of Saleh Ould Hanena who happened to be a high
official of the ruling Parti Républicain, Démocratique et Social
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(PRDS), Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Hamady, was also detained, as
well as many other army officers, enlisted men, and civilians who
were members of the Oulad Nasr, a Moorish tribe to which Ould
Hanena belonged and which mainly hailed from the eastern provinces of Hodh ech-Chargui and Hodh el-Gharbi. Few of those
imprisoned were held for long periods, and in a conciliatory gesture
in late August 2003, Ould Taya pardoned Mohamed Lemine Ch’bih
Ould Cheikh Melainine, a dissident religious leader and politician
who was serving a five-year jail sentence. But the hunt for Ould Hanena, Ould Mini, and Ould Cheikhna continued at full tilt, and the next
few months were highly unstable for the people of Mauritania, as no
fewer than two further “conspiracies” were apparently unmasked by
the authorities. Ould Hanena and Ould Mini were not apprehended
until October 2004.
The general public anxiety over just what a government led by
Saleh Ould Hanena would entail, and the resultant (and apparently
sincere) gratitude for his defeat, however, did not lead President
Ould Taya to modify his polices during his remaining two years in
office. Dissenters—whether in the political parties, the country’s
newspapers, or elsewhere—continued to be treated as high-handedly
as before; the September 2003 presidential election was relentlessly
manipulated to ensure as large a margin of victory for the incumbent
as possible (although his main challenger, former president Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah, did garner 18 percent of the vote
despite continuous harassment); the country’s pro-Western foreign
policy was not changed; and commercial opportunities continued
to flow in the direction of the president’s supporters, notably his
Semasside tribal kinsmen. Finally, concerns over the future allocation of Mauritania’s petroleum revenues added to a pervasive sense
of gloom and the feeling that a complete political impasse had been
reached.
On 3 August 2005, the end of the 21-year Ould Taya regime finally
came. Seeing no prospect for an end to his presidency, and angered by
the continued decay—indeed, virtual disarmament after the 2003 coup
attempt—of the armed forces, a consummate insider, Col. Ely Ould
Mohamed Vall, peacefully deposed Maaouiya Ould Taya while he
was out of the country. Assisted by several army units as well as by
the BASEP, Col. Ould Vall immediately set up a 17-member Conseil
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Militiare pour la Justice et la Démocratie (CMJD) to govern Mauritania during a self-described “transitional” period, at the conclusion
of which the army hoped to see installed a more genuinely democratic
and less repressive government, in which both the excesses of the
previous regime and the perceived need to violently overthrow the
head of state—as during those bloody 48 hours in June 2003—would
be absent.
COUP D’ÉTAT (of 3 August 2005). On 1 August 2005, Mauritania’s
president, Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, boarded his personal
aircraft and headed for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to attend the funeral of
the late King Fahd, leaving behind a country that had been in a nearly
constant state of agitation for at least the previous five years. Ever
since Ould Taya had begun to use increasingly bare-knuckled methods of repression against even the legal political parties of the ostensibly democratic Second Republic and had oriented Mauritanian
foreign relations steadily in favor of the West (including, critically,
the establishment of full diplomatic relations with Israel in July 1999),
the head of state had become more and more unpopular. Baring his
regime’s teeth against any and all opponents of his two-decade rule,
he began to crack down more harshly on independent newspapers;
imprisoned a prominent critic, Mohamed Lemine Ch’bih Ould
Cheikh Melainine, for over two years on dubious charges; resorted
to questionable electoral practices to stay in power; banned three
political groups outright (Ahmed Ould Daddah’s Union des Forces
Démocratiques [UFD], the pro-Iraq Parti de l’Avant-Garde Nationale [PAGN], and the broadly based Action pour le Changement
[AC]); and barely beat back a violent coup attempt on 8–9 June
2003 mounted by disaffected armed forces personnel, led by Saleh
Ould Hanena and Abderrahmane Ould Mini. After this uprising was
put down, Ould Taya continued his habitual mode of governance, arresting many alleged accomplices in the plot; relentlessly reshuffled
both the army officer corps and the civilian Conseil des Ministres;
and kept the populace on edge by the subsequent announcement of at
least two other conspiracies, supposedly hatched by Ould Hanena’s
Les Cavaliers pour le Changment in alliance with Libya, Senegal,
or Burkina Faso.
COUP D’ÉTAT (OF 3 AUGUST 2005)
• 153
There were many additional sources of discontent with President
Ould Taya. According to some observers, Ould Taya’s Moorish
Semasside tribe was inordinately favored with business opportunities at the expense of other groups, widespread anxiety existed about
whether Mauritania’s forthcoming petroleum revenues would be
similarly misallocated, and there was concern that the parlous state
of Mauritanian agriculture would lead to even greater malnutrition
and other public health problems as well as accelerate the process of
urbanization and all the social and economic problems it generated.
The army, too, had cause for concern: Ould Taya’s jailing of many
suspected members of militant Islamic groups may have been the
reason that the Algerian-based Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication
et le Combat (GSPC) attacked a Mauritanian army garrison in the
remote Lemgheity area in eastern Tiris Zemmour on 4 June 2005,
killing at least 15 soldiers, leading to fears that more attacks could
be in store for the pro-Western government. In addition, the army
itself had been largely neglected as an institution since the advent of
the Second Republic in 1992, with readiness and morale sinking to
historic lows.
Through all these difficulties, the military high command and
the security apparatus of the state, led since 1985 by Col. Ely Ould
Mohamed Vall, assumed a largely passive stance, but after the
Lemgheity attack and a subsequent unsuccessful search for the GSPC
perpetrators in the vast Mauritanian-Malian desert, a few senior officers decided to rid themselves of a president who showed every
sign of wanting to remain in office for life and whose continued rule
might well serve as a magnet for future Islamist raids. Ould Vall,
along with Col. Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz, the commander of the
Bataillon de la Sécurité Présidentielle (BASEP), an elite unit that
had played a key role in defeating the 2003 coup attempt, formulated
the coup plan. By later in the summer the assistant army chief of
staff, Col. Abderrahmane Ould Boubacar, the head of the pivotal
Nouakchott military region; Col. Mohamed Ould Mohamed Znagui; and the chief of military intelligence, Col. Mohamed Ould elGazouani, all added their support for President Ould Taya’s ouster.
Interestingly, neither the Gendarmarie Nationale, the National
Guard, nor certain other important officers were privy to Col. Ould
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COUP D’ÉTAT (OF 3 AUGUST 2005)
Vall’s plans, something that would not in the end affect the outcome
but would cause a few problems when the putsch was executed. Although King Fahd’s death and Ould Taya’s attendance at his funeral
were purely fortuitous, the army conspirators, before settling on the
idea of deposing him when he was out of the country, had originally
planned on arresting him in the eastern town of Néma—far from the
capital—during the president’s projected visit to the Mauritanian
hinterland, if they could not take power in his absence.
At 3:00 a.m. on 3 August, Col. Ould Vall and Col. Ould Abdelaziz
left their homes and immediately made their way—escorted by
BASEP units—to the residence of Col. El-Arby Ould Jeddein, the
chief of staff (chef d’état major) of the army. Ould Jeddein, taken
completely by surprise, offered no resistance and was quickly taken
into custody, as was the head of the National Guard, Col. Ainina
Ould Elvaida, a short time later. Col. Sidi Mohamed Ould Elvaida,
the commander of the army’s airborne unit, the Bataillion des Commandos Parachutistes (BCP), however, proved harder to persuade,
and it took the encirclement of his barracks by BASEP-led armored
units and a five-minute ultimatum delivered by Ould Vall to induce
him to lay down his arms. He, too, was quickly arrested. Meanwhile,
BASEP units fanned out across Nouakchott, peacefully seizing the
army’s headquarters, the presidential compound, and the radio and
television stations in the center of the city at about 5:00 a.m. However, an impasse of evidently major proportions was developing at
the nearby headquarters of the Gendarmerie, whose commander, Col.
Sidi Ould Riha, refused to capitulate and threatened armed resistance
to the coup. Col. Ould Vall telephoned the recalcitrant colonel and
warned him that army units from Nouadhibou and elsewhere stood
ready to move on his position, and BASEP troops as well as those belonging to the Mauritanian ground forces commander, Col. Aliouine
Ould Mohamed (another ally of Ould Vall), surrounded the Gendarmarie barracks in an atmosphere of high tension. At 10:15 a.m.,
forces loyal to Ould Vall and Ould Abdelaziz began to fire warning
shots at Ould Riha’s outnumbered soldiers, which may have been the
origin of the sounds of gunfire heard by some residents of the capital
at about this time. By 11:00 a.m. the Gendarmarie had surrendered,
Ould Riha had been detained, and the takeover of the government
had been accomplished with no loss of life.
COUP D’ÉTAT (OF 3 AUGUST 2005)
• 155
As ordinary Mauritanians awoke on the morning of 3 August, a
state of relative calm prevailed, as the soldiers stationed at Nouakchott’s intersections and public buildings gave an indication of the
arrival of a new regime. As word spread of President Ould Taya’s
overthrow (the former head of state traveled to Niamey, Niger, and
Banjul, Gambia, before taking up residence in Doha, Qatar, after his
initial hopes of reversing the coup were dashed), reaction was mostly
favorable, a sentiment deepened by Col. Ould Vall’s promise that his
new 17-member Conseil Militaire pour la Justice et la Démocratie
(CMJD) would be of a “transitional” nature only, pending the installation in 2007 of a more democratic government. The CMJD, seeking to reassure Mauritanians and the international community about
its intentions, appointed a new civilian cabinet a few days after the
coup, the head of which was Prime Minister Sidi Mohamed Ould
Boubacar, a respected economist and pro-Western technocrat. The
ruling council also issued the following statement:
In the name of God, the Merciful, the Gracious. The national armed
forces and security forces have unanimously decided to put a definitive end to the oppressive activities of the defunct authority, which our
people have suffered from during the past years. These activities have
led to a severe deviation which has begun to threaten the future of our
nation. The national armed forces and security forces have decided to
institute a Military Council for Justice and Democracy. This council
is committed before the Mauritanian people to create the appropriate
circumstances for an open and transparent democracy. This will enable
the civil society and all political activists to participate with complete
freedom. Our armed forces and security forces will not rule for longer
than the necessary period required to prepare and create the genuine
democratic institutions. This period will not exceed two years at the
most. The council finally confirms Mauritania’s commitment to all the
international treaties and agreements which it has signed.
The assumption of power in Mauritania in a bloodless manner by
known military “insiders” after the 21-year rule of an increasingly
high-handed Ould Taya, coupled with the new regime’s promises of
free elections and adherence to its international agreements, had a
salutary effect. After some rhetorical opposition to the coup from the
United States and by the African Union (AU) as well as Nigeria and
several other African states, the CMJD’s statements of democratic
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COUP D’ÉTAT (OF 3 AUGUST 2005)
intent were taken largely at face value within a few days, there being
in any case little real choice on the part of the world community. Also
in the CMJD’s favor was the fact that the Mauritanian constitution
of 20 July 1991 was not abrogated (although the Assemblée Nationale and the Senate, comprising the bicameral parliament, were shut
down), and existing political parties were not disbanded. A month after the takeover, moreover, all the country’s political prisoners (with
the exception of a few hard-core Islamists, but including Saleh Ould
Hanena, the ringleader of the June 2003 coup attempt), were freed in
a general amnesty. At about the same time, Col. Ould Vall dismissed
all the provincial governors his predecessor had appointed, and the
long-serving chairman of the state mining company—the Société
Nationale Industrielle et Minière (SNIM)—Mohamed Salek Ould
Heyine (like Ould Taya a Semasside but well-respected in the international business community), was fired and replaced with Youssuf
Ould Abdel Jelil. On the other side of the coin, Ould Vall’s decision
to retain diplomatic ties with Israel did not sit well with the citizenry, and the former leader of Action for Change, Messaoud Ould
Boulkheir, deplored the presence in the cabinet of so many members
of the former governing Parti Républicain, Démocratique et Social
(PRDS), a group that was in great disfavor after the coup. Col. Ould
Vall did decide to leave for his civilian successor regime the matter
of the persistence of slavery in Mauritania, as well as how to deal
with the issue of the 30,000 or so remaining refugees who had been
living in Senegal since 1989–1990. There was, however, a remarkably free-wheeling conference held by the new military government
in Nouakchott on 25–29 October 2005, which brought together most
of the country’s political tendencies, including Ould Boulkheir and
the head of the SOS-Esclaves human rights organization, Boubacar
Ould Messaoud.
As the first step on what was anticipated to be a more pluralistic
path for Mauritania, voters overwhelmingly approved a series of
amendments to the constitution on 25 June 2006, which limited
future presidents to two five-year terms to prevent a reprise of Ould
Taya’s two-decade incumbency. Later in 2006 and early in 2007,
the military establishment further laid the groundwork for its exit
from direct governance, sponsoring the parliamentary elections of
19 November and 3 December 2006—which resulted in a National
COUP D’ÉTAT (OF 6 AUGUST 2008)
• 157
Assembly in which no one political tendency predominated—and,
finally, the presidential election of 11 and 25 March 2007, in which
the 20 candidates in the first round were reduced to two in the second, the narrow winner on 25 March being the 69-year-old Sidi
Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi, a respected administrator who
was nonetheless seen as the army’s favored candidate (along with the
man who soon became Ould Abdellahi’s first prime minister, Zeine
Ould Zeidane). The fact that parliament had a good many independent candidates who were believed to represent traditional, rural, and
moderately Islamist interests, along with Ould Abdellahi’s nonaffiliation with any of Mauritania’s political parties, gave Col. Ould
Vall and his colleagues the confidence they needed to formally turn
power over to Ould Abdellahi on 19 April 2007, disband the CMJD,
and inaugurate the Mauritanian Third Republic. But as the Londonbased Economist Intelligence Unit had been pointedly reminding its
readers during all of 2006, “Accustomed as the (political) elite is to
being close to the center of power in Mauritania, it would represent
a historic break with the past if it were to allow an alternative group
to take power through the ballot box,” a statement that implied—
probably correctly—a continuing role for the military establishment
in the country far into the future, even though it had returned to its
barracks and would, for the moment at least, have to make its wishes
known in other ways.
COUP D’ÉTAT (OF 6 AUGUST 2008). When the Mauritanian armed
forces relinquished power to a civilian government headed by the
freely elected president Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi on
19 April 2007, there was a general expectation among both the country’s citizens and outsiders alike that the new Third Republic would
enjoy a fairly lengthy tenure in spite of the strong continued influence
of the military establishment. The fact that the previous junta, the
Conseil Militaire pour la Justice et la Démocratie (CMJD) headed
by Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, had stayed in power for less than
two years and had not posed any overt obstacles to a return to civilian
rule reassured many observers, as did Ould Vall’s departure from the
political scene (and from Mauritania itself for a time) immediately
after President Ould Abdellahi was inaugurated. Widespread international disapproval of military governments, too, gave some reason
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COUP D’ÉTAT (OF 6 AUGUST 2008)
for confidence that the revived Mauritanian democratic experiment
would be at least partially successful, despite the continued presence
of most of the former CMJD membership in the army and the apparent
willingness of the military establishment to seek out deputies in the
Assemblée Nationale and the Senate, who shared both their priorities
as well as their skepticism about the new civilian regime.
In retrospect, the first signs of potential trouble for Ould Abdellahi may have come in the first weeks of his presidency, when, ignoring the advice of many in the country, he chose members of his
Conseil des Ministres who were primarily technocratic (including
his first Prime Minister, Zeine Ould Zeidane, a former presidential
candidate) and not some of Mauritania’s most important politicians
who might have been expected—in spite of their opposition to Ould
Abdellahi’s candidacy—to strengthen civilian institutions in the
country, adopt a less detached stance toward ordinary citizens that
the technocrats were later severely castigated for, and perhaps seek
more imaginative approaches to the young nation’s many problems.
But Ould Abdellahi did not do this, and thus, on 13 November 2007,
when massive riots swept several Mauritanian cities and towns in the
wake of abruptly announced increases in the price of food (a situation
aggravated by poor domestic agricultural yields), public outrage
immediately focused on Ould Abdellahi and Ould Zeidane for their
alleged insensitivity to the plight of the citizenry. Allegations of corruption, both with respect to food supplies as well as other matters,
also began to be voiced with more frequency at about this time, less
than 12 months into President Ould Abdellahi’s five-year term.
In the spring of 2008, political affairs in Mauritania escalated
to near-crisis proportions. Having established, early in the year, a
new pro-presidential political party, the Pacte National pour la
Démocratie et la Développement (PNDD), the head of state soon
found that the party’s existence (and its apparent majority support in
parliament) was no guarantee of stability, as calls for inquiries into
the activities of his administration became more and more frequent
in the National Assembly. The finances of the charitable foundation
headed by the president’s wife, Khattou Mint Boukhary, also came
under scrutiny, out of a suspicion that public funds might have been
utilized to enrich the organization. Consequently, on 6 May 2008,
Ould Abdellahi felt compelled to dismiss Ould Zeidane, his unpopu-
COUP D’ÉTAT (OF 6 AUGUST 2008)
• 159
lar premier, and carry out a thorough reshuffle of the cabinet in the
hopes of avoiding the wrath of the newly independent parliament. But
this move brought little respite for the troubles of the Third Republic.
Like the rest of the new cabinet, the replacement Prime Minister,
Yahya Ould Ahmed el-Waghef, was a technocrat, and opposition
political figures still encountered no luck in attempting to have some
of their number appointed to positions of executive responsibility.
At about this time, supporters of President Ould Abdellahi began to
complain openly of interference by the army in the political process,
with much of the commentary centering around Col. Mohamed
Ould Abdelaziz, the commander of the Bataillon de la Sécurité
Présidentielle (BASEP), and Col. Mohamed Ould el-Ghazouani, an
officer with a military intelligence background, who (by early 2008)
was serving as the army’s chief of staff. In June, a further reorganization of the cabinet took place, again to little effect as the demands
of parliament (probably pushed along by the military) only intensified, and President Ould Abdellahi also took additional criticism for
choosing some former stalwarts of the discredited 1984–2005 regime
of Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya to the Council of Ministers. Between 29 July and 4 August, a climax was reached, as about
50 PNDD deputies in the National Assembly demanded a special parliamentary session to deal with the food supply situation, and when
this was refused, most of the PNDD members of parliament quit the
party in protest, doubtless spurred on by senior army officers.
On 5–6 August 2008, President Ould Abdellahi made a last, desperate gambit to preserve his authority by formulating a decree dismissing not only Col. Ould Abdelaziz and Col. Ould el-Ghazouani,
but also two other high-ranking officers, Col. Ahmed Ould Bekrine
and Col. Félix Négri, the respective commanders of the Gendarmarie Nationale and the National Guard. After the decree was
broadcast over Mauritanian state radio at approximately 7:00 am on 6
August, the army sprang into action literally within minutes. BASEP
units (who, after all, were guarding the presidential palace in Nouakchott) arrested Ould Abdellahi in his office and packed him off to
house arrest in a military barracks. Prime Minister Ould el-Waghef
was personally arrested by Col. Négri at his office and was detained
for a few days before being released. Soldiers threw a heavy guard
around Radio Mauritanie headquarters and other key governmental
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COUP D’ÉTAT (OF 6 AUGUST 2008)
installations, all air traffic into and out of Mauritania was stopped,
and the country’s land borders were closed for a few days. There
was no violence. The armed forces, after only a three-year hiatus, had
once more assumed supreme power over Mauritanian affairs, and it
had all been accomplished in less than two hours. The Haut Conseil
d’État (HCE), with Col. Ould Abdelaziz as its leader, would henceforth govern the country for an indefinite period of time. In sharp
contrast to the August 2005 coup, which overthrew President Ould
Taya and brought Col. Ould Vall and the CMJD to power, the first
communiqué issued by the HCE was terse in the extreme: it merely
nullified Ould Abdelalhi’s decree sacking Col. Ould Abdelaziz and
his three army colleagues and conspicuously failed to set a date, or
even a general time frame, for new elections or whether members
of the HCE would be permitted to seek office. Also unlike the 2005
coup, Col. Ould Abdelaziz did not dissolve parliament—although it
was clear that its newfound independence was now at an end—but in
a move similar to those of Col. Ould Vall, all pre-existing political
parties would be permitted to remain operating, and moreover, the
Mauritanian constitution of 20 July 1991 was not abrogated.
Although the 6 August coup d’état was swiftly and efficiently executed without even the very limited opposition encountered in 2005,
the planning of the composition of the HCE evidently was not well
thought-out beforehand. For the first 48 hours or so after the coup,
only five army officers were listed as being members of the HCE,
as first reports suggested that, in a bid for legitimacy in the eyes of
the Mauritanian people, the military establishment offered places on
the High State Council to selected civilian politicians, most notably
Ahmed Ould Daddah and Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, the latter being a veteran opposition figure, anti-slavery activist, and the current
Speaker of the National Assembly. Three other civilian politicians
were also reportedly on the army’s list of potential HCE members,
but the entire idea was evidently torpedoed by Ould Boulkheir’s flat
refusal to join the council and by Ould Daddah’s reluctance to put his
political fortunes at the whim of the army—even though he was by
no means as opposed to the coup as Ould Boulkheir and many others.
Having been unsuccessful in inducing a broader membership for the
ruling committee, Col. Ould Abdelaziz then named five additional
army officers to the HCE to round out its membership at 11. The
COUP D’ÉTAT (OF 6 AUGUST 2008)
• 161
controversy over civilian participation in the HCE was symptomatic of the uneven response that greeted the coup on the part of the
general Mauritanian populace: in the first hours after the takeover,
police broke up crowds of demonstrators protesting the army’s actions, while other groups took to the streets of Nouakchott in favor
of Col. Ould Abdelaziz, brandishing his portrait. The exiled Black
African nationalist group, the Forces de Libération Africaine de
Mauritanie (FLAM) issued a statement condemning the coup, and
many black Mauritanians were worried about the future, given that
several members of the HCE had been allegedly involved during the
late 1980s and early 1990s in massive human rights violations.
The domestic reaction to the August coup might have been mixed,
but the international reaction was almost unanimously critical. Both
Western countries and organizations, as well as many African states
categorically condemned the military’s action against the Ould Abdellahi government, including France, the United States, the European
Union (EU), Nigeria, and South Africa. All of them demanded—in
vain, as it turned out—the restoration of the civilian regime to power.
Paris and Washington immediately called a halt to all nonhumanitarian international aid to the junta, while the African Union (AU)
went so far as to suspend the country from the organization pending
a return to an elected government. Only Morocco seemed to offer any
backing for the coup: less than 24 hours after the putsch, the semiofficial Rabat-based newspaper, Le Matin du Sahara et du Maghreb,
described Col. Ould Abdelaziz and his colleagues as “patriots attached to the national unity of their country and its stability” and said
the coup was a “nationalist and patriotic protest movement,” even
as the Moroccan Foreign Ministry remained silent and speculation
was rife as to why Morocco should have welcomed the departure of
President Ould Abdellahi. Very early reports of uncertain credibility
attempted to explain the Moroccan attitude as arising from Col. Ould
Abdellahi’s supposedly pro-Moroccan opinions on the Western
Sahara conflict. Whatever the actual situation in that regard, it was
clear that the condemnation of the August 2008 coup by nations that
were critical to Mauritania’s overall foreign relations would quite
possibly have longer-term ramifications for the new government,
particularly if it did not cede power back to civilians in one manner
or another within a relatively short time.
162 •
CURRENCY
In his first interviews and pronouncements after he assumed office, Col. Ould Abdelaziz sought to offer an explanation for the
army takeover. Calling the coup a “movement of national rectification,” he stated that the officer corps simply could not have allowed
the infighting between parliament and the president to persist for
much longer in the face of the regime’s corruption and “miserable
economic performance,” and hinted that to do so would heighten
dissention within the army itself, with unforeseeable consequences.
The head of state refused to set any date for new elections, or comment on whether HCE members would be permitted to take part in
them. The military regime also attempted to maintain some degree of
continuity with past practices by convening a session of the National
Assembly (over Messaoud Ould Boulkheir’s strong objections) to
inquire into official corruption and the food supply issue. The HCE
also appointed a respected former Mauritanian ambassador to the
EU, Moulay Ould Mohamed Laghdaf, as its new Prime Minister
on 14 August, and on 31 August, selected a new civilian cabinet in
which certain key ministries were left in the hands of those who had
occupied them under President Ould Abdellahi. One month after it
took power, the international reaction remained highly negative, but
domestically there seemed to be a good deal more acceptance: most
observers conceded that an extended period of military governance
lay in Mauritania’s future. It was possible, however, that the military
establishment might wish to retain its privileged position by more
indirect means. Some credence was given to this possible scenario in
late August 2008, when Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall returned to the
country from an extended stay in Europe, leading to speculation that
he could stand for the Mauritanian presidency as a civilian.
CURRENCY. Mauritania’s attainment of independence from France
on 28 November 1960 did not mean the end of its close financial and
other ties to the former mother country, as the new state, led by President Mokhtar Ould Daddah, badly needed the continuing support of
Paris to run its economy and civil administration. From the beginning,
therefore, Mauritania was a member (along with 11 other ex-French
colonies) of the Communauté Financière Africaine (CFA), which
oriented the country’s monetary affairs toward France, since Paris at
the time heavily underwrote the value and the convertibility of the CFA
DAH OULD ABDEL JELIL
• 163
franc. In addition, Mauritania was also a member of the West African
Monetary Union (Union Monétaire Ouest-Africaine; UMOA), which
gave France an additional degree of leverage over the Mauritanian
economy but was a relatively secure arrangement since—somewhat
like its support of the CFA franc—Paris used the UMOA to guarantee
the value of the government’s foreign exchange holdings.
By the late 1960s, membership in the CFA and the UMOA began
to chafe Mauritania, particularly since the country was becoming
flush with additional revenues, including those derived from the extraction of iron ore. In 1971, an extraordinary congress of the ruling
Parti du Peuple Mauritanien (PPM) voted to either renegotiate or
repudiate the various 1960 agreements with France that the country
had signed just before formal independence, including those dealing
with monetary matters. This decision was ratified—unsurprisingly—
in June 1972 at a meeting of the PPM’s Bureau Politique National
(BPN), an organ even more tightly under Mokhtar Ould Daddah’s
control than was the PPM itself. After attempts to renegotiate the
monetary treaty with France failed, Mauritania decided to withdraw
from the CFA franc zone and issue its own currency, to be called the
ouguiya. On 30 June 1973, the financial divorce from Paris became
official, with the ouguiya replacing the CFA franc, although for a
time the ouguiya’s value was fixed in relation to the French franc.
In response to demands from the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) beginning in the late 1980s, however, the
ouguiya, like the currencies of other developing countries, was cut
loose from fixed exchange rates in order to more accurately reflect
its value. As a result, by 2003 the ouguiya was trading with the U.S.
dollar at a rate of approximately 255 to 1; in other words, only a little
more than one-third the value it had in 1992, with a particularly sharp
decline in its value occurring between 1999 and 2001.
–D–
DAH OULD ABDEL JELIL. A longtime member of the Mauritanian
state bureaucracy both during the 1978–1982 period of military rule
and during the later Second Republic, Dah Ould Abdel Jelil was
164 •
DAH OULD ABDEL JELIL
involved in highly controversial activities at least as far back as the late
1980s when, as governor of the Black African–populated province of
Guidimaka, he allegedly helped organize “haratine militias” made up
of “Black Moors,” intended to safeguard Mauritania’s territory from
incursion from the exiled Forces de Libération Africaine de Mauritanie (FLAM). These irregular armed units were quickly implicated
in a variety of human rights abuses, particularly during the time of
the Senegal–Mauritania crisis, which began in April 1989 and rapidly degenerated into a state of near-war between the two neighboring
countries, and which also led to a prolonged period of virtual martial
law in the Senegal River Valley, including Guidimaka.
By the early 1990s Ould Abdel Jelil, a reputed pan-Arabist, was
moved into another governorship, that of the région of DakhletNouadhibou, but beginning on 7 May 1996, he joined the Conseil
des Ministres for the first time, being appointed minister of the interior, replacing the increasingly unpopular (and hard-line) Mohamed
Lemine Salem Ould Dah at a time when the Mauritanian government was showing clear signs of becoming more repressive. But Ould
Abdel Jelil only occupied the top position at the Interior Ministry for
five months, being replaced in October 1996 by Kaba Ould Elewa,
who himself occupied the post for about a year (until December
1997), when a regime stalwart, Col. Ahmed Ould Minnih, took his
place. Then, on 12 July 1998, Ould Abdel Jelil once again became
interior minister, holding on to the position until October 2001. He
presided over this key ministry as it spearheaded a series of increasingly oppressive actions, including the harassment and mistreatment
of dissidents and the more or less continuous censorship of the country’s struggling newspapers. Possibly owing to President Maaouiya
Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya’s strategy of periodically sacrificing certain
unpopular government officials, the head of state fired Ould Abdel
Jelil from the Interior Ministry in October 2001 and appointed him to
the considerably less important post of minister of rural development
and environment. His successor as interior minister was another longtime Ould Taya loyalist, Lemrabott Sidi Mahmoud Ould Cheikh
Ahmed. By early 2002 Ould Abdel Jelil had left the cabinet entirely,
relinquishing the Ministry of Rural Development and Environment to
a relative newcomer, Mustapha Ould Maoloud.
DAKHLET-NOUADHIBOU
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DAKHLA. Virtually the only population center of consequence in
Mauritania’s former portion of Western Sahara (an area it called
Tiris el-Gharbia), Dakhla is situated at the end of a long peninsula
on the desert territory’s 875-kilometer Atlantic coastline. The town
had its origins as the trading and fishing settlement of Villa Cisneros,
founded by Spain in 1884 but largely abandoned after 1895 after the
Spanish suffered attacks by Western Saharan tribesmen. For several
decades thereafter, Villa Cisneros comprised part of Madrid’s colony
of Río de Oro and was almost totally isolated and commercially
unviable—the number of residents often did not exceed 200. The
drought-induced decline in nomadism in Western Sahara after the
1950s, however, brought about an increase in the population, and by
1974, the year Spain conducted its final census, the town had at least
5,413 Western Saharans and 3,000 Europeans by 1974.
By the terms of the Madrid Agreement of 14 November 1975,
Vila Cisneros (which soon reverted to its Arabic name, Dakhla),
fell within the Mauritanian zone of occupation, Western Sahara
having been partitioned between Morocco’s King Hassan II and
Mauritania’s president, Mokhtar Ould Daddah. Ironically, Moroccan troops were the first to enter Dakhla, doing so on 9 January 1976,
three days before the arrival of the Mauritanian armed forces. The
vast majority of the native population fled Dakhla on the outbreak of
war among Morocco, Mauritania, and the proindependence Polisario
Front.
In a secret addendum to the Algiers Agreement of 5 August 1979,
by which Mauritania’s military government made peace with the
Polisario Front and renounced its claims to Western Sahara, it was
stipulated that upon Mauritania’s withdrawal from Tiris el-Gharbia,
the territory would be transferred directly to Polisario control. But
this did not happen. On 6 August, Morocco occupied Dakhla immediately after Mauritania departed and formally annexed it eight
days later.
DAKHLET-NOUADHIBOU. One of Mauritania’s smallest (22,000
square kilometers) yet relatively most prosperous administrative
régions, Dakhlet-Nouadhibou was called Baie du Lévrier by the
French colonial authorities, after the name of its enclosed harbor
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DÉPARTEMENT
formed by the Cape Blanc peninsula, one of the few such protected
shorelines in that area of West Africa. The province has several
sources of economic activity, all centered on the région’s capital,
Nouadhibou. Fishing activity is intense, with fleets from around the
world partaking (not always legally) in the huge numbers of fish that
dwell on the area’s large and shallow continental shelf. The province
is also the terminus of the railway line running from the iron ore
diggings at Zouérate to the Port Minéralier, 10 kilometers south
of Nouadhibou. Merchant shipping also takes advantage of Nouadhibou’s position as one of the only major ports in the vicinity. The
presence of the Parc National du Banc d’Arguin in the province,
along with an improved road that finally linked the cities of Nouadhibou and Nouakchott in the early 21st century, also makes the area
attractive to tourists.
In 2000, the région boasted 79,516 residents, a moderate increase
from the 63,030 reported in 1988 but over three times the 23,000
people living there in 1977. The vast majority lived in or near the
city of Nouadhibou, as the rest of the province consisted of trackless desert wilderness. There were only two notable exceptions: the
settlement of Nouamghar along the Atlantic coast (population 4,151),
which was home to Mauritania’s unique Imraguen fishing tribe, and
Inal (population 1,234), a tiny outpost near the border with Western
Sahara, which was reportedly the scene of major human rights
abuses by the regime of President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed
Taya in 1990–1991.
DÉPARTEMENT. Also called by their Arabic name, Moughataas,
the départements are the former sous-préfectures, serving as the
middle level of local and regional administration in Mauritania, below the régions but above the arrondissements. The départements
were established on 30 July 1968 as part of the sweeping changes
initiated by President Mokhtar Ould Daddah and were identical to
the sous-préfectures except for a few minor adjustments. The chief
administrator in each départment was a préfet who, along with the
civil servants under his direction, was subordinate to the regional
governor, who in turn was appointed directly by the president of the
republic in Nouakchott, preserving the tightly centralized system
inherited from the French colonial period. After the coup d’état of 10
DESERTIFICATION
• 167
July 1978, which displaced Ould Daddah in favor of direct rule by the
country’s armed forces, the départements lost what limited authority they possessed and were placed under the supervision of regional
military commanders, who were answerable only to (if they were not
themselves members of) the Comité Militaire de Redressement
National (CMRN)—during 1978 and 1979—or its successor body,
the Comité Militaire de Salut National (CMSN), which governed
between 1979 and 1992. Under the Mauritanian Second Republic,
inaugurated by President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya on 18
April 1992 and terminated by the military coup d’état of 3 August
2005, the départements, like other local bodies, were revitalized,
although the general organization of Mauritania’s government still
reserved most real power to Nouakchott.
DESERTIFICATION. Arguably the most serious and pervasive
natural phenomenon to affect Mauritania since independence, desertification’s symptoms include the gradual conversion of relatively
fertile grasslands (pasturelands), black-earth agricultural lands, and
even forests into arid or semiarid wastelands upon which crop cultivation or livestock herding is difficult or impossible. In the place
of trees, crops, or bushes anchoring the topsoil, sandy desert moves
in, supporting only a few hardy varieties of plants that usually have
no economic value. Animal life migrates or becomes extinct, and the
human population leaves the land, often permanently, moving to the
cities and towns, a process of urbanization that in turn brings its
own particular difficulties.
Meteorologically, the process of desertification can be traced
through the rainfall pattern, which in the case of Mauritania manifested itself in the movement of the 150 millimeter isohyet line (at
which rainfall is the same amount in a given year) southward by
about 100 kilometers during the 1970s and 1980s, and from which
it had not moved appreciably northward again by the early 21st
century. The cause and permanency of desertification have been disputed among many experts. One school of thought, dire in its predictions, holds that desertified zones, made so by overgrazing, overuse
of lands for agricultural purposes, and general overpopulation, tend
to remain that way indefinitely. Moreover, these experts believe that
droughts (a cyclical and ubiquitous phenomenon throughout Africa
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DESERTIFICATION
as elsewhere) are perpetuated by the existence of desert, which reflects solar energy back into the sky immediately, without the moisture and vegetation-generating carbon dioxide that would eventually
be converted into clouds and rain. In short, the “microenvironment”
created by the desertification of a small area or Sahelian fringe zone
is duplicated and enlarged by climatic processes. If the vegetation
in a particular area has already been denuded by livestock or human
activity, a vicious cycle is established that is extremely difficult to
overcome, and desertification can then be expected to continue until
it claims vast tracts of land or even entire countries.
In the 1990s, however, an alternative theory of desertification was
circulating in the international scientific community. According to
this view, rainfall cycles do produce desert or desertlike conditions,
but once the drought situation improves, grasslands will reestablish
themselves and the desert will be “pushed back.” In the African
context this pattern, some believe, has been present for 10,000 years,
and the 1968–1988 drought period, for example, was merely a periodic oscillation, albeit one exacerbated by overpopulation and poor
land management. This theory, which uses satellite-derived data as
well as long-term climatological observations, holds out rather more
hope that countries like Mauritania will be able to preserve their
pastoral economic sector as wet years alternate with dry spells, leading to more fertile conditions and slowing or stopping the Sahara’s
encroachment.
Whatever the theoretical debates or prospects for the future,
droughts and desertification have had calamitous consequences for
Mauritania. Beginning with the great Sahelian drought of the late
1960s and early 1970s, agricultural output fell drastically and rains
came late if at all. Many thousands of people were driven off their
rural lands and into cities and towns—notably the capital of Nouakchott but also other areas such as Atar and Kiffa—and sand dunes
began to invade hitherto unaffected places in the country. Scarce
water resources, as well as shortages of electricity and petroleum,
made a bad state of affairs worse by forcing many Mauritanians to
use firewood for cooking and heating, taking a huge toll on the trees
in the southern portion of the country in particular, eliminating up
to 80 percent of the forest cover in the Senegal River Valley. This
necessitated a determined—and partially successful—effort to plant
DIAMONDS
• 169
additional trees to stem the desert’s advance. According to one estimate, 21,000 hectares of trees would have had to be planted annually
by the year 2000 just to keep pace with the die-off rate and preserve
existing forests. Netting and selective plantings along particularly
stressed areas, including adjacent to the Mauritanian road network,
have also been attempted. In spite of these efforts, a population symposium held in Nouakchott in 1994 predicted that the Sahara would
advance from 6 to 10 kilometers southward each year for the foreseeable future. This appeared not to have fully occurred by 2008, despite
the plentiful rainfall of the middle and late 1990s having given way
by 2001 to meager rainfall amounts and a disastrous decline in agriculture to near-famine levels.
The expansion of the Sahara, of course, had additional human consequences for Mauritania. Not only did frequent sandstorms have an
adverse impact on the public health situation, but lost incomes and
ways of life (and the resultant psychological stress) exacted incalculable costs upon the populace and the country. Desertification had a
political dimension as well. Increased competition for the remaining
cultivable lands led to increased tensions between the traditional
farmers of the southern provinces (mainly the Halpulaaren and
other Black Africans) and their Moorish (Beydane and haratine)
counterparts, and although this seemed to be in relative decline after
the early 1990s, future conflict over this issue cannot be ruled out
because of the inherently unpredictable character of this climatebased situation. All that may be predicted with any certainty is that
desertification and its attendant problems will continue to be a preoccupation of any Mauritanian government, irrespective of political and
other circumstances.
DIAMONDS. The search for commercially exploitable diamond deposits in Mauritania, in progress since the late 1990s, is an example
of high hopes for added export income being dashed on the shoals
of geological and economic reality, as well as an object lesson in the
tactics of the international diamond trade. Utilizing a Mauritanian
government concession totaling 57,900 square kilometers that they
had been granted a short time earlier, two companies, Ashton Mining of Australia and Rex Diamond Mining of Canada, announced in
1997 that they had discovered diamonds in the north of the country
170 •
DIAMONDS
(in the administrative région of Tiris Zemmour, in a zone known as
the Reguibat Shield) and would soon be in a position to begin experimental extraction. The following year, Ashton and Rex stated that
additional diamonds had been found near Zouérate. Another mining
concern, Dia Met of Canada, soon joined the prospecting efforts in
northern Mauritania.
The year 1999 was particularly eventful for the hoped-for diamond
deposits, but it was also a time when serious questions began to be
raised about the veracity of the diamond companies’ claims. In late
May, Rex and Dia Met announced that prospecting in the Reguibat
Shield would continue, and in December followed this up with the
proclamation of a major find: Rex said that it would invest up to
$12 million over the next six months to explore for diamonds over
its entire concession area, which now totaled about 100,000 square
kilometers (including other concession holders, fully one-fifth of
Mauritania’s total land area—214,000 square kilometers—was open
to diamond prospecting). Ashton Mining and Dia Met also issued
hopeful statements, but these were more cautious in tone, and some
observers soon began to question Rex Mining’s truthfulness, given
that it may have been under pressure to increase its share prices
following its forced exit from Sierra Leone. Rex strongly denied
any impropriety, stating that about 100 diamonds had been found
by early 2000, most of gem quality, and that more and more Kimberlite “pipes” (rock strata potentially containing diamonds) were
being found each time the company resurveyed its concession areas.
Moreover, by January 2001 Ashton Mining had evidently found
17 Kimberlite pipes in northern Mauritania; Rex estimated that in
the Tenoumer area of Tiris Zemmour diamonds were present at the
promising ratio of 0.14 carats per ton of rock; and more companies,
among them BHP Billiton of Australia, the South African–based
De Beers marketing monopoly, and the London-headquartered Rio
Tinto, had joined in the hunt for diamonds along with an American
firm, Brick Capital. However, not a single carat had been exported to
Mauritania’s benefit, although the government did award Rex Mining an additional concession in Tiris Zemmour in October 2002.
Between 2002 and 2006, the early optimism about diamonds
largely evaporated. In May 2004 (long after the supposedly viable
deposits were to have come on-stream), Mauritania granted Dia Met
DIOUF, ABDOU
• 171
Minerals Africa a three-year concession to explore for diamonds over
9,965 square kilometers in Tiris Zemmour and the Adrar, on top of
another license covering nearly 10,000 square kilometers. Here, too,
little in the way of tangible results was forthcoming by 2007, and thus
it became clear that a 2003 study by the World Bank predicting that
Mauritania could earn as much as $10 million per annum by 2005
(and $50 million by 2012) from diamond extraction was unrealistic.
In addition, the World Bank pointed out that even under a best-case
scenario, Mauritania would still rank far behind Africa’s top three
diamond producers, Botswana, South Africa, and Angola.
DIOUF, ABDOU (1935– ). Senegal’s president from 1981 to 2000,
Diouf was educated at the Lycée Faidherbe and the universities of
Dakar, St. Louis, and Paris. He occupied a wide variety of important government positions, including in the ministries of defense,
foreign affairs, and planning and industry. He also served as prime
minister of Senegal from 1970 to 1980 under Léopold Sédar Senghor, the country’s first president and paramount political figure,
and with whom Abdou Diouf became closely associated. In what
was widely noted as being a first in postcolonial African politics,
he peacefully succeeded Senghor as head of state in January 1981.
In contrast to his predecessor’s consistently pro-Moroccan stance
on the Western Sahara conflict, Abdou Diouf pursued a more
evenhanded set of policies toward the Arab Maghreb, balancing
a continued close relationship with King Hassan II with some
consideration of the aims of Western Sahara’s independence movement, the Polisario Front. As far as Mauritania was concerned,
he at first showed a willingness to accommodate the interests of
Senegal’s northern neighbor, expelling from Dakar many Mauritanians belonging to the opposition Alliance pour une Mauritanie Démocratique (AMD) after the organization’s coup attempt
against the government of Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah on 16 March 1981. However, around 1986–1987 President
Diouf displayed a sympathetic attitude toward black Mauritanians
who wished to carry on, from exile, various activities against the
Mauritanian armed forces regime. Most prominently, the Forces
de Libération Africaine de Mauritanie (FLAM) was allowed to
make Dakar its African headquarters.
172 •
DIRECTION D’ÉTUDES ET DE LA DOCUMENTATION
Abdou Diouf, like his Mauritanian counterpart, Col. Maaouiya
Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, was apparently caught off guard by the incidents along the Senegal River border area in early April 1989, which
touched off the Senegal–Mauritania crisis and led to hundreds of
deaths in intercommunal rioting, a massive airlift of persons fleeing
the strife, and mass expulsions of Senegalese from Mauritania and of
mainly Moorish citizens of Mauritania living in Senegal. Over the
next several months, the Ould Taya government and President Diouf
constantly traded accusations that each country was being subjected
to hostile or subversive acts instigated by the other. Abdou Diouf was
not able to resist pressures to sever diplomatic relations with Mauritania on 21 August 1989, but, according to some observers, was able
to disregard the urgings of certain Senegalese, including opposition
leader Abdoulaye Wade, who advocated taking stronger measures,
including military action, against what they perceived as the racist
policies on the part of the Beydane Moors in Mauritania. Eventually,
tensions were partly defused through the vigorous diplomatic intervention of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the Arab
League, and formal ties with Mauritania were reinstated on 22 April
1992. Despite this apparent thaw, “misunderstandings” along the
two countries’ riverine frontier continued well into the 1990s. Abdou
Diouf, however, soon turned his attention to other matters of importance to Senegal’s economy and external relations. He left office on
1 April 2000, after his Socialist Party was defeated in elections by the
Senegalese Democratic Party led by Abdouaye Wade, who became
the country’s third president.
DIRECTION D’ÉTUDES ET DE LA DOCUMENTATION (DED).
Mauritania’s primary intelligence agency, the Department of Research and Information was established after the December 1984 accession to power of Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya as head
of state, replacing the formidable and widely feared Bureau d’Études
et de la Documentation (BED), which had become an instrument of
severe repression under Ould Taya’s predecessor, Col. Mohammed
Khouna Ould Heydallah. Rather little was known about the DED’s
exact level of staffing, collection resources, and budget by the early
21st century (or, for that matter, whether it placed primary reliance
on human- or technology-based methods of gathering information),
DIRECTION GÉNÉRALE DE LA SÛRETÉ NATIONALE
• 173
but it was believed to be tasked with the refinement of raw intelligence gathered not only by the agency itself but also by the Gendarmarie Nationale and intelligence departments (deuxième bureaux)
of the Mauritanian armed forces. Headquartered during the 1990s
in a nondescript two-story building near one of Nouakchott’s largest mosques, the DED was headed during that time by Commandant
(Major) Mohamed Cheikh Ould El-Hady, who was also counselor
to the president during Ould Taya’s tenure. It was unclear to outside
observers exactly what powers of arrest, imprisonment, and interrogation the DED actually possessed, but, like the rest of the Mauritanian security apparatus, the agency was implicated in various human
rights abuses, particularly in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
DIRECTION GÉNÉRALE DE LA SÛRETÉ NATIONALE
(DGSN). One of several Mauritanian agencies charged with the preservation of law and order throughout the country (others including
the Gendarmarie Nationale and the National Guard), the General
Directorate for National Security was primarily an urban-based police force somewhat akin to those found in Europe and North America, thought to number roughly 1,000 members by the mid-1980s.
But comparisons with Western law enforcement could not be carried
very far, because although each préfet and town mayor officially
had jurisdiction over police forces in his locality, in reality all real
power resided with the Director of National Security in the capital,
Nouakchott, a post occupied from 1985 to 2005 by Col. Ely Ould
Mohamed Vall, who was destined to become head of state after his
bloodless overthrow of President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya
on 3 August 2005.
The Mauritanian police possessed formidable powers. For example, they could (and often did, even during the ostensibly more
democratic period of the Second Republic from April 1992 to August 2005) prohibit or disperse demonstrations or meetings and place
individuals under detention, house arrest, or restriction to a particular
area, all with little or no oversight by the country’s judiciary or legal
system. Therefore, it was not wholly surprising that by 2006 many
DGSN personnel stood accused of myriad human rights violations,
whether directed at political dissidents, suspected Black African militants, campaigners against slavery, or others deemed to be engaged
174 •
DJIBRIL OULD ABDELLAHI
in acts loosely defined as either “subversive” or “injurious to the
national unity.”
DJIBRIL OULD ABDELLAHI (1943– ). One of Mauritania’s most
powerful and controversial leaders, he was born Gabriel Cimper in
Kiffa, the son of a French administrator stationed there who converted
to Islam, married a Moorish Mauritanian woman, and adopted the
name Abdellahi. After receiving a primary education in Mauritania,
Gabriel Cimper attended secondary school both in Nouakchott and at
the Lycée Van Vollenhoven in Dakar, Senegal. In 1963, he decided to
become an officer in the country’s fledgling armed forces, and after
graduating from the École d’Application de l’Armée Blindée at St.
Marie, France, he served a stint as a sublieutenant in the city of Atar
from 1964 to 1966. He then traveled once again to France to receive
advanced military training at the École d’Application du Matériel at
Bourg, being awarded a diploma in 1970. As a specialist in administration and logistics, he served the next eight years (until 1978) as the
Mauritanian army’s director of materiel and supply. In the aftermath
of the country’s involvement in the Western Sahara conflict and
the displacement of the civilian regime of Mokhtar Ould Daddah
by a military council, Cimper was promoted to captain in January
1979 and placed in command of the Sixth Military Region, in effect
becoming the military governor of Nouakchott. He remained in that
key post until 1980, when in addition to becoming a commandant
(major) in the armed forces, he was tapped by the chairman of the ruling Comité Militaire de Salut National (CMSN), Col. Mohammed
Khouna Ould Heydallah, to be deputy chief of staff of Mauritania’s
military establishment. After Ould Heydallah successfully put down a
coup attempt by the exiled Alliance pour une Mauritanie Démocratique (AMD) in March 1981, he selected Cimper (on 27 April) to
be minister of the interior, with responsibility for internal security,
a position that included membership in the CMSN itself. In March
1982, he was transferred again, becoming minister of equipment and
transport, occupying that post during the peaceful “restructuring” of
the CMSN that deposed Ould Heydallah in favor of a fellow officer,
Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya. In January 1985, after having been promoted to lieutenant colonel the previous year, Cimper
reassumed the interior portfolio.
DJIBRIL OULD ABDELLAHI
• 175
Continuing his rise to the top of the Mauritanian power structure,
Djibril Ould Abdellahi—the name Cimper increasingly began to
use—was appointed army chief of staff in late 1985, his place as
minister of the interior being taken by a prominent Halpulaar officer, Lt.- Col. Anne Ahmadou Babaly. On 31 August 1986, Ould
Abdellahi’s penchant for firmness toward suspected adversaries of
the CMSN enabled him to recapture the job as interior minister for
the third time, after some members of the governing body had come
to suspect Anne Ahmadou Babaly of laxity in locating the authors
of the controversial pamphlet Manifesto du Négro-Mauritanien
Opprimé, issued by the Forces de Libération Africaine de Mauritanie (FLAM), many members of which were, like Col. Babaly,
Halpulaaren from the sensitive Senegal River Valley. Another officer
with a relatively nonideological outlook, Lt.-Col. Ahmed Ould Minnih, was chosen army chief of staff, leaving Ould Abdellahi free to
conduct a massive search for FLAM militants, a hunt that led in 1987
and 1988 to the arrest, trial, and imprisonment under harsh conditions
of those thought to harbor antigovernment opinions. Throughout
the period when he headed the Interior Ministry (1986–1990), Ould
Abdellahi became the unquestioned second-in-command of the Mauritanian regime, widely known as “Taya’s strongman” and reportedly
cultivating support among the country’s former slaves, the haratines,
in an effort to secure his political base. In March 1989, in addition to
being by now a full colonel, Ould Abdellahi’s position as minister of
the interior was reaffirmed in a cabinet reshuffling.
As one of the CMSN’s most influential members, Djibril Ould
Abdellahi had a major role in the unfolding events of April 1989
that led directly to the Senegal–Mauritania crisis. After a series
of “incidents” in the Senegal River border area had resulted in outbreaks of violence against Mauritanian Moors in Senegal, he flew to
Dakar to hold (unsuccessful) talks with André Sonko, his Senegalese counterpart. For the remainder of 1989, he was perhaps one of
Senegal’s most forceful opponents within the CMSN, urging a hard
line against the government of Abdou Diouf and resisting concessions. But on 4 February 1990, Ould Abdellahi was suddenly and
without explanation dismissed as interior minister, his post being assumed by Lt.-Col. Sidina Mohamed Ould Sidiya. Ould Abdellahi’s
dismissal from the CMSN was announced four days later, followed
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ÉCOLE MILITAIRE INTERARMES D’ATAR
by the news that he had been placed under house arrest in his birthplace of Kiffa.
Intense speculation followed the firing and detention of Ould Abdellahi. Some observers maintained that President Ould Taya had
removed his longtime colleague as a conciliatory gesture toward
Senegal, given that the two countries were hovering dangerously close
to war at this time. Others believed that Ould Abdellahi had lost an
internal power struggle with the pro-Iraq partisans of the Arab Baath
Socialist Party (ABSP), who were eager to use the crisis with Senegal, an upswing in FLAM activity, and heightened ethnic tensions
to move Mauritania further down the road to complete Arabization.
Whatever the actual reasons, Ould Abdellahi was released from detention later in 1990, only to briefly reenter the political scene on 6 June
1991, when he was arrested and jailed along with the leaders of the
semiclandestine, illegal opposition group, the Front Démocratique
Uni des Forces du Changment (FDUC). Along with the FDUC
leaders (with whom he was not associated), Ould Abdellahi was set
free on 29 July 1991. He then devoted himself to a variety of business
ventures both in Nouakchott and Kiffa. A rumored political comeback
in 1995 did not materialize, and by the early 21st century, Djibril Ould
Abdellahi was evidently still living in Kiffa, although his alleged
complicity in the human rights abuses of the Ould Taya regime made
him unpopular among the Mauritanian citizenry at large.
–E–
ÉCOLE MILITAIRE INTERARMES D’ATAR (EMIA). Located
on the outskirts of its namesake city near a former French fort, the
Combined Military Academy of Atar was established in November
1976 after the start of Mauritania’s involvement in the Western Sahara conflict, which necessitated a more rapid pace in the training of
officer candidates for the country’s armed forces. France, the former
colonial power, played a major role in the formation of the EMIA.
Officers went through a two-year course of study, while noncommissioned officers (NCOs) faced only one year of academic work before
assignment. The EMIA taught traditional military subjects, including
tactics, firearms training, engineering, signals, logistics, and general
ECONOMIC COMMUNITY OF WEST AFRICAN STATES
• 177
administration. The academy conducts all training for the Mauritanian armed forces inside the country, except for a small school for
the navy in Nouadhibou.
ECONOMIC COMMUNITY OF WEST AFRICAN STATES
(ECOWAS). One of the most significant regional organizations
in Africa, ECOWAS was established in May 1975 and as of 2008
included Benin, Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta), Cape Verde
(which joined in 1977), Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea
(Conakry), Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria,
Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. From its inception, the goals of
ECOWAS were to gradually promote free trade and the unrestricted
movement of persons within the 16 member states, the harmonization of agricultural and industrial development policies, conflict
resolution and peacekeeping, and similar endeavors. However, by
the late 1990s ECOWAS had suffered the fate of many other such
groupings in Africa and elsewhere. Hamstrung by a lack of funding
from its members and buffeted by varying political and economic
policies, the organization had never achieved more than a fraction of
its objectives. Mauritania, as the only Arabic-speaking North African
member of ECOWAS, was a good example of this; as of 1999 it had
not fully paid its membership dues for more than 16 years and seldom
if ever sent high-level officials to ECOWAS meetings.
Seeking to enhance the standing of the organization, a majority
of the ECOWAS states, beginning in 1993 and ending in December
1998, negotiated a new treaty setting forth broad objectives, including the eventual integration of the armed forces of each member, the
end of most border controls, a common currency to be circulated
throughout West Africa, and freer trade. These measures, ratified at an
ECOWAS conference in Lomé, Togo, on 15 December 1999, generated an immediate response from Mauritania. Speaking to parliament
on 26 December, Prime Minister Cheikh el-Avia Ould Mohamed
Khouna announced that his country would withdraw from the group
and thus—intentionally or not—orient its foreign relations even farther away from sub-Saharan Africa and in the direction of the Arab
Maghreb. Senior Mauritanian officials, when asked about the decision, stated that Mauritania would not submit to having its national
currency, the ouguiya, superseded by a multinational medium of
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ECONOMY
exchange and could not countenance a cessation of frontier controls
because it feared uncontrolled immigration, with an unpredictable
impact on the interethnic balance. The regime also evidently feared a
massive influx of imported goods into the country that could have had
adverse economic consequences.
Although many observers were not surprised by Mauritania’s
pending withdrawal from ECOWAS, given its prior lack of interest
in the organization, reaction from the opposition political parties,
as well as from the Mauritanian business community, was swift
and negative. Ahmed Ould Daddah, the leader of the Union des
Forces Démocratiques (UFD), issued a statement that the withdrawal decision was “a continuation of the systematic destruction
of Mauritania’s historical and natural relations with the rest of the
Arab world, Africa and Europe.” Taking note of the fact that some
300,000 Mauritanians resided in various ECOWAS member countries (where they were prominent in the commercial sector), the UFD
also pointed out that “this unjustified withdrawal will undoubtedly
harm the economic and commercial interests of Mauritanians and
the businessmen who invested in West Africa.” Finally, the statement
urged Arab and African states to “find new factors of rapprochement
and encourage Arab-African unity so as to protect their peoples’ supreme interests.” Expanding on business concerns that a pullout from
ECOWAS would bar the country’s exports from the sub-Saharan African markets in which they were most competitive, one Mauritanian
banker noted that “our products are more competitive in Black Africa
than in the Arab world, where we have nothing to offer. Our future
is with the South.”
The Mauritanian government had already made up its mind, however, and—in accordance with the organization’s charter—its withdrawal from ECOWAS finally took effect in December 2000. Matters stood at this point until late 2007, when it was widely reported
that the country’s new democratically elected civilian president, Sidi
Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi, was actively considering having Mauritania rejoin ECOWAS.
ECONOMY. From the time it gained independence through the early
21st century, the Mauritanian economy has been characterized by all
of the attributes of developing nations in general: a thin infrastruc-
ECONOMY
• 179
ture, dependence on commodity exports, wildly shifting fortunes in
agriculture, and the demands of outside financial institutions such as
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for reforms that generated
their own sets of problems even as they resolved or alleviated others.
Until 1983, Mauritania relied nearly entirely upon iron ore exports
for its foreign exchange income, as the ancient cross-border commerce with Mali, Senegal, and other territories was not amenable to
thoroughgoing regulation (in spite of the establishment in 1966 of the
Société Nationale d’Importation et d’Exportation (SONIMEX) to
bring agriculture, livestock herding, and other parts of the informal
trade under closer state supervision). The fisheries sector was hamstrung, then as always, by regulatory problems; poaching by wellequipped factory ships from the former Soviet Union, Japan, South
Korea, and others; corruption, and poor onshore facilities on Mauritanian shores. Half-hearted attempts at industrial development were
also made, mainly during the 1970s and early 1980s, but these largely
foundered. The lack of a large, skilled workforce and poor roads and
port facilities, along with uncertain domestic market demand, spelled
an end to these schemes by the mid-1980s after inflicting a significant
drain on the budgetary and managerial resources of the state. Another
factor underpinning the fortunes of Mauritania was international aid,
without which the country probably could not have survived, which
emanated from a wide variety of donors, including specific European
countries and the European Union (EU); the People’s Republic of
China (PRC); Japan; and the wealthy Arab League states of the Gulf,
which had expressed a tangible interest in the development of the
Mauritanian economy since the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The partial privatization, starting in the late 1990s, of certain
economic enterprises in Mauritania that had previously been a monopoly of the government, brought to the fore for the first time a
few indigenous entrepreneurs who were willing to invest (usually
in collaboration with foreigners) in such sectors as mining, banking, communications, petroleum, and other aspects of international
trade. However, this was an uneven process at best, as some areas
(electricity and water resources, to take just two examples) generated little interest on the part of either the nascent indigenous private
sector or foreign-based companies. Furthermore, there was always
the suspicion that Mauritanian businesses were competing on an
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EDUCATION
uneven playing field, as tribal, regional, and personal connections to
the top leadership of the country—particularly during the 1984–2005
presidency of Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya—were often
of paramount importance. On top of this, there was a widespread
perception inside Mauritania that “unfair” access to economic opportunities was further skewing the already-wide chasm between the
vast majority of impoverished Mauritanians and the tiny “new class”
of moneyed citizens, a phenomenon for which the World Bank and
IMF as well as the government were widely blamed.
Future prospects for the Mauritanian economy appeared in 2008
just as uncertain as they had been in the prior four decades. Fiscal
problems arising out of lower than expected oil revenues, poor crop
yields, and a more numerous and more urbanized population with
correspondingly more basic needs tended to offset the willingness
of international aid donors to assist the country, which remained
strong, and high commodity prices on the world market, which were
guaranteeing—at least temporarily—a richer revenue stream into the
state’s coffers. Finally, the overarching reality is that Mauritania,
like so many developing states, simply has fewer resources—both
material and human—with which to work than its leaders and people
would have undoubtedly wanted. See also COPPER; CURRENCY;
DIAMONDS; ECONOMIC COMMUNITY OF WEST AFRICAN
STATES (ECOWAS); GOLD; GYPSUM; OUGUIYA; PHOSPHATES; RAILWAYS; TOURISM.
EDUCATION. Mauritania’s system of primary and secondary schooling (and, to a lesser extent, its university-level institutions), characterized since independence by low enrollments, deficient physical
facilities, and shortages of trained teachers and administrators, underwent substantial improvements in the 1990s, including reforms
that made education somewhat less politicized, in the sense that it no
longer served as a prime focus of the Arabization policies pursued
by successive governments. However, it is a historical fact that, until
primary education was made compulsory in June 2001, only a small
proportion of the Mauritanian school-aged population was enrolled
at any given time, in turn contributing to the country’s low overall
literacy rate of less than 50 percent (and substantially lower for
women). In addition, the great size of Mauritania and the distances
EDUCATION
• 181
separating its cities and towns meant that secondary and vocational
schools often were obliged to board their students, at additional
expense. Before independence, virtually the entire Mauritanian
educational system consisted of Islamic schools, which instructed
their pupils from an early age, often in places such as Boutilimit,
Nouakchott, Oualata, and Tidjikja, utilizing substantial libraries
of Muslim texts, a dedicated faculty, and private sources of funding. But a curriculum based on the Koran—although it retained its
popularity into the early 21st century, often with international aid
from other Arab/Islamic states—was not sufficient to ensure a skilled
workforce or cultivate a well-rounded intelligentsia. In 1966, an indigenous Mauritanian secular college to train future civil servants,
the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), opened its doors. In
the mid-1980s, the Institut Supérieur Scientifique opened, providing
instruction not only in traditional sciences such as physics, biology,
and chemistry, but also in modern languages and computer science. In 1982, a technological training school, the Centre Supérieur
d’Enseignement Technique (CSET), was founded in Nouakchott, and
a teacher training school, the École Normale Supérieure, was established as early as 1970. Higher Islamic studies were the province of
the Institut Supérieur des Études et Recherches Islamiques (ISERI),
a cultural studies syllabus was founded at Nouakchott’s Institut Ben
Abass, and the country’s fisheries sector trained students in marine
biology and oceanography at the École Nationale de l’Enseignement
Maritime et des Pêches, also located in the capital city. Finally, the
École Nationale de Formation et Vulgarisation Rurale (ENFVR),
located in the southern city of Kaédi, trained students for careers
in the agricultural and livestock areas, and the École Militaire
Interarmes d’Atar (EMIA), located in its namesake northern city,
provided training for the Mauritanian armed forces, often in collaboration with outside instructors such as those from France, Spain,
and the United States.
At the top of Mauritania’s educational hierarchy was the country’s
only institution of general higher learning, the University of Nouakchott. Founded in 1981, it had three faculties: law and economics,
letters and humanities, and science and technology. Closely patterned
after the French system of higher education, it awarded a general
diploma after two years of study, and after two additional years, a
182 •
EDUCATION
specialized degree that could be in law, the natural sciences, economics, management, or the humanities. With a faculty of about 70
and a student body of somewhat over 9,000 in 1999, the university
was established primarily for nationalistic reasons, but the budgetary toll was considerable, as some estimates put the cost of accommodating a student at university level inside Mauritania itself at 250
percent more than simply sending him or her abroad to study. The
vast majority of funds for all educational institutions came from the
government, but private schools were not forbidden, and several soon
established themselves, mainly in Nouakchott, Nouadhibou, and a
few other locations. But a lack of money and other difficulties in
Mauritanian education continued to manifest themselves in official
statistics, which showed that by 2004 only 2.8 percent of the population had graduated from secondary school, and that only a minuscule
1.5 percent had a university or technical degree. Enrollment in primary education (levels 1 through 6) rose greatly, from 197,202 pupils
in 1991 to 394,400 in 2002 (partly because of new laws enacted in
2001, which provided for fines for parents who refused to send their
sons and daughters to school), but matters deteriorated from that
point onward, as only 14 percent of the relevant Mauritanian age
group was enrolled in secondary school, although these numbers also
increased, from 37,912 in 1991 to 83,098 in 2002. At the university
level, 10,400 students were enrolled by 2002, an even smaller segment of the population at large. Although the regime led from 1984
to 2005 by President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya committed
itself in January 2002 to spend $49 million on education over the
following decade, this came at the end of a period during which the
percentage of the total budget devoted to education fell from 21.1
percent (in 1991) to 13 percent (in 2000).
Aside from the recurrent problems over staffing, enrollment,
administration, and curriculum, the most controversial aspect of
Mauritania’s schools has been the use of Hassaniyya Arabic as the
language of instruction. This emphasis began in 1966, when the
country’s first head of state, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, decreed that
Arabic would be mandatory in all public schools beyond the primary
level. This change was considered essential by the Moorish populace,
because under colonial rule the use of Arabic was officially discouraged in favor of French, ensuring that upon independence in 1960, a
EDUCATION
• 183
preponderance of the new nation’s educated men and women (as well
as teachers) were not Arabic speaking. Ould Daddah’s new policy
angered some Mauritanians of Black African extraction, however,
who felt not only that African languages such as Fulani, Sarakolé,
and Wolof were being shortchanged, but also that French was being
deemphasized as well—a language that, in spite of the negative connotations attached to it due to colonialism, was a major international
tongue that many citizens needed for professional advancement. But
Arabization in education continued to be the rule throughout the
1970s and 1980s, although some retreat from it was evident from
1980 to 1984, when then-president Mohammed Khouna Ould
Heydallah set up an Institute of National Languages to train teachers and produce public school textbooks in traditional Black African
languages, as well as making use of another innovation, the Structures pour l’Education des Masses (SEM), to promote literacy
among adults. These steps did not, to be sure, mollify more militant
Black African groups such as the Forces de Libération Africiane
de Mauritanie (FLAM), whose Manifesto du Négro-Mauritanien
Opprimé castigated Arabization in the educational sector. By the
time Maaouiya Ould Taya assumed power in December 1984, the
Arab point of view was back in full prominence, with the Ministry of
Education often staffed with hard-line Arab nationalists or followers
of the Arab Baath Socialist Party (ABSP).
By the late 1990s, some changes in official attitudes could be
discerned. Arab nationalists at the University of Nouakchott—
including members of a pan-Arab political party, the Alliance
Populaire Progressiste (APP)—were weeded out of some positions
of responsibility, and in April 1999 the minister of education (and
future prime minister), S’ghair Ould M’Barek, unveiled some the
most radical reforms to Mauritanian education since 1960. Under
these proposals (which were codified as Ordinance 99–012 of 26
April 1999 and enacted in time for the 1999–2000 academic year),
Arabic would be taught as the sole language only for the first year
of primary school, with both French and Arabic being taught concurrently from the second year onward, especially for scientific and
technical subjects, where Arabic was perceived as being deficient.
All secondary and university students (with the probable exception
of those pursuing exclusively Islamic studies) would be instructed
184 •
EL-FASSI, MOHAMMED ALLAL
in French and English only, with Fulani, Sarakolé, and Wolof being
relegated solely to the university level. The reforms met with some
opposition among Black Africans (although they were pleased at
the reemphasis on French, they disliked the distinctly second-class
status given their native tongues), and also among Arab nationalists,
who saw Arabization in education as potentially on the wane. But
the government explained that the changes were essential to enable
Mauritanians to make their way in an increasingly “globalized”
world, and for the time being at least, it appeared as though the intense national debates on the proper place of Arabic in the country’s
schools had taken second place to improving the educational system
generally.
EL-FASSI, MOHAMMED ALLAL (1907–1974). A prominent Moroccan politician in the 1950s and 1960s and leader of the Istiqlal
(Independence) Party, el-Fassi originated the concept of a “Greater
Morocco,” based on the alleged historical ties between the Alawite
monarchy and areas lying to the south of present-day Morocco. In
practice, this meant that el-Fassi advocated the absorption into the
Moroccan state of not only all of Mauritania, but also the adjacent
Spanish colony of Western Sahara, large tracts of the Algerian Sahara including the strategic town of Tindouf, the Spanish enclaves of
Ceuta and Melilla on Morocco’s Mediterranean coast, and even parts
of Mali far to the southeast. El-Fassi’s views did not at first find great
acceptance among the Moroccan public, but because the Istiqlal was
an important competitor to the fledgling regime of King Mohammed
V, the monarch felt he could not be outmaneuvered on nationalistic
grounds, and so embraced many of el-Fassi’s positions.
The specter of a possible Moroccan move against Mauritania was
a source of constant concern to President Mokhtar Ould Daddah
following his country’s independence in November 1960 and greatly
affected his foreign relations posture for a decade. In the late 1960s,
Mohammed V’s son and successor, King Hassan II, who had also
adopted the “Greater Morocco” ideology, gradually softened his
opposition to Mauritania’s existence after he saw international and
Arab League support for his territorial designs crumbling. As a
result, King Hassan established diplomatic relations with Mauritania
in April 1970. El-Fassi, along with the rest of the Istiqlal ultranation-
EL-HOR
• 185
alists, vehemently opposed this rapprochement, but King Hassan’s
political position by that time was such that he could afford to ignore
them.
EL-HOR (Arabic: “Free Man”). A semiclandestine organization
claiming to represent the interests of Mauritania’s freed slave class,
the haratines, as well as opposing the persistence of slavery within
the country. El-Hor was founded in 1974 by a group of intellectuals and officers in the armed forces who were dissatisfied with the
policies of President Mokhtar Ould Daddah on the slavery issue
and who blamed the Mauritanian head of state for not allocating sufficient resources to address the needs of haratines, especially the provision of agricultural land. In addition, El-Hor demanded the total
and effectively enforced abolition of slavery, compensation for those
enslaved, new labor laws to prevent exploitation of haratines by their
Beydane Moor owners, increased social services and educational
opportunities, and full acceptance by White Moor society of haratine
cultural identity, even though most Black Moors had adopted the
Arab way of life over a span of many years.
El-Hor’s early years were devoted both to the distribution of pamphlets and word-of-mouth agitation, but although the organization
was not subjected to severe repression by President Ould Daddah, it
initially made little progress toward its goal of achieving mass support, with some observers blaming this on apathy and indifference on
the part of the haratines themselves, as well as the great distances and
difficult communications within Mauritania. Beginning in late 1978,
however, the group assumed greater prominence, staging a protest
march in Nouakchott’s cinquième (fifth) district in November after
two escaped slaves were detained by police pending a possible return to their owner. In August 1979, antislavery slogans, written by
El-Hor supporters, were displayed on placards in Nouakchott during
a rally celebrating Mauritania’s signing of the Algiers Agreement,
which marked the end of the country’s involvement in the Western
Sahara conflict. These two public displays elicited no significant
government response, but this was soon to change under the rule
of Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah, who assumed full
power as head of the governing Comité Militaire de Salut National
(CMSN) in January 1980. Spurred on by the attempted sale of a
186 •
EL-HOR
young slave woman in a public marketplace in Atar in February
1980—an event that generated a 300-strong demonstration in the
city’s streets—El-Hor stepped up its efforts, holding protests on 14
March not only in Nouakchott but in Nouadhibou and Rosso as well.
Ould Heydallah then struck hard at the organization, briefly jailing
about 100 of its members and forcing certain others into exile. But
in his characteristic fashion, the Mauritanian leader also sought to
satisfy some of El-Hor’s demands. The CMSN thus issued a statement, dated 5 July 1980, abolishing slavery in the country, followed
on 9 November 1981 by a decree (Ordinance 81.234) formalizing
the abolition, although it also specified that slave owners had a right
to compensation, something that greatly angered El-Hor and others.
A similiarly conciliatory move with respect to haratine interests was
made on 5 June 1983, when a new Land Reform Act was promulgated, a controversial law that was intended to increase farming opportunities for former slaves.
Despite these substantial measures, El-Hor remained mostly underground, and its fortunes declined in the 1980s. Never seeking full
identification with any larger organization, it nonetheless loosely
attached itself to two other groups from 1981 to 1984, the Alliance
pour une Mauritanie Démocratique (AMD) and the Mouvement
National Démocratique (MND). El-Hor, along with the AMD and
MND, publicly welcomed the accession to power on 12 December
1984 of Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya in a bloodless coup
that ousted the repressive and erratic Ould Heydallah. Until the early
1990s it carried out its activities primarily as a “current” or “tendency” within other groups, a process assisted by the appointment of
El-Hor members such as Messaoud Ould Boulkheir to high-level
government posts. Beginning in 1991, however, El-Hor formally attached itself to Ahmed Ould Daddah’s Union des Forces Démocratiques (UFD) as a tactic to improve its visibility and viability within
what became Mauritania’s main opposition political party during
the early years of the ostensibly more pluralistic Second Republic.
But Ahmed Ould Daddah’s leadership of the UFD had a polarizing
effect, and on 6 June 1994, El-Hor announced it was leaving the
UFD, citing an “excessive centralization of power” on the part of its
leader. In addition, El-Hor itself suffered a schism at this time, as a
prominent member of the group, Boubacar Ould Messaoud, left to
ELY OULD MOHAMED VALL
• 187
form his own antislavery organization, SOS-Esclaves. For its part,
El-Hor (with Ould Boulkheir as its head) spent about a year in the
political wilderness before it teamed up with various other opposition
currents and personalities to form, on 22 August 1995, Action pour
le Changement (AC), which soon evolved into Mauritania’s most
significant and most broadly based political party, which opposed
President Ould Taya. However, El-Hor was to again find itself out in
the cold after 3 January 2002, when the AC was formally banned by
the regime, supposedly for fomenting “racism” and “dissension” but
also shortly after it had scored impressive electoral gains both in the
country’s municipal councils and in the lower house of parliament,
the Assemblée Nationale. Ould Boulkheir’s attempt to reconstitute
the AC under a new name, Convention pour le Changement (CC),
having proved unsuccessful in the summer of 2002, a few months
later El-Hor affiliated itself with a smaller opposition political party,
the Alliance Populaire Progressiste (APP). Ould Boulkheir became
president of the APP in 2004.
ELY OULD MOHAMED VALL (1953– ). A high-ranking officer in
the Mauritanian armed forces, he led the bloodless coup d’état of 3
August 2005 against President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya.
Ely Ould Mohamed Vall was born on 1 January 1953 in western
Mauritania (perhaps in Trarza province) and was the son of a businessman and a member of the Moorish Oulad Bou Sbaa tribe. After
attending primary school in Mauritania (including a stint at a Frenchrun institution in Nouakchott that catered to the children of military
personnel), Ould Vall, sometime around 1966, chose a career in the
Mauritanian army, attaining his baccalauréat in 1973 after studying
in France at the military academies located in Le Mans and Aix-enProvince. He went on to receive a law degree from the University of
Nouakchott as well as attending the Moroccan military academy at
Meknès. After completing his academic training in 1976, Ould Vall
was thrust almost immediately into the Western Sahara conflict,
which from 1975 until 1979 pitted Mauritania’s army against the
guerrillas of the Polisario Front. During the Saharan war, he occupied
postings in such sensitive northern locations as Ain Ben Tili, Ouadane (about 100 kilometers northeast of Chinguetti), Bir Moghrein,
and Atar. In July 1978, the future president waded into political
188 •
ELY OULD MOHAMED VALL
affairs for the first time, playing a significant (yet probably minor)
role in the overthrow of President Mokhtar Ould Daddah and his
replacement by the Comité Militaire de Redressement National
(CMRN), headed by Col. Mustapha Ould Mohammed Salek, the
army’s chief of staff.
From 1979 to 1984—a turbulent time in Mauritanian affairs—
Ould Vall, by now a commandant (major) in the army, was rewarded
for his loyalty to successive military heads of state, first by being
made commander of the country’s ninth military region centered in
the border town of Rosso and subsequently by being given the command of the all-important sixth region encompassing Nouakchott and
its environs. On 12 December 1984, Ould Vall once more entered the
political fray when he played an active part in deposing the increasingly erratic president, Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah,
and replacing him with Col. Ould Taya. His continued loyalty to the
military hierarchy earned him a major promotion in November 1985,
when he was elevated to the rank of colonel and appointed director
of national security, a position that placed him near the pinnacle of
power in Mauritania. He was outranked only by Col. Ould Taya
and, probably, the powerful interior minister from 1985 to 1990,
Col. Djibril Ould Abdellahi. His new job brought with it, among
other things, the leadership of the Direction Générale de la Sûreté
Nationale (DGSN), the country’s formidable police force. Over the
next several years, Ely Ould Mohamed Vall’s name would gradually
become known as a suspected perpetrator or accomplice of the severe
human rights violations that were inflicted upon many opponents
of the government at a time of high political tension, including—but
not limited to—alleged members of the outlawed Forces de Libération Africaine de Mauritanie (FLAM), against whom Ould Vall
consistently advocated a hard line. According to a 1994 report by the
Washington-based group Human Rights Watch, Ould Vall was also
complicit in a “massacre” that took place in late 1990, in which perhaps several hundred Black African army personnel and other regime
critics were murdered at various military garrisons, including at the
J’reida base north of Nouakchott and the remote Inal barracks near
the border with Western Sahara.
Attempting to rally from a period of domestic disarray and isolation in foreign relations due to his perceived support for Iraqi Presi-
ELY OULD MOHAMED VALL
• 189
dent Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, President Ould Taya
initiated an ostensibly more democratic Second Republic in April
1992 after he won election as civilian head of state. Throughout the
remainder of Ould Taya’s presidency, however, the security organs
headed by Col. Ould Vall did not lose any of their authority, and
after a period of relative leniency that lasted until about 1997, the
state once again became highly repressive, repeatedly imprisoning
and mistreating dissenting elements in general and suspected FLAM
militants and members of a legal political party, Action pour
le Changement (AC), in particular. Censorship of the country’s
newspapers also became more frequent, and Ould Taya’s decision
in July 1999 to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel added
fuel to the growing dissatisfaction among the populace. Moreover,
the start of the 21st century brought with it renewed concerns about
Mauritania’s overall direction, with matters such as the allocation of
future petroleum revenues, the apparent monopolization of lucrative
business positions by President Ould Taya’s Semasside tribal kinsmen, and presidential neglect of the military figuring prominently.
The country also suffered two additional sharp blows. The coup attempt of 8–9 June 2003, led by ex-Capt. Saleh Ould Hanena, came
very close to unseating Ould Taya, and a brutal attack on 4 June
2005 by the Algerian-based militant Islamic Groupe Salafiste pour
la Prédication et le Combat (GSPC) killed at least 15 Mauritanian
soldiers at the Lemgheity outpost in Tiris Zemmour province. This
attack raised many alarms, and the fruitless search for the GSPC
guerrillas—which apparently extended into neighboring Mali—gave
rise to additional disappointment on the part of Col. Ould Vall and
some of his colleagues, who reportedly began planning the overthrow
of President Ould Taya at about this time.
Early on the morning of 3 August 2005, while Ould Taya was in
Saudi Arabia attending the funeral of King Fahd, Col. Ould Vall, assisted critically by Col. Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz, the commander
of the Bataillon de la Sécurité Présidentielle (BASEP), occupied
the presidential palace in Nouakchott, the state radio and television
station, and other key installations peacefully within the course of
only a few hours. Ould Vall and his backers encountered resistance
only from the commanders of the Gendarmarie Nationale and the
army parachute battalion, but this was overcome nonviolently by
190 •
ENTENTE MAURITANIENNE
noon on 3 August, and their leaders were placed under arrest. The
August coup, which ushered in a period of “transitional” governance
by the Conseil Militaire pour la Justice et la Démocratie (CMJD)
headed by Ould Vall and 16 other top-ranking officers, was generally
well-received by the Mauritanian public, who cheered the end of the
often-oppressive 21-year rule of Maaouiya Ould Taya and seemed
inclined to take the new president at his word when he declared in a
televised address on the day of the coup that the CMJD would hold
office for no longer than two years, pending new elections and the inauguration of a democratic, civilian government. As events unfolded,
this promise was kept. Mauritanian voters approved amendments to
the country’s 1991 constitution restricting future heads of state to
two five-year terms, and in late 2006 and early 2007 parliamentary
elections placed opposition and independent political figures in a
stronger position. Finally, the presidential election of 11 and 25
March 2007 resulted in the victory of Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh
Abdellahi, the end of CMJD rule, and the beginning of Mauritania’s
so-called Third Republic on 19 April 2007. Ely Ould Mohamed
Vall then retired from the army (although most of his CMJD colleagues kept their army posts), and there was persistent speculation
almost as soon as President Ould Abdellahi was elected that Ould
Vall would be a candidate in the next round of presidential balloting
scheduled for 2012, there being no legal or constitutional prohibition
against him doing so.
ENTENTE MAURITANIENNE. Mauritania’s first political party
was formed in mid-1946 under the auspices of the French Socialist
Party, among whose members was the future president of Senegal,
Léopold Sédar Senghor. The party remained loosely organized
and without real mass support throughout its existence, a state of
affairs some observers ascribed to the personality of its first leader,
Horma Ould Babana, an ardent supporter of Moorish interests and
an advocate of either expanded ties to, or integration with, Morocco.
Immediately after its formation, the Entente decisively defeated a
French candidate (Ould Babana received 6,076 votes out of a total of
9,611 in November 1946) and thus achieved the distinction of being
the first purely Mauritanian group to sit in the French National Assembly. However, Ould Babana chose to spend most of his five-year
ENVIRONMENT
• 191
parliamentary term in Paris rather than in Mauritania, with the unsurprising result that he was isolated from the currents of the territory’s
politics.
Various tribal and regional interests, fearing the Entente’s nationalist platform, founded the Union Progressiste Mauritanienne (UPM)
in February 1948. In 1951, Ould Babana lost his seat in the French
Assembly to a UPM candidate and then went into self-imposed exile
in Dakar, Senegal. After this, the Entente went into permanent eclipse.
Horma Ould Babana tried to win a seat in the French-sponsored Conseil Général in 1956 but lost heavily, polling fewer than 20,000 votes
out of more than 100,000 ballots cast. Again, Ould Babana chose exile
and eventually ended up in Morocco, where he actively supported
the “Greater Morocco” aspirations of Mohammed Allal el-Fassi. In
retaliation for this, the other members of the Entente Mauritanienne
expelled him from the party. Those elements of the Entente who had
fallen out with Ould Babana subsequently agreed, at the Congress of
Aleg in February 1958, to merge their organization with the UPM and
a few other smaller parties, with the new group to be called the Parti
de Regroupement Mauritanien (PRM), headed, as was the UPM,
by the country’s paramount politician and future president, Mokhtar
Ould Daddah.
ENVIRONMENT. Viewed in the broadest possible sense, the people
of Mauritania have always been largely at the mercy of their natural
environment. A mostly dry and hot climate (except for the Senegal
River Valley, where moister conditions prevailed, although at the
cost of increased hazards to the health of the persons residing there),
historically scarce water resources throughout most of the country,
and the role that Mauritania’s endemic poverty played in amplifying
the effects of whatever natural disasters did occur, all conspired to
make the environmental setting stressful and unpromising even without human intervention. But a thin economic base, official and private corruption and misconduct, and the imperatives of providing the
country with at least a modicum of development all militated against
the evolution of an environmental consciousness until (at least) the
closing years of the 20th century. As a result of this neglect of the
environment, sanitary conditions in most of Mauritania were very
poor, with irregular refuse collection common even in the center of
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Nouakchott. Moreover, trash and abandoned vehicles often littered
the roads and open spaces in and near the capital city, and Nouakchott was sometimes hit with cholera epidemics due to the presence
of untreated human and other wastes. Mining operations and other
economic activities were carried out with almost total disregard for
their environmental effects.
The operation of a gold mining endeavor near the town of Akjoujt
in 1992–1996 was typical of the inattention successive governments
and private business interests gave to the environment. Seeking to
extract gold from the waste tailings of a former copper mine, a partly
state-owned company, Mines d’Or d’Akjoujt (MORAK), was formed
for this purpose. It soon came to light that it was using a variety of
highly toxic chemicals to extract the gold ore, allegedly causing the
deaths of many goats and other livestock, migrating birds, and at least
one worker by July 1992. Moreover, MORAK utilized a plastic-lined
retention pond to store the hazardous runoff from the plant (which
was situated close to Akjoujt’s drinking water supply), and evidently
disregarded warnings that the area’s periodically heavy rainfall could
send toxic materials cascading through the surrounding land. Resentment and fear of the operation grew steadily among the local populace (feelings only worsened by the fact that MORAK paid no taxes
and had made no effort to rebuild any of the infrastructure left behind
years before by the copper mining operator), and an official inquiry
was mounted that largely found the protests valid. Remediation of the
problem, however, proved to be difficult. The Mauritanian weekly
newspaper Mauritanie Nouvelles, which had first exposed the pollution at the gold mine, criticized the company’s erection of fences
around the site and the provision of free drinking water to Akjoujt as
part of a “vast charm offensive” that would not meaningfully reduce
the hazards. It also stated that employees had been dismissed for
complaining about their health problems, government officials had
restricted the flow of information about MORAK’s activities, and
Akjoujt’s medical director had been transferred to Nouakchott after
repeatedly suggesting that all mine employees be screened for illness.
These complaints apparently continued right up to the time the gold
mine was closed in early 1996.
In June 2000, there was finally some indication that official attitudes toward the environment were changing, albeit very slowly.
FAIDHERBE, LOUIS
• 193
On World Environment Day during that year, the Ministry of Rural
Development and Environment proposed a new law that would require impact studies on various kinds of hazardous materials for the
first time, and provided for fines and other penalties in the event of
violations. Significantly—and especially so for the mining sector—a
prime requirement of the new law was to mandate the return of any
affected areas to their natural state after the end of any extraction
activity. It remained very much to be seen whether any Mauritanian
government—civilian or military—could or would wholeheartedly
enforce these rules, let alone ameliorate the environmental impacts of
urbanization in the Nouakchott area and elsewhere, but by the early
21st century, there were signs that a few of the country’s citizens
were interested in the environment. In January 2001, Mohamed Ould
Dellahi formed a new group, the Parti Mauritanien pour la Défense
de l’Environnement (PMDE). It explicitly modeled itself after the
“Green” parties of Western Europe and North America. Ould Dellahi, reportedly, harbored no illusions about the PMDE’s potential
for electoral success against the entrenched (until August 2005) Parti
Républicain, Démocratique et Social (PRDS), nor about rapidly
changing long-complacent attitudes, but the party’s formation was
a small sign that Mauritania in the future might be obliged to pay
at least some attention to environmental conditions in its territory.
See also ORGANISATION POUR LA MISE EN VALEUR DU
FLEUVE SÉNÉGAL (OMVS).
–F–
FAIDHERBE, LOUIS (1818–1889). As French colonial governor of
Senegal from 1854 to 1861 and again from 1863 to 1865, Louis Faidherbe played a major role in early attempts by France to penetrate
and “pacify” modern-day Mauritania. Like his counterpart almost
half a century later, Xavier Coppolani, he advocated indirect rule as
the best approach to the territory’s governance and suggested leaving in place traditional Mauritanian institutions. Almost as soon as
he arrived in Dakar, Faidherbe, under orders from Paris, militarily
conquered great portions of the modern provinces of Brakna and
Trarza, and successfully defended the border town of St. Louis from
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a counterattack by Moorish tribesmen in 1856. He forced the defeated Moors to recognize French sovereignty over the north bank of
the Senegal River, although the relevant areas were mostly left with
only a very thin European presence. After these military victories,
Faidherbe turned his attention to mapping and surveying Brakna and
Trarza and publishing his observations. His surveys also extended
farther north into the Adrar, which he (correctly) believed would be
the focus of any future effort by France to fully occupy Mauritania.
F’DERIK. The administrative center of Mauritania’s vast northern
région of Tiris Zemmour, F’Derik was known during the French colonial period as Fort Gouraud, named after General Henri Gouraud,
who in the early 20th century successfully “pacified” the area. (See
ADRAR CAMPAIGN.) After Mauritanian independence in 1960,
the town found itself largely overshadowed by the nearby iron ore
mining center of Zouérate. A Mauritanian government census in
2000 put F’Derik’s population at only 4,431.
FISHERIES. The Atlantic waters off Mauritania’s 754-kilometer
coastline are home to an almost bewildering variety and quantity of
fish, which since independence have underpinned one of the nation’s
two most critical industries, the other being iron ore extraction. As a
general rule, the aquatic life inhabiting the sea floor (demersal fish)
is most highly prized by consumers, while the fish that swim the
seas more freely (pelagic species) are both more plentiful and less
difficult to catch. Demersal varieties in Mauritania include octopus,
cod, squid, shrimp, sole, and lobster. The number of pelagic species
is also high and includes mackerel, trout, tuna, and herring, among
many others. But despite this huge abundance of a major renewable
resource, the exploitation of these fisheries has been fraught with
problems for decades, difficulties that if anything have intensified
since the 1980s. More than any other factor, overfishing and outright
poaching by either Mauritanians or (especially) foreign interests have
threatened future supplies of fish (and the country’s lack of an effective navy and coast guard has aggravated the situation), although a
lack of suitable infrastructure and a very small domestic market for
fish have been secondary factors. In addition, Mauritania has suffered
from an almost total lack of a maritime tradition, with only the small
FISHERIES
• 195
Imraguen tribe engaging in fishing as a vocation. The resulting reliance on foreigners for expertise, vessels, and other equipment has led
to enormous losses for the fragile Mauritanian economy.
For about the first two decades after independence (1960 to
1979), Mauritania depended on a patchwork of individual licensing
agreements with mainly European fishing fleets, but this policy was
never successful, for several reasons. In the first place, many foreign
interests—beginning a pattern destined to extend over many years—
simply ignored license requirements and stationed their boats beyond
the 30 nautical mile limit of Mauritanian sovereignty, or else violated
the legal limit with impunity. Second, shore facilities for storing and
processing fish were inadequate during this period, with the national
fisheries center of Nouadhibou even lacking a dependable supply of
electricity at the time. Furthermore, Nouadhibou offered few amenities to the overseas crews of fishing vessels, which almost invariably
preferred Las Palmas in the Spanish-administered Canary Islands as
a place to rest after their long and difficult tours of duty. Las Palmas
also had better facilities for storing and processing the catch, and for
this reason Nouadhibou never seriously challenged its preeminent
position, because the northern Mauritanian coastal city could only
accommodate 50,000–80,000 tons of fish per year. Still, it was a
measure of the sheer plentitude of fish off Mauritania that the fisheries sector became the second largest segment of the economy almost
immediately after 1960.
Urgently seeking increased revenues in the wake of Mauritania’s
disastrous involvement in the Western Sahara conflict between
1975 and 1979, the ruling Comité Militaire de Salut National
(CMSN) took several significant steps in 1979 to rehabilitate the
fishing business. After issuing a decree that extended its territorial
waters outward to form a 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone
(EEZ), President Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah largely
scrapped the old individual licensing arrangements with overseas
fleets and instead mandated that interested outside parties form joint
ventures with his government. Some of the most important joint stock
companies, formed mostly in the late 1970s, were the Compagnie
Mauritanio-Coréenne de Pêche (COMACOP) with South Korea, the
Mauritanienne-Soviétique des Ressources Maritimes (MAUSOV)
with the former Soviet Union, the Société Algéro-Mauritanienne des
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Pêches (ALMAP) with Mauritania’s close ally Algeria, the Société
Arabe Libyenne des Pêches (SALIMAUREM) with Libya, the Société Arabe Mauritano-Irakienne de Pêche (SAMIP) with Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq, and the Société Industrielle Mauritano-Roumaine de
Pêche (SIMAR) with Romania, which by itself accounted for about
15–18 percent of total fish exports between 1985 and 1987. Even
though these arrangements were often little more than a façade owing to the fact that international aid donors often lent Mauritania
the funds needed to establish them, the effort had the desired effect.
Business increased almost at once, thousands found gainful employment in the fisheries sector, and Mauritanians began to overcome
their traditional aversion to working in maritime-related fields.
Although pelagic fish were not yet subjected to any real degree of
regulation, demersal fish, by virtue of a government edict in 1983,
had to be offloaded in Nouadhibou, where they would be marketed
by the state-operated Société Mauritanienne de Commercialisation du Poisson (SMCP), which held a legal monopoly on the valuable demersal trade that was often ignored. A second agency (also
owned by the government), the Société Frigorifiques Mauritaniens
(SOFRIMA), undertook to improve refrigeration and storage facilities in and near Nouadhibou. Together these measures did result in
fisheries revenues outstripping iron ore proceeds beginning in 1983,
with pelagic species accounting for approximately 80 percent of the
total catch by 1987. But there were still many problems. Nouadhibou’s infrastructure continued to compare unfavorably to that of Las
Palmas, corruption was always present, larger trawlers and factory
ships still could not use the Nouadhibou harbor, and up to 10,000
tons of fish were still being taken illegally every year during most
of the 1980s. With difficulties multiplying, the regime headed after
December 1984 by Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya tried to
enhance the sector’s attractiveness. A new ship repair yard in Nouadhibou was opened in 1989 after Saudi Arabia advanced funds for its
construction, and the SMCP monopoly was ended in the early 1990s.
In addition, the Senegal–Mauritania crisis, which began in April
1989 and resulted in an influx into Mauritania of thousands of Moors
who had formerly resided in Senegal, helped the fishing sector due to
many displaced persons finding jobs therein.
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But it did not take long for the negative factors in Mauritania’s
fisheries to reappear. By the early 1990s, catches had began to decline
(mackerel was a particularly poor performer, with a 75 percent decline
over 20 years previously), and in early 1994 the European Union
(EU) banned the export of fish landed in Mauritania from European
markets, owing to inadequate sanitary conditions at cold storage
warehouses located in Nouadhibou and Nouakchott. A similar EU
ban was imposed for two months in the spring of 1996; both actions
highlighted the parlous state of Mauritania’s fishing-related facilities.
In May 1994, a dispute with the Russian Federation (the successor
to the Soviet Union) brought the formerly profitable MAUSOV joint
venture to the brink of collapse, as Russia insisted on not landing its
catch on Mauritanian shores (instead, its massive factory ships, implicated in countless acts of poaching, tended to return directly home
after the fish harvest), and two fully laden Russian vessels sailed away
from the country owing some $360,000 in fees, taking with them
any short-term prospects of further revenues from Moscow. Also,
increased foreign participation in the fishing sector—possibly recommended by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), among other
institutions—brought many indigenous operators to the brink of ruin
as overfishing intensified. Consequently, in the spring and autumn
of 1995 the government, as an experiment to conserve fish supplies,
ordered a “biological rest period” of 45 days (subsequently extended
to 60 days), during which time all fishermen except for small locally
based boats were prohibited from operating, in order to give fish
stocks time to replenish themselves. Tuna, lobsters, and shrimp were
exempt from this rule. Moreover, the EU signed a five-year fishing
agreement with Mauritania in June 1996 that would bring the Nouakchott government some $405 million but that immediately raised fears
of a new round of overfishing. In March 1997, Mauritania and Russia
finally mended fences and signed a new treaty under which Moscow
could take 360,000 tons of fish annually from Mauritanian waters,
only 20 percent of which needed to be landed in the country itself.
Whatever small scraps of optimism could be gleaned from these
developments, the late 1990s and the early 21st century brought additional evidence that the multiplication of foreign and domestic fishing operators, coupled with the state’s perpetual quest for additional
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revenue, was bringing about a classic “tragedy of the commons,” in
which the pursuit of individual (or narrowly nationalistic) self-interest was rapidly resulting in increasingly anemic fish harvests for all
concerned. Notwithstanding the fact that fully 25 percent of all of
Mauritania’s customs fees collected in 1996 (about $116 million)
were fisheries-related, more and more small operators were seeing a
marked decline in their fortunes, as the EU agreement, coupled with
Russia’s removal of more than a quarter-million tons of fish every
year from the country’s waters, was pushing many species toward
extinction, as was noted at a fisheries conference held in Nouakchott
in March 2000. The Greenpeace environmental organization also
raised its voice in opposition to these policies, but the Ould Taya
regime pushed on irrespective of this criticism. In February 2001, it
licensed an additional 159 Senegalese vessels to fish in Mauritanian
waters, and in August 2001 initialed an additional five-year extension of the already contentious 1996 agreement with the EU. The
new treaty provided that, in return for 430 million euros in revenues
and an increase in various fees, many additional EU vessels would
be permitted to take fish out of Mauritania. Greenpeace and other
concerned groups redoubled their criticism, and in the spring of 2002,
in an unusual move, the United Nations Environmental Programme
(UNEP) also dissented, noting that 251 fishing vessels of EU origin
were operating in Mauritanian waters—many of them massive factory ships that literally scoured the ocean bottom—and that catches
would drastically diminish in the near future and certain fish would
become extinct in relatively short order.
By 2008, the future of the fisheries sector in Mauritania looked unpromising. With antipoaching measures still inadequate and stocks of
fish apparently in steep decline in spite of the continued use of annual
biological rest periods, it was evident that the sector would probably
never recover its former prominence, especially when the country’s
newfound petroleum revenues (which began flowing in early 2006)
were added to the equation. Also, with a major study of fisheries issued in the autumn of 2006 predicting that 90 percent of the world’s
fish would be depleted by the year 2050, it was safe to predict that the
many factors hindering the viability of Mauritania’s fisheries, present
since independence, would continue to exert a significant influence
far into the future.
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• 199
FOOLAN. The alternative name given to the Fulbe, one of Mauritania’s Black African groups. The Fulbe are closely related to the
Halpulaaren, a much more numerous category of black Mauritanians. Both the Fulbe and the Halpulaaren speak Fulani, a language
prevalent throughout West Africa.
FORCES DE LIBÉRATION AFRICAINE DE MAURITANIE
(FLAM). The African Liberation Forces of Mauritania was founded
in May 1983 to protest what its organizers saw as a pervasive system
of racial discrimination in the country practiced by the politically
dominant Beydane Moors. In addition, it attacked the persistence of
slavery in Mauritania as well as the lack of political and economic
opportunities for the haratines, who, according to FLAM, were
still in a quasi-servile status. From the beginning, FLAM’s goals
went far beyond simply reforming existing government structures.
Instead, FLAM (composed of four smaller previous groups) urged
the overthrow of the regime, by armed force if necessary, and its
replacement by a nondiscriminatory, “nonracial” government. Some
elements within the group, however, advocated from time to time
that Mauritania’s territory be divided between Moorish and Black
African regions, although this never appears to have been an official
part of FLAM’s platform.
At first, FLAM saw itself mainly as a political force, but its
declared willingness to engage in armed struggle against the thengoverning Comité Militaire de Salut National (CMSN) led the
junta to declare the group illegal in 1984, driving it underground and
to offices in Paris and in Dakar, where its members were welcomed
by certain Senegalese politicians. Little more (aside from a few
communiqués) was heard from FLAM until April 1986, when those
members of the organization operating clandestinely in Nouakchott
issued a 50-page, forcefully argued pamphlet entitled Manifesto du
Négro-Mauritanien Opprimé, which detailed the alleged abuses and
injustices inflicted by the Mauritanian government on Black Africans
since independence in 1960. In addition to attacking what it saw as
racist patterns in employment, education, and foreign relations, the
manifesto also criticized the regime headed by President Maaouiya
Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya for accelerating the process of Arabization
and for expropriating the ancestral lands of the Halpulaaren and
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other Black Africans in the Senegal River Valley by means of a selective and biased interpretation and application of the Land Reform
Act of 5 June 1983. Government corruption and purported racial
discrimination in the country’s armed forces were also discussed in
some detail.
After a series of armed attacks, reportedly carried out by FLAM
members, on Mauritanian government vehicles and buildings in
Nouadhibou and elsewhere in September 1986—which did little
damage and caused no loss of life—the Ould Taya regime responded
harshly. On 4–5 September at least 30 people, many prominent black
intellectuals suspected of being FLAM sympathizers, were arrested,
and at least 20 were later given jail sentences. Over the following
several weeks, another 10 or so black Mauritanians were detained by
the police, and at about this time, as documented by human rights
organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights
Watch, stories of torture and other forms of mistreatment became
more common. Furthermore, some black prisoners, such as the former minister of health, Djigo Tafsirou, and the well-known writer
and intellectual Téné Youssouf Guèye, were transferred to a remote
jail located in Oualata, where at least four would perish in September 1988 owing to the exceedingly poor conditions and brutal treatment they encountered there. The newfound prominence of FLAM
also had the effect of casting suspicion on members of the government itself for allegedly harboring favorable opinions of the outlawed
group. One such person was a prominent Halpulaar officer and
CMSN member, Col. Anne Ahmadou Babaly, who was dismissed
as minister of the interior in August 1986 for allegedly disregarding
FLAM’s activities. He was replaced by Col. Djibril Ould Abdellahi,
a noted Moorish hard-liner. Highly placed Halpulaaren (members of
the other Black African groups in Mauritania, such as the Wolof and
the Soninké, were largely spared repression) in the banking sector,
the army and navy, and elsewhere in the civil service were fired
from their positions and prosecuted. A full-scale purge of suspected
FLAM militants was soon underway.
This strenuous repression continued into 1987, with additional
trials of accused FLAM supporters taking place that resulted in jail
sentences of up to five years for certain defendants. However, these
events were eclipsed by the CMSN’s announcement on 17 October
FORCES DE LIBÉRATION AFRICAINE DE MAURITANIE
• 201
1987 that it had uncovered a conspiracy within the armed forces
to overthrow President Ould Taya and establish a separate, blackdominated “Walo Republic” in southern Mauritania. This shook the
regime to its foundations and guaranteed a strong response. Between
18 November and 3 December 1987, 50 black Mauritanian military
officers were put on trial by a special army tribunal at the J’reida barracks north of Nouakchott. The trial, which was attended by outside
observers, was despite its military character conducted pursuant to the
provisions of the Mauritanian Penal Code. On 3 December, verdicts
were issued. Seven of the accused (including Anne Ahmadou Babaly)
were acquitted, but eighteen were sentenced to life imprisonment
(two of whom later died at Oualata), nine were given 20 years’ imprisonment, five received 10 years, and three others were sentenced
to five-year prison terms. Six other officers were given suspended
sentences and were ordered to remain in their home villages in the
Senegal River Valley. There was no right of appeal. The ultimate
punishment was reserved for the convicted ringleaders of the coup
plot, Lieutenants Sy Saidou, Bâ Seydi, and Sarr Ahmadou. Although
some Mauritanians (including the Moorish imam of Nouakchott’s
main mosque) protested that their degree of guilt did not warrant
the death penalty, all three were executed by a firing squad on 6
December. Reportedly, President Ould Taya was personally reluctant
to carry out these shootings (the first, and as it turned out, last use
of judicially imposed capital punishment during his time in office),
but acceded to them under pressure from some of his CMSN colleagues, including Djibril Ould Abdellahi and the influential director
of national security (and future president) Col. Ely Ould Mohamed
Vall, who were insistent that the threat posed by FLAM be rapidly
eliminated. These trials and executions subjected Mauritania to additional harsh international criticism, contributed to a tense atmosphere
throughout the country, and—critically—encouraged some Moors,
notably those affiliated with the pro-Iraq Arab Baath Socialist Party
(ABSP), to step up the pace of Arabization and allegedly redouble
their efforts to acquire land owned by Black Africans in the fertile
areas of southern Mauritania.
The Senegal–Mauritania crisis, which began in April 1989,
resulted in a steep and rapid (if somewhat short-lived) escalation of
FLAM’s activities. To oppose what the organization understandably
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FORCES DE LIBÉRATION AFRICAINE DE MAURITANIE
saw as a developing pattern of antiblack repression within Mauritania, it staged violent attacks against Mauritanian army units stationed
near the Senegal River beginning in early 1990. Reportedly, two of
the bloodiest attacks took place on 21–22 April and 26–27 September 1990. The first raid, which occurred in the village of Sabouala
near Kaédi, apparently claimed the lives of 51 Mauritanian soldiers;
the second, which took place at Bofel (about 45 kilometers west of
Bogué near the Senegalese border), killed 49 troops and destroyed
six army vehicles. FLAM admitted only that three of its own militants had been killed in the latter attack. Autumn 1990 and early 1991
brought still more chilling news, as alleged FLAM sympathizers
continued to be rounded up, mistreated, and extrajudicially executed
while the world’s attention was diverted by the ongoing Gulf Crisis, which began with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990.
These added rights abuses—which apparently culminated in a massacre of hundreds of Black Africans at various Mauritanian military
installations—would draw more condemnation from FLAM and the
international human rights community and haunt the country for
years to come.
By the end of the Gulf Crisis in March 1991, the government’s position on FLAM had softened somewhat. Just a few days after the end
of hostilities in Kuwait and Iraq (on 7 March 1991), President Ould
Taya announced a broad amnesty of most of the remaining political
prisoners in Mauritania—including FLAM sympathizers—in order
to ease his country’s estrangement from the West and the conservative Arab states that had arisen from his perceived alignment with
Saddam Hussein before and during the crisis. In addition, FLAM was
temporarily mollified—and induced to end its armed activities—by
Ould Taya’s announcement in April of an impending political liberalization, which would result in early 1992 in the election of a bicameral legislature and a contestable presidential election, albeit one
in which the incumbent won easily. But in late 1991 and early 1992
FLAM, seeing that the CMSN’s plans for democratization fell short
of its expectations (for one thing, it desired a national conference
to draft a new constitution and conduct free elections), stated that it
reserved the right to resume its armed struggle, it would stand aloof
from all the institutions of Mauritania’s Second Republic, and any
dialogue with the regime was “impossible.”
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• 203
By January 1992, therefore, FLAM found itself still very much on
the margins of Mauritanian political life, with only a limited number
of former militants willing to take advantage of the government’s
amnesty and return home. Some ex-FLAM members found a home in
at least two legal political parties, the Union des Forces Démocratiques (UFD), led by Ahmed Ould Daddah between 1991 and
1996, and Action pour le Changement (AC), whose leader until its
banning in January 2002 was Messaoud Ould Boulkheir. But no
mainstream Mauritanian politician, with the exception of Mohamed
Lemine Ch’bih Ould Cheikh Melainine, seemed willing to call
for FLAM’s full integration into the country’s political process,
and thus in the coming years FLAM concentrated on organizing the
65,000 or so black Mauritanian refugees still living in Senegal and
on generating publicity and sympathy for itself in Europe and North
America. But the organization’s success was limited. FLAM was
not, for example, able to prevent the return of many of the refugees
from Senegal to Mauritania in 1996, robbing the movement of much
of its base and illustrating that it was still quite susceptible to events
over which it had little control. Both the Mauritanian and Senegalese
governments wanted to resolve the refugee situation, and to that end
they pressured the United Nations High Commission for Refugees
(UNHCR) to cease providing assistance to the displaced persons on
the south bank of the Senegal River, leaving many little choice but to
return to Mauritania. In somewhat the same vein, FLAM applauded
the election of Abdoulaye Wade as president of Senegal in April
2000, believing that he would be as sympathetic to it as he was while
in opposition during the Senegal–Mauritania crisis of 1989–1990.
But the group soon became disenchanted with Wade’s willingness to
cooperate with Nouakchott on a variety of matters (not least the refugee question and the contentious issue of water resources) and began to castigate the new head of state for allegedly extraditing FLAM
members to Mauritania, where they reportedly suffered mistreatment
(or even “disappeared”) at the hands of the Ould Taya regime.
FLAM encountered difficulties in exile also, although to a lesser
extent. According to a 2001 article by Lance Kinne (who conducted
extensive fieldwork in the Senegal–Mauritania region in 1999 and
2000), the group was hamstrung by its reputation for having a mostly
Halpulaar membership, the loss of much of its refugee constituency
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FORCES DE LIBÉRATION AFRICAINE DE MAURITANIE
in the mid-1990s, and the “benefits of exile” being offset by a resulting greater distance from the home country. On the positive side,
FLAM no longer had to deal with the problems it might have encountered had it attempted to fully take part in the affairs of the Second
Republic (and probable governmental repression was only one of the
challenges it would undoubtedly have faced, given its narrow membership roster, apparent lack of contact with Mauritania’s other ethnic groups, and lack of success in forging an alliance between Black
Africans and haratines) and could reach out to certain organizations
in the West highly sensitized to issues of racial discrimination, a
matter on which FLAM could speak with authority. Political factors
(as well as the obvious economic ones) were also present in FLAM’s
decision to have hundreds of its members seek (and in many cases,
receive) political asylum in France and the United States during the
1990s, enabling the group to draw upon fairly substantial numbers
of people in the event they were needed for demonstrations, media
appearances, and similar activities. In the United States, FLAM
members settled in cities as diverse as Louisville, Kentucky, Washington, D.C., Columbus, Ohio, and Memphis, Tennessee, where they
had some success in penetrating the mainstream news media at least
in some of the smaller locales. Other FLAM members also took part
in various international conferences (mainly in Europe), where they
were able to draw additional attention to their cause and quite possibly prevent Mauritania’s full (as opposed to backhanded) embrace
by the United States and Europe due to the Ould Taya government’s
pro-Western orientation. Finally—and in common with a great many
other similar groups—FLAM used the Internet as a means of publicity, maintaining a professionally executed website (www.flamus.net)
by the early 21st century.
Having fought relentlessly against President Ould Taya by one
means or another from 1986 to 2005 (although its armed struggle
did not resume after 1991), FLAM’s reaction to the coup d’état of
3 August 2005, which removed Ould Taya from power and installed
Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall as “transitional” military leader, was
guarded. In a communiqué issued a few days after the coup, FLAM’s
leadership stated that “after more than two decades of oppression,
the hurting Mauritanian people have come finally to get rid of the
criminal, mafia-type, racist and tribal dictatorship of Colonel Ould
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Taya. The means used to put an end to this dictatorship seem to us
legitimate because the change by the ballot box proved to be a utopia
which was believed by only a thin fringe of the Opposition.” However, it went on to say that the end of the Ould Taya regime left unanswered basic questions about the country’s character and future, and
reiterated FLAM’s call for a national conference and a “concerted
two-year transition” to a nonracial government in which genuine political pluralism and a frank treatment of the slavery question would
be paramount. The communiqué also called for an independent commission to investigate all human rights abuses, compensation for
those it termed unjustly accused of wrongdoing by the regime, and
the reinstatement of civil servants dismissed due to their past political
activities or beliefs. The prospects for a national conference, always
dim, did not materialize by 2008, and FLAM did not in any formal
way participate in the elections that led to the installation of President
Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi and a newly constituted
legislature in April 2007, but the August 2005 coup, coupled with
the advent of a purely civilian-led Third Republic, may open up at
least a small space within which the organization can plan its future
inside Mauritania.
FOREIGN RELATIONS. Since attaining independence on 28 November 1960, Mauritania has been obliged, by geographical and political circumstance, to pursue a balanced approach in its external relationships, primarily between sub-Saharan Black Africa to the south
and the Arab-populated Maghreb to the north, a necessity reinforced
by the country’s own internal situation, in which Moorish Mauritanians share the same territory with black groupings such as the
Halpulaaren, Soninké, and Wolof. The degree of orientation toward
one region of Africa or another has varied over time, although since
the mid-1960s, a ”tilt” in favor of Arab North Africa has been the
practice of successive governments. Complicating this equation, the
North African political picture has on occasion been highly competitive and conflicted, forcing Mauritania to juggle an array of relationships that usually revolved around the region’s two major rival states,
Algeria and Morocco. Adding even more complexity to Mauritania’s
foreign policy, extraregional actors have sometimes been influential,
with a nearly continuous good relationship with the former colonial
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power, France, being supplemented over time with unusually close
ties to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the 1980s and—in a remarkable
turnaround starting in the late 1990s—with the United States, Israel,
and the West in general.
1960–1975: Establishing a Presence in Africa. When the French
colonial regime finally departed in late 1960, Mauritania faced an uncertain future, due in considerable part to a claim on its entire territory
by Morocco, based on supposed historical ties between the country’s
Berber inhabitants and the early Moroccan sultans, an irredenta first
enunciated by the nationalist Moroccan politician Mohammed Allal
el-Fassi. Such was the popularity of el-Fassi’s “Greater Morocco”
concept among the Moroccan public that his claims were embraced
by Morocco’s first postindependence monarch, Mohammed V, and
by his son Hassan II, who ascended the throne upon the death of
his father in 1961. Both Mohammed V and Hassan II enjoyed great
international esteem during this period, and although they were evidently deterred by French pressure from mounting a military raid on
Mauritania in 1960 to prevent its emergence as an independent state,
they were able to ensure that the infant country would remain unrecognized by nearly all the member states of the Arab League, Tunisia
being the most prominent exception. Spurned by the Arab world, the
first Mauritanian head of state, President Mokhtar Ould Daddah,
turned instead to Black Africa for diplomatic support, realizing that
they were sometimes suspicious of the Arabs and feared the eruption
of similar territorial claims among themselves, jeopardizing their
hard-won autonomy. In 1963, Ould Daddah played an active role in
the formation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which
had a majority Black African membership, and whose charter explicitly ruled out territorial rearrangements that were at variance with the
frontiers inherited from the colonial period. Furthermore, the Mauritanian president felt compelled to accept the presence of French
military installations and troops in his country until 1966, confident
that Paris’s involvement in Mauritania’s security would checkmate
any Moroccan move against him. President Ould Daddah also settled
Mali’s far less substantial claims to his country by negotiating and
signing the Treaty of Kayes in February 1963, and on a rhetorical
and theoretical level sought to put the best face possible on a stilldifficult situation, offering his infant nation as a “bridge” or “hyphen”
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between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa as at least a potential
path to harmony and understanding between the two regions.
But Mauritania’s lopsided identification with Black Africa was not
destined to last through the 1960s. More and more Arab countries
recognized Mauritanian independence over the next several years,
discrediting Morocco’s claim and leaving the Rabat monarchy isolated on the issue. Also, King Hassan had not been able to prevent
Mauritania’s admission to the United Nations in 1961 (even with
the assistance, for a time, of the Soviet Union), an early sign that his
efforts would not be successful. With the growing Arab acceptance
of Mauritania behind him, Ould Daddah was able, by about 1966, to
rely on the Arab League’s superior oil-generated wealth as a prime
source of international aid. This shift was felt within the country
as well. The government began its highly controversial Arabization
policy in the mid-1960s, requiring the primary use of Hassaniyya
Arabic as the language of instruction in the educational system,
drawing protests from black Mauritanians, who up to then had made
up a preponderance of the state’s educated elite. But Arabization
made barely a ripple on the international scene, largely because of
Ould Daddah’s skill in portraying his pro-Arab measures as incremental and because of his continuing close interest in the OAU.
As far as the countries of the Arab League were concerned, President Ould Daddah displayed a willingness to accept assistance and
diplomatic backing from anyone, ranging from Saudi Arabia’s conservative monarchy to one of the most “radical” countries in North
Africa, Col. Muammar el-Qadaffi’s Libya. Possibly prodded by Algeria’s president, Houari Boumedienne (with whom Ould Daddah
had an exceptionally harmonious relationship until late 1975), the
Mauritanian head of state became more vocal in championing many
developing-world concerns, including the struggle against apartheid
in South Africa and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Friendship with
President Boumedienne also brought with it one invaluable advantage: The Algerian leader helped bring an end to the long breach with
Morocco, and formal diplomatic ties were established by the two
former adversaries in April 1970. Mauritania was finally admitted to
the Arab League in October 1973. Ould Daddah’s popularity among
Arab nationalists was further bolstered by nationalizing the Frenchdominated Société Anonyme des Mines de Fer de Mauritanie
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(MIFERMA) iron ore consortium in November 1974, pulling out
of the Paris-run Communauté Financière Africaine (CFA) franc
zone in 1973, and issuing a new, purely Mauritanian currency, the
ouguiya. For the first time since independence, Mauritania’s foreign
relations appeared to have reached equilibrium, both with Africa and
the wider world.
The Western Sahara Question: Conflict, Defeat, and Disengagement. The impending decolonization during the early 1970s of the
adjacent Spanish colony of Western Sahara threw all of Mauritania’s
prior political calculations into question. President Ould Daddah’s
stance on this issue had previously been ambiguous; he claimed the
entire territory for Mauritania while at the same time advocating a
plebiscite of self-determination for the Western Saharan people. But
his real concern, according to some observers, was to keep Morocco
out of at least the southern portion of Western Sahara if possible,
reasoning that if King Hassan’s army could establish itself there,
they would be only a literal stone’s throw away from his country’s
economic center of Nouadhibou, and only slightly more distant from
the critical iron ore mines. This could have allowed Morocco—
under a pessimistic, worst-case scenario—to virtually hold Mauritania hostage if it so chose.
After briefly (and embarrassingly) matching Mauritania’s claim to
Western Sahara against Morocco’s, President Ould Daddah, acting in
late 1975, agreed to divide the Spanish colony with Rabat, with the
southern one-third, a tract of desert known as Tiris el-Gharbia, going to Mauritania. Once the principle of partition had been settled, it
remained for a formal treaty to be signed. This document, the Madrid
Agreement of 14 November 1975, was consummated by Mauritania,
Morocco, and Spain and made no reference to Western Saharan selfdetermination. Not only did this treaty formally ally Mauritania with
King Hassan’s Morocco only five years after their rapprochement, it
immediately alienated Algeria, as President Boumedienne had fallen
out with his old friend Ould Daddah over the Saharan issue and
emerged as the strongest supporter of the Polisario Front, a nationalist organization claiming to speak for Western Sahara’s inhabitants,
which demanded the establishment of an independent state in the
former colony. For his part, Ould Daddah felt that Polisario was not
a movement with mass popular support and was confident that most
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Western Saharans would accept Mauritanian sovereignty over Tiris
el-Gharbia, conscious of the tribal links between them and the Moors.
Intensely worded appeals from Houari Boumedienne and Polisario’s
leader, El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed, as a result, fell on the deaf ears
of President Ould Daddah and his pro-Moroccan foreign minister,
Hamdi Ould Mouknass.
The Western Sahara conflict began in earnest in early 1976 with
the withdrawal of Spanish troops from the territory and the nearly
simultaneous proclamation of the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) by Polisario on 27 February. It also quickly turned
into a rout for Mauritania’s small and ill-equipped armed forces.
The highly mobile and motivated guerrillas of the Polisario Front,
correctly seeing a vulnerable foe, soon staged attacks not only inside
Western Sahara itself but also in Mauritania, at times disabling the
railway line running from the iron ore mines to Nouadhibou, making
exports of this vital commodity highly irregular. Few places in the
country were safe from Polisario incursions, and Polisario humiliated Ould Daddah further by two spectacular Nouakchott raids in
June 1976 and July 1977, in which mortar rounds were fired into the
grounds of the presidential palace in the Mauritanian capital city. An
additional and perhaps more important blow was struck on 1 May
1977, when the mining town of Zouérate was captured for several
hours by the Polisario Front, which encountered no resistance from
its 1,000-strong army garrison.
Aside from its military aspects, the Zouérate raid was a diplomatic crossroads for Mauritania’s civilian leadership—and also in
the slightly longer term for the leadership of its armed forces. Recognizing that his own military resources were inadequate to the task,
the Ould Daddah regime signed a Moroccan–Mauritanian Defense
Committee agreement a fortnight later, which gave King Hassan the
right to station his troops throughout northern Mauritania. Upward
of 9,000 Moroccans were in the country several months later. By
late 1977, moreover, France had staged its own air strikes against
Polisario forces (in what Paris called Opération Lamantin) in an
attempt to stem the tide, but they—like the Moroccan presence—
could not make a decisive difference. And from a political point of
view, the defense pact with Morocco and Opération Lamantin may
have sealed Mokhtar Ould Daddah’s fate. Both the French and the
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Moroccan alliances were unpopular with many Mauritanians, due
not only to King Hassan’s former claims to their country, but also
because reliance on Paris marked the reversal of one of Mauritania’s
proudest achievements—the distancing of the country from the former colonial power. Ties to the OAU and Black Africa were also
severely frayed.
Partly because they felt affronted by their country’s inability to
defend itself, and because they saw little prospect for an end to Mauritania’s international isolation or an improved economy under civilian rule, a group of high-ranking military officers, led by the army’s
chief of staff, Col. Mustapha Ould Mohammed Salek, peacefully
deposed President Ould Daddah on 10 July 1978. Setting up a new
government, known as the Comité Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN), they pledged an end to Mauritania’s involvement
in Western Sahara. This, however, was to prove extremely difficult
in practice. For almost a year, the CMRN remained paralyzed over
what to do to ensure a final, face-saving exit from the destructive
conflict. Ould Salek himself, according to some reports, could not
deliver a settlement plan alone, as he was faced with divergent attitudes toward the problem on the part of his fellow CMRN members,
who advocated either a unilateral withdrawal from Tiris el-Gharbia
and a peace treaty with the Polisario Front, a continued alignment
with King Hassan’s Morocco, or some other alternative(s). It proved
impossible to reconcile all these differences, and on 6 April 1979,
Ould Salek was striped of all real power, his place taken by Lt.-Col.
Ahmed Ould Bouceif, the de facto head of a new army junta, the
Comité Militaire de Salut National (CMSN), which replaced the
CMRN. But Ould Bouceif could not make peace either, and his death
in a plane crash near Dakar, Senegal, on 27 May 1979, led to further
factional infighting in the governing council, out of which Lt.-Col.
Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah emerged as the effective
head of state. Although Ould Heydallah belonged to a Western Saharan tribe, the Arosien, and had long been suspected of pro-Polisario
sentiments, he also got off to a slow start, mindful, among other
things, of the 9,000 Moroccan soldiers still in his country. But after
the Polisario Front broke its year-long cease-fire with Mauritania in
July 1979, the CMSN finally capitulated, signing the Algiers Agreement with the Western Saharan nationalists on 5 July. Diplomatic
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relations with Algeria were soon restored, and Ould Heydallah took
the precaution of requesting that French paratroopers guard the vital
port facilities at Nouadhibou. Morocco’s Forces Armées Royales
(FAR) left Mauritania by late 1980, although King Hassan annexed
Tiris el-Gharbia to his kingdom as soon as all the Mauritanian soldiers had departed.
1979–1992: Military Rule, Baath Party Influence, and Internal Instability. With peace achieved in Western Sahara, balance in Mauritanian foreign relations had been partially restored, and the early 1980s
were characterized by increased diplomatic exchanges with African
and “progressive” and conservative Arab states alike. Cooperative
arrangements with Romania, the Soviet Union, and other countries,
mainly in the fisheries area, were strengthened. But a violent coup
attempt against the government on 16 March 1981, led by two former
CMSN members aligned with the exiled Alliance pour une Mauritanie Démocratique (AMD), fueled President Ould Heydallah’s
suspicions that Morocco was seeking revenge for his country’s peace
treaty with the Polisario Front. Diplomatic relations with Rabat were
severed, and the regime moved squarely into the Algerian orbit. The
seal on this new state of affairs was set on 13 December 1983, when
Mauritania—after facing a good deal of reluctance on the part of
the other signatories—adhered to an earlier Algerian–Tunisian pact,
the Treaty of Fraternity and Concord. Ould Heydallah repeatedly
threatened to recognize Polisario’s SADR government-in-exile if
Morocco did not agree to hold a referendum of self-determination
in the territory under the auspices of the OAU. When King Hassan
(unsurprisingly) did not do so, the Mauritanian leader extended full
recognition to the SADR on 27 February 1984, irritating some CMSN
colleagues who felt that any Moroccan counterresponse could trigger
Mauritania’s reentry into the Saharan war, with calamitous results.
Those who wanted continued strict neutrality on the Western Sahara
question (and who had other differences with Ould Heydallah’s stewardship), including Cols. Anne Ahmadou Babaly and Maaouiya
Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, felt compelled to lead a bloodless “restructuring” of the CMSN on 12 December 1984, which deposed Ould
Heydallah and installed the 41-year-old Col. Ould Taya in his place.
Very quickly, Ould Taya further reoriented Mauritanian foreign affairs. Diplomatic ties with Morocco were soon restored, and concerted
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efforts were made to mend the country’s traditionally good relations
with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf states after a period of
tension after the military takeover of 1978. The number of French
troops in the country (mostly in a training role) was also increased
significantly. In addition, Ould Taya tried to revive some links with
Black Africa, primarily through the water resources projects carried
out by the Organisation pour la Mise en Valeur du Fleuve Sénégal
(OMVS), of which Mauritania, Mali, and Senegal were members
and which focused on securing the long-struggling agricultural sector. Close commercial relations with the People’s Republic of China
(PRC), which had been established under Mokhtar Ould Daddah,
were strengthened further in the 1980s; Chinese engineers constructed
the Friendship Port near Nouakchott. The Gulf emirates supplied
additional assistance in several areas, and Brazil helped complete
the final stretch of a badly needed road between Nouakchott and
the eastern town of Néma (the so-called Route de l’Espoir). Overall,
President Ould Taya’s early days at the helm were distinguished
by a lack of ideological posturing, a more clearly neutral stance on
Western Sahara (although the prior recognition of the SADR was not
rescinded, and the Polisario Front was allowed to maintain offices in
Mauritania), and a willingness to accept development aid from any
source irrespective of past political considerations.
By early 1986, however, the foreign relations outlook was once
again becoming cloudy. The revived activities of the exiled Forces
de Libération Africaine de Mauritanie (FLAM) and the issuance of
its forceful antigovernment tract, Manifesto du Négro-Mauritanien
Opprimé, were clearly related to internal conditions and Black African grievances, but they had a decided external effect in at least two
ways. First, the Nouakchott regime suspected that FLAM’s actions
were orchestrated (or at least tacitly backed) by either the Senegalese
government led by Abdou Diouf or opposition elements in Dakar—among whom was a future president, Abdoulaye Wade—both
of which, evidently, urged a harder line toward Mauritania. Hence,
the usually correct state of relations between Mauritania and Senegal
could not help but suffer, particularly since Senegal was home to
many exiled Mauritanians who opposed the CMSN. Second, some
of the harsh measures President Ould Taya was increasingly taking against suspected FLAM militants caused international human
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rights organizations (which had already castigated the country over
what they saw as the persistence of slavery) to take greater notice of
its internal problems, and in the years to come they would often report on detentions without trial, allegations of torture and other forms
of mistreatment, and—in an especially egregious case—the deaths of
several black Mauritanian dissidents under subhuman conditions at
the remote Oualata prison fortress.
Somewhat related to this deteriorating domestic situation and
its growing international repercussions were Mauritania’s deepening ties with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, whose Mauritanian branch
of the Arab Baath Socialist Party (ABSP) had been active since
about 1980 and which, in spite of periodic spells of repression,
had emerged as a major political force from approximately 1988
onward. The CMSN believed that friendship with Iraq, a relatively
wealthy, technologically advanced state that enjoyed considerable
prestige in the Arab League due to its perceived victory over Iran
after a bloody eight-year war, carried few risks vis-à-vis the Gulf
countries (or, for that matter, with the West, which still maintained
good ties with Baghdad), and that there was less chance of interference in Mauritania’s affairs from Iraq than would have been the case
with an adjacent or nearby country. Therefore, by 1989 Mauritania
had become quite close to Iraq, taking extensive deliveries of military equipment for its armed forces, enhancing cooperation in the
fisheries sector, and accepting aid to improve the Mauritanian communications network. In February 1989, Mauritania decided to join
the Union du Maghreb Arabe (UMA), confirming its emphatic
affiliation with North Africa. Together with heightened Baath Party
influence, UMA membership, even though consistent with past
practice, seemed to put a capstone on an increasingly pan-Arab, and
perhaps anti-Black African, foreign policy.
Against this backdrop, the Senegal–Mauritania crisis erupted in
April 1989 and rapidly escalated into the severest external test for
Mauritania since the end of the Western Saharan war a decade before.
Beginning with a limited dispute over livestock in the Senegal River
Valley between the citizens of both states, a pattern of assaults, robberies, arsons, and killings was soon established in which Senegalese
nationals in Mauritania, as well as Moors in Senegal, were set upon
by the inhabitants of each country, who blamed them for the violence
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taking place across the border. After diplomatic efforts to end the
crisis had failed, it was mutually decided, in late April, to repatriate
any Mauritanian or Senegalese resident who wished to leave. Hundreds of thousands of people, often made destitute by the violence,
were airlifted or taken by road to safety. The successful population
transfer plan, though, did not lead to an end to the impasse. Senegal
charged that the CMSN was exploiting the confusion generated by
the dispute to deport large numbers of bona fide black Mauritanians
to Senegal, allegedly to make way for Moorish traders and farmers.
The Nouakchott government denied that any deportations had taken
place and stated that it had merely fulfilled the terms of the repatriation agreement, while conceding that some mistakes might have been
made. President Ould Taya—and, importantly, his powerful minister
of the interior, Djibril Ould Abdellahi—also accused Senegal of
encouraging FLAM to mount attacks inside Mauritania. Over the
next few months, Senegalese–Mauritanian relations sank to an alltime low, as they closed their long common border, embarked on a
military buildup (punctuated with occasional exchanges of fire), severed diplomatic relations, and moved close to all-out war, which was
averted only by intensive international mediation. The Baath Party,
for its part, urged a hard line against Senegal (just as Abdoulaye
Wade in Dakar had urged an armed response against Mauritania),
and its influence grew so much by 1990 that some commentators
remarked that Mauritania stood some chance of becoming a dependency, or “satellite,” of Iraq.
Matters essentially stood at this point on 2 August 1990, when
Saddam Hussein sent his forces crashing into neighboring Kuwait,
conquering the emirate in less than 24 hours. At one stroke, Mauritania’s foreign relations were utterly transformed—and in a highly
negative way. The exiled Kuwaiti monarchy and its Saudi and other
Gulf supporters made clear that any nation that sided with Baghdad
or failed to oppose the invasion would suffer a cessation of economic
aid. Since the majority of Mauritanians (like most other people in
North Africa) were sympathetic to Iraq’s position, and because the
pro-Iraq Baathists were so active in Mauritania, the country bore
a heavy burden of disapproval, including from the United States,
which was in the process of dispatching a 550,000-troop military
force to the region to dislodge Saddam from Kuwait. Faced with this
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situation—and mindful that frontier incidents with Senegal were still
taking place—the CMSN took immediate steps to defuse what was
promising to become yet another full-bore crisis, one in which Mauritanians were powerless to affect the outcome. As the Gulf Crisis
wore on into the beginning of 1991, the country’s foreign minister at
the time, Hasni Ould Didi, made clear that Mauritania opposed the
invasion of Kuwait, had no objection to the U.S.-led expeditionary
force, and expressed a willingness to see the relevant resolutions of
the United Nations on the issue carried out. The comprehensive isolation of Baghdad also cut Saddam Hussein off from his Mauritanian
Baathist clients, and more moderate members of the CMSN, led by
President Ould Taya himself, were able to rally and clarify the country’s external relationships as the standoff in the Gulf moved toward
a violent conclusion in January and February 1991. But in spite of
Mauritania’s best efforts to distance itself from Iraq, it continued for
some time to be shunned by the United States and also by the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), organizations
in which the West carried considerable weight. Bilateral relations
with Washington remained strained into the early years of the new
decade.
The Second Republic and Beyond. After embarking on wideranging domestic reforms starting in early 1991 that transformed
a military dictatorship into an ostensibly more democratic Second
Republic, which was inaugurated on 18 April 1992 with Maaouiya
Ould Taya elected to the presidency as a civilian ruler, Mauritania’s
external relations largely settled into a regular pattern for the next
several years. A few days after the new government was installed,
Mauritania and Senegal announced that they were reestablishing
diplomatic relations that had been broken in 1989, although issues
of compensation for property lost on both sides of the border were
not resolved until later, and a series of low-level “incidents” along
the Senegal River sometimes caused concern. The work of the
OMVS also returned more or less to normal for several years—
even though some of its water diversion projects were themselves
controversial—but in late 1997 and early 1998, relations turned
rocky once more, this time over the so-called Vallées Fossiles
diversion program, which Nouakchott believed would appropriate
an unjust share of the Senegal River’s water for use by Senegalese
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agriculture. Mauritania went so far as to place Baba Ould Sidi Abdallah, a high OMVS official and a Mauritanian national, on trial
on charges of treason in January 1998 for allegedly favoring Vallées Fossiles and thus working against the interests of his country.
Although Ould Abdallah won acquittal by arguing that his status
as an international civil servant made his stance proper, the Diouf
government went to some lengths to reassure Mauritania that the
project would not go forward. Then, in June 2000—with Abdoulaye Wade occupying the Senegalese presidency for only a few
weeks—President Ould Taya made the rash decision to retaliate
for Dakar’s reported reactivation of Vallées Fossiles by ordering
all of Senegal’s citizens residing in Mauritania to return home, an
act which, until it was rescinded a week later under intense international pressure, threatened to rapidly evolve into a reprise of the
events of 1989. But unlike his stance in that year, when he espoused
a strongly anti-Mauritanian line while in opposition, Abdoulaye
Wade reacted to this Senegal–Mauritania incident with restraint,
traveling to meet Ould Taya in Nouakchott and once more assuring
the skeptical head of state that the project had been permanently
shelved. As far as relations with neighboring Mali were concerned,
only the Tuareg refugees living in eastern Mauritania remained a
problem, and after Nouakchott and Bamako settled all their outstanding border differences in September 1992, it was agreed that
most or all of the Tuaregs (who were fleeing a rebellion against
the Malian government) would be encouraged to leave. This did
not happen, though, and by 1996 there were an estimated 42,000
Tuaregs in makeshift camps in Mauritania’s Hodh ech-Chargui
province, where they subsisted in squalid conditions.
With the remainder of the Arab world, President Ould Taya pursued what amounted to a two-track policy of repairing relations with
Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf states while at the same
time distancing himself from Iraq. In September 1993, for example,
Ould Taya stopped over in the United Arab Emirates as part of a trip
to China, and on 27 April 1994, Kuwait’s foreign minister, Cheikh
Sabah al-Ahmed al-Jabir, paid a visit to the Mauritanian capital that
presaged the resumption of economic aid. Then, during 1995, Mauritanian–Iraqi relations underwent a chill that was to last until the
end of Saddam Hussein’s regime. On 23 October 1995, more than
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100 suspected Baath Party sympathizers were detained on charges
of acting on behalf of Baghdad (an often-made and rarely proven accusation), but Ould Taya’s rapid pardoning of most of the defendants
a few days later did not prevent the Iraqi ambassador in Nouakchott,
Anwar Moulad Dhibiane, from being ordered to leave Mauritania.
A year earlier (in October 1994), Ould Taya had also dealt harshly
with another “radical” state, Col. Muammar el-Qadaffi’s Libya. After
Tripoli had objected to Mauritanian contacts with Israel, Mauritania’s
state radio station broadcast a highly unusual personal denunciation
of the mercurial Libyan leader, leading immediately to a spectacular
breach that was to last beyond the 1990s.
In spite of this cooling of relations with Iraq and Libya, the establishment of full diplomatic ties with Israel was by any measure the
most disputed legacy of President Ould Taya, one which demonstrated
the lengths he was willing to go in pursuit of better relations with
the United States. Encouraged by the signing of the Oslo Agreement
between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the
foreign ministers of Israel and Mauritania met in Madrid in June 1995,
and in June 1996 they established “interest sections” in the Spanish embassies located in both Nouakchott and Tel Aviv. This move was not
popular among other Arab governments, in particular Iraq and Libya,
but the greatest shock was administered on 28 July 1999, when the
two states established full diplomatic relations at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. (a venue whose significance was not lost on anyone), at
which the respective Israeli and Mauritanian foreign ministers, David
Levy and Ahmed Ould Sid’Ahmed, shook hands in the presence of
U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright. President Ould Taya having
characteristically taken no measures to prepare public opinion for this
step, the clamor was nearly deafening from virtually the entire opposition political spectrum, and riots quickly ensued in Nouakchott. Some
Arab countries such as Qatar, Oman, and Morocco were only mildly
critical of the move, but the reaction from Syria, Iraq, Algeria, and
Tunisia was intense, and in mid-November 1999, a surprising schism
opened up in the long-standing close relationship between Mauritania
and Algeria, apparently caused when Prime Minister Cheikh el-Avia
Ould Mohamed Khouna, on a trip to Algiers to explain his government’s action, found himself unable to meet either Algerian President
Abdelaziz Bouteflika or any other high-level official.
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From this time until the end of the Ould Taya regime, ties with
Algeria were badly frayed, but those with Morocco rapidly improved,
with the death of King Hassan in July 1999 and the accession to
the throne of his son and successor, Mohamed VI, speeding the
process. In February 2000, Ould Taya opened a fairly significant (if
temporary) breach with the Polisario Front—Morocco’s opponent in
Western Sahara—by expelling from Mauritania Hametti Ould Abdelaziz Rabbani, a high SADR/Polisario official who was then the
front’s representative in Nouakchott, after he had publicly criticized
Ould Taya’s warmer relationship with Rabat. Ironically, Ould Rabbani himself defected to Morocco on 30 June 2005. On the Israeli
question, the Mauritanian regime found that the status of being only
the third Arab country (after Egypt and Jordan) to have diplomatic
ties with the Jewish state was not an enviable one. Periodic riots
and other demonstrations became so commonplace that Israeli delegations could no longer visit the country without a heavy security
contingent; Tel Aviv’s ambassador was obliged to both live and
work in his embassy because no Mauritanian would rent or sell him
a home; and the eruption of the “second intifada” in late 2000, which
led to the premiership of the hard-line Likud Party leader, Gen. Ariel
Sharon, caused much additional anger, particularly when it became
apparent that President Ould Taya would not break off or downgrade
Mauritanian–Israeli relations after the Sharon government engaged
in aggressive military actions against the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. In May 2001, Mauritania’s foreign minister at the
time, Dah Ould Abdi, paid a low-key but nonetheless official visit
to Tel Aviv, where he appeared to be clearly uncomfortable in the
presence of Prime Minister Sharon; back in Nouakchott, the visit
was unreported in the print media (although widely discussed on the
Internet), and the Foreign Ministry tried to justify the trip by saying
that Mauritania and Israel were attempting to resolve the Palestinian
conflict, an explanation that convinced no one.
The almost always close relationship with France, the former
colonial ruler of Mauritania, suffered a massive reverse in 1999.
Even though French president Jacques Chirac contributed strong
support to Ould Taya’s reelection bid by paying a formal state visit
to Mauritania on 4–6 September 1997—just three months before the
presidential polling, in which the incumbent’s victory was a foregone
FOREIGN RELATIONS
• 219
conclusion—on 3 July 1999 Capt. Ely Ould Dah, a Mauritanian officer attending a military exchange training course in Montpellier,
France, was arrested by a French magistrate acting on a criminal
human rights complaint from exiled Mauritanians, who alleged he
had tortured them during the early 1990s. President Ould Taya,
furious with Paris, demanded the cancellation of the arrest and the
return of Ould Dah by the Chirac government (something the French
head of state explained he had no power to do), withdrew all other
Mauritanian officers from France, and terminated most ties. In April
2000, the Ould Dah affair took another turn when the defendant,
who had been freed from prison on condition that he remain in the
Montpellier area pending his trial, violated his parole and returned to
Mauritania, with the assistance (it was widely felt) of the Ould Taya
government. The ensuing further rupture in relations took at least two
years to repair.
Given the turmoil surrounding Mauritania’s ties with Israel, Iraq,
Libya, and France, it was not surprising that the country announced,
on 26 December 1999, that it would withdraw from the mainly
Black African Economic Community of West African States
(ECOWAS), citing a series of measures the group had taken at its
last summit that Nouakchott believed would infringe on its sovereignty. Once again, the opposition political parties (along with some
in the Mauritanian business community, who feared a lucrative door
to international trade was being closed) protested bitterly, but to no
avail; the withdrawal was made final by ECOWAS a year later, in
December 2000.
Next to Mauritania’s extremely controversial ties with Israel,
President Ould Taya’s blossoming relations with the United States
caused the most controversy at home, particularly in the wake of
the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003 (which Mauritania did not
protest) and the consequent loss of America’s popularity in most of
the developing world. Although it was widely accepted that Mauritania’s diplomatic distancing from Iraq and establishment of links
with Israel during the 1990s were impelled by a desire to improve
ties with Washington (still dominated by President Bill Clinton),
and few Mauritanians either welcomed the terrorist attacks on the
United States on 11 September 2001 or objected to President Ould
Taya’s full-throated condemnation of them, other manifestations of
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FOREIGN RELATIONS
the closer relationship with the administration of George W. Bush
rankled many. In November 2002, Mauritania stated that it would
not extradite Americans to the jurisdiction of the newly founded International Criminal Court (ICC)—a demand the United States made
of many nations—and allowed its airports to be used on several occasions for the “extraordinary rendition” of suspected Al Qaeda militants to countries in which, it was believed, they would be subjected
to torture and other aggressive forms of interrogation that could not
be legally utilized in U.S. custody. For all this cooperation, however,
neither the Clinton administration nor that of George W. Bush ever
accorded President Ould Taya the honor of an official state visit to
Washington, perhaps out of fear that Mauritania’s worsening human
rights situation in general, and the slavery issue in particular, would
mobilize American public opinion if such an ostentatious step were
taken.
Closer ties with the United States also had domestic ramifications.
Assured of at least tacit American support for his regime, President
Ould Taya did not hesitate to justify his repression of the followers
of “militant Islam” in the country as antiterrorist measures, even
when such evidence was scant at best. The coup attempt of 8–9 June
2003, which came very close to success, was blamed by the authorities mainly on Islamists, even though, from the available evidence,
Arab nationalists led by ex-army officer Saleh Ould Hanena were
dissatisfied with Ould Taya’s domestic policies and his recognition
of Israel and evidently did not act out of religious conviction. In addition, a March 2005 report by the International Crisis Group on the
“terrorist” situation in the Central African Sahel found any threat to
be exaggerated, although this document was issued shortly before a
serious raid by Algerian-based Islamist militants against a remote
Mauritanian army post near the Malian border, resulting in at least
17 deaths.
The coup d’état of 3 August 2005, which bloodlessly deposed
President Ould Taya while he was out of the country and resulted in
a “transitional” period of military rule by Col. Ely Ould Mohamed
Vall, brought about very few changes in Mauritania’s foreign policy
posture, including its diplomatic relations with Israel and its closer
ties to Washington. In an interview shortly after he took power, Ould
FRENTE POPULAR PARA LA LIBERACIÓN DE SAGUIA EL-HAMRA Y RÍO DE ORO
• 221
Vall stated that Mauritania would maintain its contacts with Israel,
would remain neutral on the Western Sahara question, and would
stay on friendly terms with Morocco, although the new Mauritanian
leader took pains to restore a political balance with its North African
neighbors by mending fences with Algeria in 2006. During the first
months of the presidency of Ould Vall’s civilian successor, Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi, care was taken to keep ties with
neighbors and other important international actors on an even keel,
including a state visit to Senegal in the summer of 2007 (at about
which time plans were set in motion to allow the repatriation of the
remaining refugees in that country), some signs of renewed Mauritanian interest in resolving the Western Sahara conflict, and an evident
wish to rejoin ECOWAS. These measures illustrated the enduring
continuities and firmly rooted realities that have shaped—and will
continue to shape—the young Mauritanian nation’s foreign affairs
into the indefinite future.
FRENTE POPULAR PARA LA LIBERACIÓN DE SAGUIA ELHAMRA Y RÍO DE ORO (Polisario Front). The Popular Front
for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro—referring to
the two constituent regions of Western Sahara—was founded on 10
May 1973 by a group of young, educated Western Saharans from
the Spanish colony. At the time of its formation, the front’s goals
were primarily anti-Spanish and did not exclude the possibility of
some sort of federation of Western Sahara with Mauritania, and it
did not seek—as it would later—the formation of an independent
Saharan state. Mauritania’s president, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, was
not wholly unsympathetic to the Polisario Front at first, because its
anticolonial stance largely paralleled his own rhetoric on the subject.
He may also have believed that Polisario’s efforts would result in
the colony’s being conveyed into Mauritanian hands, something
Ould Daddah had always favored. But he probably did not take the
organization very seriously, and his territorial aspirations were such
that he later signed (on 14 November 1975) the Madrid Agreement
with Spain and Morocco, under which Western Sahara would be partitioned, with Mauritania receiving the southern one-third of the territory, a desert wasteland that became known as Tiris el-Gharbia.
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Polisario’s reaction was swift. From late 1975 onward, the front’s
highly motivated guerrilla fighters ranged far and wide across Mauritania, causing considerable destruction, great economic hardship,
and hundreds of casualties. The Mauritanian armed forces, which
proved unable to contain the front’s depredations, were subsequently
forced to call upon Morocco (and later, France) for assistance, and
Mauritania’s citizens, whether or not they harbored sympathies for
their Western Saharan tribal brethren, were increasingly weary of
what they saw as a futile and unnecessary war.
It was with a good deal of satisfaction that the Polisario Front
witnessed the 10 July 1978 overthrow of President Ould Daddah
and his replacement by the Comité Militaire de Redressement
National (CMRN), headed by Col. Mustapha Ould Mohammed
Salek. Immediately after the coup, the front declared a cease-fire
against Mauritanian targets, hoping that the new regime would disengage from Tiris el-Gharbia and recognize its government-in-exile,
the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). For a variety of
reasons, however, a peace treaty with Mauritania did not materialize
until 5 August 1979, when the Comité Militaire de Salut National
(CMSN), the CMRN’s successor, and the Western Saharan nationalists signed the Algiers Agreement renouncing all Mauritanian
claims to Western Sahara. The pact was made possible, in large part,
by the accession to power in June 1979 of Lt.-Col. Mohammed
Khouna Ould Heydallah, a Mauritanian officer who hailed from a
Western Saharan tribe, the Arosien.
Under Ould Heydallah’s leadership, relations between Mauritania
and Polisario reached their highest level, formalized on 27 February
1984 by the country’s official recognition of the SADR. This decision, which Ould Heydallah apparently made on his own, was not
well received by all CMSN members, who feared Moroccan reprisals
against Mauritania. These concerns played a role in the bloodless
coup d’état of 12 December 1984, which deposed Ould Heydallah
and put in his place a more cautious and pragmatic colleague, Col.
Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya.
Under Ould Taya’s presidency, which lasted from December 1984
until August 2005, relations with the Polisario Front at first became
somewhat ambivalent, then warmed appreciably, and then deteriorated after about 1999. From 1984 until about 1989, the front’s activi-
FRIENDSHIP PORT
• 223
ties inside Mauritania were somewhat curtailed, and the CMSN took
great care to balance its relations with Morocco, Algeria (Polisario’s
primary backer), and the other Maghreb states. Some diplomatic support continued, and Ould Taya did not try to rescind his predecessor’s
recognition of the SADR. Then, in 1989, the regime grew more alienated from Morocco as a result of King Hassan II’s clear backing for
Dakar in the Senegal–Mauritania crisis, and as a result it moved
closer to Algeria and Polisario. But after King Hassan’s death in
1999 and the accession to power of his son, Mohamed VI (who, unlike his father, showed a less dismissive attitude toward Mauritania),
President Ould Taya distanced himself once again from the Western
Saharan liberation movement. On the eve of the first-ever official
visit to Morocco by a Mauritanian head of state (26–28 April 2000),
Polisario’s representative in Mauritania, Hametti Ould Abdelaziz
Rabbani, was expelled from the country after he publicly criticized
Mauritania’s fast-developing ties to the new Moroccan monarch.
For other reasons, relations with Algeria also became more distant
at about the same time, and although a new Polisario diplomat was
soon posted to Nouakchott, the relationship remained strained up
until President Ould Taya’s overthrow on 3 August 2005. See also
FOREIGN RELATIONS; WESTERN SAHARA CONFLICT.
FRIENDSHIP PORT (of Nouakchott). Although Mauritania’s capital
city is located only about five kilometers from the country’s Atlantic
coast, there was until the mid-1980s no high-capacity deepwater port
facility in the area, as there were no natural harbors between Nouadhibou and Dakar, Senegal. As a consequence of this, Mauritania was
obliged after its independence to continue to rely on Senegalese ports
to supply the needs of Nouakchott, a situation that, aside from its political dimensions, increased transportation costs and overburdened
the modest Mauritanian road system. And although Nouakchott’s
small existing port facility was refurbished at a cost of almost $30
million in the late 1970s (a project funded by Kuwait and the World
Bank), a lasting solution to the shipping problem required a far more
ambitious undertaking.
In the early 1980s, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) designed
and began to construct an entirely new port facility southwest of the
capital at a cost of $150 million, financed by a 50-year, interest-free
224 •
FRONT DE LA RÉSISTANCE POUR L’UNITÉ
Chinese loan. The Friendship Port (Port de l’Amité) was built under
extremely difficult conditions, as over 400 Chinese workers had to
position about 100,000 concrete blocks, each weighing 12 tons, along
the rugged and unprotected shoreline and were beset by high winds
and waves, sandstorms, and strong currents. Despite these hardships, the jetties and other parts of the facility were completed by 17
September 1986, and the port was opened several months ahead of
schedule. The Friendship Port’s capacity was 500,000 tons per year
(a figure that was 80 percent attained by 1988), and up to three merchant ships of 10,000 tons displacement could be moored there at the
same time. Nouakchott’s Friendship Port underwent relatively few
changes through the early 21st century, with two exceptions. In late
2001, Spain announced it would finance a petroleum tanker terminal
near the port to handle the country’s increasing demand for oil, and
in the spring of 2003 Mali, Mauritania’s landlocked eastern neighbor, said it would build on past investments and construct 92,000
square meters of warehouse space at the port for its own imports and
exports, although the poor state of the Mauritanian highway network
greatly hindered cross-border trade.
FRONT
DE
LA
RÉSISTANCE
POUR
L’UNITÉ,
L’INDÉPENDANCE ET LA DÉMOCRATIE EN MAURITANIE (FRUIDEM). One of a number of clandestine political groups
claiming to represent the interests of black Mauritanians, the Resistance Front for Unity, Independence and Democracy was founded
on 24 August 1989 (that is, at the height of the Senegal–Mauritania crisis) and had as its goal the overthrow—perhaps by peaceful means—of the government led by President Maaouiya Ould
Sid’Ahmed Taya and the cessation of repressive measures against
Black Africans in Mauritania. According to its founding communiqué, issued in Paris, FRUIDEM called for the immediate release of
all prisoners who were “victims of the chauvinism of the state,” the
punishment of all persons responsible for the repression of the country’s Black Africans, and a new government based on the principles
of federalism. In pitched competition with the more militant Forces
de Libération Africaine de Mauritanie (FLAM) for the loyalties of
displaced Mauritanian blacks residing in Senegal, FRUIDEM had attracted relatively little popular support by the early 1990s, and on 10
FRONT DÉMOCRATIQUE UNI DES FORCES DU CHANGEMENT
• 225
October 1991, following the announcement by President Ould Taya
that Mauritanian political life would be liberalized, the Executive
Committee of FRUIDEM stated that it would merge with a larger opposition political party led by Ahmed Ould Daddah, the Union des
Forces Démocratiques (UFD). In spite of this, there was reportedly
some continued presence by FRUIDEM in the Senegalese refugee
camps near the Mauritanian frontier until late 1995, when most supporters of FRUIDEM, along with those of another organization, the
Front Uni pour la Résistance Armée en Mauritanie (FURAM),
elected to return to Mauritania, rendering FRUIDEM to all intents
and purposes extinct.
FRONT DÉMOCRATIQUE UNI DES FORCES DU CHANGEMENT (FDUC). The United Democratic Front of Forces for
Change, founded on 5 June 1991, was an illegal, short-lived, and
loosely organized opposition grouping that encompassed a variety
of Mauritanian political tendencies. After President Maaouiya Ould
Sid’Ahmed Taya had announced in April that the country’s political
system would be liberalized and that multiple political parties and
a free press would be permitted for the first time since independence
in 1960, FDUC, right after its formation, demanded that democratization proceed well beyond what the head of state had outlined. The
group requested President Ould Taya’s resignation and the installation of an interim government of national unity, an investigation into
alleged human rights abuses by the regime, and a national conference to decide the future course of the nation. A total of six factions
made up FDUC, including the still-influential Mouvement National
Démocratique (MND) and Messaoud Ould Boulkheir’s El-Hor
organization claiming to represent the country’s haratines.
On 6 June 1991, the day after FDUC announced its existence, and
in what would become a portent of things to come under President
Ould Taya’s Second Republic, the group’s leaders were arrested and
detained, among them Ould Boulkheir and FDUC’s leader, ex-minister
of education Hadrami Ould Khattri. The pretext for the arrests was a
series of destructive riots in Nouadhibou four days earlier triggered
by a variety of local political and economic grievances, but there was
little doubt that Ould Taya intended to signify that his government
would consistently exert tight control over the nature and extent of
226 •
FRONT NATIONAL DE LIBÉRATION MAURITANIEN
Mauritania’s liberalization. The remainder of the FDUC’s members
still at liberty mounted an intensive domestic and international campaign to free its leaders, and all were unconditionally released on 25
July. Thereafter, FDUC’s membership dispersed, with many finding a
home in one of the legal political parties established in August 1991
and thereafter, most notably Ahmed Ould Daddah’s Union des
Forces Démocratiques (UFD).
FRONT NATIONAL DE LIBÉRATION MAURITANIEN
(FNLM). The Mauritanian National Liberation Front was a small
political party set up in Morocco in the summer of 1956 under the
leadership of Horma Ould Babana, who was the founder of the
territory’s first party, the Entente Mauritanienne, in 1946, and
Mauritania’s first deputy to the French National Assembly. After
Ould Babana’s political fortunes took a sharp turn for the worse
in the early 1950s—elections resulted in a lopsided victory by the
Union Progressiste Mauritanienne (UPM)—he, along with some
of his followers, fled to Morocco, where they founded the FNLM,
whose platform openly espoused the “Greater Morocco” irredentism
of Mohammed Allal el-Fassi. Even more controversially, the FNLM
also acted as a surrogate for the Army of Liberation, and this led the
UPM’s leader, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, to call for French assistance
in halting its guerrilla activities. This was accomplished in February 1958 by means of Opération Ouragon, a joint French–Spanish
counterinsurgency campaign.
FRONT UNI POUR LA RÉSISTANCE ARMÉE EN MAURITANIE (FURAM). Created by a group of black Mauritanians on 1 May
1990 during the Senegal–Mauritania crisis, which had begun in
April of the previous year, the United Front for Armed Resistance
in Mauritania had, according to its founding manifesto, the primary
objective of mounting an armed struggle to topple the government
of President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, which it held responsible for the expulsion of thousands of Halpulaaren and other
Black Africans from the country, the deaths of many others in detention, and “ignoring black Mauritanian cultural identity.” In the early
period of its existence, FURAM conducted armed raids into Mauritanian territory in the Senegal River Valley in order, it claimed, to
FULBE
• 227
repatriate livestock allegedly stolen from black Mauritanian herders
by their Beydane Moor counterparts. But FURAM never achieved
the popular support accorded to the largest black Mauritanian opposition group, the Forces de Libération Africiane de Mauritanie
(FLAM), and by the mid-1990s it had made only limited inroads into
the loyalties of black Mauritanian refugees living in Senegal. Moreover, after President Ould Taya announced in November 1995 that all
Black African refugees were welcome to return home to Mauritania,
the great majority of FURAM supporters did so, effectively bringing
an end to the organization’s activities.
FULANI. Fulani is sometimes used in Mauritania to describe the
Halpulaaren, the country’s most numerous and important Black
African grouping. Somewhat confusingly, it is also the name of one
of West Africa’s primary languages. Fulani is spoken not only by
Halpulaars in Mauritania, but also by their ethnic kinsmen in Mali,
Nigeria, and Senegal.
FULBE (variants: Foolan, Fulani). One of Mauritania’s several
Black African population groups, the Fulbe are related by a common language and customs to the Halpulaaren, the country’s largest
group of blacks. Their origins are obscure. Some historians believe
that they originally came from Senegal and then migrated eastward
and northward, whereas others say that they came from the Sudan
and traveled westward in small groups, over a period of 800 years.
The Fulbe are found across a wide expanse of western and central
Africa from Senegal to the Sudan, and only a small minority reside
within Mauritania. The Fulbe share many common attributes with
their black Mauritanian counterparts. They practice polygyny, have
a historically rigid caste and occupational system, and are dependent
on animal husbandry for their livelihood. Unusually for black Mauritanians, however, many Fulbe led nomadic or seminomadic lives,
living temporarily in huts or tents near the Senegal River Valley
and moving on in search of new pastureland. Wealthier Fulbe, by
contrast, were among the first to opt for a sedentary existence after
Mauritania’s independence, with droughts and desertification accelerating this trend. As do all Mauritanians, the Fulbe adhere fervently
to Islam. They live primarily in the région of Trarza.
228 •
GENDARMARIE NATIONALE
–G–
GENDARMARIE NATIONALE. As Mauritania’s main paramilitary
police force, the Gendarmarie Nationale is responsible for law enforcement in both urban and rural areas, although the latter are also
under the jurisdiction of the National Guard. In 2008, it comprised
about 3,000 men organized into six regional companies covering the
entire country. When it was formed after Mauritania’s independence
from France, the Gendarmarie was considered part of the regular
armed forces, but it was later separated from the army and given its
own commander and headquarters. Answerable to the minister of the
interior, it is equipped with mainly small arms and light armored and
unarmored vehicles.
GHAZZI. In the harsh Saharan regions of Mauritania as recently as the
early 20th century, raiding and pillage by rival Moorish tribes against
one another often served as the only perceived way to avoid disaster
when food and water ran short. The ghazzi was an elaborately prepared and executed raid against the “enemy” tribe, in which camels
and other equipment were borrowed from allies, and booty taken in
the campaign was meticulously divided among the participants. In
Mauritanian and Western Saharan (Saharawi) tribes alike, ghazzis
over time began to be seen as an efficient way to increase a group’s
wealth and influence. As a result, the practice was very difficult to
eradicate, and it was only after the complete French “pacification”
of the Adrar (and the Spanish suppression of armed Saharawi resistance in the early 1930s) that armed tribesmen found their activities
restricted. Because France insisted that disputes among tribes be resolved peacefully, many Moors were forced to channel their martial
energies elsewhere, often by joining the French army as an entrée to
a better standard of living and enhanced social mobility.
GOLD. Gold in commercially viable quantities was first discovered
in Mauritania in 1991 in the tailings of a former copper mine in the
vicinity of Akjoujt. General Gold Resources (GGR), a subsidiary
of Rothschild Australia, Ltd., had a plurality (42.5 percent) stake,
with the Mauritanian government and other Arab investors holding
smaller shares. Operated by Mines d’Or d’Akjoujt (MORAK), the
GORGOL
• 229
$10 million venture was projected to net at least 204,000 troy ounces
of gold over a five-year period, but it failed to live up to expectations
and was closed in the first quarter of 1996 after production during
1995 had fallen 20 percent from the level of the previous year, when
the operation netted $15.4 million for the Mauritanian treasury and
was extracting approximately 2,800 troy ounces of gold monthly.
GGR, along with a multicountry consortium known as the Société
Arabe des Mines d’Akjoujt (SAMIN), had started prospecting for additional gold deposits in Inchiri province as well as across a 20,000square-kilometer concession in the southern province of Gorgol, in
cooperation with Mauritania’s Bureau des Recherches Géologiques
et Minières (BRGM). But despite a $14 million World Bank loan
granted for the purpose in October 1998, GGR and SAMIN had little
to show for their efforts by early 2000, causing GGR to withdraw
from Mauritania entirely. A search for gold in another location at
about the same time, Oussate Sfaryatt in northern Mauritania, also
showed a similar lack of promise.
Somewhat unexpectedly, the gold mining sector sprang back to
life in 2004. Bolstered by the BRGM’s continuing surveys, Defiance
Mining Ltd. of Canada announced that it would be able to extract 9
million tons of gold over an eight-year period from the so-called Tasaist deposit, situated about 310 kilometers northeast of Nouakchott
between Akjoujt and Atar. Underscoring the inherent uncertainty
of the Mauritanian natural resources sector, though, Defiance Mining was replaced in late 2005 by another Canadian firm, Rio Narcea
Gold Mines, which stated that it would build and operate the Tasaist
gold mine and extract about 105,000 troy ounces of gold starting in
mid-2007 at a cost of over $100 million, financed almost equally
by its own capital as well as a World Bank loan. In addition, the
old Akjoujt mine site looked set to resume operations. In the third
quarter of 2004, First Quantum Minerals Ltd. of Canada (which held
an 80 percent share of the mine) announced that it would attempt to
recover some 50,000 troy ounces of gold and 30,000 tons of copper
annually by 2006.
GORGOL. A Mauritanian région bordering on the Senegal River Valley, Gorgol, one of the country’s best-watered areas, covers an area
of approximately 14,000 square kilometers and supports significant
230 •
GOURAUD, HENRI
agricultural and livestock activity. Its location on the Senegal River
makes it the site of considerable cross-border commerce with Senegal. Ethnically, Gorgol is a stronghold of black Mauritanian groupings, notably the Fulbe and the Halpulaaren, a fact that made the
area a zone of high tension during the Senegal–Mauritania crisis
of 1989–1990. Officially, the population of the province stood at
242,711 in 2000, a great increase from the 1988 figure of 184,359
and the 1977 estimate of 149,000.
GOURAUD, HENRI (1867–1946). After the 12 May 1905 assassination of the French governor-general of the Mauritanian territory,
Xavier Coppolani, French plans to “pacify” and administer the
country as a colonial possession went through a period of soulsearching. Individuals with the stature and intelligence of Coppolani,
who skillfully blended inducements to the inhabitants of Brakna and
Trarza with the application of military force, were difficult to locate.
Finally, in 1907, French forces in Mauritania were placed under the
command of Colonel Henri Joseph Eugène Gouraud (later promoted
to general), a flamboyant yet highly professional officer who was
prepared to use more frankly military means to bring the rest of
the country, notably the Adrar, under French suzerainty. Mindful
that the most aggressive opponent of the French presence in the
region, Cheikh Ma el-Ainin, had a considerable popular following
as well as a large army, Gouraud laid his plans for the capture of the
Adrar carefully, drawing on his previous military successes against
similarly intransigent Muslim tribesmen in adjacent “Soudan” (Mali)
several years before.
Gouraud aimed first to occupy the strategic town of Atar and then
attack Ma el-Ainin’s forces and defeat them piecemeal, with what
he regarded as vastly superior French firepower. On 9 January 1909,
he launched his Colonne d’Adrar (Adrar Campaign). He rapidly
captured Atar, but nearly met disaster against the more skilled and
motivated men under Ma el-Ainin’s command. After an inconclusive series of skirmishes that lasted until June, Gouraud revised his
strategy, cutting off the rebel forces from their critical wadis and
date palm groves and then attacking them frontally. By 28 July 1909,
Idjil and Chinguetti had been taken and most resistance had been
crushed, sending Ma el-Ainin back to Morocco. The following year,
GUIDIMAKA
• 231
Gouraud published a diary/memoir of his experiences in Mauritania.
He later commanded French forces in World War I.
GRAND CONSEIL D’AOF. The Grand Council of the Federation of
French West Africa (Afrique Occidentale Française) was created in
1925 to assist the French-appointed governor-general (commissaire
du gouvernement) in his administration of France’s vast West African colonies, which included Mauritania. When the Grand Council
was established, its members were appointed by the governor-general
according to corporatist principles, with only military officers, businessmen, and civil servants, along with a few others, represented.
Even with this narrow and undemocratic base, the council had no
real power and served only to advise the governor-general on matters
primarily of local political and economic interest. The Grand Council
of AOF was based in Dakar, Senegal, as was a parallel institution,
the Conseil du Gouvernement, which had a slightly broader (but
still appointed) membership that encompassed all eight territories
of AOF. The Grand Council, however, did acquire some additional
influence on 26 October 1946, when a French decree transferred to
it most of the consultative powers formerly held by the Council of
Government. At the same time the council was reorganized, giving
five persons from each AOF territory (including Mauritania) places
on it. Mauritania was separated administratively from Senegal at this
time, although its capital continued to reside at St. Louis until the
founding of Nouakchott over a decade later.
GUELB. The label given to a relatively large, isolated peak situated on
a plateau in Mauritania’s Saharan zone. A prominent guelb known as
Kediet d’Idjil is located near the towns of F’Derik and Zouérate in
the administrative région of Tiris Zemmour. At over 900 meters, it
is the highest point in the entire country. Guelbs have often turned
out to be rich in mineral deposits, notably copper and iron ore.
GUIDIMAKA. Mauritania’s smallest région and probably the one with
the best agricultural resources, Guidimaka covers an area of about
10,000 square kilometers. The province had a population of 116,436
according to a 1988 census, and in the year 2000 another government census counted 177,707 people there. Very few of Guidimaka’s
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residents are nomadic, most being sedentary farmers in the fertile
Senegal River Valley. Many of these farmers are Soninkés, one of
the country’s principal Black African groupings. As Mauritania’s
southernmost province, Guidimaka has been less drastically affected
by droughts and the process of desertification than many other areas,
but it still sometimes registers less than its normal level of rainfall.
Sélibaby, the provincial capital, is the only large population center,
and the town is linked to the rest of Mauritania by a small but improving network of roads.
GULF CRISIS AND WAR (2 August 1990–3 March 1991). Although
Mauritania is located thousands of kilometers from the Gulf region,
the crisis caused by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait on 2
August 1990 and lasting until 3 March 1991, when Iraq formally surrendered to U.S.-led coalition forces, presented the country with one
of its most intense domestic and foreign relations challenges since
independence. The crisis also occurred at a time when the government
of Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya was under severe pressure
from two other directions: the still unfriendly relations with its southern neighbor, Senegal, as a result of the Senegal–Mauritania crisis
that began in April 1989, and the high level of influence being exerted
upon the governing Comité Militaire de Salut National (CMSN) by
the Mauritanian branch of the Arab Baath Socialist Party (ABSP),
closely aligned with Baghdad. Consequently, Mauritania found itself
under heavy international scrutiny due to its friendship with Iraq and
the hostility felt by many ordinary people in the country toward the
U.S.-organized campaign, which succeeded in liberating Kuwait after several weeks of air strikes beginning on 16 January 1991 and a
ground assault (Operation Desert Storm) lasting 100 hours, launched
in late February, which encountered limited Iraqi resistance.
Although the CMSN, like the civilian regime of President
Mokhtar Ould Daddah before it, had cultivated good political and
economic ties with both the conservative Gulf monarchies and the
more “radical” states such as Iraq without undue incident, this situation underwent a subtle change following the end of the Iran–Iraq
war in mid-1988. Baghdad’s perceived victory over Teheran in that
conflict, coupled with its oil wealth, enhanced its standing as an alliance partner within the Mauritanian government. Somewhat later, the
GULF CRISIS AND WAR
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CMSN’s need for a steady supply of weapons during the crisis with
Senegal deepened the relationship, and however skeptical President
Ould Taya may have felt about a wholehearted embrace of Saddam
Hussein (all observers agreed that Ould Taya himself had no Baathist
leanings), he was induced to hold two summit meetings in Baghdad
with the Iraqi leader, in December 1988 and October 1989. Soon
visits by Iraqi representatives were nearly continuous; the persistent
efforts of Iraq’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, appeared to be yielding
benefits for both countries; and some worried commentators began to
speak ominously about Mauritania’s becoming a “satellite” of Iraq.
Almost literally overnight, the diplomatic equation underwent
a drastic change. On 2 August 1990, Iraqi forces, led by the elite
Republican Guard, overran Kuwait City and the rest of the small
sheikdom in a blitzkrieg operation lasting only 24 hours. The nowexiled Kuwaiti monarchy, as well as Saudi Arabia and other states in
the Gulf region, quickly made clear that countries (especially Arab/
Islamic ones) that did not express at least rhetorical disapproval of
the invasion of Kuwait would find their financial assistance curtailed
or halted, regardless of any past relationship. In spite of this, Mauritania sought to straddle the fence by abstaining on votes taken by the
Arab League on 3 August and at the Islamic Conference a day later,
making itself one of the few Arab (and African) states that did not
immediately condemn the invasion. During the next week, however,
intense pressures were exerted by Arab and Western countries alike
for Mauritania to alter its stance, so that at the next emergency meeting of the Arab League (on 9–10 August), the country sided with
the majority to demand the full restoration of Kuwaiti sovereignty.
However, it did express “reservations,” a gambit designed to mollify the still-powerful Baathists in Mauritania and also to take into
account the overwhelmingly pro-Iraqi sentiments of the Mauritanian
citizenry. Two months later, Hasni Ould Didi, Mauritania’s foreign
minister, further modified his country’s position, stating that “the
presence of fraternal and friendly forces in the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia is legal and legitimate, because it came at the request of a
sovereign state and falls within the context of United Nations resolutions.”
From Mauritania’s economic standpoint, the Gulf Crisis could
scarcely have come at a worse time. On top of an existing cutoff
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of most trade with Senegal that had begun in 1989, there was also
a cessation of economic assistance, as well as trade, with the Gulf
emirates due to Saudi and Kuwaiti anger at Nouakchott’s perceived
sympathies for Baghdad. These donors provided fully 40 percent of
Mauritania’s total international aid, and the Kuwait problem also
caused a temporary disruption of petroleum supplies, with a steep
rise in oil prices after 2 August. Mauritania, with few energy resources of its own, saw its oil import bill skyrocket from $50 million
in 1989 to an estimated $100 million in 1990. With iron ore prices in
a slump, the condition of the Mauritanian economy looked as bleak
as it had in the early 1980s, just after the country had extricated itself
from its ruinous involvement in the Western Sahara conflict.
In the final weeks before the outbreak of the Gulf War on 16
January 1991, the political situation in Mauritania became extremely
tense. Despite the reassuring statements emanating from both President Ould Taya and foreign minister Ould Didi, popular opinion
grew more and more anti-Western as it appeared increasingly likely
that the United States and its allies would resort to all-out war to
force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. France, for its part, urged all
of its estimated 1,600 nationals in the country to either take refuge
in its Nouakchott embassy or leave Mauritania entirely, and the
U.S. State Department urged all Americans to depart as early as
15 December 1990. Street protests were not uncommon during this
period (although all were dispersed by riot police), and Mauritanian
educational institutions were ordered closed by the government. Irrespective of this flurry of activity, events in Mauritania were soon
relegated to the distant background by the events in the Gulf itself,
although the arrival on 16 January 1991 of two Iraqi Airways Boeing 707s at the Nouakchott airport caused speculation (later proven
partially correct) that the Ould Taya regime was giving refuge for
the duration of the conflict to certain members of Saddam Hussein’s
family.
The rapid defeat of Iraq was greeted with keen disappointment
in Mauritania, but the end of the war allowed political events in the
country to move fairly rapidly. In a determined effort to complete the
discrediting of the Baath Party and begin the process of reconciliation
with the Gulf monarchies, President Ould Taya announced a wideranging amnesty for political prisoners within days of Iraq’s 3 March
GYPSUM
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surrender. On 15 April 1991, moreover, the head of state announced
that a new constitution would soon be promulgated and that the formation of independent political parties would be permitted. Many
members of the Baath Party (including the executive secretary of the
CMSN, Mohammed Yehdih Ould Breideleil), were dismissed from
the government, and by 1993, mutually advantageous political and
economic ties with Saudi Arabia had been largely restored. By 1995,
as part of an evolving shift in Mauritania’s external alignments, diplomatic relations with Iraq had been severed, and in July 1999, President Ould Taya went so far as to become only the third Arab country
to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel, to massive public
disapproval. So pronounced had Mauritania’s shift to a pro-Western
foreign policy become by the early 21st century that in March 2003,
when the U.S. administration of President George W. Bush mounted
a full-scale invasion and occupation of Iraq, Mauritania offered not
even verbal criticism of this action, in spite of the nearly universal
anti-American state of public opinion on this issue.
GYPSUM. With deposits estimated at 4 billion tons, Mauritania possesses some of the most plentiful supplies of gypsum in the world,
but until the late 1990s their exploitation was plagued with difficulties. In 1973, the Société Nationale Industrielle et Minière (SNIM)
began gypsum mining operations at a quarry near N’Drahamcha in
the administrative région of Trarza about 50 kilometers south of
Nouakchott. The material was exported overland to Senegal for
export, but high transportation costs forced an end to the venture in
1981. Three years later, a joint stock Mauritanian–Kuwaiti concern,
the Société Arabe des Industries Métallurgiques Mauritano-Koweitienne (SAMIA), resumed mining at the site and fared considerably
better, achieving a production level of 19,400 tons in 1987. But this,
too, could not be sustained due to technical problems at the mine, and
all production had been drastically curtailed by 1989.
SNIM, however, had not given up all hope of increasing gypsum
production beyond very low levels (6,000 tons in 1990, and only
3,000–4,000 tons per annum from 1991 to about 1995). In 1997,
SNIM, which was broadening its interests beyond its long-standing
iron ore mining endeavors, discovered additional gypsum deposits
at N’Drahamcha and was able, with foreign participation, to increase
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extraction to roughly 100,000 tons per year from 1999 to 2005. In addition to gypsum, commercially viable salt deposits were found near
the N’Drahamcha mine, although an average of no more than 5,500
tons of salt were extracted each year between 2000 and 2005.
–H–
HALPULAAR (plural: Halpulaaren; variants: Fulani, Toucouleur). The most numerous of Mauritania’s Black African population groups, the Halpulaaren, like virtually all their compatriots, are
adherents to Islam and belong to the Tidjaniya religious brotherhood.
Their lingua franca is Fulani, a language found throughout West
Africa, including countries such as Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, and The
Gambia, where the Halpulaaren are also present. Like their Black
African brethren (but unlike the Fulbe, their closest black ethnic
kinsmen), they are mainly sedentary and engage in agriculture, often alternately cultivating land on both sides of the Senegal River. In
common with most other black Mauritanians, as well as their Moorish Arab counterparts in the country, traditional Halpulaar society
was highly stratified, with a recognized institution of slavery, although it had almost entirely vanished among the black Mauritanian
population before independence in 1960.
At the pinnacle of the Halpulaar social order were the learned men
concerned mainly with religious scholarship and propagation; further
down the ladder were a substantial middle class and lower middle
class, which included fishermen, farmers, traditional warriors, and
tradesmen. Not as highly regarded in Halpulaar society were craftsmen, jewelers, woodworkers, musicians, and weavers. The lower
middle class also included bards, held in low esteem but nonetheless respected for their talents. Except for slaves, the lowest stratum
was composed of manual laborers and servants, often former slaves,
who occupied a position analogous to the so-called Black Moors or
haratines. Although the rigid caste structure among the Halpulaaren
was gradually modified by, among other factors, greater economic
opportunities over the years, the extended patrilineal family remained
an extremely strong institution. Intermarriage generally took place
within the particular caste group.
HAMDI OULD MOUKNASS
• 237
Largely because their numbers relative to the total population of
Mauritania were so high (although this is hotly disputed), the Halpulaaren were found more than any other Black African group in the
ranks of the Mauritanian civil service and the armed forces and the
diplomatic corps, at least before the late 1980s. Probably the bestknown and most prominent Halpulaar serving under the 1984–2005
presidency of Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya was Dieng
Boubou Farba, an economist, former minister of energy, and president of the Mauritanian Senate from 1992 to 1999, who represented
the El-Mina arrondissement of Nouakchott in that chamber. Another well-known Halpulaar was Lt.-Col. Anne Ahmadou Babaly,
until 1986 a full member of the ruling army junta and a holder of
key ministerial positions. On the other hand, Halpulaaren were also
numerous in the leadership and rank and file of the exiled Forces de
Libération Africaine de Mauritanie (FLAM), formed in 1983 to
protest alleged racial discrimination by the Arabic-speaking Moors.
Another more moderate (and shorter-lived) group with a mostly
Halpulaar constituency was the Organisation des Nationalisties Mauritaniens (ONM). Those Halpulaaren who supported neither President Ould Taya nor FLAM and who still desired to remain politically
active mostly found a home in either Ahmed Ould Daddah’s Union
des Forces Démocratiques (UFD) or Action pour le Changement (AC), the latter group being led by a hartani, Messaoud Ould
Boulkheir, which was forcibly dissolved by the government in January 2002. But regardless of their political leanings or loyalties, many
Halpulaaren in Mauritania found themselves under nearly constant
suspicion of being either backers of the opposition in general or
FLAM militants in particular, and—if the allegations by FLAM and
several Western human rights groups were to be believed—were
victims of official harassment, mistreatment, and repression both in
the late 1980s and early 1990s and also after the advent of the ostensibly more pluralistic Second Republic, inaugurated in April 1992
and terminated by a military coup d’état on 3 August 2005.
HAMDI OULD MOUKNASS (1935–1999). One of independent
Mauritania’s most prominent political personalities and a longtime
foreign minister, Hamdi Ould Mouknass was born in Port Étienne
(later Nouadhibou), the son of a Moorish tribal chieftain. After
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HAMDI OULD MOUKNASS
receiving both a primary and secondary education in Port Étienne
and Boutilimit, he joined the French colonial government at around
age 21 and achieved great distinction, soon being promoted to chef
de cabinet in the Ministry of Civil Service. In 1960, he left Mauritania for France, acquiring a baccalauréat from the Collège Michelet in Nice, a law degree from the Faculté de Droit in Paris, and
an advanced legal degree (diplôme d’études supérieures) from the
same institution in 1965. Returning to Nouakchott, he became one
of the closest advisers to President Mokhtar Ould Daddah, first
serving as legal counsel to the presidential office. He also joined
Ould Daddah’s Parti du Peuple Mauritanien (PPM) and was
soon elected to the PPM’s governing body, the Bureau Politique
National (BPN), a sign of the trust reposed in him by the head of
state. Over the following three years, Ould Mouknass held a variety
of increasingly responsible positions, including commissioner for
state security; high commissioner for youth and sports; social chargé
d’affaires; and, by January 1968, minister of youth, information, and
culture. He only held this last portfolio for a few months, however,
because in July 1968 he was selected by President Ould Daddah to
be minister of foreign affairs, a post he would hold uninterruptedly
for the next 10 years. As head of the country’s foreign ministry, he
played a critical role in the reformulation of Mauritania’s foreign
relations strategy, which was underway at the time. This included
loosening military and economic ties with France, assuming a more
nonaligned and nationalistic stance at the United Nations (UN), and
moving closer to the Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle
East, a process consummated in October 1973 when Mauritania
finally joined the Arab League.
As foreign minister, Hamdi Ould Mouknass faithfully enunciated
Mauritania’s long-standing territorial claim to the neighboring Spanish colony of Western Sahara, but in the early 1970s, the hitherto
somnolent desert dependency became the focus of more and more of
President Ould Daddah’s attention as it was becoming apparent that
Madrid’s ability and willingness to remain in “Spanish Sahara” was
doubtful. For about two years, Mauritania and Morocco each pursued
mutually exclusive claims to the entire colony, but in October and
November 1974 a series of critical meetings between Ould Mouknass
and Moroccan diplomats at the United Nations in New York resulted
HAMDI OULD MOUKNASS
• 239
in a basic understanding to partition Western Sahara between the two
states. After the idea had been cleared by President Ould Daddah,
Morocco and Mauritania agreed, in early 1975, to make a joint approach to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to attempt to have
their claims to Western Sahara legally accepted. Ould Mouknass
thereafter became quite close to the Moroccans (as he would be for
the remainder of his life), playing a prominent role in the negotiation
and signing of the Madrid Agreement on 14 November 1975. The
Madrid Accords, which were kept secret, provided that after Spain’s
withdrawal from Western Sahara no later than February 1976, Mauritania and Morocco would each take control of allotted portions of
the Great Britain–sized territory. The treaty took no account of the
wishes of the indigenous population of Western Sahara, as the ICJ
had demanded in an opinion issued that same month.
Mauritania’s annexation of Tiris el-Gharbia (as the southern
one-third of Western Sahara was called) was to prove far from painless. The small, underequipped Mauritanian armed forces were
soon pitted against the guerrilla fighters of the Polisario Front, with
ruinous consequences for the country’s economy. Ould Mouknass,
for his part, continued to lobby the UN, the Organization of African
Unity (OAU), and other international forums on behalf of President
Ould Daddah’s policies, but his long tenure as foreign minister
came to an abrupt end on 10 July 1978, when officers of the warweary Mauritanian army, led by Col. Mustapha Ould Mohammed
Salek, overthrew Mokhtar Ould Daddah in a bloodless coup d’état
and instituted a military government. Ould Mouknass, who was in
Khartoum, Sudan, at the time of the coup, returned to Mauritania on
13 July and was immediately placed under arrest by the new regime.
He remained in detention until April 1979, when he was freed and
allowed to reside in his home city of Nouadhibou.
In the wake of the liberalization of Mauritania’s hitherto authoritarian institutions begun by President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed
Taya in early 1991, Hamdi Ould Mouknass ended a long period
of political inactivity and exile to become one of the country’s primary opposition politicians. In the period leading up to the January
1992 presidential elections, he aligned himself with Ahmed Ould
Daddah’s Union des Forces Démocratiques (UFD), the largest
opposition party. However, after Ould Taya emerged victorious as
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president, and after the head of state’s Parti Républicain, Démocratique et Social (PRDS), won a lopsided parliamentary majority
partly as a consequence of a UFD boycott, Ould Mouknass, along
with several other prominent individuals, decided in early 1993
to break away from the UFD and start their own political party,
the Union pour le Progrès et la Démocratie (UPD), which was
formally registered with the Mauritanian authorities on 15 June.
Reportedly, Ould Mouknass was anxious to distance himself from
Ahmed Ould Daddah and wished to adopt a more conciliatory stance
toward the Ould Taya regime than the “radical” UFD was willing to
contemplate. And although Ould Mouknass was briefly detained by
the Mauritanian police in mid-1993 on suspicion of accepting foreign
(possibly Moroccan) funds for the UPD, he had fully aligned himself
with President Ould Taya by July 1997, urging his fellow Mauritanians to give the head of state a second six-year term in upcoming
elections. For this, Ould Mouknass was rewarded by Ould Taya with
the title of minister without portfolio for Arab–African relations.
Hamdi Ould Mouknass was still serving in this largely informal
role at the time of his death from a heart attack in Nouakchott on 15
September 1999.
HARATINE (sing., hartani). In Mauritanian society, haratines (literally in Arabic, “plowmen”) constituted a unique stratum, and according to certain experts may constitute a plurality of the overall
population, outnumbering either the Black Africans or the politically
and economically dominant “white” Moors or Beydanes. Generally
speaking, a hartani is one who has traditionally been in slavery and
is not any longer subject to a master’s direction in any form, or is either partly (or, much more controversially, wholly) enslaved; that is,
formally emancipated by his or her Beydane overseers, but remaining
a part of the Moorish family unit in a servile or semiservile condition.
Although the majority of haratines are black-skinned and possess
“negroid” facial characteristics to some extent, the former slaves can
be lighter-skinned as well and display the “Caucasian” features of the
Beydanes owing to intermarriage. Moreover, haratines have almost
always been totally assimilated to Arab culture, speak Hassaniyya
Arabic as their lingua franca; bear Arab names; and are consequently
isolated culturally from the free Black African groups such as the
HARATINE
• 241
Halpulaaren and the Soninké, which historically reside in and near
the Senegal River Valley.
The origins of the haratine class can be traced to the 16th century.
At about that time, most black Mauritanians, formerly subjects of
the Ghana and Mali Empires, were displaced to the south by Arab
invaders from the north and east. The Black Africans who remained
behind or who were captured by the invaders became slaves, working
mostly in small-scale agriculture or with livestock, activities supervised by white Moors, although the latter were quite often little better
off economically than their haratine subjects. Their servile condition continued well into the 20th century, until a gradual (although
by no means complete) erosion of the strict Moorish caste system
was brought about partly by the formal abolition of slavery under
French colonial rule after Paris penetrated farther north into northern
Mauritania by about 1905. Many stayed enslaved during the immediate postindependence period (1960–1980), and the persistence
of slavery remained easily the most controversial aspect of modern
Mauritanian society. The majority of the time, the lot of a hartani
was an unpromising one, as it often meant continued dependence on
a Beydane family or tribe, nearly nonexistent economic opportunities, and the unenviable distinction of occupying nearly the lowest
rung in the Moorish social hierarchy. On the other hand, growing
emancipatory attitudes did penetrate the country by the 1970s, and
the growing population shifts to the cities and towns of Mauritania
brought about by droughts and the desertification process meant that
haratines were increasingly found in the professions, owning land
and businesses, and as officers and enlisted men in the Mauritanian
armed forces. Their attainments and earning capacity sometimes
outstripped their Beydane counterparts.
Both politically and economically, however, the haratines continued to suffer from discrimination and poverty, and in 1974 certain intellectuals in the ex-slave community came together to form El-Hor
(“Free Man”), an organization intended to protest against slavery
and all forms of discrimination against “Black Moors.” Although the
group, like many others, was subjected to government repression and
was independently active only between 1978 and about 1983 (and
its degree of popular support was uncertain), the group did manage
to focus the attention of at least a small segment of the Mauritanian
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public and the international human rights community on the special
problems of the haratines. It was probably due to El-Hor’s pressures,
for example, that the military regime headed by Col. Mohammed
Khouna Ould Heydallah issued a decree in July 1980 reabolishing
slavery and followed this up in June 1983 by promulgating a Land
Reform Act that had as one of its goals the placement of haratines
on fertile farmland in the Senegal River Valley, hectarage that sometimes was not being cultivated.
The political ramifications of the existence of a formerly enslaved
segment of society within Mauritania were immense and had both
positive and negative consequences for the military government
between 1984 and 1992 and also for the ostensibly more democratic
Second Republic that followed (1992–2005). The authorities could
take some comfort in the fact that the free Black Africans, for fairly
obvious cultural reasons, did not form an alliance with the haratines,
as was hoped for by the exiled Forces de Libération Africaine de
Mauritanie (FLAM), and many Black Moors allegedly cooperated
with the government during and after the 1989–1990 Senegal–
Mauritania crisis in displacing Black Africans from their ancestral
lands, reportedly with the active assistance of hard-liners such as
Col. Djibril Ould Abdellahi and Dah Ould Abdel Jelil. On the
other hand, continued social discrimination—along with the probable
persistence of slavery itself—militated against many haratines ever
being truly attached to a government dominated by Beydanes. During
the 1990s, as restrictions on political activities diminished for a time,
haratines were drawn in significant numbers to political parties such
as Messaoud Ould Boulkheir’s Action pour le Changement (AC),
which was formed in August 1996 and operated until it was banned
in January 2002. In addition, SOS-Esclaves, a prominent antislavery
organization under the leadership of another hartani, Boubacar Ould
Messaoud, drew considerable attention and always was at least tolerated by the regime. By the early 21st century, it was apparent that
in spite of the alignments and sentiments of the moment among the
haratines, the problems posed by their condition would not go away,
due not only to their being part of the still-potent slavery question,
but because their situation often mirrored the dilemmas confronted
by the Mauritanian people as a whole.
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• 243
HARMATTAN. A hot, dry wind, which in Mauritania generally blows
westward toward the coastal areas from the Sahara. It gives rise to the
irifi, the feared sandstorms, which can afflict the country for hours or
even days at a time. See also CLIMATE.
HASSAN. As the dominant social stratum among Mauritania’s Moors,
the hassan, or warrior tribes, are descended from the Arab invaders
originating in Yemen who, after a series of conflicts ending with
the Char Bobha, or Thirty Years’ War (1644–1674), defeated the
Berbers of the region, who were thereafter forced into vassalage as
znaga, or tributaries. The only exception to the hassan tribes’ undisputed mastery were the zawiya or religious tribes, who themselves
were often more Arab than Berber and who enjoyed protection from
the hassan due to their knowledge of Islam. Even before the start of
vigorous French penetration of Mauritania in the late 19th century,
the distinction between hassan and zawiya tribes had begun to lose
some of its significance because of intermarriage and other factors,
and the policies of Xavier Coppolani, the French governor-general
of Mauritania between 1901 and 1905 who attempted to elevate the
zawiya to a higher social position relative to the hassan, lessened it
still further.
HASSAN II, KING OF MOROCCO (1929–1999). Born on 9 July
1929 in Rabat and the son of the first postindependence Moroccan
king, Mohammed V, Crown Prince Moulay Hassan became King
of Morocco on 26 February 1961, a few days after the unexpected
death of his father. Even before the beginning of his long reign on the
Alawite throne, Hassan II displayed a fairly consistent and at times
controversial preoccupation with Mauritania. For example, it was
revealed in 2004 that, before he became king, Crown Prince Hassan,
in collaboration with his father and in his capacity as the commander
of Morocco’s Forces Armées Royales (FAR), formulated a plan to
militarily invade and occupy Mauritania before it could gain full
independence from France in November 1960. Although nothing
came of this scheme (probably due to the near-certainty of a French
military response and intense African opposition), the new Moroccan
monarch continued to embrace Mohammed V’s “Greater Morocco”
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aspirations, urged by Mohammed Allal el-Fassi, a prominent nationalist leader in the 1950s and 1960s. Consequently, Hassan II
enunciated territorial claims not only to Mauritania and the adjacent
Spanish colony of Western Sahara, but also to large parts of western
Algeria and the Spanish presidios of Ceuta and Melilla on Morocco’s
Mediterranean coastline, in part to solidify his political position
at home and also to gather international support by espousing an
“anticolonial” foreign policy. Thus, Rabat refused to extend recognition to Mauritania throughout the 1960s and mounted an aggressive
campaign to deny the country admission to both the United Nations
and the Arab League. For a time, these efforts bore some fruit: No
Arab country except for Tunisia at first supported Mauritania’s existence, and King Hassan did briefly succeed in gaining the backing of
some Mauritanian pan-Arabists, notably Horma Ould Babana and
elements of the nationalist political party, An-Nadha al-Wataniyya
al-Mauritaniya (Nadha).
Morocco’s (and the Arab world’s) nonrecognition was to exert a
profound influence on Mauritania’s foreign relations in the first years
after independence. President Mokhtar Ould Daddah always took
care to cultivate extremely close ties with France and relied heavily
on the more positive attitudes of many Black African states, gaining
admission to the Organization of African Unity (OAU) when it was
founded in 1963. The Moroccan monarch, however, persisted in his
efforts to annex Mauritania, creating a separate ministry within his
government for Mauritanian (and Western Saharan) affairs in 1966
to prepare the way for the “return” of these territories to the Moroccan fold. But by the late 1960s, King Hassan’s endeavor waned as it
became apparent that President Ould Daddah’s regime simply enjoyed
too much international recognition—even among Arab countries
as the decade wore on—for it ever to be legitimately absorbed by
Morocco. Moreover, Hassan II was by then feeling increasingly secure
in his internal political position and could afford to ignore the hard-line
irredentist groups in his country, such as the Istiqlal (Independence)
Party. Relations were on the mend with Algeria as well after a brief and
inconclusive border war in 1963. On 15 January 1969, King Hassan II
and Algerian President Houari Boumedienne held a summit meeting
at Ifrane, Morocco, and agreed in principle to resolve their frontier and
other differences amicably. This Algerian–Moroccan détente also had
HASSAN II, KING OF MOROCCO
• 245
a positive effect on Mauritania. Through the intervention of Boumedienne and other Arab leaders, Hassan II and Mokhtar Ould Daddah
met for the first time in Rabat in September 1969, and the definitive
abandonment of Morocco’s claim to Mauritania came in early 1970,
when the two heads of state signed a convention establishing formal
diplomatic relations. After this, ties developed rapidly, with Morocco
supplying development assistance to the Mauritanians, including a
crucial loan that enabled Ould Daddah to compensate the French and
other shareholders of the giant iron ore mining company, the Société
Anonyme des Mines de Fer de Mauritanie (MIFERMA), which
was nationalized in November 1974.
King Hassan retained his claim to Western Sahara, however, and
sought to avoid a confrontation with President Ould Daddah, who
also claimed the entire territory for his country. After a period of
equivocation in the early 1970s, the Mauritanian head of state decided in November 1975 to join his erstwhile adversary and agree to
the partition of the Spanish colony between them. On 14 November,
Mauritania, Morocco, and Spain signed the Madrid Agreement,
which divided the colony but also disregarded the demands for independence of the Polisario Front and a decision by the International
Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague that found both countries’ claims
to Western Sahara unpersuasive in relation to the legal requirement
of self-determination. On 14 April 1976, the Moroccan–Mauritanian Conventions were signed, formally delineating the two states’
respective zones of occupation. This document left Mauritania with a
nearly worthless expanse of desert known as Tiris el-Gharbia. Morocco, for its part, took over the phosphate-rich northern two-thirds
of the former colony, known as Saguia el-Hamra.
The Western Sahara conflict, which was still to be unresolved
into the first decade of the 21st century, was already in progress before the signing of the Madrid Agreement and the formal annexation
of the territory by Mauritania and Morocco. Mauritania’s tiny and illequipped armed forces were pitted against highly motivated Polisario guerrillas, which soon raided virtually every population center in
the country’s northern and central regions, exposing the limitations
of the Mauritanian army and forcing President Ould Daddah ever
further into the arms of King Hassan. After a series of disastrous
military defeats and the near collapse of the Mauritanian economy,
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a Moroccan–Mauritanian Defense Committee was set up on 13
May 1977 (significantly, just a fortnight after Polisario briefly occupied the key iron ore mining town of Zouérate), allowing Moroccan troops to station themselves both in Tiris el-Gharbia and within
Mauritania proper to try to secure Ould Daddah’s hold on his outgunned nation. Soon nearly 9,000 of King Hassan’s soldiers were in
Mauritania, virtually relegating the country to the status of a junior
partner in Western Sahara. The deepening alliance with Morocco,
among other things, rekindled suspicions among some Mauritanians
that the Moroccan king had never really reconciled himself to their
country’s independence. The large Moroccan presence, even when
accompanied by French air strikes against Polisario in late 1977, was
not enough to turn the military tide, and as a consequence President
Mokhtar Ould Daddah was overthrown by his demoralized army in a
bloodless coup d’état on 10 July 1978.
King Hassan reacted to the July coup with considerable alarm,
fearing a loss of resolve by Mauritania to hold onto its Saharan possession. But he was pleased that Col. Mustapha Ould Mohammed
Salek, the chairman of the governing Comité Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN), was reluctant to pull out of Western
Sahara unilaterally and sign a separate peace with the Polisario Front.
Ould Salek tried to entice the Moroccan monarch into joining him in
a “global” settlement of the Western Sahara problem, and as a result
had little to show for his mediatory efforts by April 1979, when he
was stripped of power by his fellow Mauritanian officers and eventually replaced as paramount leader by Lt.-Col. Mohammed Khouna
Ould Heydallah. After a few months, the new military leader took
the step that had eluded his predecessors, putting Mauritania’s signature to the Algiers Agreement on 5 August 1979, by which the country permanently renounced its claim to Western Sahara and made
peace with the Polisario Front. The thousands of troops Morocco still
had inside Mauritania were quickly obliged to leave. Morocco moved
into Tiris el-Gharbia as Mauritanian forces withdrew and annexed
Mauritania’s share of the territory a week later.
Despite Ould Heydallah’s strenuous attempts to personally explain
his policy shift to King Hassan, the Algiers Agreement evoked the
monarch’s wrath, especially given the new head of state’s purported
sympathy for the Polisario cause. As a result, King Hassan welcomed
HASSAN II, KING OF MOROCCO
• 247
to Rabat members of the exiled Mauritanian opposition group, the
Alliance pour une Mauritanie Démocratique (AMD), and allegedly allowed them to conspire against Ould Heydallah as a means
of revenge against his “pro-Polisario” government. Matters came to
a head on 16 March 1981, when AMD members (including several
disaffected former Mauritanian army officers) staged a violent coup
attempt in the streets of Nouakchott, killing several people before
loyal army troops overpowered them. President Ould Heydallah severed diplomatic relations with Morocco a few days later and moved
his country progressively closer to Algeria and Polisario. Three years
later, on 27 February 1984, the Mauritanian leader formally recognized the Polisario Front’s government-in-exile, the Saharan Arab
Democratic Republic (SADR), further antagonizing King Hassan.
Soon afterward, however, in a move met with undisguised satisfaction in Rabat, Ould Heydallah was deposed by a fellow officer, Col.
Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, who signaled a desire to assume
a more neutral stance on Western Sahara. Diplomatic relations were
restored a few months later, although friendly ties with Algeria were
maintained and the recognition of the SADR was never rescinded. Finally, in February 1989, President Ould Taya brought Mauritania into
the Union du Maghreb Arabe (UMA), a five-nation arrangement
that replaced the implicitly anti-Moroccan Treaty of Fraternity and
Concord, which Ould Heydallah had signed on 13 December 1983.
Although the overall state of relations between King Hassan and
the Ould Taya regime were regularly described as “excellent” by
diplomats from both countries from 1985 to 1999, irritants remained.
Mauritania registered a strong protest with Hassan II when he ordered the extension of Morocco’s “defensive wall” (earthen barrier)
system in Western Sahara to within a few kilometers of Mauritania’s
borders in early 1987, and Rabat’s attitudes with respect to the
Senegal–Mauritania crisis (which began in April 1989) also caused
Ould Taya some anxiety, because King Hassan had made Senegal
one of his closest allies in sub-Saharan Africa and according to some
observers was not prepared to give full backing to his Maghreb
counterpart in its dispute with the Dakar government led by President Abdou Diouf. After these two setbacks, ties between Rabat and
Nouakchott improved once again, but to the end of his life King Hassan never paid an official state visit to Mauritania, and it would be
248 •
HASSANIYYA
left to his son and successor, Mohamed VI, to preside over an even
warmer period of relations between Mauritania and Morocco after
the 70-year-old monarch’s death on 23 July 1999.
HASSANIYYA. The dialect of Arabic spoken in Mauritania. As the
name indicates, it was imported by the hassan, or warrior, tribes,
who finally subjugated the country in the late 1600s in the Char
Bobha against the Berbers. The Hassaniyya dialect is one of the
purest in the Arabic language, coming closest to classical Arabic.
Despite the prevalence of Hassaniyya, many local place names in
Mauritania, as well as some words in everyday use, retain their Berber antecedents.
HAUT CONSEIL D’ÉTAT (HCE). An 11-member committee of senior officers of the Mauritanian armed forces that overthrew the civilian government headed by President Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh
Abdellahi, the High State Council first announced its existence in
the first hours after the army coup d’état of 6 August 2008, which
peacefully terminated Mauritania’s Third Republic and substituted
Col. Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz in place of the deposed Ould Abdellahi, who was placed in detention. In spite of the fact that Col. Ould
Abdelaziz and his officer colleagues were thenceforth to exercise
supreme power over their country’s affairs, the new military leaders
did not dissolve the Assemblée Nationale and the Senate, the two
branches of the legislature, nor did they disband any of the pre-existing political parties in the country or suspend the constitution of
20 July 1991. Moreover, the HCE asked all of the civilian members
of the Conseil des Ministres (except for the Prime Minister, Yahya
Ould Ahmed el-Waghef, who was also detained) to remain at their
posts, and also (on 14 August), appointed a new premier, Moulay
Ould Mohamed Laghdaf, a respected Mauritanian ambassador to the
European Union (EU), in a clear bid for international legitimacy by
the new ruling junta.
The August 2008 putsch was evidently planned and carried out
in some haste by Col. Ould Abdelaziz because its immediate trigger
was the attempted dismissal of four high-ranking military officers
(including Ould Abdelaziz himself) by President Ould Abdellahi
only a few hours before. Consequently, the composition of the HCE
HAUT CONSEIL D’ÉTAT
• 249
was highly uncertain for the first several days after the coup, and this
manifested itself in at least three ways. First, in spite of his evident
importance in the military’s chain of command, the army chief of
staff, Col. Mohamed Ould el-Ghazouani, was evidently not a member of the HCE, although he had been named by the parliamentary
supporters of President Ould Abdellahi in the summer of 2008 as
one of the officers who were interfering with the civilian regime.
Second, the chief of staff of the Mauritanian National Guard, Col.
Félix Négri, was relieved of his place on the HCE on 12 August
for reasons that were unclear and was replaced by his deputy, Col.
Mesgharou Ould Ghoueizy. But third and most significant, Col. Ould
Abdelaziz and his colleagues seemed to have seriously considered
the idea of putting selected civilian political leaders on the High State
Council to lend it an air of legality. Reportedly, these politicians included Ahmed Ould Daddah, the chairman of the Rassemblement
des Forces Démocratiques (RFD), Messaoud Ould Boulkheir,
Speaker of the National Assembly, Bâ Mamadou dit M’Baré, the
Senate president, and Constitutional Council chairman Abdellahi
Ould Ely Salem, as well as prominent National Assembly member
Mohamed Ely Cherif. But although Ahmed Ould Daddah—who
was more favorably disposed to the coup than many of his fellow
politicians—was receptive to inclusion on the HCE as long as certain
conditions were met, Ould Boulkheir was understood to have flatly
refused. Indeed over the next two weeks, Ould Boulkheir would clash
with the army establishment over the reconvening of parliament under the military’s aegis. Thus, after 48 hours or so, the idea of a joint
military–civilian HCE was abandoned, and five additional senior officers were appointed in their stead.
The membership roster of the High State Council as of late August
2008, along with their positions in the military hierarchy (if known)
were as follows:
President: Col. Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz (commander of the
Bataillon de la Sécurité Présidentielle)
Members:
Col. Mohamed Ould Cheikh Mohamed (army chief of staff)
Col. Mesgharou Ould Ghoueizy (deputy commander of the National Guard)
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Col. Ahmed Ould Bekrine (chief of staff of the Gendarmarie
Nationale)
Col. Mohamed Cheikh Ould el-Hady (chairman of the Direction
Générale de la Sûreté
Nationale, and former chairman of the Direction d’Études et de
la Documentation
Col. Ghoulam Ould Mohamed, M.D.
Col. Mohamed Ould Meguett
Col. Mohamed Ould Mohamed Znagui
Col. Dia Adama Omar
Col. Hennoune Ould Sidi
Col. Ahmedou Bamba Ould Baya
HEALTH. In spite of certain improvements in the public health situation in Mauritania during the 1990s, as noted by statistical compilations such as the Human Development Report issued by the United
Nations (UN), overall conditions in the country showed few favorable signs, and indeed there was some evidence that a marked deterioration may have been present, even though it had largely escaped
the full ravages of the AIDS/HIV epidemic by the early 21st century.
On the positive side of the equation, life expectancy at birth in 2003
stood at 52.7 years, up appreciably from the 45 years for men and 51
years for women recorded in the mid-1990s. Likewise, the percentage of malnourished individuals fell from 15 in 1990 to 10 in 2002,
more Mauritanians had regular access to clean water resources (56
percent in 2002 versus 41 percent in 1990) and improved sanitary
facilities (42 percent in 2002 against 28 percent in 1990), and more
births were attended by medical professionals (57 percent in 2002
compared with a much lower proportion in the 1980s and 1990s).
The infant mortality rate, a key public health indicator, showed great
improvement from the high levels of past decades; it stood at 61 per
1,000 live births in 2002–2003 as opposed to 125 in 1993 and 102 in
the late 1980s. Childhood immunizations, too, were on the upswing
by 2002; 84 percent of one-year-olds were vaccinated against tuberculosis and 71 percent against measles. There were approximately
14 doctors per 100,000 people in Mauritania by 2006, a number that
had essentially stayed the same since 1990, and total government
HEALTH
• 251
expenditures on health also remained constant, at approximately 2.9
percent of the country’s total gross domestic product (GDP).
However, other trends were more disturbing. A child born in
Mauritania in 2002 stood a very great chance (30.5 percent) of not
surviving to the age of 40, while fully 32 percent of children under
five years of age were underweight, and 35 percent were believed
to be under normal height. The incidence of malaria in the general
population stood in the year 2000 at 11,500 cases per 100,000 (very
high, although not on a par with sub-Saharan Africa), and cases
of tuberculosis were recorded in 2003 at 664 per 100,000, a high
incidence even by the standards of the developing world. At the
same time, Mauritanian women continued to face their own peculiar
health difficulties in spite of their overall higher life expectancy.
The (formally outlawed) practices of forced feeding (gavage) and
female genital mutilation (FGM) exacted their own physiological
(and psychological) toll, and the maternal mortality rate was actually
increasing, from 750 per 100,000 live births from the mid-1980s to
the 1990s to about 1,000 in the year 2000, despite the lowering of
the fertility rate in the country from 6.5 children in 1970–1975 to
5.8 in 2000–2005. Finally, disparities in wealth led to inequities in
health care, as in most other nations. For example, among the upper
20 percent income level in Mauritania, 92.8 percent of births were
professionally attended, but only 14.7 percent of those in the poorest
25 percent had professionally attended births. Other wealth-related
disparities were somewhat less pronounced, but the larger picture
remained so dim by 2005 that the UN Human Development Report
rated Mauritania 152 out of 177 countries surveyed, an extremely
low ranking.
What diseases, specifically, could the average Mauritanian expect
to encounter during his or her lifetime? As already mentioned, tuberculosis, malaria, and measles, as well as AIDS/HIV, were endemic,
as were a variety of respiratory ailments exacerbated by the hot and
dry climate found in much of the country, often accompanied by
diseases generated by airborne fecal dust from humans and animals
alike. Cholera and dysentery from impure water supplies, as well as
the ubiquitous piles of garbage in places such as Nouakchott, were
also common, although northern Mauritania was generally healthier
252 •
HEALTH
than the fertile (and tropical) Senegal River Valley zone, an area in
which poliomyelitis, typhoid, meningitis, Rift Valley Fever, yellow
fever, and the parasitical illness bilharzia (schistosomiasis) were
all found, the latter being steeply on the rise during the 1995–2005
period as a result of the reduced flow of the Senegal River and its
tributaries due to the construction of the Manantali Dam in Mali
by the Organisation pour la Mise en Valeur du Fleuve Sénégal
(OMVS).
For the treatment of these and other maladies, only about a dozen
hospitals were scattered throughout Mauritania, ranging from Nouakchott’s Centre Hospitalier Nationale to smaller facilities in the major
cities and towns, all of which suffered from underinvestment, shortages of supplies, and a lack of trained staff and medicines despite
the presence of French and other expatriate doctors. The government
made a limited investment in mobile health clinics and maternal clinics starting in the 1970s, and the armed forces, as well as the state
mining company, the Société Nationale Industrielle et Minière
(SNIM), operated their own hospitals and clinics. Information on
psychiatric care in Mauritania as well as the incidence of mental
illness in general is not readily available, although a psychiatric hospital (the Institut Neuro-Psychiatrique) was in existence on the west
side of Nouakchott and appeared to be in abysmal condition during
the mid-1990s.
Several examples of the evidently worsening health situation in
Mauritania could be found by 2008. The first, malnutrition in children, a perennial problem throughout Africa, increased greatly due to
the severe difficulties in the agricultural sector after the late 1990s
and was thought to be well in excess of official pronouncements,
particularly given the rapid rate of urbanization found in Nouakchott, which was directly linked to the often-desperate conditions
found in the Mauritanian countryside. Reportedly—whether owing
to a lack of funding, a lack of interest on the part of the authorities,
or some combination of the two—little aid was available to malnourished children wherever they lived, and although a special ward was
opened in 2000 at Nouakchott’s main hospital in cooperation with a
French nongovernmental organization (NGO), by 2006 it had only a
single (overworked) doctor in attendance and was overrun with stray
cats. Another unwelcome development was reported with respect
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• 253
to malaria by three Spanish researchers in early 2003. Using data
from both Nouakchott and Kaédi from the late 1990s, they stated
that for the first time to their knowledge, malaria was endemic to the
capital city; in other words, not simply imported into Nouakchott by
travelers from the Senegal River Valley and elsewhere (as had been
the case before), but rather originating in all but one of the capital’s
arrondissements and in many cases being of the more virulent (and
potentially fatal) plasmodium falciparium strain. This marked the
onset of a new danger to the population in the largest Mauritanian
urban area, as the researchers were able to conclude with reasonable
certainty that none of their subjects (of whatever age) had traveled
outside of the Nouakchott area during—or even well before—the
malarial incubation period.
Finally, an entirely new disease was introduced into Mauritania in
2003. An extremely dangerous tick- and blood-borne condition with
a mortality rate of approximately 33 percent, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) infected 38 persons in Mauritania (all but 3 of
whom lived in Nouakchott), killing nearly one-third of them before
the outbreak was stopped by the imposition of drastic isolation measures at Nouakchott’s main hospital—but not before 15 others in the
hospital were infected. The index (originating) case was believed to
be a young woman who probably contracted CCHF from the infected
blood of a goat she had slaughtered. Although most of the CCHF
cases in 2003 centered around the Mauritanian capital, cases were
also found in the provinces of Guidimaka (in the town of Sélibaby),
Brakna, and Hodh el-Gharbi. Apart from poor hygienic conditions
at health care facilities, the primary causative factor behind this
outbreak was thought to be, once again, urbanization, in particular
the habit of former rural dwellers of keeping livestock in built-up
areas in close proximity to humans. The 12 medical researchers who
submitted their work on the CCHF outbreak to the journal Emerging
Infectious Diseases (published by the Atlanta-based U.S. Centers
for Disease Control) felt that although a fairly heavy exposure to the
blood of an infected animal was necessary to contract the disease,
additional outbreaks of CCHF throughout Mauritania may have occurred but might not have been noticed. In addition, in the period immediately before the February–August 2003 outbreak, rainfall levels
in the Mauritanian hinterland had been quite low, leading livestock
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herders to drive their animals closer to populated areas. Perhaps most
alarmingly, no human cases of CCHF had been reported in Mauritania prior to 2003, and this fact, along with the prevalence of other
infectious diseases, the expanded incidence of malaria in Nouakchott
(where about a third of the populace resided), and a completely
inadequate health care infrastructure, made Mauritania a decidedly
unhealthy place in which to live.
HIVERNAGE. The rainy season in Mauritania, generally extending
from July to September, is called the hivernage (“wintering”). Wide
regional variations exist in rainfall amounts throughout the country.
Nouadhibou, for example, gets less than 30mm of rain per year,
whereas the southern provinces of Gorgol and Guidimaka register
far more, making those areas suitable for agriculture. In some of
Mauritania’s territory, moreover, it is not unusual for several years
to pass with little or no rainfall. See also CLIMATE.
HODH ECH-CHARGUI. The Eastern Hodh, Mauritania’s easternmost
administrative région, covers about 183,000 square kilometers, most
of which is trackless desert with an extremely harsh climate. The province’s population is fairly thin, although the presence of refugees from
neighboring Mali makes an accurate count at times difficult. In 1977,
Hodh ech-Chargui had an estimated 157,000 people, a figure that rose
to an officially reported 212,203 in 1988 and 281,600 in 2000. Apart
from Néma (the provincial capital) and the smaller historic village of
Oualata, the only population centers of consequence are Timbédra and
Amourj (west and south of Néma, respectively) and Bassikounou (far
to the southeast near the Malian border). In an attempt to tie this distant
area more closely to the rest of Mauritania, an improved road, known
as the Trans-Mauritanian Highway (Route de l’Espoir), traverses the
southern part of the province, terminating at Néma.
HODH EL-GHARBI. The site of the ruins of the great trading center
of Aoudaghost, the Western Hodh was one of Mauritania’s most
populated régions because of its position near the Malian border
as well as its proximity to the Senegal River Valley. According to
official censuses, the population was 159,296 in 1988 and 212,156
in 2000. With 53,000 square kilometers, Hodh el-Gharbi is fairly
HORMA OULD BABANA
• 255
evenly divided between desert in the north and savanna grassland in
the south, near the frontier with Mali. It has a substantial number of
black Mauritanian farmers and livestock herders, although both occupations have been negatively affected by periodic droughts since
the 1970s, and, in common with its eastern neighbor, Hodh echChargui, refugee problems exist with Mali, stemming both from
the arid climate of the region and periodic civil unrest within Mali.
The only important town in the Western Hodh is Ayoun el-Atrouss
(which serves as the provincial capital), and the Trans-Mauritanian
Highway, an improved road completed in the early 1980s with substantial international aid, roughly bisects the province.
HORMA OULD BABANA (1912–1980). One of Mauritania’s first
native politicians and leader of its first political party, the Entente
Mauritanienne, Horma Ould Babana was born on 12 March 1912 in
Méderdra in southwestern Trarza province and was a member of the
Moorish Idaw Ali tribe. He had originally worked as an interpreter
for Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF), the French colonial government in West Africa. In late 1946, he was chosen by the French
Socialist Party to be its candidate in the November elections to the
French National Assembly in Paris, in which each AOF territory
would be entitled to one seat. Generous financial contributions from
France and Senegal, as well as the fact that Horma Ould Babana was
a Mauritanian running against a French opponent, helped ensure that
he won the election, garnering about two-thirds of the 9,611 total
ballots. It was expected by his French Socialist backers that Ould
Babana would work to lessen the influence of the traditional tribal
chieftains in Mauritania and promote more “modern” elements, but
he quickly proved a disappointment, spending much of his five-year
term in the French parliament in Paris, where he was isolated from
the developing currents of Mauritanian politics. Black Mauritanians
were also not reassured by his steadfast defense of Moorish interests,
and he did not seem interested in the cause of Mauritanian independence. The French Socialist Party, for its part, gradually deserted
him, and Ould Babana left the group in 1948. At about the same
time, more conservative and regionally based interests in Mauritania
founded the Union Progressiste Mauritanienne (UPM), an organization specifically designed to oppose Ould Babana’s Entente.
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In 1951, the Entente and the UPM ran against each another in
elections to the Conseil Général, and the UPM emerged the winner, with its leader, the part-Moor and part-Wolof Sidi el-Mokhtar
N’Diaye, getting 29,323 votes to Ould Babana’s 23,649. In 1956,
Ould Babana tried for a seat on the General Council again but was
this time even more decisively defeated, obtaining only 17,371 votes
against N’Diaye’s 106,603. After this, Ould Babana became an uncritical convert to the “Greater Morocco” philosophy of Mohammed
Allal el-Fassi, which envisioned the absorption of all of Mauritania
within Morocco. This stance heightened tensions in the country still
further, and Ould Babana soon left Mauritania, settling first in Cairo
and then in Morocco, where he helped create the Front National
de Libération Mauritanien (FNLM), a surrogate for the Army of
Liberation, which hoped, among other things, to “reclaim” Mauritania for Morocco. The armed activities of the Army of Liberation
were so threatening by the late 1950s that Mokhtar Ould Daddah,
Mauritania’s dominant politician by that time, felt constrained to call
upon France for military assistance, which was forthcoming in the
form of Opération Ouragon in February 1958. Ould Babana, having
been expelled from the Entente Mauritanienne for his pro-Moroccan
leanings, remained in Morocco for the rest of his life, becoming a
strong supporter of the country’s monarchy and serving as a royalist
member of the Moroccan parliament in the 1960s.
HOUSING. Throughout its existence as an independent country,
Mauritania has suffered from a severe shortage of housing, due to
droughts and the impact of the desertification process in rural areas,
which led to rapid urbanization beginning in the 1970s, particularly
in the capital, Nouakchott. Displaced from their agricultural lands
in the Mauritanian hinterland and often unable to give their livestock
herds proper pasturage, the new arrivals to the urban areas—who
could essentially be termed internal refugees—constructed either
tents or rough lean-to shelters of scrap metal and wood, where, of
course, they lacked access to clean water resources, were at the
mercy of the region’s harsh climate, and had little access to modern
health care. From the late 1970s onward, these shantytowns (sometimes known as kébés) sprang up at a fast pace on the periphery of
Nouakchott. It was thought that fully one-third of Mauritania’s entire
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• 257
population was living somewhere in the capital or its environs, a
situation that persisted into the early 21st century despite periodic
(and usually transitory) improvements in the country’s agricultural
situation and some efforts by successive governments to relocate displaced persons back to rural areas. On the positive side—at least until
the late 1990s when the number of internal refugees made conditions
untenable—most people were able to obtain food rations due to their
relative proximity to cities and towns, where food—often part of
international aid programs—was distributed through the state relief
agency, the Commissariat à la Sécurité Alimentaire (CSA).
The first attempt to improve housing in Mauritania was made by
the civilian government of President Mokhtar Ould Daddah in
1974. In that year, Ould Daddah established a state-run corporation,
the Société de Construction et de Gestion Immobilière (SOCOGIM),
but due to a lack of funding, shortages of indigenous building materials, high prices for imports, and the corruption and mismanagement
that soon reared its head in this sector, few additional low-cost units
were built, and those that were constructed were mostly priced out
of the reach of the average Mauritanian. Under the rule of the armed
forces between 1978 and 1992, little change was effected with respect
to housing; rather than attempt to construct acceptable dwellings for
the new residents of Nouakchott and other towns, the government for
a time went so far as to prohibit the building of permanent structures
in the shantytowns, trying (with little effect) to induce those living in
them to return home, something they understandably refused to do
unless and until conditions in the countryside improved. However,
a more imaginative approach was undertaken in the border town of
Rosso between 1977 and 1982, wherein under a cooperative scheme,
houses were to be built with locally obtained materials by the people
who would occupy them. Funding was provided by a variety of foreign donors, and an impressive start was made, with over 500 units
being constructed with room for about 4,500 persons. Then the project was allowed to lapse for a variety of reasons, among which were
persistent allegations of corrupt practices at SOCOGIM.
Since the 1980s, Mauritania has continued to turn to external aid
providers for some housing-related assistance, but the results have
been far from satisfactory, with what progress having been made
largely negated by the near-famine conditions in much of rural
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Mauritania in the late 1990s and the early 21st century. In 1985,
Kuwait and Saudi Arabia agreed to provide funds for some 1,000
new houses, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) undertook
to do likewise, but these were little more than the proverbial drops
in the bucket given the magnitude of the problem. Moreover, the
unbalanced character of Mauritanian development, which became apparent during the 1990s under President Maaouiya Ould
Sid’Ahmed Taya—reportedly because of his adherence to the
“structural adjustment” programs of the International Monetary
Fund (IMF)—manifested itself in the housing sector, too, with
the proliferating shacks and lean-tos of Nouakchott’s El-Mina and
‘Arafat arrondissements existing only a few kilometers from the
extremely large houses (even by Western standards) of the capital’s
Tevragh Zeina district north of the city center, built by wealthy
Mauritanians with the help of the country’s expanding private banking sector. The SOCOGIM company, which was still 89 percent
state owned in 2008, continued to be the dispenser of what housing construction assistance there was, with an example being a $70
million World Bank program, announced in mid-2001, that was
supposed to construct some dwellings and improve water access to
the poorer areas of Nouakchott, although it was recognized by most
observers that these efforts, as had prior ones, would have only marginal overall benefits.
HUMAN RIGHTS. As commonly understood in Western nations and
elsewhere, basic human rights—namely, freedom of expression, assembly, religion, and so forth, as well as freedom from mistreatment
or other arbitrary behavior at the hands of the authorities—has been
at best an uncertain commodity in Mauritania, and at worst, practically nonexistent. Throughout its history as an independent state,
its citizens have been routinely repressed by successive governments, whether civilian or military, and although the levels of state
violence have usually not approached those of other Arab/Islamic
or African countries, Mauritanians have to date never been able
to benefit from a truly autonomous judiciary willing to protect the
rights of the individual, nor have they for the most part enjoyed a
robust legal system that would assist them in securing their personal
and political freedoms. With domestic pressures for legal reform
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almost nonexistent and usually possessing little practical force, since
the 1980s it has increasingly been left to international human rights
organizations—such as Amnesty International (AI) and Human
Rights Watch (HRW) in the English-speaking world—to assist
Mauritanian dissidents as best they could and to draw attention to
various repressive acts by the government, efforts that sometimes did
succeed in freeing at least a few prisoners and curbing some abuses,
but did not come close to altering the fundamentally authoritarian
character of the Mauritanian polity.
The civilian government headed by President Mokhtar Ould
Daddah (1960–1978) was, in retrospect, the least oppressive regime
under which Mauritanians have lived until 2008, although even here,
violations did not take very long to manifest themselves. The thenomnipresent institution of slavery, in the first place, made any talk of
Western-style human rights a fiction from the outset (Ould Daddah
himself was reputed to have owned several slaves), and the head
of state’s establishment, in 1961, of the Parti du Peuple Mauritanien (PPM) as the sole legal political party in the country ended a
period of pluralism that had extended back to the late 1940s, when
Mauritania was still firmly under French colonial rule. The PPM’s
Bureau Politique National (BPN), set up in 1963, entrenched this
dictatorial tendency, and the country’s police and armed forces
were utilized—if somewhat uncommonly—during the remainder of
the 1960s first to break up demonstrations protesting Ould Daddah’s
new Arabization policy, and then, in 1968, to violently repress the
protests by workers and students at the country’s iron ore mines.
These actions drew significant attention to Mauritania for the first
time. In the 1970s, even the limited dissent that accompanied President Ould Daddah’s decision to annex a portion of Western Sahara
was dealt with harshly. Those few PPM members who protested
were sometimes detained without charges or trial, and just before
he was deposed in a July 1978 military coup, the president pushed
a law through a complaisant Assemblée Nationale giving him the
unappealable right to imprison indefinitely anyone he believed was a
threat to state security.
With the civilian government displaced by the military establishment, the outlook for human rights in Mauritania deteriorated still
more. Without even the nominal guarantees afforded by the 1961
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Mauritanian constitution, treatment of individual citizens was more
and more at the whim of army officers—usually without legal training—who succeeded one another in often-murky circumstances from
1979 to 1984. The nine-month term in office of the first military
president, Col. Mustapha Ould Mohammed Salek, and the (barely)
seven-week tenure of his successor, Lt.-Col. Ahmed Ould Bouceif,
were relatively free of major abuses, but the same could not be said
of Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah, who held power as
the de jure leader of Mauritania from January 1980 to December
1984. Repression on a purely ethnic or racial basis was not a common phenomenon under Ould Heydallah, but as the most religiously
inclined Mauritanian head of state before or since, he introduced
into the legal code some of the most controversial provisions of the
Islamic sharia, between 1982 and 1984. Until he ended them under
mounting domestic and international protests, Ould Heydallah allowed public whippings, amputations, and executions against those
accused of relatively minor offenses, nearly always after proceedings
that fell far short of commonly accepted minimum standards. As opposition to his increasingly erratic rule deepened, the military leader
made increased use of the Mauritanian police agency, the Direction
Générale de la Sûreté Nationale (DGSN), and its intelligence
network, the Bureau d’Études et de la Documentation (BED), later
slightly renamed the Direction d’Études et de la Documentation
(DED). Inside the country’s prison system—overcrowded in the
best of circumstances—the number of inmates detained for political
reasons skyrocketed.
The peaceful overthrow of Ould Heydallah by an army colleague,
Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, on 12 December 1984,
temporarily brought an end to the worst abuses of 1980–1984. Most
political prisoners were released, and for approximately two years
Ould Taya enjoyed a honeymoon of sorts with the Mauritanian
people, the great majority of whom had approved of his takeover.
This interlude, however, merely presaged the worst and widest-scale
human rights violations the country had ever seen. Reacting strongly
to the increasing agitation of the Forces de Libération Africaine
de Mauritanie (FLAM), Ould Taya’s influential interior minister,
Col. Djibril Ould Abdellahi, jailed (it was believed) hundreds of
suspected FLAM sympathizers and Moorish dissidents, imprison-
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• 261
ing some of them for lengthy periods in subhuman facilities such as
those at Oualata, where several prominent black Mauritanians died
of mistreatment in 1988. Capital punishment, a rarity under Mokhtar
Ould Daddah but more common under army rule, was more freely
employed, and four junior Halpulaar officers accused of fomenting a
coup against President Ould Taya met their end before a firing squad
in December 1987. Before they rose to greater political influence,
members of the pro-Iraq Arab Baath Socialist Party (ABSP) were
also regularly harassed, detained, and subjected to virtual show trials,
although their conditions of imprisonment were sometimes better,
and their sentences usually shorter, than those of Black Africans.
Far worse was to follow in 1989 and 1990. Forced population
transfers, which had never been instituted before, were effected by the
government in the wake of the Senegal–Mauritania crisis, with nonArab Black Africans being expelled across the border into Senegal,
allegedly to make room for Moorish former slaves (haratines), whom
Ould Abdellahi was attempting to cultivate as a source of personal
political power. Full-scale purges of accused FLAM supporters took
place in the army and in the Mauritanian civil service, and in late 1990
the abuses reached a crescendo when hundreds of Halpulaars and
certain other Black Africans were systematically tortured or extrajudicially executed, a “massacre” whose victims were divided among
several military installations, including the J’reida barracks just north
of Nouakchott, the town of Aleg in Brakna province, and at the remote Inal outpost adjacent to the Western Saharan border. Distracted
as it was by the Gulf Crisis unfolding at the same time, the outside
world did not hear of the killings until several months later, although
the world human rights community—energized in the late 1980s by
the slavery question and the treatment of black Mauritanians—would
never thereafter lose sight of the country’s internal affairs.
Returning to a position of greater influence after the formerly powerful Baath Party had been eclipsed, President Ould Taya once again
amnestied all political prisoners in early 1991 and carried out steps
toward greater openness and pluralism. But the Mauritanian Second
Republic, inaugurated in April 1992 with an elected head of state,
a bicameral parliament, and an array of independent newspapers,
never matched either its initial billing or the letter and spirit of the
constitution of 20 July 1991, which formally enshrined many civil
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liberties. After about three to four years of relative relaxation—albeit
punctuated by the short-term detentions of opposition leader Ahmed
Ould Daddah and others and the beginnings of what would become
pervasive press censorship—the state security apparatus resumed
a fairly high level of activity. The Association Mauritanienne
des Droits de l’Homme (AMDH), led by Cheikh Saad Bouh Kamara, and SOS-Esclaves, led by antislavery activist Boubacar Ould
Messaoud, existed in legal limbo, tolerated in practice but officially
forbidden to operate. Even legal political groups, most notably
Messaoud Ould Boulkheir’s Action pour le Changement (AC),
which operated from 1995 to 2002, regularly found their activities
restricted, and when the AC showed signs of fielding a potentially
effective (and multiethnic) challenge to President Ould Taya both in
the national legislature and on certain municipal councils, the atmosphere became all the more strained. A prominent opponent of the
regime, Mohamed Lemine Ch’bih Ould Cheikh Melainine, was
jailed under austere conditions at Ayoun el-Atrouss from April 2001
to August 2003 on flimsy charges, which signaled that no person was
wholly safe from arbitrary state action, and the DGSN—headed since
1985 by Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, a close associate of Ould
Taya—often arrested and detained Black Africans and others who
were attending AC meetings. Reports of deaths and mistreatment
in custody mounted. In one particularly notorious instance, a young
black Mauritanian AC member, thought by the authorities to be a
FLAM militant, was apparently beaten to death by the police; his
body was not immediately released to his family but instead was kept
in a refrigerated morgue. When his relatives asked for a full investigation of the matter and attempted to retrieve the body, the police cut
off the electrical power to the morgue, causing the body to rapidly
decompose and making a forensic examination impossible. Faced
with these prospects, a steady stream of FLAM members and other
dissidents left Mauritania in greater numbers by 2005, seeking (and
often receiving) political asylum in Europe and North America.
The country’s independent news media having been restricted
nearly to the point of collapse by the year 2000 (with detention of
newspaper personnel being the exception and not the rule), other
forms of authoritarianism reared their head after the late 1990s.
Demonstrations against Mauritania’s foreign relations alignment
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• 263
with the West (including the United States and Israel) were broken
up by force; a French judge’s attempt to prosecute a Mauritanian
army officer for human rights violations (the Ould Dah affair) was
met with a ferocious official response that reportedly extended to
assisting the defendant’s improper return to Mauritania after breaking the terms of his parole; and—starting in November 1999—some
political parties were banned outright, with the pro-Baathist Parti de
l’Avant-Garde Nationale (PAGN) soon being followed by Ahmed
Ould Daddah’s Union des Forces Démocratiques (UFD) and then
Action for Change in January 2002, not coincidentally after it scored
several electoral successes. The coup attempt of 8–9 June 2003
shook the Ould Taya regime to its foundations, and although the
embattled president did not resort to techniques of mass repression
that would surely have been employed in many other Arab or African
states, neither did he alter his basic approach to governance. Opposition candidates participating in the November 2003 presidential elections (including former president Ould Heydallah) were relentlessly
harassed, as were the country’s increasingly vocal Islamists, whom
Ould Taya often alleged were in the pay of hostile foreign interests.
The successful coup d’état of 3 August 2005, which deposed Ould
Taya while he was traveling outside the country and replaced him
with Col. Ould Vall, who headed what turned out—as promised—to
be a temporary governing body, the Conseil Militiare pour la Justice
et la Démocratie (CMJD), brought about many improvements in the
country’s troubling human rights situation. Most political detainees
were released, exiles were invited to return home, press censorship
tapered off, and the AMDH and SOS-Esclaves were finally legalized.
Moreover, the parliamentary elections of 19 November and 3 December 2006, which were followed in short order by the presidential
election of 11 and 25 March 2007, allowed the armed forces to relinquish the formal levers of power on 19 April 2007 to a civilian head
of state, Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi, and so inaugurate
the Mauritanian Third Republic. Ould Abdellahi issued an apology
for past human rights abuses upon assuming office, but by 2008 it
remained very much to be seen whether the police and other security
forces in the country, which had historically not been amenable to
civilian oversight and control, could have their activities brought
within the ambit of legal and constitutional norms, particularly if the
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army (as rumored) continued to exert indirect political influence after
it ostensibly returned to its barracks.
–I–
IMRAGUEN. Mauritania’s smallest ethnic grouping and the one with
the most obscure origins, the Imraguen probably number no more
than 1,500 and are found between Nouadhibou and the settlement of
Nouamghar on the southern edge of the country’s renowned wildlife
preserve, the Parc National du Banc d’Arguin. Unlike other Mauritanians, the Imraguen engage in fishing as their vocation along the
largely unspoiled Atlantic coastline, which limits their contact with
outsiders. Black-skinned and physically well-built, they are believed
by some historians to be the descendants of the Bafour, a pastoral,
proto-Berber people who migrated to the area during Neolithic
times, when Mauritania had not yet succumbed to the process of
desertification. After the Berbers were defeated in the Char Bobha
in 1674 by the Beni Hassan, the Imraguen were reduced to the status
of znaga to the victorious hassan tribe, the Oulad Bou Sbaa. Like
other Moorish Mauritanians, the Imraguen speak mainly Hassaniyya
Arabic.
INCHIRI. Located in the southwest of Mauritania and occupying a
total of 47,000 square kilometers, Inchiri is one of the country’s
most sparsely populated administrative régions. The population of
the province, moreover, has been in decline at least since the late
1970s, owing to its location within the Saharan climate zone and
its consequent lack of vegetation and rainfall. A Mauritanian census
in 1977 put the number of inhabitants of Inchiri at 18,000, a 1988
survey at 14,613, and the most recent census in 2000 counted 11,500
people residing there. Two arrondissements make up Inchiri; one,
Akjoujt, is the only population center of consequence and was the
site of extensive copper and gold mining operations, and the other,
Bennichab, is a village (population about 3,600 in 2000) that produces highly regarded supplies of spring water. A substantial paved
road connects Akjoujt with the capital city of Nouakchott as well
as with the important city of Atar located farther north, and a newer
INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT
• 265
road connecting Nouakchott and Nouadhibou also passes through a
portion of the province.
INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT. From the time of independence
onward, the great majority of Mauritania’s industrial infrastructure
has been directly related to the extraction of iron ore and other
minerals as well as the fisheries sector. In addition, there are small
petroleum refining and distribution facilities in the country, mainly
in and around Nouadhibou. Efforts to develop indigenous Mauritanian industries have been severely hamstrung by a lack of money, a
dependence on the skills of outsiders, the priorities of international
aid donors, the absence of a significant pool of educated labor, and
a very limited domestic market for finished products due to low incomes. Most industry-related endeavors date to the 1970s and 1980s,
and faded into insignificance after that time.
Starting in the early 1970s, the first president of Mauritania,
Mokhtar Ould Daddah—like his counterparts elsewhere in the
developing world—embarked on the construction of state-sponsored
industrial enterprises that would produce goods that, it was envisioned, would obviate the need for expensive imports. In 1974, the
Société Arabe des Industries Métallurgiques (SAMIA) was set up
with Kuwaiti participation to construct a fully integrated steel industry in Mauritania that was projected to produce 500,000 tons of steel
and copper products annually by 1980. However, only a single mill
was built, and it was designed to produce a maximum of 36,000 tons
per year of steel reinforcing rods for the construction trade. For a variety of reasons, even this plant ran into severe difficulties and never
produced anywhere near its planned output; in 1985, only 5,300 tons
of steel were cast, leading to the closure of the plant in the same year.
In 1987, the mill reopened after a reorganization of management and
additional financing provided by Jordan and Kuwait, but SAMIA
remained a marginal enterprise into the 1990s, leading to the sale
to outside investors of 50 percent of the company in 1997 as part of
the government’s privatization policies, the other half being taken
by the state’s iron ore mining firm, the Société Nationale Industrielle et Minière (SNIM). Also in late 1997, SNIM announced plans
to build a foundry adjacent ot the old SAMIA mill on the outskirts
of Nouakchott to produce parts to support the mining, fishing, and
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agricultural sectors. The cost, scheduled to be borne by foreign interests, was an estimated $3 million.
Besides the abortive efforts to establish a steel industry, there have
been singularly few forays into industrial development in Mauritania.
A few leather-tanning and textile mills operated sporadically before
being liquidated in 1991 and 1992 after finding no private buyers,
and a large sugar refinery in Nouakchott opened in 1977, although
the plant confined itself to processing imports and closed after only
six months’ operation. In 1982, it reopened with assistance from Algeria, but in 1991 it shut down again, probably for good, after years
of substandard performance, the priorities of the government having
in the meantime shifted decisively away from import substitution and
in the direction of fostering a native enteprenurial class that would
gradually develop an industrial presence in the country. To this end,
special “enterprise zones” were established, mainly in and around
Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, and some incentives were given to
serious Mauritanian businesspeople between the early 1990s and the
start of the 21st century.
There were, however, two small exceptions to the overall shrinkage
of the heavy industrial sector. In both the cement- and flour-producing
areas, import substitution (although not state ownership and management) was consciously pursued. In May 1998, a new cement plant
located near Nouakchott’s Friendship Port—known as Ciments de
Mauritanie and wholly owned by indigenous investors—opened its
doors after the expenditure of $10 million. Designed to make up to
250,000 tons of cement yearly for the Mauritanian market from a
mixture of native and imported materials, the plant—in an uncanny
reprise of prior problems in industrial development—operated well
below expectations from the start, saddled not only with technical
obstacles but also with the underpricing of its product by Japanese
and Chinese imports that were permitted under international assistance agreements. Somewhat mysteriously given these difficulties, in
the summer of 1999 Ciments de Français, a Paris-based firm, stated
that it wished to build another cement-producing facility, again near
Nouakchott, that would have an output of 150,000 tons per year and
fill 60 percent of Mauritania’s demand. The plant opened in 2000. In
the flour processing area, the picture was somewhat brighter. In 1999,
a consortium of French and Italian investors announced the pending
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construction of a flour mill near the Mauritanian capital with a capacity of about 70,000 tons per year. Pursued explicitly with the aim of
reducing flour imports, the mill opened a year later at a cost of approximately $7.8 million. Another new flour mill, known as Grands
Moulins de Mauritanie, began operations in November 2001, with an
initial goal of producing 60,000 tons of wheat flour and 20,000 tons of
animal feed yearly, with future plans to boost output and even export
some flour after satisfying the demands of Mauritania’s hundreds of
small bakeries, essential for the sustenance of its people.
INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND (IMF). Although Mauritania’s involvement with the IMF, a major and controversial Washington-based financial institution, dates back to the 1980s, it was only
in the early 1990s that the government of President Maaouiya Ould
Sid’Ahmed Taya decided to align the country fully with its recommendations, following several years during which the Mauritanian
economy actually shrank, its gross domestic product (GDP) declining by 10.9 percent in 1991 after the shock administered by both the
Senegal–Mauritania crisis and the sharply higher oil prices caused
by the Gulf Crisis of 1990–1991. On top of this, the Ould Taya
regime was shunned for a time by the IMF and the World Bank, an
outgrowth of the perception by the U.S. administration of President
George H.W. Bush that Mauritania was inordinately aligned with
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Seen in this light, it was apparent that Ould
Taya saw adherence to the strictures of the IMF not only as a way to
potentially restore the Mauritanian economy, but also to regain the
good graces of the West (and, not coincidentally, of the wealthy Gulf
monarchies, who were angered by the country’s apparent alignment
with Baghdad), thereby restoring a traditional balance to his foreign
relations strategy.
Consequently, when Michel Camdessus, the head of the IMF,
visited Mauritania in July 1992, he encountered a receptive attitude,
as President Ould Taya and his “technocratic” prime minister, Sidi
Mohamed Ould Boubacar, were willing to place the country under
the IMF’s Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF) to make
it eligible for additional development assistance, preferential loans,
and the possibility of debt forgiveness at some future date. To do
this, though, required, inter alia, the immediate devaluation of the
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national currency, the ouguiya, by nearly 30 percent; the achievement of a balanced state budget; an end to state subsidies for various
goods and services; and the opening of the Mauritanian economy to
outside (i.e., foreign) involvement as well as the gradual privatization of nationalized companies. Unfortunately, the devaluation of
the ouguiya in October 1992 triggered brief yet intense outbreaks of
civil unrest, an increase in inflation, and an admission by Prime Minister Ould Boubacar that civil service salaries (never lavish to begin
with) had to be raised by 28 percent to compensate for the currency’s
steep decline in value. On the debt side of the equation, however,
Mauritania benefited from nearly immediate relief. The IMF’s stamp
of approval, the so-called Paris Club of creditors, meeting in late
1992, cut interest payments on existing Mauritanian debt by onehalf, decreed a 10-year grace period on interest payments on certain
categories of debt, and made other concessions that would save the
country some $218 million per year. The IMF also began to disburse
the first tranche of the $47 million ESAF, and additional payments
were made to the Mauritanian treasury during 1993, a year in which
economic performance improved smartly, helped by greater iron ore
export revenues (and resultant higher taxes paid by the Société Nationale Industrielle et Minière [SNIM], the state mining company)
and relatively low inflation. In December 1993, another $23.2 million ESAF was approved.
By the summer of 1994, structural adjustment appeared to be yielding some positive results, at least on the surface. An IMF mission to
Mauritania found little cause for complaint, although it noted that the
iron ore and fisheries sectors were highly unreliable as consistent
sources of revenue and that the balance of payments showed some
deterioration. But the ESAF essentially continued on course through
1996, although there was renewed civil unrest during another round
of currency devaluation in January 1995, the unpopular imposition of
a value added tax (VAT) at about the same time, and the liquidation
of a few state-owned firms, mostly in the fishing and insurance areas.
From 1994 to 1998, GDP growth sometimes exceeded 4 percent per
annum, additional Paris Club debt relief (to the tune of $70 million)
was regularly forthcoming, and IMF loans continued to be disbursed
on the agreed-upon basis. The national budget also came as close to
being balanced as it ever would. From 1996 onward, the World Bank
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also stepped into the picture, dispensing targeted aid to streamline
the country’s bureaucracy, improve tax collection procedures, and
create a better foreign investment climate, although the latter had
achieved few results by 2008. But—in what many observers called
a “Catch-22” situation in which Mauritania’s very success under the
ESAF brought about the opposite of the desired effect—the IMF, in
a statement issued in September 1996, dashed the country’s hopes for
immediate debt forgiveness, citing as a reason the necessity for it to
do even more to “rationalize” the economy and the apparent inapplicability to Mauritania of the IMF’s Heavily Indebted Poor Countries
(HIPC) initiative, even though the Mauritanian external debt burden
was one of the highest of any country in the world. Debt relief, as
a result, was postponed to another day. It was probably at this point
that public backing for structural adjustment, limited to begin with,
began to decline further, although only one of the political parties
of Mauritania’s Second Republic, Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mah’s
Union Populaire Socialiste et Démocratique (UPSD), made the
IMF an issue in election campaigns, with little effect in the group’s
dismal vote-getting fortunes. An additional 11 percent devaluation
of the ouguiya on 12 July 1998 heightened public dissatisfaction, as
it was tantamount to a steep overnight rise in an already high cost of
living.
The 1998–2000 period, despite witnessing generally favorable
GDP growth and sectoral strengths as well as a low rate of inflation,
saw the beginnings of a marked disconnection between the IMFrelated economic targets (whether or not fully met) and the actual
state of the Mauritanian economy. Although low inflation (under 5
percent most of the time) did motivate the IMF to recommend that
the country cut its budget surpluses to make room for additional antipoverty programs, and another three-year, $57 million ESAF was
signed on 21 July 1999, economic statistics published by the government began to show a wide variation from those provided by the
IMF, raising many questions. In addition, it was commonly thought
that the gap between rich and poor Mauritanians had been getting
wider under structural adjustment, as well-connected citizens, helped
by President Ould Taya’s increasingly blatant familial, tribal, and regional favoritism, were greatly increasing their share of the country’s
wealth, rapidly outstripping those who could not take advantage of
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the opportunities generated by the growth of new businesses and the
plethora of new World Bank and other international aid projects. In
a reprise of the debt relief efforts earlier in the decade, Mauritania
was once more unsuccessful in getting debt forgiven under the IMF’s
HIPC program; just six months or so after a joint World Bank/IMF
mission to the country found that 80 percent of their projects had
a satisfactory result (something that was not equalled by any other
African state), the Paris Club forgave only $80 million of debt ($380
million was rescheduled), a far cry from the $620 million the Ould
Taya regime believed would be written off. The Paris Club, making
an already delicate situation more volatile, dwelt on the difficulties
the government was allegedly having in making the ouguiya a fully
convertible medium of exchange.
With little apparent choice but to continue along the path of
economic restructuring, Mauritania doggedly adhered to the IMF’s
prescriptions at least through 2002, even as individual sectors such
as agriculture registered severe declines, the chasm between the rich
and poor widened even more, the balance of payments went deeper
into red ink, and inflation was rising. The IMF still regularly disbursed considerable sums of money under the structural adjustment
scheme—in an Orwellian twist, renamed by this time the Poverty
Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF)—and praised the country’s
adherence to its recommendations, but overall macroeconomic conditions, along with growing doubts about President Ould Taya’s
management of the state, cast a distinct pall over matters. Wide variations between economic data issued by the government and those
presented to the IMF were also persistent.
In May 2005, the situation drastically worsened. An IMF delegation found that due to the substantial revision of economic information from 2003 and 2004, two PRGF disbursements totaling nearly
$18 million had been improperly made by the IMF, leading to the
cancellation of the PRGF and Mauritania’s forced (and extremely
embarrassing) repayment of the money in November 2004. General
economic conditions in Mauritania were found to be highly unfavorable, with massive increases in salaries (just before President Ould
Taya’s overthrow in August 2005) adding to budgetary pressures.
Further “off the books” spending by the regime threw the fiscal
picture into further disarray. The post-August 2005 military regime
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headed by Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, seeking to prevent any
further punitive action, acknowledged that the prior government had
provided the IMF with inaccurate data, pledged that it would not
happen again, and agreed to accept the installation of another IMF
tool—a Staff Monitored Programme (SMP), usually employed with
financially errant developing countries—to track the country’s fidelity to various economic targets through 2007. After the SMP was put
into place, the IMF awarded an additional $49 million in debt relief
in June 2006, with projected similar actions by the World Bank and
the African Development Bank (ADB) set to bring total debt forgiveness to $830 million by early 2007. But the apparent dishonesty of
the former Ould Taya government would not be forgotten anytime
soon. The slippage and later cancellation of the PRGF program confirmed in the eyes of many that Mauritania’s economic affairs were
incompetently managed and corrupt, even after the great intrinsic
difficulties the country faced were taken into account.
IRIFI. The Arabic word for a severe sandstorm, the irifi is one of the
harshest and most costly aspects of Mauritania’s climate. The fine
sand of the Sahara, thrown up by the wind, often reduces visibility to
near zero and clogs roads as well as entering homes and other buildings. In some years, the irifi makes itself felt nearly 50 percent of the
time in the country’s capital, Nouakchott, impeding air traffic and
bringing much human activity to a halt.
IRON ORE. In the late 1940s, a series of French aeromagnetic and
other surveys revealed the existence of enormous quantities of highgrade iron ore in northeastern Mauritania, contained in a series of
guelbs (raised geological formations) near the French military outpost of Fort Gouraud. In particular, the deposits at Kediet d’Idjil, a
few kilometers east of Fort Gouraud, were believed to be especially
promising, with an estimated 125 million tons of 65 percent pure
iron ore available, in addition to nearby deposits of lower-quality (25
to 30 percent purity) ore thought to total one billion tons. All told,
more than 50 individual ore-bearing sites were identified by geologists, and in 1952 efforts to mine the ore advanced further with the
formation of the Société Anonyme des Mines de Fer de Mauritanie (MIFERMA), a multinational consortium dominated by France
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(with British, West German, and Italian investors also present), with
an initial capitalization of $52 million.
The actual start-up of mining operations, however, had to wait
until the attainment of Mauritanian independence on 28 November
1960. Just a few months before (on 17 March), a $66 million loan
was secured from the World Bank, with France and Mauritania guaranteeing repayment. Moreover, in September 1959 the government
headed by Mokhtar Ould Daddah had agreed to the overall terms
and financing of the venture. Many logistical and technical problems had to be resolved before the mines could become productive,
but construction went ahead fairly quickly. By early 1963, a 650kilometer railway line had been laid down between the mine sites
near Zouérate and the port city of Nouadhibou, where a brand-new
docking facility, the Port Minéralier, had been built to accommodate the large ships into which the ore would be loaded for export.
In April 1963, MIFERMA’s operations began in earnest and soon
injected millions of dollars into an infant Mauritanian economy,
which had hitherto been almost wholly dependent for revenue on
agriculture, fisheries, and livestock.
Mining procedures at Kediet d’Idjil were relatively simple. After
being blasted from the sides of the guelbs with large amounts of explosives, the ore was shoveled into 100-ton trucks for the journey to
the railhead, where the ore was loaded into hopper cars. Once a full
train had been assembled, it would begin its slow trip to Nouadhibou,
typically taking 16 hours to reach the Port Minéralier. In Nouadhibou, ships would be waiting to transport the ore for steelmaking in
Europe and North America. The empty train would soon return to
Zouérate for a fresh load. Operations went on around the clock and
often required two daily railway runs from the mines. MIFERMA
intentionally automated as much of the operation of the mines as it
could, citing a shortage of qualified Mauritanian workers and a desire
to reduce labor costs.
The iron ore mines were an immediate economic success story for
Mauritania. More than 4 million tons of ore were extracted in 1965,
two years after the start-up, and an overwhelming 92 percent of
Mauritanian exports were accounted for by the iron ore deposits. In
budgetary terms, the mine’s operator turned a clear profit every year
from 1966 to 1976, and through taxes and remittances from the sale
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of the ore itself, the mining sector provided fully 30 percent of the
Mauritanian government’s revenues by the early 1970s. Indirect economic benefits were also significant. The MIFERMA workers and
their dependents soon created a market for housing, food, transport,
and other amenities, further contributing to the relatively flush atmosphere in the late 1960s. A few years later, iron ore revenues earned
Mauritania an additional prize: It was reclassified by the World Bank
and the United Nations from a “least developed country” to a “moderate-income developing country,” contributing not only to national
prestige but also to the government’s ability to seek financing for an
ambitious (if ill-fated) program of industrial development.
The huge iron ore reserves were not an unmixed blessing. Attempts to diversify exports were spotty at best (as they would remain
into the 21st century), the iron mining industry consumed about 40
percent of Mauritania’s expensive petroleum products, revenues
derived from MIFERMA were often sunk into unsuccessful and
inefficient projects, and the fertile southern part of the country was
not allocated sufficient development funding proportionate to the
region’s economic importance. The mining sector was politically
problematic. Throughout the 1966–1972 period, strikes and protests
shook MIFERMA, with students from Nouadhibou and Nouakchott joining the strikers, who resented the continued domination of
Mauritania’s most important industry by French interests and also
disliked MIFERMA’s slowness in recruiting Mauritanian workers,
particularly in the middle and upper management ranks of the company. As a result, the mines were sometimes shut down for days or
weeks at a time, and there was some loss of life and many injuries
and arrests when demonstrations were suppressed by the Mauritanian
police and armed forces, especially in 1968, the year that witnessed
the first mass-scale opposition to President Ould Daddah’s one-party
government.
Seeing that foreign control of the iron mines had the distinct potential for becoming a focus of opposition to his regime, and irritated
that MIFERMA’s revenues were not being remitted to Mauritania to
a degree he felt reasonable, President Ould Daddah decided to nationalize the industry, a step he accomplished on 28 November 1974,
the 14th anniversary of his country’s independence. MIFERMA was
abolished, and all mining and associated activities were taken over
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by a Mauritanian parastatal, the Société Nationale Industrielle et
Minière (SNIM). The changeover from MIFERMA to SNIM operation was uneventful, and production was not disrupted. Government
revenues—and the profitability of the mines—increased substantially, and efforts were made to employ more Mauritanians in skilled
positions. But the progress that was made by the nationalization of
the industry was offset by two factors. The first, a worldwide slump
in commodity prices, was beyond Mauritania’s control and would
recur often in later years. But the second, the disruption of mining operations caused by Mauritania’s involvement in the Western Sahara
conflict, was something for which the regime itself was accountable. President Ould Daddah’s adherence, on 14 November 1975,
to the Madrid Agreement among Mauritania, Morocco, and Spain,
providing for the Spanish colony to be partitioned between the two
North African states, took no account of the attitudes of the Polisario
Front, a nationalist organization claiming to represent the people of
the territory, which demanded an independent Western Sahara. As
soon as Mauritania’s intentions to annex its share of Western Sahara
(known as Tiris el-Gharbia) became clear, Polisario’s aggressive
guerrilla fighters made the country’s iron ore facilities one of their
first military targets.
The Polisario Front first struck at the SNIM railway line, which
ran within a few kilometers of the Western Saharan border and
could not be policed effectively due to its great length and the remote areas it traversed. Zouérate was also greatly affected; after a
series of smaller-scale attacks, a massive assault by Polisario against
the town was mounted on 1 May 1977, laying waste to mining and
railway equipment. Iron ore production, which had hovered between
7.7 and 11.9 million metric tons between 1968 and 1974, declined
steeply, to 7.5 million tons in 1977 and 7.1 million tons in 1978,
rebounding only after Mauritania signed the Algiers Agreement on
5 August 1979, which made peace with Polisario and renounced any
Mauritanian claims to Western Sahara. Even before this, however,
the troubles in the iron ore sector contributed in no small measure to
the economic difficulties that led to the overthrow of President Ould
Daddah on 10 July 1978 and his replacement by an armed forces
council, the Comité Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN),
led by Col. Mustapha Ould Mohammed Salek.
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The end of Mauritanian military involvement in the Western
Sahara war did not immediately lead to the resumption of the high
revenues and profits that had characterized the late 1960s and early
1970s. Continued low market prices for iron ore were a constant
impediment, as was the fact that the original Kediet d’Idjil mines
were nearing exhaustion (they ceased production entirely in 1992),
an event for which the country was not at all prepared, as its overall
economy was still greatly dependent on the Zouérate-area reserves.
Consequently, in 1984 the military government embarked on the
so-called Guelbs Project, a scheme that was to cost $360 million
and targeted for exploitation large iron ore deposits located at elRhein, about 30 kilometers northeast of F’Derik. An extension of
the SNIM railway was built to the new mine sites, and for a while
the el-Rhein deposits were more than adequate to ensure the health
of the mining sector. Total production, which had been at a low
ebb of 7.3 million tons in 1982 and 7.5 million tons the following
year, rebounded smartly, to 9.3 million tons in 1985 and 1986, 10.2
million tons in 1988, and 11.6 million tons in 1990, was the largest
output for the mines since the prewar year 1974. But the low quality
(38 percent purity) of some of the el-Rhein reserves, coupled with
various technical difficulties, caused production to fall once again,
to 8 million tons in 1992. SNIM once more looked elsewhere for a
solution.
In the early 1990s, armed with $200 million in support from
Arab and other international aid donors, the national mining
company shifted its attention toward much larger iron ore reserves
at M’Haoudat, roughly 15 kilometers from el-Rhein. It was estimated that these deposits totaled over 100 million tons, and their
estimated purity of 60 percent eliminated any need—for the time
being at least—to construct costly concentration facilities at the site
(or at Nouadhibou) to enhance the quality of the ore. By 1993, the
M’Haoudat reserves were being exported, primarily to Italy and
France, although as the decade ended, Finland, South Korea, and Tunisia were increasingly important SNIM customers. Exports soared
to an exceptionally high 11.7 million tons in 1997, before settling
back to what experts called a more “normal” level of 11.4 million
tons in 1998, although by 2003 just over 10.5 million tons of ore were
being produced.
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Knowing by the late 1990s that its reserves of 60 percent quality
ore were steadily being depleted, and beginning to keenly feel the
need to increase the demand for its product in the face of intensifying international competition, SNIM solicited financial aid in late
1997 for a new ore concentrator at Nouadhibou, a project that would
probably cost in excess of $200 million but which the company
hoped would increase its income by $100 million per year, thus paying for itself quickly. Between 1997 and 2001, the European Union
(EU), the World Bank, and other donors granted four loans to SNIM
for its various projects, whether for ore refinement facilities or the
extraction of newly found 60 percent deposits 12 kilometers south
of Zouérate, announced in November 2000. An age-old problem
reappeared in 1999, though, when falling world prices for iron ore,
together with doubts about the capacity and level of repair of the Port
Minéralier, forced SNIM to scale back its operations and dismiss
many workers. SNIM’s long-term production goal of 13 million tons
per annum, moreover, looked increasingly unrealistic, as a depressed
demand for ore, along with problems at the Nouadhibou port, held
production down to 10 million tons by 2003, even as the thencurrent capacity of the company’s infrastructure was approximately
12 million tons. Even so, SNIM could take some pride in the fact
that its product supplied fully 8.2 percent of Europe’s total iron ore
needs in the face of the prodigious output of other countries such as
Brazil, whose yearly production of 200 million tons the company
could never hope to match.
As one of the best-functioning and most professionally respected
economic activities in Mauritania, the iron ore sector had always been
excluded from the government’s privatization plans of the 1990s,
although as early as 1978 a 20 percent share of SNIM had been sold
to outside Arab interests, including the Islamic Development Bank
(IDB), for the purpose of assisting the firm’s recovery after the end
of Mauritania’s involvement in Western Sahara. In the early 21st
century, however, the need for outside participation in Mauritanian
iron ore operations once more became evident. In October 2001,
SNIM announced a joint venture with Sphere Investments of Australia for the development of new ore deposits (of up to 70 percent
purity) at Guelb al-Aouj, situated 35 kilometers from existing mines
and thought to contain more than 500 million tons of recoverable
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• 277
minerals. The project needed $650 million, and to finance this SNIM
utilized its own resources as well as those of international lending
institutions. Sphere went so far as to raise money for the scheme by
divesting itself of various other projects around the world and selling
a 14.8 percent share of itself to a company based in Saudi Arabia. In
2002, it was believed that the Guelb el-Aouj deposits would by themselves enable SNIM to produce a previously unheard-of 18 million
tons of iron ore per year, but by 2008 this forecast had been radically
downgraded to 7 million tons, underscoring the great uncertainties
surrounding commodity extraction in the developing world, whatever
the successes registered by the iron ore sector in Mauritania. Finally,
iron ore, which had been the mainstay of the Mauritanian economy
in the 1960s and 1970s, had steadily declined in importance, as fishing, tourism, and other sectors increased their contribution to the
country’s overall export earnings. By 1983, iron ore exports had
fallen below 50 percent of Mauritania’s total exports for the first time
since 1963, and by the early 1990s it had declined further, to about
40 percent. See also TRADE, INTERNATIONAL.
ISLAM. Islamic religious and cultural identity has formed the bedrock
of Mauritanian life since the faith was introduced to northwest Africa
by Arab merchants in the 10th century. Fairly soon after that time,
virtually all Mauritanians, whether Moorish or Black African, considered themselves to be Muslim, adhering since the 19th century to
the Sunni Malekite school of Islamic law. Mauritania has also from
an early date, been noted for its citizens’ membership in various religious brotherhoods, hierarchical yet relatively informal institutions
that provided spiritual guidance. The Qadiriya and Tidjaniya brotherhoods are the most important of these, although smaller brotherhoods, such as the Chadeliya, centered in Tagant, and the Goudfiya,
also found in Tagant as well as in the Adrar and in Hodh echChargui and Hodh el-Gharbi, also exist, as do various sufi (mystical) movements. In the early 20th century, the religious brotherhoods
acquired a great deal more influence when, as part of the “pacification” strategy of the French colonial government led by Xavier Coppolani, the monastic, or zawiya, tribes were officially favored over
their more militaristic hassan counterparts. Independent Mauritania’s first president, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, came from a religious
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tribe, the Oulad Berri of Boutilimit, as did many other officials of the
new state. The head of a religious brotherhood, Mohamed Lemine
Ch’bih Ould Cheikh Melainine, achieved prominence in the late
1990s as one of the main opponents of the Mauritanian government,
albeit couching his dissent in a secular idiom.
Early on, Mokhtar Ould Daddah and his French and Mauritanian
backers recognized the key role of Islam in the social arrangements
of the country. The Islamic faith was basically the only thing the
various tribal, racial, and regional groupings had in common, and
therefore religion was constantly emphasized as a powerful tool in
attempting to build national unity where none existed. The name of
the country, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, reflects this overriding concern, and it was the very first state in the Arab/Islamic world
so named. Yet this identity, coupled with the formal constitutional
designation of Mauritania as a Muslim country, did not portend the
advent of a theocratic state, because its governmental structures were
Western-derived and liberal-democratic in form (but not substance)
from 1960 onward. After the overthrow of President Ould Daddah in
July 1978 and his replacement by two armed forces councils (which
ruled until 1992), very little changed with respect to the regime’s
attitudes toward Islam until 1980, when the country’s leader, Col.
Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah, decided to greatly enhance
Mauritania’s orientation to the Islamic sharia, enforcing some of the
most severe provisions of Islamic jurisprudence, such as amputations, public whippings, and capital punishment. These measures,
which produced a firestorm of domestic and international protest,
were suspended in February 1984 and had not been reintroduced by
the early 21st century.
Ould Heydallah’s successor as head of state, Col. Maaouiya Ould
Sid’Ahmed Taya, adopted a much more cautious stance toward Islam, disparaging (and often repressing) Muslim militants throughout
his 21-year rule but also on occasion extolling the unifying powers
of a religion in which all Mauritanians had a place. Koranic education continued to be supported and encouraged by the state, and
indigenous resources as well as foreign donations (including, controversially, from Saudi Arabia) were solicited for the construction and
operation of new Islamic schools and mosques. At the same time,
the outlook of the government remained secular, with administrative
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models and procedures broadly emulating those found in the West.
The same was true of the country’s foreign relations. Although ties
to Islamic states and members of the Arab League were emphasized,
overidentification with any one country or bloc of nations tended
to be avoided, at least until a new set of foreign policy calculations
were carried out in the mid-1990s. Purely religious political parties were outlawed by a statute enacted pursuant to the Mauritanian
constitution of 20 July 1991 and were mostly excluded from the
institutions of the Second Republic (1992–2005). The country was
largely spared the effects of the upsurge of Islamic militancy that
swept through much of the rest of North Africa, notably Algeria and
Egypt. A few Islamist organizations sprang up in 1993, however: the
fundamentalist Oumma Party, which advocated the forcible imposition of the sharia and the replacement of the Ould Taya regime; the
Mauritanian Muslim Brotherhood, thought to be aligned with likeminded persons in Egypt; and even a tiny branch of the Iran-based
Hezbollah (Party of God). None of these groups achieved any real
popular support, but President Ould Taya did arrest some 60 suspected Islamists on 30 September 1994 and accused them of acting
on behalf of Algeria’s Front Islamique de Salut (FIS), which at the
time was mounting a violent campaign against the military-backed
regime in Algiers. After some of the accused were induced to make
public confessions of their guilt, the head of state issued pardons to
all the militants on 11 October, ending the affair.
President Ould Taya’s increasing overall repression at home, as
well as his formal diplomatic recognition of Israel in July 1999 and
his simultaneous closer alignment with the United States, led to the
increasing popularity of Islamic groups in Mauritania, although still
not to the degree seen elsewhere. In addition, the adoption by the
government of the economic policy prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—which in the view of some analysts
had widened the gap between rich and poor in the country—also allowed the Islamists to advance their populist economic and political
message and to portray the IMF as yet another example of Western
domination. Soon, at least two dozen suspected Islamic militants were
jailed by Ould Taya on “subversion” charges, including the former
mayor of Nouakchott’s ‘Arafat district, Mohamed Jamal Ould Mansour, and a well-known imam in the capital city, Cheikh Mohamed
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el-Hacen Ould Dedew. Additional repressive measures against Muslim fundamentalists were taken after the unsuccessful coup attempt
of 8–9 June 2003, even though the leader of the uprising, former
army officer Saleh Ould Hanena, was suspected by many of being
either a secular pan-Arabist in general or a follower of the outlawed
Arab Baath Socialist Party (ABSP) in particular. Two other alleged plots to overthrow the regime were uncovered before the end
of 2004, and Ould Taya hastened to blame these, too, on Mauritanian
Islamists and their supposed foreign allies, including—with a total
lack of evidence that revealed the head of state’s eagerness to receive
U.S. backing—the then leader of the Sunni insurgency against U.S.
forces in Iraq, Abu Mu’sab al-Zarqawi. The government also took
care, after the suppression of Ould Hanena’s coup attempt, to shut
down a variety of Islamic charities in the country—including those
from Saudi Arabia—and directed most of the efforts of the security
forces against those in the army who might have been sympathetic to
the June rebellion.
Mauritanian Islamists, of whatever stripe, had never been able to
gain official recognition for any political party espousing their goals,
and never achieved more than very slight successes at the ballot box.
Their high point (if it could be called that) came in November 2003,
when former president Ould Heydallah, running with the backing
of both Islamists and secularists, managed to win a reported 18.7
percent of the vote in an effort to recapture his old job, this coming
after the government, in a move that was harshly criticized although
consistent with past practice, denied permission for the pro-Islamist
Parti de la Convergence Démocratique (PCD) to operate. Also very
much to Islamist displeasure was the regime’s decision in April
2005 to shift the Mauritanian weekend from Friday and Saturday (as
practiced in many Muslim states) to Saturday and Sunday, the same
as observed in the West. Although the prime minister at the time,
S’ghair Ould M’Barek, stated that the measure would save the
country an estimated $64 million per year by harmonizing the work
week with its mainly European trading partners, and that the change
was approved of by the Mauritanian High Islamic Council, many
citizens—and not just devout Muslims—opposed the move.
The problem of “radical Islam” in Mauritania and North Africa
took an entirely new and sinister turn on 4 June 2005. An estimated
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several dozen guerrillas of the Algeria-based Groupe Salafiste pour
la Prédication et le Combat (GSPC) attacked a Mauritanian army
outpost at Lemgheity, an exceedingly remote area in northern Tiris
Zemmour province near the Algerian and Malian borders. At least 15
of Mauritania’s soldiers were killed and an equal number (or more)
were wounded before the GSPC retreated, reportedly after capturing
some Mauritanian army vehicles and other equipment. Mauritania’s
own Islamists unanimously condemned the attack, yet 25 or so suspected adherents of the GSPC (renamed “Al-Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb” in September 2006 after it swore fealty to Al-Qaeda’s
leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri), were arrested in
the summer of 2005 and were not freed until 9 June 2007, when all
but one were acquitted after being brought to trial in a Nouakchott
court under a new president, Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi, who was believed to be more willing than Maaouiya Ould Taya
to co-opt moderate Islamist interests. An early sign of this, in the
opinion of many, was the new head of state’s restoration, on 13 December 2007, of Mauritania’s traditional Friday–Saturday weekend,
rescinding President Ould Taya’s controversial April 2005 decree
establishing a Western-type Saturday–Sunday holiday.
Politically, the Lemgheity attack was perhaps the decisive factor
leading some of the country’s increasingly frustrated military officers
to overthrow President Ould Taya in the bloodless coup d’état of 3
August 2005. These officers, led by Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall,
evidently feared, among other things, that Ould Taya’s harsh actions
against Islamists and other dissidents were making Mauritania a target for radical Muslim organizations such as the GSPC, which was
suspected even at that time (before it became official a few months
later) of being part of Al-Qaeda. The army’s fruitless mission to locate and destroy the GSPC militants (thought by 2006 to consist of
300–500 men, who often engaged in simple banditry as opposed to
terrorism per se) in Mauritania and Mali, under this interpretation of
events, only made it more urgent to remove the Ould Taya government.
With respect to Al-Qaeda’s level of active support within Mauritania and the number of Mauritanians who affiliated themselves with
the group, there was little to say. Few of the country’s citizens chose
to join Al-Qaeda, with the only significant known examples being a
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relatively high-ranking figure who went by the nom de guerre of Abu
Hafs al-Moritany, apparently a spiritual adviser to the organization,
and Mohamedou Ould Slahi, an engineer by training and sometime
resident of Germany during the 1990s, where he appeared to function
as some sort of recruiter of radicalized Muslims living there. Living
in Senegal by 1999, he was interrogated by the U.S. Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI) on his alleged (but never proven) involvement
in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa. Extradited to Mauritania in January 2000, he was freed by the authorities two weeks later and placed under restriction in a rural area. After
the terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001, he
was questioned (and soon released) again, then once more detained
in October 2002 by the Mauritanian government, handed over to
the United States, and interned without charges at the controversial
Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, where he still resided in late 2008
despite rumors of his release and the apparent decision of a U.S.
military commission not to charge Ould Slahi with any terror-related
offense. The 9/11 attacks themselves were not generally applauded
by ordinary Mauritanians, as the country had no real history of antiAmericanism.
With a population virtually 100 percent Muslim, the question
naturally arises of whether any real degree of autonomy exists for
other religions in Mauritania. According to the International Religious Freedom Report for 2006, issued by the U.S. State Department,
which mirrored the findings of the previous several years, nonMuslim groups, although officially unrecognized, were nonetheless
permitted to engage in humanitarian work—Catholic Relief Services,
World Advocates, Caritas, and World Vision all did so—and Roman
Catholic services could be freely held for the expatriate community,
not only at St. Joseph’s Church in Nouakchott but also at scattered
Catholic facilities elsewhere in Mauritania. Moreover, the possession
of Bibles and other Christian materials by Mauritanians was not illegal, and conversion from Islam to another religion, while exceedingly rare, was evidently not punished by the authorities. Expatriate
Protestants and Jews, however, were forced to be more circumspect,
as no established Protestant churches or Jewish synagogues existed,
and religious services therefore had to be held discreetly in private
homes. Protestylizing to Muslims by any Christian was strictly for-
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bidden, and each year a few foreigners were either briefly detained or
expelled from the country for doing so. All Mauritanian governments
since independence—civilian or military—also sought to protect the
populace against any real or perceived insults to Islam, and during
the 1990s and early 21st century, Article 11 of the Press Law of 1991,
which institutionalized restrictions on free expression, was occasionally utilized to that end, although its more common use was to censor the content of independent Mauritanian newspapers on matters
wholly unrelated to religion.
–K–
KAÉDI. One of Mauritania’s largest population centers and the capital
of the administrative région of Gorgol, Kaédi is located on the north
bank of the Senegal River and is linked to the rest of the country by
a basic but improving system of roads. The city’s population increased substantially in the 1980s: in 1988, a census showed 30,515
residents, up from about 20,000 a decade before. By the year 2000,
the population had grown again, but more modestly this time: a total
of 34,227 residents were counted in that year. It was in Kaédi that
Mauritania’s first president, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, consolidated
his hold on the country, at a meeting of his ruling political party held
in January 1964 (see KAÉDI, CONFERENCE OF). The city is also
home to a large, centuries-old library of Islamic scholarly books and
manuscripts and has historically been an active center for commerce
owing to its proximity to Senegal. Both agriculture and livestock
herding are quite common in the area, and the Mauritanian government, as far back as the 1960s, devoted considerable resources to
promoting both farming and animal husbandry, setting up large-scale
farms (500 hectares and larger) to take advantage of the region’s fertility, also opening a veterinary school in the city in 1968.
The same proximity to Senegal that makes Kaédi such an active
and relatively prosperous commercial center also renders it hostage,
to one degree or another, not only to relations with Senegal in general but to Mauritania’s own interethnic/interracial situation. There
were serious instances of civil unrest in Kaédi after the 6 December
1987 executions of three Halpulaar officers in the country’s armed
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forces, who had been convicted of complicity in a coup attempt a
fortnight earlier, protests that could possibly have been instigated
by the primary black Mauritanian opposition group, the Forces de
Libération Africaine de Mauritanie (FLAM). Kaédi was also
very tense during the Senegal–Mauritania crisis, which began in
April 1989 and severely interrupted trade and the free movement
of people between the city and the surrounding area. The city was
considered by many observers to be under martial law for all intents
and purposes for much of that period. Tensions did not begin to ease
appreciably until about 1991.
KAÉDI, CONFERENCE OF (28–29 January 1964). A key event in
postindependence Mauritania’s political evolution, the Kaédi Conference was held at the instigation of the country’s first president,
Mokhtar Ould Daddah, and was announced at a seemingly routine
meeting of the Bureau Politique National (BPN), the top governing
body of the ruling Parti du Peuple Mauritanien (PPM). But not
all of the party’s members could (or would) attend, and when all the
BPN members who had elected to come were seated, the area was
reportedly cordoned off by units of the Mauritanian armed forces.
President Ould Daddah then took it upon himself to deliver a lengthy
speech, denouncing the PPM’s “inertia” and “indiscipline” in carrying out his policies and demanding better communication between
the party and ordinary Mauritanians. Ould Daddah then turned his
attention to the Assemblée Nationale, the PPM-dominated national
legislature. He criticized “electoralism,” by which he meant the
age-old practice of trading favors for favorable votes on matters of
constituent interest. Henceforth, the president declared, there would
be no more free selection of candidates for the National Assembly—the electoral slate would now be approved by the BPN, and all
deputies would be required to submit an undated resignation letter
to the president of the republic, which Ould Daddah could invoke
at his pleasure. In the absence of any contingent of PPM members
who might have questioned these highly authoritarian measures, the
Kaédi Conference fully endorsed them. The conference marked the
end of any semblance of autonomy for the Mauritanian People’s
Party; until it was disbanded by the army in July 1978, it had little
substance other than as a conduit for the execution of policy deci-
KAYES, TREATY OF
• 285
sions made elsewhere—that is, by President Mokhtar Ould Daddah
himself.
KAYES, TREATY OF (16 February 1963). When Mauritania became an independent nation on 28 November 1960, it faced two immediate foreign relations difficulties. The first and most troubling
was Morocco’s territorial claim to the entire country, which was not
finally resolved until April 1970, when diplomatic relations were established. The second was the poor state of relations with Mali, Mauritania’s neighbor to the south and east, with whom it shared a land
and riverine border of almost 2,000 kilometers. Much of the frontier
area was in dispute, with 1960–1961 being marked by clashes between the Mauritanian armed forces and those of Mali, engagements
that were the outgrowth of disputes over the rights of nomads to
water resources and pastureland in the Saharan zone straddling Mali
and Mauritania. To make matters worse, Mali’s president at the time,
Modibo Keita, was closely aligned with Morocco’s King Hassan II
and harbored Mauritanian dissidents opposed to the government of
President Mokhtar Ould Daddah.
Both countries, consequently, were under a great deal of diplomatic pressure to resolve their troubled relationship and rectify
the frontier question. When discussions finally began in the early
1960s, they focused on two topics, both dealing with Mauritania’s
far eastern provinces of Hodh ech-Chargui and Hodh el-Gharbi.
In these areas, boundary lines were fixed solely by the French colonial authorities (as they were throughout Francophone Africa),
but because French administration did not effectively extend to
these remote areas, the dividing line was never rigorously laid out.
In addition, Hodh ech-Chargui had been part of Mauritania only
since 5 July 1944, when the governor-general of Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF) unilaterally transferred it from Mali (then
known as “Soudan”) for reasons of military security relating to the
availability of troops to quell an intertribal conflict that had broken
out in 1940. Then, on 28 October 1944, the AOF authorities made
another adjustment of the frontier at the expense of Mali, transferring a substantial slice of Hodh el-Gharbi to Mauritania, and in the
process abolished the former boundary line along the Ouadou River
south of the town of Ayoun el-Atrouss. Very few places along the
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border were actually marked, and a 1958 convention attended by
Mauritanian and Malian authorities freezing the status quo by giving the nomads of the Hodh free access to the wells of both countries was recognized as a temporary solution at best.
Negotiations were begun by the Ould Daddah and Keita governments shortly after independence and resulted in the Treaty of Kayes,
which was signed at Bamako, the Malian capital, on 16 February
1963, the agreement taking its name from a town in Malian territory
located about 110 kilometers southwest of Sélibaby. The outcome
of the talks was relatively favorable to Mauritania, as it did not have
to relinquish significant amounts of territory, although a thin strip of
Hodh ech-Chargui in the extreme east was ceded to Mali, as were a
few pockets of land in the Western Hodh, usually the sites of wells
upon which the Saharan nomads of the vicinity depended for survival. The right of unfettered movement, a system of priorities for
water resources, and economic and commercial concessions were
continued as under the 1958 convention, with the general intent that
cross-border commerce should remain as free of restriction as possible.
With the signing of the Treaty of Kayes, the Mali–Mauritania
relationship was free to develop normally, but over the following
quarter century there contined to be uncertainty over the exact location of the border (the location of which was never demarcated). To
help resolve this lingering problem, Malian and Mauritanian negotiators, meeting in Bamako on 31 May 1988, agreed to delineate the
common frontier, and on 12 September 1993 the interior ministers
of both states, convening again at Kayes, signed a second treaty
finalizing the border after negotiations that lasted four days. By this
time, the general state of relations between Mali and Mauritania was
good, and it was subsequently agreed, in October 1997, that joint
Mauritanian–Malian–Senegalese military maneuvers would be held,
with the objective of minimizing the impact of the Tuareg refugee
problem in the border zone and to improve security generally. The
Malian government, by now led by a democratically elected president, Alpha Oumar Konaré, also assumed a cooperative attitude to
border security vis-à-vis Mauritania with respect to the activities of
the Algeria-based Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et de Combat
(GSPC): Mali’s armed forces increased their surveillance of the vast
KOUMBI SALEH
• 287
frontier areas of the two countries starting in the late 1990s and conducted even more patrolling after a highly destructive GSPC attack
on a Mauritanian army garrison in Tiris Zemmour province on 3
June 2005, which killed at least 15 soldiers.
KHOUM. The khoum is a subunit of Mauritania’s national currency,
the ouguiya, which was established on 30 June 1973 following the
country’s decision to withdraw from the French-dominated Communauté Financière Africiane (CFA). Five khoums made up one
ouguiya under this monetary arrangement, and a coin worth one
khoum was issued in the 1970s, but given the steady devaluation of
the ouguiya over the years (particularly between 1995 and 2005), the
value of the khoum soon became negligible.
KIFFA. The administrative center of the Assaba région of Mauritania,
Kiffa was located approximately halfway along the Trans-Mauritanian Highway (Route de l’Espoir), an improved road that was completed in the early 1980s and extended from the capital of Nouakchott to the eastern town of Néma. Officially, its population was
29,292 in 1988 and 32,716 in 2000. As a center of commerce and
agriculture on the fringes of southern Mauritania, Kiffa has a mixed
Moorish and Black African population, and the town has always
given the country more than its share of political leaders. For example, Mustapha Ould Mohammed Salek and Ahmed Ould Bouceif,
Mauritania’s first two military presidents, were born there, as was an
influential minister of the interior from 1985 to 1990, Col. Djibril
Ould Abdellahi. Another powerful cabinet minister in the 1990s,
Mohamed Lemine Salem Ould Dah, also hailed from Kiffa.
KOUMBI SALEH. One of the most important cities in ancient Mauritania, Koumbi Saleh was the commercial and political center of
the Kingdom of Ghana, which flourished in the southern part of the
country from about the fifth century A.D. until 1076, when it was
defeated, and Koumbi Saleh was occupied, by the Almoravids, led
by the great Islamic campaigner, Abdallah Ibn Yacin. The Kingdom
of Ghana, dominated by the Soninké, controlled, along with the
Berber-dominated Sanhadja Confederation, many caravan trading
routes that passed through Koumbi Saleh on their way to Mali and
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the Maghreb. Chroniclers of the period relate that the city was the
most populous and cosmopolitan to be found anywhere in the region,
and that it was divided into two sections, one Berber and Muslim and
the other, Ghanaian. Houses, both palatial and more modest, were
constructed of stone by the Berbers, whereas the Soninké used mud
and thatch for their dwellings. Large mosques were also present.
After the sacking of Koumbi Saleh in 1076, the city rapidly lost its
importance, although the Kingdom of Ghana remained in existence
for another hundred years. A shift in caravan trading patterns away
from the area and toward other routes that offered more convenient
access to the European-occupied entrepôts along the Mediterranean
coast sealed the fate of the city, but its companion trading towns in
present-day Mauritania, Aoudaghost and Oualata, continued to be
important commercial centers well into the 16th century. Koumbi
Saleh quickly fell into ruins after the Almoravid conquest and is
today of purely historical interest, with no permanent inhabitants. It
is situated about 70 kilometers southeast of Timbédra in the administrative région of Hodh ech-Chargui and about 25 kilometers from
the border with Mali. Reached by a largely unimproved road that
branches off the Trans-Mauritanian Highway (Route de l’Espoir) at
Timbédra, it is one of Mauritania’s most significant archaeological
sites.
–L–
LA GUERA. Located in Western Sahara near the southwestern tip of
the Cape Blanc (Ras Nouadhibou) peninsula about three kilometers
from the city of Nouadhibou, La Guera served from about 1920 to
1975 as a small fishing port and military base. Its population in 1974
was only about 1,200. As part of Spain’s colony, the settlement was
included in the Mauritanian sector of Western Sahara pursuant to
the Moroccan–Mauritanian Conventions of 14 April 1976, which
formalized the division of territory agreed upon by the two claimant
states in the Madrid Agreement of the previous November. Spanish troops were quickly pulled out of La Guera, leaving it briefly
in the hands of the Polisario Front, who were in turn dislodged by
Mauritania’s armed forces on 19 December 1975. For the remain-
LAND REFORM ACT
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der of Mauritania’s involvement in the Western Sahara conflict,
La Guera was considered part of Tiris el-Gharbia, although it was
administered as part of the région of Dakhlet-Nouadhibou.
In August 1979, after suffering severe reverses at the hands of
Polisario, Mauritania signed the Algiers Agreement, under which
it relinquished its claim to Tiris el-Gharbia. But after the country’s
military rulers saw Morocco immediately occupy all of the former
Mauritanian zone after they had withdrawn, they declined to leave
La Guera, fearing the presence of Moroccan troops only a stone’s
throw from the vital fishing and iron ore facilites of Nouadhibou.
Stating that Mauritanian soldiers would remain only until a definitive
settlement to the Western Sahara question was reached, and that no
territorial claim was implied, the government stationed a small garrison there, its uneventful presence disrupted only by a brief shelling
by a Moroccan gunboat on 20 January 1983, which resulted in no
casualties or property damage. La Guera remained under Mauritanian control in 2008 despite the reported presence of Moroccan units
nearby starting in the mid-1990s.
LAND REFORM ACT (of 5 June 1983). Promulgated as Ordinance
83.127 by the ruling Comité Militaire de Salut National (CMSN)
in Mauritania, then headed by Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah, the Land Reform Act was intended to regularize the relationship of certain of the country’s citizens to the fertile agricultural
land along the Senegal River Valley, and in so doing open substantial
new tracts of land to cultivation. But the language of the law and the
manner in which it was reportedly applied affected much more than
Mauritania’s supply of urgently needed foodstuffs. It elicited questions about the relations between the Arabic-speaking Moors of the
country and the Black African groups in the southern régions. Secondarily, the law raised concerns about the application of the Islamic
sharia to those persons who had not traditionally structured their land
tenure patterns around it, instead relying on a more communal set of
customs that sometimes predated the conversion of those Mauritanians to the Muslim faith.
The economic rationale for the passage of the law was, in the
opinion of most outside observers, beyond question, given that the
1970s and early 1980s were extremely bleak years for the country’s
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agricultural sector, with crop yields in virtually every area that would
support pastoralism registering steep declines. This phenomenon was
traceable to severe, extended droughts and the seemingly inexorable
process of desertification, which caused an exodus of rural inhabitants to the country’s cities and towns, where they became dependent
on foreign food assistance. Furthermore, much arable land in the
régions of Assaba, Brakna, Guidimaka, and Hodh el-Gharbi was
either fallow or in the hands of no readily identifiable owner, whether
Black African or Moorish. Finally, it was envisioned by the CMSN
that the dam projects in the Senegal River Valley, constructed under
the auspices of the Organisation pour la Mise en Valeur du Fleuve
Sénégal (OMVS), would, when completed, result in additional
hectarage being available for agricultural purposes. It was considered
imperative that as much unproductive land as possible be brought
into use to feed growing numbers of Mauritanians, and that ownership of those lands be given to those willing to improve them.
The most important—and controversial—parts of the law were the
first four articles:
Article 1: The land belongs to the nation and to every Mauritanian
without discrimination of any kind who may, in conformity with
the law, become the owner of part thereof;
Article 2: The State recognizes and guarantees the private ownership of land which, in accordance with the sharia, must contribute to the social and economic development of the country;
Article 3: The traditional system of land tenure is hereby abolished;
Article 4: Any right of ownership which is not directly connected
with an individual or legal entity, or which does not arise from a
legally protected development, is hereby declared nonexistent.
Other sections of the new law stated that “dead” (unused) tracts of
land, or those that had no owner, were to revert to state ownership
(Articles 9 and 11); that under some circumstances the state could
take land under the principle of eminent domain (Article 21); and that
the water resources of the country would be opened to public use if
they were situated outside of a legally recognized property interest
(Article 22).
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• 291
By abolishing the “traditional” system of land tenure, the CMSN
laid itself open to charges of racial discrimination, because that system, in which land was passed through the generations as the property of extended families, was common among black Mauritanians.
This system did not strictly conform to the sharia, which has a more
individually based, recorded method of real estate purchase and sale
not wholly dissimilar from that found in Western societies. To drive
this point home, the law stated that “individual ownership shall be
mandatory” (Article 6).
By the 1983 Land Reform Act, Mauritania’s military government
appeared to be providing a powerful new tool for land purchases
that could benefit most of the country’s citizens, but it also allegedly
made it more difficult for Black Africans to prove ownership of land
they had cultivated for decades. They could conceivably lose their
land to wealthy Moors, who would legally purchase vacant land,
register their interest in accordance with the sharia, and then cultivate it, with the former black Mauritanian possessors reduced to the
status of tenant farmers. On the other hand, the opening of new lands
for cultivation did provide many economic opportunities for the formerly enslaved haratines, who, upon gaining their freedom, often
had few or no prospects for an independent existence. Moreover,
resentment by black Mauritanians of the new law was not universal;
indeed, some prosperous Black African farmers near the Senegal
River saw its passage as a change to increase their own holdings. It
was also considered possible by some commentators that some black
Mauritanian groups owned their land communally, but in the name
of the chief of the clan or the village, thereby satisfying the legal
requirement of individual ownership.
Despite a land tenure system that lent itself to varying interpretations and could well have been unevenly applied by the 1990s,
it was undeniable that some Black Africans in Mauritania saw the
Land Reform Act as a legal artifice intended to dispossess them as
part of a conscious government strategy of Arabization. The law
was strongly condemned by the country’s primary black opposition
group, the Forces de Libération Africaine de Mauritanie (FLAM),
in its forcefully argued pamphlet, Manifesto du Négro-Mauritanien
Opprimé, issued in April 1986. Land tenure problems may also have
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been at least partly responsible for the increase in ethnic tension that
became part of Mauritanian political life in the late 1980s, and, according to some, played a role in igniting the Senegal–Mauritania
crisis, which began in April 1989, leading to a condition of near-war
between the two states. And although the law led to a more efficient cultivation of lands in Mauritania’s southern provinces, it did
not—and could not—resolve the larger question of the long-term
viability of the country’s agricultural sector itself, nor make the Senegal River Valley more attractive for investment, whether indigenous
or foreign.
LEGAL SYSTEM. Throughout its history as an independent nation, Mauritania’s legal and judicial institutions have suffered not
only from shortages of qualified personnel and conflicting lines of
jurisdiction between French-based and Islamic law, but also from
a notable lack of autonomy. After the end of the French colonial
period, the legal code of the county was nearly entirely of French
origin (and dating to the reforms undertaken by Paris in 1946), with
the exception of a few areas—primarily domestic relations—that had
traditionally been under the purview of qadis (Islamic judges), whose
authority continued to be respected. To ensure continuity with past
practice, the Mauritanian constitution of 20 May 1961 provided that
French laws should prevail until a purely indigenous system could be
established. Progress in this regard, however, was extremely slow,
as the European legal codes were never entirely replaced and native
lawyers were scarce until at least the 1980s. Furthermore, appellate
courts were almost nonexistent in the early years, and there was no
one to examine legislation for its conformity or nonconformity to the
constitution.
In the early 1970s, limited reforms were enacted. The government, led by President Mokhtar Ould Daddah, promulgated new
legal codes, which encompassed both civil and criminal matters,
as well as regulatory areas such as labor law, administrative and
nationality law, and laws and procedures to govern commerce. But
cases referred to the courts were still handled with an almost glacial
slowness, and the lack of bail in criminal cases, for example, meant
that pretrial detention periods were often lengthy. Moreover, under
President Ould Daddah (as in later periods), the court system was
LEGAL SYSTEM
• 293
never truly an independent branch of the government, as the executive steadily expanded its reach over most aspects of Mauritanian
life. One demonstration of this occurred in January 1966, when the
signers of the “Manifesto of 19,” mostly Black Africans who complained to the head of state about the country’s nascent Arabization
policy and alleged racial discrimination, found themselves arrested
and held without charges for six months under a broadly worded
national security statute that accorded few rights to a defendant. Taking matters even further, in 1978, when Mauritania was embroiled in
the Western Sahara conflict and just before an armed forces coup
d’état deposed him, Ould Daddah pushed legislation through a compliant Assemblée Nationale that enabled him to detain indefinitely
anyone believed to be a threat to public order. The country’s security
organs remained almost totally impervious to outside supervision,
with the result that those persons affected by the police and army
suppression of strikes and protests in the iron ore mining sector in
1968 had no legal recourse.
The long era of military rule in Mauritania, which extended from
July 1978 to April 1992, brought continued stagnation to the legal
system. The Comité Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN;
1978–1979) and the Comité Militaire de Salut Nationale (CMSN;
1979–1992) often disregarded legal procedures, which meant that persons could be—and often were—apprehended and incarcerated without judicial review. The country’s highest court, the Supreme Court,
still held sessions, but it rapidly fell under the army’s shadow, as its
officers had full powers of appointment over its membership. About
the only period during which evolution (of a sort) took place was in
the early 1980s under the aegis of President Mohammed Khouna
Ould Heydallah, who devoted great energy to the imposition of the
Islamic sharia in criminal matters such as murder, rape, theft, and
adultery (but not, revealingly, in cases of financial corruption, rampant at the time). Even here, however—and momentarily putting aside
the domestic and international furor that greeted the public executions,
whippings, and amputations that were carried out between 1981 and
1983—untrained judicial personnel, inconsistent decisions, and a lack
of formalized procedures reduced the system to farcical dimensions.
Plans made by Ould Heydallah at about the same time to extend the
application of the sharia to civil and commercial areas never got off
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the ground, and a presidential proposal to institute the death penalty
for the crime of apostasy (i.e., the conversion by a to Muslim to another religion) was never even codified, much less enforced.
The bloodless “restructuring” of the CMSN that ousted Ould Heydallah on 12 December 1984 and replaced him with Col. Maaouiya
Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya did for a time result in an end to arbitrary
detention (as well as the permanent shelving of sharia-based criminal
punishments), but few steps were taken to improve the administration
of justice or to augment Mauritania’s slender law-related resources.
Both pretrial and extrajudicial imprisonment began to be utilized
more and more against the suspected followers of both the Arab
Baath Socialist Party (ABSP) and the Forces de Libération Africaine de Mauritanie (FLAM) during the 1980s, and trials were often
held in a cavalier fashion, with a limited right to defense counsel and
with few opportunities to appeal the decisions of various tribunals.
One court, the State Security Section of the Special Court of Justice,
drew particular ire, as it held its proceedings in secret at the J’reida
army barracks a few kilometers north of Nouakchott and operated
under a broad and unreviewable grant of authority from the CMSN.
The three presiding judges, all military officers, were not even required to have a legal education; no appeals were possible against
their frequently harsh sentences, rendered with little or no input
from attorneys; and the accused and their lawyers were sometimes
not informed of the exact charges until the day of the proceedings.
Of particular concern to Mauritanian defense lawyers during this
period was the government’s liberal use of the summary procedures
afforded by the continental legal rule of flagrant délit (literally,
“caught in the act”), originally intended to apply only in cases in
which a defendant was observed committing an illegal act in the presence of a law enforcement officer. The CMSN extended the doctrine
to conspiracy cases and other secret or inchoate crimes. Suspected
Baath Party members, FLAM militants, and dissident civil servants
and army officers and enlisted men were all subjected to untrammeled governmental power at one time or another between 1987 and
1991, with a low point being reached during and after the Senegal–
Mauritania crisis, when heightened ethnic and racial tensions,
coupled with various alleged coup plots, resulted in the arrests of
hundreds of people, many of whom were tortured and killed.
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• 295
The Mauritanian Second Republic, which was inaugurated on 18
April 1992 and existed until its abolition by a military putsch on 3
August 2005, was based on a new constitution, which took effect
on 20 July 1991, and possessed an expanded and formally independent legal system. Titles VI and VII of the constitution set forth, in
broad outline, the court structure, including at its apex a six-member
Supreme Court selected jointly by the National Assembly and the
country’s Senate. Below the Supreme Court (whose chief justice was
appointed directly by the president) there were three appeals courts,
one in Nouakchott and two others based in Kiffa and Nouadhibou.
These panels had original jurisdiction over felonies in addition to
their primary function of hearing appeals on the merits from the
lower courts, one in each administrative région or province and 53
lesser tribunals, which handled domestic relations, inheritance, and
divorce cases, as well as matters involving monetary amounts no
greater than 10,000 ouguiyas. Each of the three appeals courts, as
well as many lower courts, was staffed by judges trained in both
European-derived and Islamic law, and who sometimes sharply divided their hearings between one legal area or the other. Only within
the strictly Islamic sector were the peculiarities of that system—
primarily the accordance of only one-half the normal weight to the
testimony of a woman—observed, with no application of either this
rule or any Islamic precept existing in cases such as those involving
commercial questions, automobile or aircraft law, or other “modern”
areas. Special tribunals were also set up to adjudicate labor disputes;
two assessors, one from the employees’ side and one from the employer, assisted the single presiding magistrate. The right to legal
counsel was constitutionally enshrined irrespective of a defendant’s
ability to pay, and was apparently respected by the authorities in
practice, albeit with exceptions that became more frequent after the
late 1990s.
Three other quasi-judicial bodies affected the Second Republic’s
legal system. A Supreme Council of Magistrates, made up of nine
members including the country’s president and two justices of the
Supreme Court, reportedly took an active role in the functioning of
the courts, both administratively and in their adherence to proper procedures and substantive results. The training of judges and other court
personnel also came under their purview. The High Islamic Council,
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LEGAL SYSTEM
composed of imams and other Muslim legal experts, was officially
tasked with the assessment of laws with respect to their conformity
to the sharia (formally, the “sole source of law” under the 1991 constitution), although it had little real impact on the functioning of the
basically secular Mauritanian government. Finally, the Constitutional
Council, established by Articles 81 through 88 of the constitution and
with six members chosen by both parliament and the executive branch
for a nonrenewable nine-year term, evaluated the constitutionality of
both legislation and parliamentary rules and formally announced the
results of elections and popular referenda. No appeals were possible
against its decisions. Rounding out the rather large array of Mauritanian judicial institutions, military courts-martial were convened from
time to time under the direct authority of the army chief of staff. These
proceedings, unlike most others, had very little publicity attached to
them; encompassed solely those offenses committed by army, navy,
or air force personnel; and could not be appealed in the civil court
system, although review could be obtained through the military chain
of command all the way up to President Ould Taya in his role as commander-in-chief of Mauritania’s armed forces.
The autonomy that existed on paper for the Mauritanian legal
system was honored mostly in the breach as the 1990s gave way to
the early 21st century. Although legal cases of little or no political
importance were evidently handled with reasonable competence,
executive interference was never far beneath the surface, and as time
passed, instances in which the courts provided few or no remedies
for presidential actions grew more numerous. Appeals of allegedly
fraudulent or irregular election results by the country’s opposition
political parties were routinely denied, Mauritania’s independent
newspapers seldom were able to have the Interior Ministry’s censorship orders modified or quashed, and prison sentences—whatever
their length—were rarely shortened or eliminated by the judiciary.
Trials with weighty political implications—such as those involving
Mohamed Lemine Ch’bih Ould Cheikh Melanine in 2001 and a
mass proceeding in early 2005 involving the participants in the coup
attempt of 8–9 June 2003, as well as other dissidents including expresident Ould Heydallah and his supporters—seemed frequently
to culminate in almost exactly the result that the Ould Taya regime
desired, although a court of appeals did vacate all charges in January
LEMRABOTT SIDI MAHMOUD OULD CHEIKH AHMED
• 297
1996 against many accused Baath Party members who were accused
of acting as surrogates for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Also, the government’s banning of political groups, such as the pro-Baathist Parti de
l’Avant-Garde Nationale (PAGN) in 1999, Ahmed Ould Daddah’s
Union des Forces Démocratiques (UFD) in October 2000, and
Messaoud Ould Boulkheir’s Action pour le Changement (AC)
in January 2002, was let stand by the courts in spite of well-founded
petitions. The judicial branch also showed a conspicuous unwillingness in February 1998 to entertain evidence that slavery still existed
in Mauritania. Several antislavery activists had planned to call expert
witnesses on this issue, only to suffer a ruling by the court that not
only was slavery extinct in their eyes, but “the court cannot listen to
those who claim the contrary.”
By the time the military coup d’état of 3 August 2005 ousted
President Ould Taya and replaced him with a transitional regime
headed by Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, the reputation of the legal
system was in tatters, having already suffered a severe blow to its
image in 1996 by the arrest of several magistrates (as well as some
members of the security forces) in an alleged drug-smuggling operation in Nouakchott. Ordinary Mauritanians, as well as most of the
country’s elites, viewed the judiciary as essentially an appendage of
the presidential office, and when they could, they avoided the courts
and instead availed themselves of the informal and tribally based
dispute resolution procedures that predated the state. In other words,
the disrepute in which the judicial branch was held mirrored the unpopularity of the Ould Taya regime in general, and it was too early
to say whether the inauguration of the civilian-led Third Republic
under President Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi on 19 April
2007 would result in a change in this perception and perhaps lay the
groundwork for a genuinely law-based society.
LEMRABOTT SIDI MAHMOUD OULD CHEIKH AHMED
(1957– ). A government official who occupied a diverse array of
high positions on the Conseil des Ministres during the Mauritanian
Second Republic (1992–2005) before serving as interior minister
between 2001 and 2005 during a time of increasing repression, Lemrabott Sidi Mahmoud Ould Cheikh Ahmed was born on 15 October
1957 in the village of Timbédra in the far eastern province of Hodh
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LEMRABOTT SIDI MAHMOUD OULD CHEIKH AHMED
ech-Chargui. After attending a lycée in Nouakhcott in the late
1970s, he received an undergraduate education at the École Nationale
d’Administration (ENA), located in the Mauritanian capital, graduating in 1981. By 1982, he was serving as secretary-general at the Ministry of the Interior (outranked only by the minister himself). Leaving
that post in 1984, he held the second-ranking position at the Ministry
of Fisheries and Maritime Economy before being tapped in 1985 by
President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya to serve as governor
of Nouakchott. From about 1986 to 1990, he was director-general of
the country’s pharmaceutical department and also secretary-general
of the State Audit Commission. The end of rule by the Mauritanian
armed forces and the inauguration of a new civilian regime on 18
April 1992 brought immediate benefits to Ould Cheikh Ahmed, who
was elevated to minister of mines and energy, serving there until 3
January 1993, when he began his first stint as interior minister. He
was displaced in 1994 and appointed minister of finance, still an
important cabinet slot. From 1994 to late 2001, Ould Cheikh Ahmed
occupied several other high positions, including minister of education, minister of rural development and environment, and minister of
justice. He was also a top official at Mauritania’s food supply agency,
the Commissariat à la Sécurité Alimentaire (CSA), from about
January 1998 to September 2000.
In September 2001, Ould Cheikh Ahmed began—with an interruption from 2003 to March 2005, when he was supplanted by Kaba
Ould Elewa—a controversial four-year tenure as minister of the interior, shouldering aside an equally divisive figure, Dah Ould Abdel
Jelil. He presided over a highly repressive period in Mauritania’s
history, in which harassment of both legal and illegal political parties and other groups (including those devoted to the protection
of human rights) became routine, and the country’s newspapers
were subjected to nearly constant censorship. Alleged coup plots
against the Ould Taya government, along with the actual violent
coup attempt of 8–9 June 2003, were also a feature of Ould Cheikh
Ahmed’s stormy term at the Ministry of the Interior, along with a
bout of officially sanctioned actions against former president Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah, who unsuccessfully sought to
replace Ould Taya in elections held in November 2003. Ould Cheikh
Ahmed remained interior minister through 3 August 2005, when, in
LES CAVALIERS POUR LE CHANGEMENT
• 299
a bloodless coup d’état, President Ould Taya was overthrown and
replaced by his longtime security director, Col. Ely Ould Mohamed
Vall. After the coup, Ould Cheikh Ahmed was not reappointed to any
cabinet post in the new military regime, but in the parliamentary
elections of 19 November and 3 December 2006, he reemerged from
obscurity, this time as the unofficial leader of a group of members
of the Mauritanian Senate who were former stalwarts of Maaouiya
Ould Taya’s Parti Républicain, Démocratique et Social (PRDS)
and were now sitting as independents.
LES CAVALIERS POUR LE CHANGEMENT. The Knights of
Change (in Arabic, Fursan al-Taghyir), an illegal, exiled organization led by the instigators of the unsuccessful coup attempt of 8–9
June 2003 in Mauritania, was set up in August or September 2003 in
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (where Mauritanian dissidents enjoyed
the backing of certain Burkinabé officials), headed by former armed
forces Capt. Saleh Ould Hanena along with his two primary accomplices, former Commandant (Major) Abderrahmane Ould Mini and
former air force squadron commander Mohamed Ould Cheikhna. A
civilian, Sidi Mohamed Ould Hreimou, also figured prominently in
the group’s affairs between 2003 and 2004, as all had escaped apprehension by the regime of President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed
Taya in the aftermath of the June uprising. The Cavaliers also maintained a presence in Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal, reportedly showing a
willingness over the short life of the group to maintain contact with
other exiled Mauritanian opposition groups, including the Forces de
Libération Africane de Mauritanie (FLAM) and two much smaller
bodies, Conscience et Résistance and the Alliance Patriotique.
Politically, the Knights of Change’s platform and list of grievances
mirrored the concerns of a considerable segment of the Mauritanian
population. In addition to opposing President Ould Taya and demanding his overthrow, they criticized the head of state’s recognition of
Israel and his closeness to France and the United States, also deploring
the general deterioration of the country’s army and the regime’s practice of awarding business prerogatives to members of Ould Taya’s
own Moorish Semasside tribe and others close to the presidential
office. Some observers also theorized that another tribal factor was at
work: the fact that Ould Hanena and many of his colleagues belonged
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to the Oulad Nasir tribe from the eastern provinces of Hodh echChargui and Hodh el-Gharbi, areas which had allegedly been given
short shrift by Ould Taya in favor of the president’s own region, the
Adrar.
After the failure of the June 2003 coup attempt, Ould Hanena,
Ould Mini, and Ould Cheikhna regrouped, basing their activities in
Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire and keeping up a stream of invective against the government. At one point—in autumn 2003—Ould
Hanena went on the Qatar-based al-Jazeera television station and
threatened to “open the gates of Hell” in Mauritania if President Ould
Taya did not allow a genuinely free and fair presidential election in
November of that year. Ould Hanena did not (or more likely, could
not) make good on his pledge, and the November 2003 balloting
was blatantly manipulated, with Ould Taya’s main opponent, former
president Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah, being jailed both
immediately before and after the vote—but still winning nearly 20
percent support due to his alliance with some of the country’s secularists, Arab nationalists, and Islamists. Ould Taya’s lopsided victory
margin was thus widely seen as distorted by fraud.
Moreover, additional political turmoil was shaking Mauritania’s
foundations at the same time. With little evidence, the regime accused the Knights of Change; the backers of militant Islam both
inside and outside the country; and the governments of Burkina Faso,
Côte d’Ivoire, and Libya with complicity in at least two other coup
plots in late 2003 and early 2004. Public disenchantment remained
high, and the truth behind Ould Taya’s maneuvering became harder
and harder to fathom. Ould Hanena and his supporters entered
Mauritania in both March and September/October 2004 to prepare
for another attempt to topple the president. But on 9 October 2004,
Ould Hanena and Ould Mini were arrested at Rosso as they crossed
into the country and were imprisoned along with several other reputed backers of the Knights of Change and at least two prominent
Islamists, former local Nouakchott politician Mohamed Jamal Ould
Mansour and a Muslim imam, Mohamed el-Hacen Ould Dedew. All
were accused of treason and faced the possibility of execution or
life imprisonment, which immediately triggered the concerns of the
international human rights community, as the precedents provided
by the Mauritanian legal system were not reassuring. From Decem-
LIVESTOCK
• 301
ber 2004 to February 2005, the captured Knights of Change, former
presidential candidate Ould Heydallah, two of his sons, and dozens of
other dissidents (for a total of 181 persons) were gathered together in
a courtroom at Oued Naga east of Nouakchott and subjected to what
amounted to a show trial, orchestrated by President Ould Taya and
his dwindling band of partisans.
In early February 2005, Ould Hanena and Ould Mini were among
the minority of the defendants at the Oued Naga trial to be found
guilty of all the changes against them, an outcome that surprised
very few people. But as he was not willing to endure the domestic
and international reaction if any of the accused were sentenced to
death, President Ould Taya merely ensured that the two men (and
also Ould Cheikhna in absentia) were handed life sentences. This did
not conclude the story of the Cavaliers, for barely six months later the
coup d’état of 3 August 2005 ended President Ould Taya’s stormy
two-decade tenure and replaced him with a group of high-ranking
military officers led by Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall. A month after
the coup, a general amnesty was declared, and Ould Hanena and his
fellow Knights walked out of Nouakchott’s central prison to great
popular acclaim. Finally, on 26 January 2006, Saleh Ould Hanena
and Abderrahmane Ould Mini announced that they had formed a new
political party with themselves as its leaders, to be known as the
Parti Mauritanienne pour l’Unité et le Changement (PMUC). Ould
Hanena was also one of 20 candidates who appeared on the ballot in
the first round of the presidential election of 11 and 25 March 2007,
but as he garnered only 56,700 votes (7.65 percent) of the 794,979
ballots cast, he was eliminated from further contention.
LIVESTOCK. In traditional Mauritanian society, animal husbandry
served as a critical means of economic sustenance, although herd size
fluctuated greatly due to the country’s harsh climate and the process
of desertification, which had a severe impact on both the availability
and quality of pasturelands. Several species of animal are raised, with
Moorish Mauritanians in the north relying mainly on camels and goats,
and the Halpulaaren and other Black Africans in and near the Senegal
River Valley possessing herds of sheep and cattle as well as goats.
Also present throughout Mauritania are a limited number of horses and
donkeys, although these, like the camel, are often utilized mainly as
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beasts of burden. The predominant species of cattle is the zebu, divided
into two varieties: the lighter, short-horned Maure, owned by nomadic
Moors in the north, and the heavier, long-horned subspecies, the
Peul, which is found in the south and prefers a riverine environment.
Long-horned cattle also tend to be the choice of black Mauritanians to
supplement their often precarious agricultural holdings.
Mauritania’s livestock sector first began to suffer serious problems
in the early 1970s, when droughts afflicted the entire Sahel. According
to some estimates, between 65 and 70 percent of the sheep, 30 to 40
percent of all cows and goats, and 15 to 20 percent of all camels had
perished by 1975, with efforts by the government to replenish herds
and prevent overgrazing proving almost totally ineffectual. Overgrazing also exacerbated the desertification problem, further decimating
herds and driving their owners out of rural areas and into the already
overcrowded cities and towns—the first harbinger of urbanization.
By 1981, herd size had decreased by almost 50 percent, and the part of
the population engaged in animal husbandry fell to about 35 percent,
only half the level of 1973. Furthermore, the attitudes of successive
governments often ensured the neglect of the rural sector, as preference was given, until 1985, to industrial development programs that
often proved uneconomic. Droughts also compelled many herders to
move to better-watered areas of Mali and Senegal, if they were not
obliged to slaughter their herds to stay alive, a dynamic that repeated
itself all the way into the early 21st century.
The armed forces regime led by Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould
Heydallah made some efforts to rebuild herds and to provide rural
extension services in the early 1980s, but its primary response to the
livestock crisis was to form a state agency, the Société Mauritanienne de la Commercialisation du Bétail (SOMECOB), which held
a legal monopoly on the marketing and export of beef, augmented
by a system of guaranteed prices. This proved wholly unworkable
in practice, as the historic patterns of commerce in Mauritania had
long eluded any efforts to exert centralized control. The crisis still
seemed impervious to a solution in 1984, with drought, desertification, and out-migration of herds combining to render an estimated
70 percent of the country’s 800,000 cattle vulnerable to extinction, a
predicament shared by five million goats and sheep and half a million
otherwise resilient camels.
LIVESTOCK
• 303
The policies of the Mauritanian government changed significantly
after the accession to power of Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed
Taya in a bloodless coup on 12 December 1984. Soon afterward, the
rural areas of the country were targeted for a greater share of state
expenditures, SOMECOB’s formal monopoly was ended by the early
1990s, and rural-oriented agencies, notably the Direction National
de l’Elevage (DNE) and the Société Nationale pour le Développement Rural (SONADER), were reorganized. Helped by increasing
rainfall and the slowing of the desertification process, herd size
began to recover in the late 1980s, although by 1987 there were still
20 percent fewer goats and sheep than a decade earlier. After 1987
livestock resources rapidly rebounded, and many herders moved their
animals back into Mauritania from Mali and Senegal. The animal
husbandry sector grew to comprise fully 20 percent of Mauritania’s
entire gross domestic product (GDP). But in retrospect, this period
marked the overall high point of the livestock sector, as its fortunes
from that time onward moved more or less in tandem with the shifting fortunes of Mauritanian agriculture. In 1992, for example, about
30 percent of all the country’s livestock died due to poor rainfall,
although the situation improved later in the decade (due mainly to a
lessening of drought conditions and an aggressive government cattle
vaccination program), so that by 2001 northern Mauritania supported
approximately 55,000 camels and about as many goats. But in that
same year, cattle herds were again threatened by low precipitation,
and 300 tons of feed were distributed to herders as part of an emergency international aid effort.
By 2002, the livestock situation had blossomed into a crisis, due,
paradoxically, to either inordinate flooding in the Senegal River Valley
(which killed 16,000 cattle and about 124,000 sheep and goats early
in the year) or droughts somewhat farther north, which made grazing
nearly impossible on many hitherto fertile pasturelands. In August
2002, usually the greenest month of the year, a lack of rainfall hit the
areas of Ayoun el-Atrouss, Kaédi, Kiffa, and Sélibaby particularly
hard, and even in the southern part of Tagant province (south of Tidjikja), conditions showed a marked deterioration from 2001 levels
of grazing. By the middle of 2003, the price of livestock had declined
by 40 to 60 percent, meaning that even if herders had animals they
wished to sell on the open market to buy grain (a traditional survival
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tactic in times of scarcity), their surviving animals would not command
the prices they would have received only a short time earlier. The
nomadic minority of the Mauritanian population had few or no other
means of support, so the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
of the United Nations sought to locate sources of fodder that could
be imported into the country. There were also chronic shortages of
veterinary supplies. All these problems persisted into 2005 and 2006,
and total livestock counts even before the latest set of reverses had still
not rallied to the levels seen in the 1990s; in 2002, it was estimated
that there were 1.5 million cattle in Mauritania, along with 14.2 million
goats and sheep.
The movement of livestock between Mauritanian territory and the
adjacent countries of Mali and Senegal, although it had been a centuries-old phenomenon, had a direct impact on Mauritania’s foreign
relations in March and April 1989, when disputes over livestock
ownership in the Senegal River Valley led directly to the destructive Senegal–Mauritania crisis, which was not fully resolved until
the early 1990s and involved considerable loss of life in the affected
region and elsewhere. Partly to prevent a recurrence of these events,
Senegal and Mauritania signed an agreement in Nouakchott on 25
April 2006 regulating the crossing of the interstate frontier by livestock, primarily during the spring of each year, when an estimated 5
to 10 percent of Mauritanian livestock crossed the border for grazing
purposes prior to moving back north during and after the rains, which
were expected to fall during May and June. Under the agreement,
official permits would be required for the migration of herds; crossings would be allowed only at certain points, and then only during
daylight hours. According to a Mauritanian official involved with the
plan, increased competition between cattle breeders and farmers in
the region made misunderstandings more likely and state intervention advisable.
LOI CADRE. Promulgated by the French government of Premier
Guy Mollet in June 1956, the loi cadre, an “outline” or “enabling”
law, provided the basic framework for the independence of most
of France’s African colonies, including Mauritania. In practical
terms, the loi cadre abolished the highly centralized Grand Conseil
d’AOF, which had been set up in 1946 by the French Fourth Repub-
MA EL-AININ, CHEIKH
• 305
lic, and also strengthened the role of the native populations in the
Assemblées Territoriales, which had existed since 1952 and had
themselves replaced the Conseils Généraux. In addition, Conseils
Locaux were also restructured to give more representation to Africans, and henceforth three to six “ministers” were to be chosen by
the Territorial Assemblies, supposedly by a form of indirect universal
suffrage. However, the authority of these bodies was still restricted
by the fact that France continued to possess full powers over matters
of defense, foreign policy, and certain economic questions. At the
apex of the revamped structure was the Conseil du Gouvernement,
whose president was still a Frenchman but whose vice president
would be the territory’s most prominent politician, a position filled
in Mauritania by Mokhtar Ould Daddah. More broadly, the passage
of the loi cadre signaled the end of France’s proclaimed effort to integrate its colonies culturally and politically with Paris, and indicated
a realization by France that far from producing contentment, its mission civilistrice had created resentments and nationalist aspirations
that could not be indefinitely ignored or suppressed.
–M–
MA EL-AININ, CHEIKH (ca. 1830–1910). One of northwest Africa’s
most prominent anticolonial leaders, Cheikh Ma el-Ainin (whose
name means “water in the eyes”) was born in southeastern Mauritania,
possibly in the modern-day province of Hodh ech-Chargui. Originally called Mohammed Sidi el-Moustapha, he quickly acquired a
reputation for both physical stamina and intellectual accomplishment,
particularly due to his extensive knowledge and fervent practice of
Islam. After being sent by his family to study in Morocco (in around
1847), he engaged primarily in commercial activities from 1852 to
about 1885, but became increasingly disturbed at the growing incursions of the Spanish into Western Sahara at that time. At the beginning
of the 20th century, he shifted his ambitions farther south, to Mauritania, where certain groups, notably the Oulad Berri, a zawiya tribe,
were succumbing to the blandishments of the French (led by Xavier
Coppolani) and allowing Paris to establish control over Brakna and
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MA EL-AININ, CHEIKH
Trarza. As a step in the direction of increasing his already great influence, Ma el-Ainin set to work building the city of Smara, located
in the northeastern part of Western Sahara where Spanish control had
not yet been established. He then decided to use all possible means to
repel French incursions into the Adrar, reasoning—correctly—that
Coppolani’s next campaign would be focused there. On 12 May 1905,
a detachment of men loyal to the cheikh succeeded in killing Coppolani at his home in Tidjikja. For a few years after the assassination,
the French advance in Adrar was stopped as Paris reassessed its strategy, eventually opting for a purely military solution to the problem, in
contrast to Coppolani’s mix of peaceful and more violent means.
The 1907–1908 period marked the zenith of Ma el-Ainin’s fortunes in Mauritania, due in large part to his success in procuring
weapons from Spain and Germany, who were anxious to curb French
influence. This period was characterized by a series of brutal campaigns waged by the cheikh’s followers, not only against France, but
also against those Mauritanian tribes who chose to align themselves
with Paris. However, these raids failed to dislodge the French from
Tagant, and a parallel anticolonial effort by Moulay Idriss, the uncle
of Moulay Abdelaziz, the Sultan of Morocco, was equally inconclusive. Xavier Coppolani had been replaced as governor-general of
France’s Mauritanian colony by Col. (later Gen.) Henri Gouraud,
who, with several years of experience in “pacification” in “Soudan”
(Mali) behind him, launched a massive military endeavor to subdue
the Adrar beginning in January 1909 (see ADRAR CAMPAIGN).
Gouraud’s men proved too much for Ma el-Ainin’s forces, which
were led by two of his sons, Hassena and el-Oueli, the cheikh himself
remaining well out of harm’s way in Smara. By July 1909, his resistance had been decisively crushed, leaving Ma el-Ainin with little alternative but to return to Morocco, where he continued to oppose any
moves toward compromise with the French by the new sultan (from
1908), Moulay Hafid. In what turned out to be Cheikh Ma el-Ainin’s
last attempt to assume undisputed spiritual and political leadership in
the region, he proclaimed himself sultan in 1910 and rallied a force of
Western Saharan and other tribesmen to depose Moulay Hafid. But
he was defeated on 23 June by the French army and then retired to
Tiznit, southern Morocco, where he died on 28 October 1910.
MAAOUIYA OULD SID’AHMED TAYA
• 307
MAAOUIYA OULD SID’AHMED TAYA (1943– ). The fifth military leader in the history of independent Mauritania, who later went
on to introduce limited democratic reforms in the early 1990s, assume the country’s presidency as a civilian in April 1992, and be
peacefully overthrown by his own armed forces in August 2005
after serving as an increasingly unpopular head of state for nearly 21
years. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya was born in 1943 near Atar
into a small Moorish tribe of traders and merchants, the Semassides.
When he reached the age of five, Ould Taya, like a great many of
his compatriots, was sent to an Islamic school, where he studied the
Koran and other Muslim texts for upward of 10 hours a day for the
next three years. Around 1951, he was enrolled in a “regular” (i.e.,
secular) school in Atar, where he displayed an aptitude for mathematics and caught the eye of the school’s director, who recommended
to his parents that he attend a lycée in the southern town of Rosso.
From November 1955 to June 1959, Ould Taya was a student at that
institution, which prided itself on training a future Mauritanian (and
other West African) administrative elite, because independence for
those territories was at the time imminent.
In early 1960, diploma in hand, the teenaged Maaouiya decided
to enlist as an officer candidate in the embryonic army of his home
country. With the encouragement of his father, he made his way
to St. Louis, Senegal, then the governmental center of Mauritania,
to enroll, and from there he was sent to Atar, where he took five
months of basic military courses. His performance there so impressed
his instructors that he was chosen to attend the prestigious École
Militaire de Cavalarie at Saumur, France. Graduating in May 1961
(after entering in November 1960), Ould Taya returned to Mauritania
where, as a newly commissioned lieutenant in charge of a small unit
of men, he undertook a 1,000-kilometer patrol of the rugged, sometimes obstreperous administrative régions of Hodh ech-Chargui and
Hodh el-Gharbi, the results of which gave President Mokhtar Ould
Daddah a better idea of the political and social conditions prevailing
in the far eastern part of Mauritania. Ould Taya returned to the new
capital of his country, Nouakchott, at the age of 21.
Ould Taya’s military career had by this time reached distinguished
dimensions. At the end of 1963, he was again selected to travel to
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MAAOUIYA OULD SID’AHMED TAYA
France, this time to attend the École d’Application de l’Infanterie at
St. Maxen for a nine-month course, during which he met many of his
future Mauritanian officer colleagues. Upon receiving his degree, he
once more returned to Rosso, where, in the absence of an immediate
army posting, he was a teacher at a secondary school for approximately two years. From 1966 to 1974, Ould Taya occupied a series
of increasingly responsible positions in the small Mauritanian army,
including command of a unit at Nouadhibou, a period of service in
the deuxième bureau (intelligence corps) in Nouakchott, a prized
posting as President Ould Daddah’s aide-de-camp, and assignment as
chef de poste in Akjoujt and F’Derik. At the end of 1974, moreover,
Ould Taya traveled to France for a third time to attend the top-ranked
École Supérieure de Guerre in Paris. He acquitted himself well there,
but the Mauritania to which he returned in December 1975 was about
to be changed forever. His country stood on the brink of full-scale
involvement in the Western Sahara conflict, which President Ould
Daddah had made inevitable by signing, with Morocco, the so-called
Madrid Agreement of 14 November 1975, by which the Spanish
colony was to be divided between Rabat and Nouakchott without
reference to the wishes of either the Western Saharan people or the
threats of armed action by the proindependence Saharan liberation
movement, the Polisario Front.
Only a matter of days after Commandant (Major) Ould Taya arrived
back in Mauritania, Polisario’s guerrilla forces staged some of their
first attacks against Mauritanian targets, striking at the economically
vital railway line, which carried the country’s iron ore exports from
the inland settlement of Zouérate to the port of Nouadhibou. Ould
Daddah, realizing that he and his small nation could be headed for a
serious war, immediately sent Ould Taya back to Paris, where he held
urgent consultations with the French government with a view to acquiring much-needed weaponry for the country’s army. After successfully
completing his mission to France, Ould Taya got his first real taste of
combat in early 1976, when he was successively appointed chief of
military operations and commander of the important garrison at Bir
Moghrein. In the latter assignment, in particular, the full ramifications
of the Saharan war were driven home, as the whole area was under
nearly constant attack by Polisario. Gradually, in common with many
of his fellow officers, Ould Taya became frustrated with the seemingly
MAAOUIYA OULD SID’AHMED TAYA
• 309
endless and unwinnable Western Sahara war and reportedly shared the
suspicions felt by many—army men and civilians alike—that Mauritania was risking its very independence as a nation, in part by allowing
Morocco’s King Hassan II to station his own troops in the country
pursuant to a treaty setting up the Moroccan–Mauritanian Defense
Committee, which was signed on 13 May 1977 after a period of especially heavy military reverses.
As a result, Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya fully supported the
nonviolent coup d’état of 10 July 1978, which deposed President
Ould Daddah and instituted direct military rule in the form of the Comité Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN). The CMRN,
led by the army’s chief of staff, Col. Mustapha Ould Mohammed
Salek, counted Ould Taya as one of its members from the outset,
and by January 1979, although not yet a full colonel (the highest
rank attainable in Mauritania), he was appointed the ruling council’s
permanent secretary in charge of the Defense Ministry, in effect becoming minister of defense. But he held that post for only the next
two months, because Ould Salek was forced to relinquish his powers
on 5 April 1979, after his assumption of nearly dictatorial authority
on 20 March had alienated many in the government. Lt.-Col. Ould
Taya, although still a member of the Comité Militaire de Salut
National (CMSN), the CMRN’s successor junta, left the higher
reaches of the regime and became commander of the Gendarmarie
Nationale. He held that position until early in 1980, by which time
a series of complicated maneuvers within the CMSN had ended with
the assumption of most real power by Lt.-Col. Mohammed Khouna
Ould Heydallah.
Throughout this extremely unstable period in the postindependence
era, Ould Taya retained his reputation as a diligent, honest, and relatively apolitical soldier with a largely professional and nationalistic
outlook. Significantly, he managed to stay aloof from the ethnic and
tribal infighting that characterized the early years of army governance,
a phenomenon aggravated by the division of the officer corps into
pro-Polisario, pro-Moroccan, and other factions. After the accession
to office of Ould Heydallah and his consolidation of power in January
1980, Ould Taya was restored to favor, becoming army chief of staff.
In that post, he narrowly escaped death at the hands of the conspirators
of the exiled Alliance pour une Mauritanie Démocratique (AMD),
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MAAOUIYA OULD SID’AHMED TAYA
who staged a bloody coup attempt against the CMSN on 16 March
1981, in the process taking Ould Taya prisoner. But he broke out of
captivity in time to help rally loyal forces to defeat the plotters, who
were mostly rounded up over the next few days and executed. Ould
Heydallah, in recognition of his colleague’s role in preserving his government, promoted him to prime minister and minister of defense in
April 1981, by way of returning to direct army rule and dismissing the
civilian cabinet he had chosen in December 1980. The reshuffle made
Ould Taya the second most powerful figure in Mauritania.
For the moment, Ould Taya and Ould Heydallah had a close
working relationship, but this state of affairs did not last long.
The Mauritanian head of state soon embarked on a personalized
and—according to some—high-handed form of governance, reportedly tolerating massive corruption and instituting frequent changes
in his regime’s personnel to keep various interests in check. In the
area of foreign relations, Ould Heydallah leaned increasingly in the
direction of the Polisario Front (and its primary supporter, Algeria)
after Mauritania’s successful exit from the Western Sahara conflict
in August 1979, when the Algiers Agreement was negotiated with
the Saharan nationalist organization. Above all, Ould Heydallah was
perceived by some members of the CMSN as eroding the carefully
crafted collegiality and collective decision making that they believed
were essential. Ould Heydallah went so far as to formally recognize
Polisario’s government-in-exile, the Saharan Arab Democratic
Republic (SADR), on 27 February 1984, apparently without telling
Ould Taya or any of his fellow officers of the decision. Ould Taya,
who reportedly had some reservations about setting up diplomatic
ties with the SADR, was demoted back to army chief of staff two
weeks later after he spoke his mind on this and other matters.
On 12 December 1984, while Ould Heydallah was out of the
country, Ould Taya led a bloodless coup in which he assumed the
presidency. Almost immediately he made his mark, by distancing
himself from his predecessor’s recognition of the SADR; restoring
diplomatic relations with Morocco, which had been severed after
the March 1981 coup attempt; freeing most political prisoners; and
trying to crack down on corruption and influence-peddling on behalf
of foreign interests, particularly Libya. He also moved somewhat
closer to France and the conservative Gulf monarchies as a means of
MAAOUIYA OULD SID’AHMED TAYA
• 311
preserving vitally needed international aid. All told, Ould Taya’s
first years appeared to signal a return to a consensus-based style of
leadership by the CMSN, less frequent changes in the country’s cabinet (although this would not always be true in the coming years), and
greater overall predictability in domestic and foreign policy.
But even as Col. Ould Taya embarked on a cautious process of
limited democratization by holding remarkably free municipal elections in December 1986, the situation within the country was worsening. Ethnic tensions were on the rise, and Ould Taya soon found
it desirable to suppress the activities of the influential Arab Baath
Socialist Party (ABSP), which had been active in Mauritania since
about 1980 but was enjoying greater prominence due to the growing strength of its main backer, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
In September 1987 and July 1988, many Baathists, including the
former information minister, Mohammed Yehdih Ould Breideleil,
were jailed, ostensibly for working in Baghdad’s interests. Far more
brutal measures were taken against the resurgent (and exiled) black
Mauritanian opposition group, the Forces de Libération Africiane
de Mauritanie (FLAM); many arrests were made during this time,
long prison sentences were handed down by courts that did not follow internationally prescribed standards of fairness and due process,
and many prisoners were held in gravely deficient conditions, leading to the deaths of several detainees at the remote Oualata fortress
in Hodh ech-Chargui. Mistreatment of those—whether civilian or
military—suspected of being aligned with FLAM escalated after the
late 1980s; hundreds of Black Africans were massacred in late 1990
and early 1991, an event for which President Ould Taya could not
escape responsibility even through his authority was threatened at
this time, mainly by the Baath Party.
Ould Taya’s presidency thus entered an extremely difficult period,
which would color his entire later career. Black African criticism of
his allegedly “racist” government did not abate, and the Baathists
showed little sign of being intimidated by the CMSN’s crackdown,
because they had been trained by their Iraqi sponsors for precisely
such an eventuality. It was at this point, according to many observers of the Mauritanian political landscape, that Ould Taya began to
lose influence and to become progressively isolated. Soon an invidious dynamic seemed to be at work: The more strident advocacy of
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the Black African point of view held by FLAM led to a reaction by
some Beydane Moors in favor of the Baath Party, which by degrees
tightened the screws on the black Mauritanian opposition. This, in
turn, increased Baathist influence within and close to the CMSN, and
official contacts between Nouakchott and Baghdad (supplemented
by substantial deliveries of military hardware) reached ever-greater
heights. For his part, President Ould Taya felt obliged to follow up
his own visit to Iraq in December 1988 with another tête-à-tête with
Saddam Hussein in October 1989, during the first and most intense
stages of the 1989–1990 Senegal–Mauritania crisis. On a more personal level, it was also possible that Ould Taya was highly distracted
by the death of his wife, Sadiya Kamil (of Lebanese extraction, born
in Senegal), who died in a household accident at approximately this
time.
Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990, which touched off the
Gulf Crisis and Gulf War, was a time of acute economic and political hardship for Mauritania, but it also provided an opportunity for
President Ould Taya. With Saddam Hussein progressively isolated
by economic sanctions, quarantined by a U.S.-led military buildup
near Iraq’s borders, and finally forcibly ejected from Kuwait in
January and February 1991, Baghdad was prevented from exercising
influence in Mauritania, and this allowed Ould Taya to reassert himself. Just after the end of the Gulf War, he surprised many observers
by announcing the pending legalization of multiple political parties
in the country for the first time since the early 1960s, the holding of
a referendum to approve a new constitution (which was enacted on
20 July 1991), and contestable presidential and parliamentary elections. When the election was held in early 1992, Ould Taya emerged
triumphant, winning over 62 percent of the votes cast. Although
opinion was divided over whether the election was genuinely free
and fair, the fact that the president’s main opponent, Ahmed Ould
Daddah of the Union des Forces Démocratiques (UFD), finished
with a respectable 33 percent appeared to rule out the possibility of a
wholly preordained outcome.
Bestowed with a degree of legitimacy unprecedented in Mauritania’s history, President Ould Taya then presided over elections for
the Assemblée Nationale and the Senate, the two chambers of the
country’s bicameral legislature. But this phase of the democratization
MAAOUIYA OULD SID’AHMED TAYA
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process was marred by an opposition boycott, motivated by suspicions of fraud in voting for the president. As a consequence, Ould
Taya’s political organization, the Parti Républicain, Démocratique
et Social (PRDS), had little trouble capturing the lion’s share of seats
in each house (36 of 56 in the Senate and 67 of 79 in the National Assembly, proportions that would not appreciably change over the next
13 years). On 18 April 1992, Ould Taya inaugurated the so-called
Second Republic, accompanied by the formal dissolution of the
CMSN and the installation of a new and almost entirely civilian Conseil des Ministres (the only military man present was the minister of
defense, Col. Ahmed Ould Minnih). The new cabinet was headed
by Prime Minister Sidi Mohamed Ould Boubacar, a respected financial specialist and economist. A few former AMD members and
others were also present in the cabinet as a gesture of reconciliation,
but this did not last beyond 1993; all ministers from 1993 to 2005
were staunch PRDS backers and often were professionally beholden
to the head of state.
From 1992 to about 1997, President Ould Taya governed Mauritania with a (relative) absence of direct repression. Although the
country’s newspapers were regularly censored and harassed, ethnic
tensions remained fairly low, and the government’s nearly wholehearted embrace of the economic recommendations of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) did produce respectable growth in
the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP)—sometimes 5 percent or
so per annum—from the early 1990s onward. Moreover, non-PRDS
political parties were for the most part permitted to operate openly,
although factional infighting soon gravely weakened Ahmed Ould
Daddah’s UFD, and a few other smaller groups, including the Union
pour le Progrès et la Démocratie (UPD) led by Hamdi Ould
Mouknass, rallied behind the ruling PRDS. No party was able to
garner more than a handful of places in parliament or on municipal
councils, therefore never remotely threatening PRDS hegemony.
In addition to censorship of the print media, the regime allowed
very little opposition access to the state-run television and radio stations. Persistent allegations of voter fraud were lodged against the
government (which independent analysts found more and more credible as time went on), and perhaps most significantly in the long run,
President Ould Taya began to aggressively favor his Semasside tribal
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kinsmen with respect to government employment, commercial opportunities, and the like, alienating much of the citizenry. In addition,
President Ould Taya left no doubt that alternative political and social
currents would be swiftly dealt with. The Islamist Oumma Party was
repeatedly harassed, as were the remnants of the Baath Party, since
reorganized as the Parti de l’Avant-Garde Nationale (PAGN). These
and other actions demonstrated that no matter how pluralistic Mauritania was on the surface (and pluralism was not totally illusory during
this period), the national security organs—headed since 1985 by Col.
Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, the chief of the Direction Générale de la
Sûreté Nationale (DGSN)—possessed wide-ranging and unchecked
powers. An exclamation point of sorts was placed on this situation by
the elevation in the late 1990s of President Ould Taya’s eldest son,
Ahmed Ould Taya, to a position within the security apparatus, thus
bolstering the iron-fisted individuals who led the powerful Interior
Ministry during the Second Republic, including Dah Ould Abdel
Jelil and Mohamed Lemine Salem Ould Dah.
What caused the government of Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya
to become a dictatorship in all but name by the year 2000? A basic
narrowness of perspective—all too common among military men
in Africa and elsewhere—along with an increasingly authoritarian
mentality and growing delusions of indispensability must certainly
be accorded considerable weight, particularly in a society that nearly
always abjured violence as a means of effecting political change
yet had very few strong and functioning national institutions. The
1995 founding of Action pour le Changement (AC), headed by
Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, a longtime hartani nemesis of Ould
Taya, was also a significant development, because it rapidly overtook
the UFD as Mauritania’s foremost opposition party and moreover
achieved a diverse membership, ranging from Black Moors to Black
African (and even ex-FLAM) activists. Ould Taya may also have
felt cornered by the electoral strength of a widely respected politicalreligious figure, Mohamed Lemine Ch’bih Ould Cheikh Melainine, in the December 1997 presidential balloting; although Ould Taya
massively triumphed overall, Ould Cheikh Melainine came close to
capturing a majority of the vote both in Nouakchott and Nouadhibou,
the country’s two largest cities and home to some of Mauritania’s
best-educated citizens.
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Mauritania’s foreign policy shifts in the late 1990s also added to
public concern. Although President Ould Taya had distanced himself
from Saddam Hussein after the 1990–1991 Gulf Crisis and assumed a
basically nonaligned stance in the early years of the Second Republic,
this soon began to change, as the head of state repressed Mauritanian
Baathists, moved closer to France and the United States, and—by
far the most controversial development—established full diplomatic
relations with Israel in July 1999, without any detailed explanation
for the move or any attempt to prepare public opinion for this radical
step. Virtually the entire Mauritanian political spectrum—the AC,
UFD, the PAGN, the Islamists, and probably not a few in the PRDS
itself—strongly opposed the country’s ties with the Jewish state. A
long-standing close relationship—that with Algeria—soon showed
strain, as Algerian distaste for Nouakchott’s diplomatic relations with
Tel Aviv sent a distinct chill through what had been a nearly twodecade friendship. Ould Taya’s deepening alignment with Morocco
after the death of King Hassan II in 1999 and the accession to the
throne of his son, Mohamed VI, also caused a degree of concern (as
did the president’s apparently increasing displeasure with the Polisario Front), although these qualms did not come close to the level of
controversy generated by the Israeli issue. Finally, Ould Taya’s decision in December 1999 to withdraw Mauritania from the Economic
Community of West African States (ECOWAS) was not wellreceived by the country’s business interests, which saw an important
foreign market for Mauritania’s few exported products potentially
closed off or restricted.
President Ould Taya’s use of repression against opposition parties and personalities intensified after 2000. Ould Cheikh Melainine
was imprisoned for more than two years (April 2001–August 2003)
based on widely discredited accusations. Action for Change was
banned outright by the government a few weeks after its electoral
successes in October 2001 (the PAGN and Ahmed Ould Daddah’s
faction of the UFD had been shut down earlier), and press restrictions
became ubiquitous. On the human rights front, conditions were also
deteriorating: Allegations of arbitrary detention, torture, and police
brutality were on the rise and were documented not only by Amnesty
International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) but also by the
U.S. Department of State’s annual reports. The PRDS, meanwhile,
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had built itself into a formidable (yet not homogenous) political patronage machine by 2002, in the process touching upon even fairly
routine citizen interactions with the bureaucracy and ensuring by its
favoritism toward the Semassides and other (mainly rural-based)
interests that many Mauritanians would feel disenfranchised. And
surprisingly, in light of his background, President Ould Taya allowed
to the armed forces to decay as an institution. By 2003 morale was
poor, equipment was antiquated and in disrepair, and the conditions
of army service were abominable. Periodic reshuffling of high-ranking officers and intermittent stories of shadowy opposition groups
within the army only added to overall feelings of pessimism.
Even without the benefit of hindsight, the coup attempt of 8–9
June 2003 was not a complete surprise. Led by former Capt. Saleh
Ould Hanena along with fellow army officer Abderrahmane Ould
Mini, air force squadron commander Mohamed Ould Cheikhna, and
perhaps two dozen others, the uprising was only narrowly defeated
after over a dozen fatalities, including the death of the army chief
of staff, Col. Mohamed Lemine Ould N’Diayane. There were also
unflattering (but unconfirmed) reports that President Ould Taya had
sought refuge inside either the French or the American embassy in
Nouakchott (both located near the presidential compound) in the
event that loyalist forces failed to keep him in office. To his credit,
Ould Taya did not engage in tactics of mass repression after the
coup attempt had been crushed, but equally, he refused to change the
regime’s political direction. There was no retreat from the principle
of tribal and regional patronage; ties with Israel were not loosened;
Mauritania remained a firm ally of President George W. Bush’s
“war on terror” (Ould Taya uttered not a word of protest at Bush’s
March 2003 invasion of Iraq, a move opposed by practically all
Mauritanians); human rights abuses did not abate; and the November
2003 presidential elections were shamelessly manipulated, as a key
candidate, ex-CMSN chairman Ould Heydallah, found himself jailed
immediately before and after the balloting. Even so, Ould Heydallah
still managed to win almost 20 percent of the vote amid persistent
allegations of fraud, a measure of how deep the frustration with Ould
Taya had become.
By early 2005, the head of state embarked on what turned out to
be a last-ditch effort to remain in power. In a transparent attempt
MAAOUIYA OULD SID’AHMED TAYA
• 317
to purchase the loyalty of those around him and among the population at large, cabinet ministers, who previously had been paid only
150,000 ouguiyas ($570) per month, saw their salaries increased by
633 percent, to UM 950,000 ($3,620), retroactive to the beginning of
the year. The civil service received an equivalent pay hike, and the
defense budget for 2005 was scheduled to go from UM 3 billion to
UM 15 billion ($54 million), a rise of 500 percent. Also, the country’s meager minimum wage was increased from UM 8,000 ($30) to
UM 21,000 ($80) per month, although this was not expected to lead
to any general rise in living standards, as the formal wage-earning
sector employed relatively few Mauritanians and the majority of the
populace was thought to subsist on $1.00 per day or less. There were
concerns that these pay increases were fiscally unwise, as they would
in effect borrow from the country’s future petroleum revenues
(which did not begin to materialize until February 2006), and many
Mauritanians had by this time come to fear that oil monies would be
distributed by President Ould Taya much as he allocated other state
resources—to those bound to him by tribal, family, or political allegiance. After Ould Taya’s overthrow, it was revealed that a few of his
closest advisers, aware of his deepening unpopularity, had urged him
to step down as president in 2009, when his six-year term expired.
But the head of state, confident that he had weathered the storm created by the 2003 coup attempt, refused their entreaties, manifesting a
desire (in the opinion of some) to remain in office for the rest of his
life. Even official photographs of Ould Taya taken after 2003 showed
a less unassuming and more imperious and even haughty man.
After nearly 21 years in power, the end came for President
Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya in the early morning hours of 3
August 2005, when he was out of the country attending the funeral
of Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd. A bloodless coup led by his security director, Col. Ould Vall, resulted in the seizure of all vital government
installations, the dissolution of parliament, and a 20-month period of
rule by a transitional military body, the Conseil Militaire pour la
Justice et la Démocratie (CMJD). The replacement of Ould Taya
was met with great popular acclaim even though the African Union,
France, and the United States all expressed initial disapproval. Perhaps encouraged by this negative international reaction to the coup,
Ould Taya traveled from Saudi Arabia to Niamey, Niger, and then
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to Banjul, Gambia, to await developments, and on 8 August went on
Al-Arabiya television to declare that “as President of the Republic, I
order officers, non-commissioned officers and soldiers of the armed
forces and security forces to put an end to this criminal operation and
restore the situation to normal.” By then it was apparent that Ould
Taya’s days as president were over and, aware that neither Niger nor
Gambia may have wanted to jeopardize relations with Mauritania’s
new government by granting refuge to the former head of state, and
aware also that some human rights groups might seek to hold him
accountable for the many abuses committed during his time in office,
he requested—and received—political asylum in the Gulf emirate of
Qatar. Taking up residence in Doha along with his second wife and
his children, he began a comfortable retirement, with no indication of
when (or if) he would ever return to Mauritania.
MADRID AGREEMENT (14 November 1975). A secret treaty
signed by the representatives of Spain, Morocco, and Mauritania
under the terms of which Madrid’s colony of Western Sahara would
be handed over to the governments of King Hassan II and President
Mokhtar Ould Daddah. Spain officially denied that it was transferring full sovereignty over its Saharan possession; it merely stated, in
a six-paragraph declaration of principles that was made public, that it
was ceding only temporary administrative authority to the two claimant states pending a referendum or other type of consultation with the
indigenous population. The Madrid Agreement marked a new spirit
of entente between King Hassan and President Ould Daddah, who by
signing the accord buried their often embarrassing duplicate claims to
all of Western Sahara, settling instead for a roughly two-thirds/onethird division of the territory, with the largest and most useful part
going to Rabat, a partition finalized by the Moroccan–Mauritanian
Conventions of 14 April 1976.
For Spain, the crisis over Western Sahara came at a particularly
delicate moment. The longtime Spanish dictator, Generalissimo
Francisco Franco, had fallen gravely ill on the eve of what could
have been a military showdown with Morocco, since on 6 November
King Hassan had sent tens of thousands of unarmed civilians across
the border into Western Sahara to claim its “amputated Saharan province.” Under intense political pressure and preoccupied with internal
MANIFESTO DU NÉGRO-MAURITANIEN OPPRIMÉ
• 319
affairs (Franco eventually died on 20 November), Spain embraced
with alacrity the concept of a trilateral accord excluding the Western
Saharans.
For Mauritania, the signing of the Madrid Accord marked the
beginning of its disastrous involvement in the Western Sahara
conflict, a war with the proindependence Polisario Front that came
close to unraveling the country, because the Mauritanian armed
forces proved totally incapable of fending off Polisario attacks.
After its virtual defeat by Polisario’s guerrilla fighters (and the overthrow of President Ould Daddah by his military establishment on 10
July 1978), Mauritania formally ceased to be a party to the Madrid
Agreement, signing the Algiers Agreement on 5 August 1979, under
which it renounced its claim to Western Sahara.
MANIFESTO DU NÉGRO-MAURITANIEN OPPRIMÉ. Circulated
both inside Mauritania and abroad beginning in April 1986, the
appearance of the Manifesto of the Oppressed Black Mauritanian
marked the beginning of an intense round of ethnic disharmony in
Mauritanian political and social life and was also the clearest indication up to that time of the determination of the exiled (and illegal)
black opposition movement, the Forces de Libération Africaine
de Mauritanie (FLAM), to battle by whatever means necessary
the military government led by Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed
Taya.
The manifesto itself was a French-language pamphlet (later translated into English and posted on the Internet), approximately 50
pages in length and polemical in tone, that detailed the alleged racial
discrimination against black Mauritanians (particularly the Halpulaaren) since the country’s independence in 1960. After recounting
an earlier instance of conflict between Black Africans and Moors in
1966 under the civilian regime of President Mokhtar Ould Daddah,
which involved a decided shift in government policy toward Arabization, the FLAM document stated that most government ministries
were controlled by Moors, and that the number of black Mauritanians
in the bureaucracy and in the officer corps of the armed forces was
far less than their proportion in the Mauritanian population. The
highest positions in the army, for example, allegedly nearly always
went to Beydanes. FLAM argued that similar discrimination also
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existed in Mauritania’s diplomatic representation in other countries;
it believed that diplomats (and especially ambassadors) were overwhelmingly Moorish, and that the country maintained diplomatic
missions in a far greater number of Arab League states than in Black
African countries. In Mauritania’s economic life, particularly in the
“modern” sector, FLAM charged that the heads of the major parastatal companies were almost entirely Moors, as were the officers and
higher-ranking employees of the Mauritanian banking system. The
document also condemned Mauritania’s orientation in its foreign relations toward the Arab League and away from sub-Saharan Africa,
and alleged that the country’s communications media, such as radio,
were guilty of discrimination by not sponsoring sufficient programming in languages spoken predominantly by black Mauritanians,
such as French, Fulani, Sarakolé, and Wolof.
The FLAM manifesto targeted two aspects of Mauritanian life for
particularly vehement criticism. It alleged racism in the application
of the Land Reform Act of 5 June 1983, which modified the land
tenure system in the agricultural region of the country in the Senegal
River Valley and gave the state a greater role in allocating “dead” or
fallow hectarage in southern Mauritania. The manifesto characterized
the law as a means by which black Mauritanians, who adhered to a
land tenure system sometimes at odds with the Islamic sharia, could
be dispossessed in favor of Moorish immigrants from the north.
FLAM also feared that, by a series of legal artifices, large blocks of
land would be awarded to Beydane-dominated agribusinesses and so
force their Black African or haratine former owners into the status
of tenants, and that some members of the military ruling group and
other well-connected government officials—some of whom it identified by name—would be the prime beneficiaries of the new land
ownership arrangements. And as far as the country’s educational
system was concerned, the manifesto accused the regime of aggressively Arabizing the schools, neglecting the teaching of African
languages beyond the primary level, imposing Arabic language and
culture upon a whole generation of Black Africans, and sabotaging
the reforms that were introduced into education in the early 1980s by
the then-chairman of the ruling Comité Militaire de Salut National
(CMSN), Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah.
MESSAOUD OULD BOULKHEIR
• 321
Whatever the merits of the arguments it presented (some of which
depended on the actual number of Black Africans residing in the
country), the appearance of the Manifesto of the Oppressed Black
Mauritanian facilitated a quantum jump in the level of publicity accorded FLAM. But the effect of the document was felt most strongly
inside Mauritania itself, where its publication touched off a massive
manhunt for its authors, an effort led by a powerful CMSN member,
Col. Djibril Ould Abdellahi, who was soon afterward able to reassume his old post as minister of the interior, wresting the key portfolio out of the hands of a prominent Halpulaar officer, Lt.-Col. Anne
Ahmadou Babaly. The Black African chairman of the Banque
Central de Mauritanie (BCM) was also dismissed, and a veritable
purge in the armed forces and civil service followed. In September
1986, 21 black Mauritanians were brought to trial in Nouakchott
and accused of being the authors of the manifesto, with belonging to
an illegal organization (i.e., FLAM), and with holding unauthorized
meetings. The defendants denied their guilt, but all were convicted on
25 September and sentenced to between six months’ and five years’
imprisonment, in proceedings that lasted only one day. Several of
those convicted were later to die in detention (in September 1988) at
the remote prison fortress at Oualata in circumstances that elicited
severe international criticism. The appearance of the manifesto had
given the Ould Taya regime its first real shock, and FLAM’s activity,
the government’s response, and the question of support for FLAM
by Senegal contributed to the delicate situation that exploded into
intercommunal violence in April 1989 at the start of the Senegal–
Mauritania crisis.
MESSAOUD OULD BOULKHEIR (1943– ). Possibly the best-known
Mauritanian from the haratine (formerly enslaved) class, Messaoud
Ould Boulkheir was born into slavery in the small Mauritanian village of Farah el-Kitane but was able, by his own later account, to
receive an education due to the strenuous efforts of his mother to free
herself and her family from servitude owing to the mistreatment they
suffered at the hands of their master. During the 1970s and 1980s,
Ould Boulkheir acquired a reputation as an expert on agricultural
matters and was appointed minister of rural development in January
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1985 by Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, just a month after
he led a bloodless coup d’état that deposed his increasingly unpopular
predecessor, Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah. In a Conseil des Ministres characterized by frequent shifts in personnel, Ould
Boulkheir was an exception; he served as rural development minister
continuously from January 1985 to 20 March 1988, when he left the
cabinet and was succeeded by Hamoud Ould Ely. Also at about this
time, he became increasingly estranged from President Ould Taya’s
policies, and in the coming decade their mutual dislike would harden
still further. Some observers felt that the head of state’s attitude
toward Ould Boulkheir was far more negative—and visceral—than
toward any other opposition figure.
In November 1990, at a time of high interethnic tensions in Mauritania, which were greatly aggravated by the Senegal–Mauritania
crisis and the military government’s worsening human rights
violations, Messaoud Ould Boulkheir decided to take advantage of
President Ould Taya’s limited liberalization of local and regional
politics by running for mayor of Nouakchott on an antiregime
platform. Not yet affiliated with any political party (because none
were permitted to organize until 1991), Ould Boulkheir was making considerable progress, by some accounts, in uniting both the
haratine (“Black Moor”) and non-Arab Black African populace of
the country behind his candidacy. But also in the same month, the
government announced—without setting forth any evidence—that it
had foiled an attempted coup allegedly fomented by the Senegalese
regime of President Abdou Diouf. This announcement, along with
the scattered violence occurring in the Senegal River Valley by the
exiled black Mauritanian Forces de Libération Africaine de Mauritanie (FLAM), put an end to this period of relative openness, and
may have been the catalyst for a full-scale massacre of mainly Black
African officers and enlisted men in the armed forces (as well as the
civil service) by their Beydane counterparts in late 1990 and early
1991. Hundreds are believed to have perished at various army installations at this time.
During the general relaxation of social and political conditions that
followed the crisis with Senegal and the Gulf Crisis of 1990–1991,
Ould Boulkheir again took advantage of the nascent liberalization,
not only assuming the titular leadership of the haratine-oriented El-
MESSAOUD OULD BOULKHEIR
• 323
Hor (“Free Man”) organization but also joining—effective 2 October
1991—Ahmed Ould Daddah’s Union des Forces Démocratiques
(UFD). Before very long, however, Ould Boulkheir and El-Hor had
a falling out with the UFD, as Ahmed Ould Daddah’s personality as
well as the UFD’s singular lack of success at the polls led to widespread dissension. On 6 June 1994, El-Hor (and Ould Boulkheir) left
the UFD, but until August 1995 had no legal group with which to
affiliate themselves. On 22 August 1995 a new party, Action pour
le Changement (AC), was set up with Ould Boulkheir as one of its
top leaders. Ould Boulkheir’s antiregime attitudes had evidently become such an irritant to President Ould Taya by this time that he was
arrested in January 1997 on charges of acting as an agent of influence for the controversial Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qadaffi.
He and a few fellow defendants were freed from detention within a
month, but the AC entered a period of gradually increasing official
harassment.
Messaoud Ould Boulkheir had always distinguished himself on the
Mauritanian political scene by a willingness to take positions that few
others were willing to openly adopt. For example, he went so far as
to shelter escaping slaves inside his Nouakchott home; vehemently
opposed the 1993 amnesty law that prevented the punishment of
those responsible for the human rights abuses of 1989–1991; and in
1999, when the so-called Ould Dah affair began, he—unlike most
of the rest of the opposition—favored the prosecution in France of
the alleged human rights abuser. He also expressed disappointment in
2000 when Capt. Ould Dah illegally departed France for Mauritania,
thus effectively bringing the case to an end. But in a country in the
tight grip of President Ould Taya and his governing Parti Républicain, Démocratique et Social (PRDS), Ould Boulkheir could only do
so much to fight repression.
Following a series of successes by the AC in the October 2001
parliamentary and municipal elections in Mauritania, the party was
banned outright by the authorities in January 2002, leaving Ould
Boulkheir (and El-Hor) in the political wilderness until late 2003,
when he attached himself to a small political party, the Alliance
Populaire Progressiste (APP) after running for president in November
of that year, obtaining only 33,089 votes, just over 5 percent of the
total. Ould Boulkheir was appointed secretary-general of the APP in
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2004, but on 3 August 2005 all political activity came to a halt, as
Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall peacefully overthrew President Ould
Taya and instituted direct military rule by a 16-member junta, the
Conseil Militaire pour la Justice et la Démocratie (CMJD). The
coup was welcomed by most Mauritanians, but a few days later, when
the CMJD appointed a new cabinet to take the place of Ould Taya’s
ministers, Ould Boulkheir was unimpressed. Noting that nearly all
the new ministers were formerly affiliated with the PRDS, he added
to his reputation for forthrightness by stating that “it seems as though
the cabinet comes from a list found in a drawer of the ousted president. Our reaction is one of extreme disappointment and skepticism. I
thought the transition would mean new faces, but with a couple of exceptions they are all people from Ould Taya’s time. I don’t see a break
with the old regime.” Ould Boulkheir, however, was not ready to
retire from the Mauritanian political scene. As chairman of the APP,
he took an active role in assisting the party in the parliamentary elections of 19 November and 3 December 2006, at which time he had
already announced his candidacy for president as the CMJD prepared
to leave power. In the first round of the presidential election of 11
and 25 March 2007, he placed fourth in a field of 20 candidates, obtaining 72,493 votes, or 9.79 percent of the total. Consequently, Ould
Boulkheir could not progress to the second round of balloting, but
even so, the veteran opposition leader continued to exert influence. As
Mauritania prepared for the final balloting for president—in which the
two biggest vote-getters in the first round, Ahmed Ould Daddah and
Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi, faced off—Ould Boulkheir
shifted his support away from Ould Daddah and endorsed Ould Abdellahi, in return (it was believed) for a promise to enact new antislavery
legislation if the 69-year-old economist were elected. Some observers
believed this move was decisive for the eventual result. After Ould
Abdellahi did indeed win the election on 25 March, Ould Boulkheir
was chosen speaker of the Mauritanian Assemblée Nationale in recognition of his relatively strong performance in the first round of the
presidential election and also due to his status as one of the country’s
best-known political activists.
MINING. Outside of the agricultural, livestock, and fisheries sectors (as well as the petroleum exports that began in April 2006), a
MOHAMED VI, KING OF MOROCCO
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primary source of critical revenue for Mauritania since independence
has been the removal and sale of key minerals from its territory. The
extraction of iron ore from the vicinity of Zouérate has always been
of great importance to the country, and at one time or another deposits of copper, gold, diamonds, and gypsum have been exploited.
Mauritania is also believed to host a great variety of other minerals,
but prospecting and extraction activities have been very slow to
materialize for a variety of reasons. An estimated 135 million metric
tons of phosphate ore is thought to exist near Bofel in the Senegal
River Valley, valuable outcrops of blue granite were discovered near
Choum in northern Mauritania in October 1999, and the country’s
salt mines yielded a modest 5,500 metric tons per year by the early
21st century. The primary Mauritanian parastatal corporation with
responsibility for mining, the Société Nationale Industrielle et
Minière (SNIM), was also involved in, among other endeavors, a
search for tungsten and uranium reserves, although the results of this
effort were unclear by 2008. See also ECONOMY.
MOHAMED VI, KING OF MOROCCO (1963– ). The third Moroccan Alawite monarch since the attainment of the country’s independence from France in March 1956, Mohamed VI was born in Rabat
on 21 August 1963 and was educated both in Morocco and in France,
receiving degrees in law from French institutions between 1988 and
1993. Having gradually been accorded more responsibilities by his
father and predecessor, Hassan II, as his health deteriorated, Mohamed became the new king of Morocco on 30 July 1999, just a few
days after Hassan II’s death.
Mohamed VI’s accession to the Moroccan throne brought about
an almost immediate improvement in Rabat’s often-uneven relations with the Mauritanian government led by President Maaouiya
Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, particularly in the area of trade links and
secondarily with respect to the Western Sahara conflict. Displaying what one observer called a “less disdainful” attitude toward
Mauritania than had King Hassan (who had not recognized the
country’s independence from 1960 to 1969), Mohamed VI, after
less than a year in power, hosted President Ould Taya on an official
state visit to Morocco in April 2000, following closely on the heels
of an apparent cooling in the relationship between Mauritania and
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MOHAMED LEMINE CH’BIH OULD CHEIKH MELAININE
the Polisario Front, accompanied by a degradation in relations
with Algeria, Morocco’s North African rival and Polisario’s most
consistent backer. Returning the favor, Mohamed VI paid an official
visit to Mauritania in September 2001, which was unprecedented
for a Moroccan king and which, although it was cut short by the 11
September 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States, resulted
in agreements to expand commercial ties and otherwise strengthen
cooperation between the two states. And although this new cordiality
with Morocco did not seem to entail any favoritism toward Rabat by
the Mauritanian authorities (for example, Moroccan companies were
not successful in obtaining contracts to operate part of Mauritania’s
communications network and were also not retained to improve
portions of its road system), by 2008 it appeared that this friendship
would continue into the foreseeable future. Just a few months after he
had ousted President Ould Taya in a bloodless coup d’état, moreover,
the new Mauritanian head of state, Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall,
chose Morocco as his first foreign destination, although he also made
an effort before he left office in April 2007 to mend fences with the
Algerians. See also FOREIGN RELATIONS.
MOHAMED LEMINE CH’BIH OULD CHEIKH MELAININE
(1951– ). A prominent political and religious figure in Mauritania
who emerged as a serious opponent of President Maaouiya Ould
Sid’Ahmed Taya in the late 1990s before being imprisoned for his
activities between 2001 and 2003. Mohamed Lemine Ch’bih Ould
Cheikh Melainine was born in Atar on 12 December 1951, attended
primary and secondary school in Mauritania, and received bachelor’s,
master’s, and doctoral degrees in economics from the University of
Nancy in France in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unusually, Ould
Cheikh Melainine had some Marxist inclinations in his youth as well
as being the leader of the influential and respected Qadriya Islamic
brotherhood. Upon completing his education, he served at Mauritania’s Ministry of Industry from 1976 to 1981, working on plans for
the country’s industrial development, before moving on to become
director of research at the Mauritanian National Development Fund
(1981) and an advisor in 1981 and 1982 to the fisheries-related
Société des Frigorifriques Mauritaniens (SOFRIMA). From 1983 to
1986, he also served as a presidential consultant on fisheries policy
MOHAMED LEMINE CH’BIH OULD CHEIKH MELAININE
• 327
and had a fairly long tenure (from 1982 to 1993) as the secretarygeneral of Mauritania’s Fishing Industry and Equipment Federation,
a trade organization. A little over six months after the inauguration of
the Mauritanian Second Republic in April 1992, Ould Cheikh Melanine was named minister of commerce, serving in that capacity until
21 February 1995, when he received an even more important post,
that of minister of planning. He left the cabinet effective 12 October
1996, his place being taken by Ahmed Kelly Ould Cheikh Sidiya.
Evidently by this point, Ould Cheikh Melanine had become opposed to certain of President Ould Taya’s policies, because during
1997 he announced that he would seek the presidency in elections
scheduled for the end of the year. He ran on an ambitious platform,
planning an increase in salaries and wages and additional publicsector employment (stances that endeared him to a large segment of
the country’s youth), and also—remarkably for a Beydane Moor—
advocated an open discussion of the question of slavery in Mauritania as well as additional pluralism in the political sphere, extending even to the illegal, exiled Black African group, the Forces de
Libération Africaine de Mauritanie (FLAM). On election day (12
December 1997), Ould Cheikh Melainine surprised many observers;
although he received only 61,869 votes overall (6.97 percent), he
captured fully 36.2 percent of the votes in the capital, Nouakchott,
and an astonishing 47.7 percent in the northern economic center of
Nouadhibou, proof of his unique political-religious appeal to many
of the best-educated Mauritanians residing in those cities. In spite of
his defeat at the hands of President Ould Taya (who garnered an officially tallied 801,190 votes—90.25 percent), Ould Cheikh Melainine
continued to aggressively oppose the head of state, organizing a new
political party, the Front Populaire (FP), in early April 1998 and
ostentatiously withdrawing his candidates from the January 1999
municipal elections after the arrest and short-term detention of another prominent dissident, Ahmed Ould Daddah. In addition, Ould
Cheikh Melainine allied himself with the exiled former president of
Mauritania, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, in late 1999, urging the overthrow of Ould Taya and more democracy in the country.
Apparently feeling threatened, President Ould Taya dramatically
suspended Ould Cheikh Melainine’s political career on 8 April 2001,
when police entered his home and arrested him along with two of his
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MOHAMED LEMINE CH’BIH OULD CHEIKH MELAININE
FP colleagues. Held incommunicado for the next 30 days, the defendants were charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government;
plotting acts of terrorism, including the kidnapping of businessmen;
and taking illegal political funding from Libya, a favorite bête noire
of the regime. These accusations were greeted with nearly universal
anger and disbelief both inside Mauritania and internationally, which
at times over the next few months escalated into violent protests that
required massive police intervention. Many defense lawyers both inside and outside the country came forward to assist Ould Cheikh Melainine, but this was made difficult by the government’s moving the
case, on 10 May 2001, from Nouakchott to the remote eastern town
of Ayoun el-Atrouss, some 850 kilometers from the capital. In addition, Ould Cheikh Melainine’s access to his attorneys was limited,
and a Malian lawyer, Moussa Maiga, was forced to leave Mauritania
after he traveled to Ayoun el-Atrouss to take part in the case. Still,
offers of legal help poured in not only from within Mauritania but
also from France, Mali, Morocco, and Senegal.
The trial of Ould Cheikh Melainine and his codefendants, which
took place on 12–14 June 2001, was perfunctory even by the relaxed
standards of the Mauritanian legal system. No physical or even
circumstantial evidence was introduced by the prosecution, all three
defendants stated that their supposed confessions were extracted under duress, and only two government informants, whose credibility
was judged by independent experts to have been minimal, gave oral
testimony. Irrespective of the weakness of the case, all three were
found guilty by the tribunal on 14 June and sentenced to five years’
imprisonment each; they were immediately hauled off to begin
serving their terms in austere conditions at a prison near Ayoun elAtrouss. At this point, most observers expected President Ould Taya
to step in—as he had done in nearly all similar political cases since
1992—and grant Ould Cheikh Melainine and his colleagues a pardon
or at least commute their sentences, but as the weeks and months
went by, he did not do so even in the face of continuing protests at
home and abroad. Apprehensions about Ould Cheikh Melainine’s
fate were heightened by the news that he had become seriously ill
while in prison in February 2002, obliging the authorities to transfer
him to a hospital in Ayoun el-Atrouss until he was well enough to be
returned to detention some time afterward. All told, the case of Ould
MOHAMED LEMINE OULD GUIG
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Cheikh Melainine marked a “paradigm shift” of sorts in Mauritanian
politics under Ould Taya, as all regime opponents were put on notice
that the head of state would observe few limits in suppressing any
resistance to his increasingly iron-fisted rule. Moreover, the specter
of a defendant falling ill in a remote prison and being forced to serve
a lengthy sentence recalled the worst human rights abuses of the
late 1980s and early 1990s in Mauritania, when a number of mainly
Black African opponents of the military government were detained at
the remote village of Oualata, leading to the deaths of several.
Seeking to create at least the appearance of increased political
tolerance after his near-overthrow in the coup attempt of 8–9 June
2003, President Ould Taya issued a pardon to Ould Cheikh Melainine
(and his two codetainees) on 23 August 2003, allowing him to leave
prison after having served roughly half his sentence. Newly freed,
Mohamed Lemine Ch’bih Ould Cheikh Melainine lived quietly in
Nouakchott through the bloodless overthrow of President Ould Taya
in the coup d’état of 3 August 2005, and then—when it became
apparent that the military regime that replaced the unpopular leader
intended to leave power after facilitating the election of a new civilian government—plotted a political comeback. But this time, Ould
Cheikh Melainine was forced to run for president in a field of 20
candidates in the presidential election of 11 and 25 March 2007,
and in the first round of the balloting he received only a minuscule
0.28 percent of the vote (2,111 ballots cast in his favor). The second
round of the election resulted in the victory of Sidi Mohamed Ould
Cheikh Abdellahi, who, along with Ahmed Ould Daddah, had garnered the most votes in the first round.
MOHAMED LEMINE OULD GUIG (1950– ). A native of the remote eastern Mauritanian town of Oualata who worked as a law
professor at the University of Nouakchott during the 1990s but was
otherwise politically unknown, Mohamed Lemine Ould Guig was
appointed prime minister by President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed
Taya on 18 December 1997, several days after the head of state had
been reelected to a six-year term, albeit in disputed circumstances.
Succeeding a career civil servant, Cheikh el-Avia Ould Mohamed
Khouna, as premier, Ould Guig had been in office only about 11
months when, in November 1998, Ould Taya dismissed him and once
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more appointed Ould Khouna to the post, sending Ould Guig out of
the cabinet to preside over the Mauritanian Revenue Court (Cour
des Comptes) until the ruling Parti Républicain, Démocratique
et Social (PRDS) made a rather poor showing in the capital city of
Nouakchott in the November 2001 parliamentary elections, after
which time he was chosen as PRDS chairman. He also served a stint
in 2003 as secretary-general at the Mauritanian presidency.
MOHAMED LEMINE SALEM OULD DAH (1950– ). A native of
Kiffa who occupied a number of increasingly responsible positions
in the Mauritanian government before achieving notoriety as the
hard-line Arab nationalist in charge of the powerful Interior Ministry. Mohamed Lemine Salem Ould Dah received both his secondary
and university education in Blida, Algeria, before obtaining a degree
from the National School of Agriculture and Fisheries in Rabat, Morocco. Returning to Mauritania in the late 1970s when the country
was being governed by the armed forces, Ould Dah served as chief
magistrate for the towns of F’Derik (1979–1980) and Boutilimit
(1980–1984). In 1984, Mauritania’s new leader, Col. Maaouiya
Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, selected him to be the governor of the
administrative région of Hodh ech-Chargui, a province that would
later turn out to be a critical base of support for Ould Taya during his
tenure as head of state (1984–2005). Subsequently, Ould Dah held
a variety of governorships: Tagant (1985–1986), Trarza (1986–
1989), Brakna (1989–1990), and Tiris Zemmour (1990–1993). On
3 January 1993, in the first of countless reshuffles of the membership
of the Conseil des Ministres in the Mauritanian Second Republic,
Ould Dah was named minister of fisheries and maritime economy,
a post he remained in until May 1994, when he assumed control of
the Interior Ministry, replacing Lemrabott Sidi Mahmoud Ould
Cheikh Ahmed.
In his new position, Ould Dah rarely hesitated to apply the full
resources of the state to the suppression of dissent within the country.
He faithfully executed President Ould Taya’s instructions to restrict
the activities of the pro-Iraq Arab Baath Socialist Party (ABSP) in
late 1995, and in the following year he aggressively invoked Article
11 of Mauritania’s law concerning the news media, censoring a
prominent independent newspaper, Mauritanie Nouvelles, when it
MOHAMMED KHOUNA OULD HEYDALLAH
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was poised to expose allegations of corruption by Ould Dah when he
was a provincial governor in the 1980s. These and other actions made
Ould Dah widely disliked in Mauritania (even among otherwise progovernment elements), and on 7 May 1996, President Ould Taya felt
constrained to replace him with another pan-Arabist who turned out
to have only slightly less inflexible attitudes, Dah Ould Abdel Jelil.
Thereafter, with the exception of a brief stint as minister of justice
in 1997, Ould Dah did not occupy any cabinet-level positions in the
regime.
MOHAMMED KHOUNA OULD HEYDALLAH (1940– ). Mauritania’s fifth head of state, who was deposed in 1984 but went on to
become a prominent political figure in the early 21st century. He was
born in Port-Étienne (later called Nouadhibou) into the Arosien, a
Moorish tribe mostly found inside the adjacent Spanish colony of
Western Sahara, a fact that led to some reports placing his birthplace
farther north in the Western Saharan settlement of Bir Enzaren. After
receiving both a primary and secondary education in Mauritania,
he joined the young country’s armed forces in 1962 and was sent
for officer training in France at the St. Cyr military academy, later
supplemented by a stint at St. Maxen after being commissioned a
second lieutenant in July 1964. Ould Heydallah rose steadily in the
officer corps, becoming commandant (major) at the time Mauritania
first became involved in the Western Sahara conflict in late 1975.
Several months after the beginning of the war, he underwent his first
real combat test as deputy to Lt.-Col. Ahmed Ould Bouceif while
assigned to help defend the country’s vast northern area against the
guerrilla fighters of the Polisario Front. In June 1976, Polisario
launched the first of two daring Nouakchott raids, and Ould Heydallah was one of the first to learn of the group’s intentions, when
his men ambushed a diversionary column near his headquarters at
Zouérate. The early warning provided by Ould Heydallah did not
prevent the Polisario Front from briefly shelling the residence of
President Mokhtar Ould Daddah in the capital city, but it did ensure
that Polisario’s success would come at a high price, as Mauritania’s
army relentlessly pursued the retreating guerrillas, killing the front’s
leader, El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed, and decimating a Polisario relief
force sent to link up with Nouakchott’s attackers.
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This feat of arms, along with several other displays of command
prowess, earned Ould Heydallah a promotion to lieutenant colonel,
but his career suffered two setbacks in 1977. On 1 May of that year,
Polisario units fought their way into the center of Zouérate for several
hours, causing extensive damage and taking prisoner a small number
of French expatriate workers. As commander of Zouérate’s 1,500man garrison, Ould Heydallah was away on business in Nouakchott
at the time, and the soldiers he left there surrendered without firing
a shot, a grave embarrassment. Afterward, he was charged by a
court-martial at Atar with “collusion” with the Polisario Front, due
not so much to the debacle at Zouérate as to the allegation that some
of his Mauritanian relatives had joined the front. His career almost
ended there and then, but Ould Heydallah’s established reputation for
honesty and competence saved him, and the charges were dropped.
However, his superiors felt it best to transfer him to a less sensitive
post, as commander of the Fifth Military Region, headquartered far
to the southeast in the town of Néma.
As an officer with firsthand experience of the severe military reverses his country was suffering, and realizing that the Western Saharan war also meant the near-collapse of the Mauritanian economy,
Ould Heydallah fully supported the planning and execution of the
coup d’état of 10 July 1978 that overthrew Mokhtar Ould Daddah
and installed the first Mauritanian armed forces governing body, the
Comité Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN), headed by
Col. Mustapha Ould Mohammed Salek. Simultaneously, Ould
Heydallah became chief of staff of the army, and he appeared for a
time to work harmoniously with Ould Salek, whose preferred strategy for getting out of the Western Saharan imbroglio was to construct
a comprehensive peace agreement among all the interested parties to
the dispute, eschewing a unilateral deal with the Polisario Front and
the rapid abandonment of Mauritania’s claim to Tiris el-Gharbia.
But although Polisario halted its attacks on Mauritania while the
CMRN pondered the future of the country, Ould Heydallah, along
with some of his colleagues, became more critical of Ould Salek’s
stewardship, not only with respect to Western Sahara but also in the
areas of interethnic relations and economic policy. As a result, on 6
April 1979 Ould Salek found himself deprived of all real authority in
a “palace revolution” led by Lt.-Col. Ould Bouceif, who appointed
MOHAMMED KHOUNA OULD HEYDALLAH
• 333
Ould Heydallah as minister of defense as well as a full member of
the new governing council, the Comité Militaire de Salut National
(CMSN).
Ould Heydallah’s fortunes suddenly improved again a few weeks
later (on 27 May 1979), when Ahmed Ould Bouceif was killed in a
plane crash near Dakar, Senegal. After an intense four-day struggle
for influence, Ould Heydallah became prime minister on 31 May
and four days later, on 4 June, ousted Col. Ould Salek as titular
head of state, appointing another figurehead to that position, Lt.-Col.
Mohammed Mahmoud Ould Louly. He also retained the defense
portfolio in the revamped CMSN, and set about looking for a facesaving way out of Western Sahara. But Ould Heydallah and his fellow officers continued to temporize, and in the end the Polisario Front
forced his hand by abrogating its yearlong cease-fire and attacking
Mauritanian targets in Tiris el-Gharbia. This galvanized the CMSN
into action, and on 5 August 1979 Mauritania finally pledged, in the
Algiers Agreement, to abandon all claims to Western Sahara and to
make peace with Polisario. The Algiers peace treaty was greeted with
great relief by the vast majority of Mauritanians, enabling Ould Heydallah to further strengthen his political position and—he hoped—
redirect his energies toward national reconstruction.
But the next four years were to be stressful ones for the new
Mauritanian leader. He was able, on 4 January 1980, to ease Ould
Louly out of the government and assume for himself the formal title
of president, as well as to conduct the first of countless reshuffles
in the CMSN and on the Conseil des Ministres in which all of
the country’s main groupings—Black African, haratine, Beydane
Moorish, pro-Moroccan or pro-Polisario—underwent alternate periods of favor, disgrace, imprisonment, and restoration to positions of
responsibility. Having named a mostly civilian cabinet in December
1980 as an attempt to legitimize his rule, he felt obliged to reinstitute
a purely military regime in April 1981, after a serious and violent
coup attempt in Nouakchott led by the Morocco-based Alliance
pour une Mauritanie Démocratique (AMD). Coming after months
of Moroccan condemnations of his allegedly pro-Polisario policies,
the coup attempt deepened his suspicions of King Hassan II. Ould
Heydallah therefore cultivated increasingly close ties with Algeria
and became more wary of domestic factions that he believed might
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be linked to outside powers. Diplomatic relations with Morocco were
severed and would not be restored until after Ould Heydallah had
been removed from power.
Domestically, the Ould Heydallah years were marked by considerable energy. Being more religiously inclined than any of his predecessors, he instituted Islam’s legal code, the sharia, in 1980, but its
application (stonings, floggings, amputations, and public executions
were carried out) led to international protests and resistance at home
and so was relaxed. More auspiciously, on 9 November 1981 the
practice of slavery was (again) declared illegal, and the educational
system was reformed, with relatively less attention being paid to
the process of Arabization, and African languages such as Fulani,
Sarakolé, and Wolof being given additional emphasis at the primary
and secondary levels. Finally, Ould Heydallah organized controversial grassroots organizations at the family-neighborhood level to
prepare for an eventual return to civilian government. Known as the
Structures pour l’Education des Masses (SEM), this was another
innovation that did not long survive his removal from office.
Although Ould Heydallah himself was universally thought to be
beyond reproach, in the early 1980s he adopted a tolerant attitude
toward corrupt practices in his regime. When added to the severe
droughts, advancing desertification, and slumping commodity
prices (notably for the country’s main export, iron ore), it came as
little surprise that he was increasingly unpopular. Impulsive decision
making also became the norm as the head of state often acted on his
own, bypassing the rest of the CMSN and relying on the Mauritanian
security organs, the Direction Générale de la Sûreté Nationale
(DGSN) and the Bureau d’Etudes et de la Documentation (BED), to
keep opposition forces off balance. By 1984, the mood in the county
was approaching despair, and changes in the government’s personnel
became more frequent and sometimes difficult to fathom even for
Mauritanians, let alone outsiders.
Foreign pressures did not abate, either. Relations with Morocco
(and with Libya, which was suspected of fomenting a coup plot
against Ould Heydallah in January 1983) remained broken, strains
were developing with France and the United States (where much of
Mauritania’s international aid originated), and the regime’s increasingly pro-Polisario stance was costing it support in the conservative
MOHAMMED KHOUNA OULD HEYDALLAH
• 335
Gulf monarchies. Only relations with Algeria remained close. On
27 February 1984, Ould Heydallah took a step of which he had
warned for many months and which many had predicted: Mauritania
formally recognized the Polisario Front’s government-in-exile, the
Saharan Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), after the failure of
the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to peacefully resolve the
Western Sahara conflict through its good offices. This angered Ould
Heydallah’s CMSN colleagues, who evidently had not been informed
of the decision in advance or even consulted on its merits. Sensing
increasingly broad dissatisfaction with his policy on Western Sahara
and in other areas, Ould Heydallah reorganized his cabinet in early
March 1984 (for the fourth time in 12 months), awarding himself the
posts of prime minister and minister of defense and demoting the
prior occupant of those offices, Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed
Taya, to army chief of staff, because of Ould Taya’s reservations
about the recognition of the SADR. Ould Heydallah thought he had
consolidated his position, but the opposite was true: Ould Taya and
his backers almost immediately began plotting his downfall.
On 12 December 1984, while Ould Heydallah was out of the
country attending a Franco–African summit conference in Burundi,
an efficient and bloodless putsch removed him as president and put
Ould Taya in his place. After learning that he was no longer head of
state, Ould Heydallah chose to return to Mauritania and was placed
under house arrest in an army barracks. Despite some early reports
that he would be placed on trial for corruption, he was never charged
and was freed from detention in December 1988. In the early 1990s,
at about the time of the inauguration of the Mauritanian Second Republic, Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah once more entered the
political spotlight, this time as one of the leaders of the Parti Mauritanien pour le Rénouveau (PMR), but he gradually played a less
prominent role in the affairs of the PMR, and by the spring of 1995
had held a reconciliation meeting with President Ould Taya, which
some observers took as a sign of his dissatisfaction with the state of
the opposition political parties at the time.
Between 1995 and 2003, Ould Heydallah was not involved in
politics, but he made a dramatic reentry in September 2003, when
he announced that he would run for president against Ould Taya in
the elections scheduled for early November. Backed by an unlikely
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coalition of Islamists and liberal reformers who were united in their
desire to see the increasingly authoritarian incumbent defeated, Ould
Heydallah rapidly emerged as the Mauritanian president’s most credible challenger, and for that reason he soon replaced another wellknown opposition figure, Mohamed Lemine Ch’bih Ould Cheikh
Melainine, as Ould Taya’s chief nemesis, one who had to be stopped
at almost any cost. On 3 November 2003, just days before the presidential election, police raided Ould Heydallah’s home in Nouakchott
and arrested several supporters, as well as the retired colonel himself,
on charges of possessing illegal firearms and receiving financial support from Libya. Two of Ould Heydallah’s sons were also detained
and accused of pro-Libyan activities. Although the candidate and
some of his backers were freed in time to participate in the 7 November balloting, he was rearrested on 9 November after he (and
the other unsuccessful presidential candidates) alleged that President
Ould Taya’s 66.7 percent vote majority was the result of fraud and
other irregularities. Ould Heydallah, who received a respectable 18.7
percent of the vote, continued to be held in detention awaiting trial
on charges of acting as an agent of Libya.
The trial of Ould Heydallah and his supporters, when held over
nearly the entire month of December 2003, quickly degenerated into
farce. Boycotts of the proceedings by defense attorneys, the failure
of state prosecutors to produce key witnesses, public protests, and
several postponements by the presiding judges meant that verdicts
were not returned until 29 December, when the former president
and four others were sentenced to five-year suspended jail terms,
fined the equivalent of $1,600, and barred from political activity for
five years. Upheld on appeal in April 2004, the trial and its outcome
were deemed by both Mauritanian and foreign human rights organizations as falling well short of international standards of fairness,
but this was not sufficient to dissuade Ould Heydallah from further
political participation. He soon requested government permission to
organize a new grouping, to be called the Parti de la Convergence
Démocratique (PCD). This application was promptly denied by the
regime on 9 April 2004, although—in a somewhat puzzling step—the
Ould Taya government did certify another pro-Ould Heydallah party,
known as Sawaab (“the Right Path”), just under two months later.
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Ould Heydallah’s legal troubles had not ended, however. On the
heels of the Ould Taya regime’s announcement in August 2004 that
an attempted coup bankrolled by Libya and Burkina Faso had been
squelched, Ould Heydallah, veteran opposition politician Ahmed
Ould Daddah, and a politically active physician, Cheikh Ould
Horma, were accused on 22 October of providing financial backing
to Les Cavaliers pour le Changement, a dissident group of army
officers who were believed to be the instigators of the violent coup
attempt of 8–9 June 2003. The charges met with nearly universal
skepticism, as they were thought to be motivated by the recent
capture of the coup attempt’s ringleaders, Saleh Ould Hanena and
Abderrahmane Ould Mini, and of the government’s desire to see
stiff sentences handed down against all its prominent critics. On 22
November Ould Heydallah, Ould Hanena, Ould Mini, and 178 other
suspected “subversives” were placed on trial at an army barracks in
Oued Naga, some 50 kilometers east of Nouakchott. When the proceedings concluded on 3 February 2005, after several interruptions
reminiscent of Ould Heydallah’s 2003 trial, the former president and
111 others (including his two sons, who had also been jailed for a
second time) were acquitted.
Like the great majority of Mauritania’s citizens, Ould Heydallah
welcomed the overthrow of President Ould Taya in the coup d’état
of 3 August 2005, which installed Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall as
the head of a new temporary army governing committee, the Conseil
Militaire pour la Justice et la Démocratie (CMJD). A few months
later, Ould Heydallah hinted that he would run for president again
once the ruling junta delivered on its promised transition to civilian
rule, and indeed, in the presidential election of 11 and 25 March
2007, Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah’s name appeared on the
ballot, standing as an independent. But like all the contenders, he
had the misfortune of being just one candidate in a crowded field
of 20, and when the results of the first (11 March) round of balloting were announced, Ould Heydallah received only 12,813 votes, or
1.73 percent of the total, and was thus unable to advance to the final
phase of the election, which was held on 25 March and resulted in
the narrow victory of Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi over
Ahmed Ould Daddah.
338 •
MOHAMMED MAHMOUD OULD LOULY
MOHAMMED MAHMOUD OULD LOULY (1943– ). Mauritania’s
third head of state was born in Tidjikja into a prominent local
merchant family, completed secondary school as well as one year
studying economics at the university level inside Mauritania, and in
1960 joined the newly independent country’s armed forces, where
he soon distinguished himself in administrative tasks. After his
enlistment, he was seconded to the French military academy at St.
Cyr (and later to the École Supérieure d’Intendance) and graduated
as an officer. By the early 1970s, he had held various positions of
responsibility in the army, including unit commander and director of
the supply corps, but like most of his colleagues, he was inexorably
drawn into his country’s involvement in the Western Sahara conflict, which pitted the Mauritanian army against the proindependence
guerrillas of the Polisario Front. By this time, Ould Louly held the
rank of lieutenant colonel and was deputy director of army budgetary
affairs. He fully supported the 10 July 1978 coup d’état that deposed
President Mokhtar Ould Daddah and replaced his civilian regime
with the Comité Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN), of
which he was a member and also director of control and investigations. Ould Louly occupied this post until 16 January 1979, when
he was placed in charge of the permanent secretariat of the CMRN.
Then, after a short interlude, he was appointed minister of civil service, higher education, and vocational education. On 6 April 1979,
after the accession to power of Lt.-Col. Ahmed Ould Bouceif, Ould
Louly was chosen minister of general employment in a new cabinet
appointed by the CMRN’s successor body, the Comité Militaire de
Salut National (CMSN). On 27 May, Ould Bouceif was killed in
plane crash near Dakar, Senegal, and in the short and intense power
struggle that ensued, Ould Louly was appointed president of Mauritania by his fellow CMSN officers. However, real power at this time
resided with the prime minister and minister of defense, Lt.-Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah, making Ould Louly’s position
as head of state little more than a sinecure. Under his (titular) leadership, Mauritania finally disengaged from Western Sahara, signing
the Algiers Agreement on 5 August 1979. By 4 January 1980, Ould
Heydallah was sufficiently confident of his own position to assume
the presidency of the country for himself, gently easing Mohammed
Mahmoud Ould Louly out of the government.
MOHAMMED OULD ABDELAZIZ
• 339
MOHAMED OULD ABDELAZIZ (1956– ). A colonel in the Mauritanian armed forces who became head of state after leading the bloodless coup d’état of 6 August 2008 against the elected civilian government led by President Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi,
Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz was born in Akjoujt into the Oulad Bou
Sbaa, a prominent Moorish hassan tribal grouping. After receiving
his primary and secondary education in Mauritania, Ould Abdelaziz,
at the age of 21, chose to enter Mauritania’s army and received officer
training from 1977 at Morocco’s Royal Military Academy at Meknès,
at a time when Mauritania’s involvement in the Western Sahara
conflict was at its height and the Moroccans were hosting substantial numbers of Mauritanian officer candidates. After the end of the
country’s active role in Western Sahara in 1979, there ensued several
years of instability in Mauritania’s officer corps, and Ould Abdelaziz
rose fairly rapidly in the ranks, getting his first real taste of political
activity on 12 December 1984, when he assisted Col. Maaouiya Ould
Sid’Ahmed Taya in the overthrow of his erratic and controversial
predecessor, Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah. To help
enhance the security of the new regime, Ould Abdelaziz was reportedly the main organizing force behind the creation of the Bataillon de
la Sécurité Présidentielle (BASEP), an elite force of at least several
hundred men standing apart from the regular armed forces and nominally under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior.
As President Ould Taya became more and more repressive and unpopular during the late 1990s and the early years of the 21st century,
he came to rely heavily on both Col. Ould Abdelaziz and his Director of National Security, Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, to maintain
his authority. For example, Ould Abdelaziz, as BASEP commander,
played a crucial role in defeating the coup attempt of 8–9 June
2003 instigated by Saleh Ould Hanena, and also apparently helped
to squelch two additional antigovernment conspiracies in 2003 and
2004, these plots also originating with Ould Hanena’s Cavaliers pour
le Changement. But as popular discontent with Ould Taya grew,
the military establishment also grew increasingly frustrated with the
deterioration of their morale and conditions of service, as well as the
threats emanating from Algerian-based insurgents believed to be sympathetic to or affiliated with the al-Qaeda terrorist organization. For
these and other reasons, therefore, Ould Abdelaziz’s BASEP, along
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MOHAMMED OULD ABDELAZIZ
with other army units, peacefully executed the coup d’état of 3 August 2005, ousting President Ould Taya and elevating Col. Ould Vall
to the Mauritanian presidency as the chairman of an army junta, the
Conseil Militaire pour la Justice et la Démocratie (CMJD). Col.
Ould Abdelaziz occupied what was widely thought to be the secondranking position on this military committee, which held power until
19 April 2007.
After the CMJD relinquished power to President Ould Abdellahi,
Col. Ould Vall retired from the army and apparently left Mauritania
for a time, but Ould Abdelaziz, along with most of his colleagues,
remained in their army posts, and soon began to play a much more
intrusive role in the politics of the new Third Republic than was
at first generally appreciated. Ould Abdelaziz carefully cultivated
pro-military sentiment inside the Assemblée Nationale and the Mauritanian Senate—including in a pro-presidential political party, the
Pacte National pour la Démocratie et le Développement (PNDD),
founded in early 2008—and was thus in an excellent position to capitalize on the dissatisfaction that many of Mauritania’s citizens began
to feel with President Ould Abdellahi and his Prime Minister, Zeine
Ould Zeidane. Far lower than expected petroleum revenues, which
resulted in severe budgetary problems, allegations of corruption and
nepotism, and the perceived insensitivity of Ould Abdellahi and Ould
Zeidane (both highly educated economists) to the rising food prices
that were reportedly driving many of the country’s citizens to the brink
of starvation, all contributed to a rising sense of disillusionment by the
summer of 2008. The military establishment did not hesitate to exert
influence on as many parliamentary deputies as it could, so much so
that Ould Abdellahi’s supporters went so far as to mention Col. Ould
Abdelaziz (along with Col. Mohamed Ould el-Ghazouani, the army’s
chief of staff) by name as they navigated their way through parliamentary votes of no confidence, cabinet reorganizations, walkouts, and
defections by PNDD members and others, and threatened corruption
investigations by National Assembly deputies thought to be aligned
with the army. President Ould Abdellahi’s dismissal of Ould Zeidane
as premier on 6 May 2008 and his replacement by another technocrat,
Yahya Ould Ahmed el-Waghef, did nothing to improve matters.
For Col. Ould Abdelaziz, the last straw came in the early morning
of 6 August, when President Ould Abdellahi attempted to dismiss
MOHAMMED OULD BAH OULD ABDEL KADER
• 341
him and three other senior officers. Just a few hours later, the BASEP
commander bloodlessly and effortlessly deposed (and detained) the
president and set up an 11-member Haut Conseil d’État (HCE) to
govern the country until—as the new head of state promised—new
elections could be held. In interviews granted to the international
news media in the days after the coup, Ould Abdelaziz explained that
Mauritania would have fallen into an even worse political and economic crisis if the army had not acted, and declined to set a date for
elections or rule out the possibility that he would be a candidate. By
late August 2008, it was not apparent just what sort of overarching
plans Col. Ould Abdelaziz might have had for his country—indeed,
not much was known about him personally, except that he was reputedly a Arab nationalist—but it was clear that his (or, more generally,
the military’s) tenure at the helm of the state could turn out to be
much longer than the 20-month term of Col. Ould Vall’s CMJD.
MOHAMMED OULD BAH OULD ABDEL KADER (ca. 1940–
1981). Rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel and commander of the
small Mauritanian air force during his country’s period of involvement in the Western Sahara conflict, Mohammed Ould Bah Ould
Abdel Kader participated extensively in the war in Tiris el-Gharbia
against the guerrillas of the Polisario Front. But unlike most other
high-ranking Mauritanian officers, he did not support the coup d’état
of 10 July 1978 that toppled President Mokhtar Ould Daddah and
replaced him with a new armed forces junta, the Comité Militaire
de Redressement National (CMRN). Nevertheless, although not a
member of the governing council, he was appointed minister of culture, information, and communications in March 1979. Two weeks
later (on 6 April), when Lt.-Col. Ahmed Ould Bouceif had outmaneuvered his rivals on the CMRN’s replacement body, the Comité
Militaire de Salut National (CMSN), Ould Abdel Kader became a
member of the new junta as Ould Bouceif attempted to find Mauritania’s way out of the ruinous Western Saharan war.
After Ould Bouceif was killed in a plane crash near Dakar, Senegal, on 27 May 1979, Ould Abdel Kader rapidly lost influence in
the country in general, and with the new CMSN strongman, Lt.-Col.
Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah, in particular. He was appointed minister of education, but in mid-June 1979 he departed for
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MOHAMMED YEHDIH OULD BREIDELEIL
Morocco, where, in addition to forming a “free officers movement”
that opposed the CMSN and urging a greater role for Islam in Mauritanian affairs, he joined an exiled political organization, the Alliance
pour une Mauritanie Démocratique (AMD). As a prominent member of the AMD, he strongly dissented from the CMSN’s decision to
sign the Algiers Agreement of 5 August 1979, by which Mauritania
relinquished all its claims to Western Sahara and made peace with
Polisario. Instead, he urged a continuing Mauritanian alignment with
Morocco. In league with another dissident former CMSN member,
Lt.-Col. Ahmed Salem Ould Sidi, Ould Abdel Kader secretly reentered Mauritania to plan a revolt against Ould Heydallah’s leadership. A coup attempt was staged on 16 March 1981, but it failed, and
Ould Abdel Kader was captured and, ten days later, shot.
MOHAMMED YEHDIH OULD BREIDELEIL (1944– ). One of
the most durable and controversial Mauritanian politicians from the
1960s to the mid-1990s, Mohammed Yehdih Ould Breideleil was
born in Akjoujt and received a primary education there between
1952 and 1958. Thereafter, he attended secondary schools in Kaédi,
Rosso, and Nouakchott and graduated in the early 1960s. He then
moved to France, where he studied at the École Supérieure du Journalisme at Lille, receiving his licence in 1967. Returning to Mauritania, he spent the years from 1967 to 1969 as an editor for the official
government newspaper, Ech-Chaab (The People), becoming director of that publication between 1969 and 1973. In that year, Ould
Breideleil quit journalism and served until 1976 as one of the leading members of the Bureau Politique National (BPN) of President
Mokhtar Ould Daddah’s governing Parti du Peuple Mauritanien
(PPM). From 1976 until the bloodless military coup d’état of 10 July
1978 that deposed Ould Daddah, he occupied a position as administrative director of a Mauritanian public works department.
Despite being a strong supporter of President Ould Daddah and a
prominent PPM member, Ould Breideleil’s journalistic background
caught the attention of the country’s armed forces council, the Comité Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN), which named
him minister of culture and information the day after the 10 July
coup. But less than a year later, he apparently fell out of favor with
the CMRN and was dropped entirely from the Conseil des Ministres
MOHAMMED YEHDIH OULD BREIDELEIL
• 343
on 17 March 1979, being left out in the cold politically until February
1980, when the new president of Mauritania, Lt.-Col. Mohammed
Khouna Ould Heydallah, appointed him the governor of the important administrative région of Trarza. In December of that year,
however, Ould Breideleil was recalled to Nouakchott to become
secretary-general of the presidency, in line with Ould Heydallah’s
plans (later aborted) to gradually return the country to civilian rule.
When Ould Heydallah dismissed his civilian cabinet in April 1981
after a violent coup attempt in the capital the previous month, Ould
Breideleil was again dropped from the cabinet and returned to private
life. By this time, however, he had developed strong sympathies for
the pro-Iraqi Arab Baath Socialist Party (ABSP) and became one
of the leading lights of that organization by 1982, when he was jailed
by Ould Heydallah as part of the periodic roundups of opposition
personalities that characterized his tenure as head of state. Ould Breideleil remained in prison until December 1984, when he was freed
in a general amnesty by the new president, Col. Maaouiya Ould
Sid’Ahmed Taya, who had peacefully ousted Ould Heydallah as
Mauritania’s leader on 12 December.
After his release, Ould Breideleil remained a staunch Baathist. He
ran afoul of the authorities once again in July 1988, when he (along
with many other civilians and army personnel) was placed on trial for
conspiracy on behalf of a foreign power, a charge that amounted to
espionage and otherwise acting in the interests of the Iraqi leader at
the time, Saddam Hussein. Although the accusations were extremely
serious, he reportedly provided the Mauritanian government with
information on Baathist activities in the country and so escaped with
a lenient sentence—two years’ imprisonment. While Ould Breideleil
was in detention, the Ould Taya regime’s alignment with Baghdad
deepened, especially after the severe stresses placed on Mauritania’s
interethnic/interracial relations as a result of the Senegal–Mauritania
crisis of 1989 and 1990. It was a measure of Baathist influence, in the
opinion of some observers, that Ould Breideleil was released from
prison in December 1989 and soon made a quite astonishing political comeback. By early 1990, he had been catapulted back into his
old post, that of secretary-general to the presidency, a position that
carried with it ex officio membership in the ruling Comité Militaire
de Salut National (CMSN), making him the highest-ranking civilian
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MOKHTAR OULD DADDAH
in the entire Mauritanian government. Ould Breideleil, ensconced in
the cabinet once again, did his best to move Mauritania even closer
to Iraq, but after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait on 2 August
1990 his fortunes (like those of the Baath Party in general) rapidly
went into eclipse, as the Iraqi defeat at the hands of a U.S.-led expeditionary force in January and February 1991 in the final stages of the
Gulf Crisis discredited the ABSP.
Not long after the formal end of the Gulf War in March 1991, Ould
Breideleil abandoned his ties to the Baath Party and became, in late
August 1991, one of the founding members of the Parti Républicain, Démocratique et Social (PRDS), a grouping that was closely
associated with President Ould Taya until August 2005. After the
party’s lopsided victory in parliamentary elections held in early 1992,
Ould Breideleil moved into a new position of responsibility, that of
secretary-general of the PRDS-dominated Assemblée Nationale. But
he still retained the capacity to inflict surprises on the Mauritanian
political scene. On 23 October 1995 he was arrested and detained by
the regime for alleged pro-Baath and pro-Iraq activities, along with
some 100 others. Twenty or so (including Ould Breideleil himself)
were aligned with the ruling PRDS, while most of the others were believed to be members of the country’s main pro-Baath organization,
the Parti de l’Avant-Garde Nationale (PAGN). He was released about
two weeks later after most of the accused had their charges reduced,
and still later dropped, by the Mauritanian public prosecutor. From
that time onward, Ould Breideleil apparently played little or no role
in politics, and he was not caught up in the repression of Baathists
(and many others) in Mauritania that characterized the final half decade (2000–2005) of Maaouiya Ould Taya’s presidency.
MOKHTAR OULD DADDAH (1924–2003). Mauritania’s most
prominent and successful politician in the country’s preindependence
period, who went on to become president from 1960 to 1978. Mokhtar
Ould Daddah was born on 25 December 1924 in Boutilimit, where
his family belonged to the Oulad Berri, an important zawiya (and
Moorish as well as pro-French) tribal grouping. Raised in a devoutly
Islamic environment, he received a primary education at the Medersa
Koranic School in Boutilimit and went on to study at the École des
Fils de Chefs in St. Louis, Senegal, where he graduated in 1940. The
MOKHTAR OULD DADDAH
• 345
outbreak of World War II interrupted his schooling, and he worked as
an interpreter for Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF), the French
West African colonial administration based in Dakar, until the end of
hostilities. Then he traveled to France to complete his education, first
studying in Nice and then in Paris, obtaining a baccalauréat, a law
degree, and a diploma (in Arabic) at the Institut National des Langues
Orientales in Paris. Returning to West Africa, he settled in Dakar,
where he became a member of the bar in 1955 and was employed by
the firm of Bossier, Palun. Also at about this time he married MarieThérèse Gadroy, the daughter of middle-class Parisian civil servants,
a union that was to last the remainder of his life.
In 1957, Ould Daddah’s ambitions shifted back to his home country,
in the process catching the eye of the French government, which had
begun to prepare Mauritania for independence in close association with
France. As the territory’s only lawyer (and one of its only university
graduates), his soft-spoken nature and his personal integrity earned him
the position of territorial counselor for Adrar province in May of 1957,
followed by his election to the Conseil du Gouvernement on 20 May,
in which the then-dominant political party, the Union Progressiste
Mauritanienne (UPM), consolidated its lead over all the other groups,
including Mauritania’s first party, the Entente Mauritanienne. Crucially, Ould Daddah was able to distance himself from the internecine
quarrels and rivalries of the Entente, the UPM, the Association de la
Jeunesse Mauritanienne (AJM), and other parties by virtue of his absence from Mauritania during most of the 1950s, and he consequently
adopted a straightforward program of unifying all the country’s factions, overcoming differences between its Moorish and Black African
peoples, and preparing new Mauritanian institutions for eventual independence. To this end, Ould Daddah consistently urged the various
political groups in Mauritania to come together and reject any move
toward “union” with either the neighboring Black African countries or
Morocco, which had begun an effort to “reclaim” all of Mauritania’s
territory. In May 1958, in a move that displayed his considerable
persuasive powers, Ould Daddah organized the Congress of Aleg, at
which the UPM, elements of the Entente, and the Black African-oriented Bloc Démocratique du Gorgol (BDG) agreed to merge into a
new organization, the Parti de Regroupement Mauritanien (PRM),
in which Ould Daddah was the acknowledged paramount leader.
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MOKHTAR OULD DADDAH
But this newfound unity did not last. Four months after the Aleg
congress, disaffected youths and other PRM members broke away
from Ould Daddah out of disagreement with his pro-French policies
and formed An-Nadha al-Wataniyya al-Mauritaniya (Nadha)
under the leadership of Ahmed Baba Miské. Although the Mauritanian public approved membership in the French Community by a
large margin, Ould Daddah once more had to contend with competing political tendencies as the new Islamic Republic of Mauritania
was declared in October 1958. On 28 November 1960, Mauritania
finally achieved full independence from France, and Mokhtar Ould
Daddah became prime minister. He faced a cloudy internal situation
and an unpromising outlook in the area of foreign relations, because
Morocco and most of the rest of the Arab League continued to deny
the legitimacy of the Mauritanian state. By the summer of 1961,
there had emerged no viable challengers to Ould Daddah’s rule, and
through a combination of co-optation and persuasion he managed
to win election overwhelmingly as the first president of Mauritania
on 20 August 1961. By the provisions of a new constitution, which
had been approved on 20 May 1961 (and which was drafted by Ould
Daddah and his followers with little public input), the presidential
office was accorded great power, and the administration of the state
remained highly centralized. Barely two months later, on 4 October,
Ould Daddah consolidated his domination of the political scene
by holding the Congress of Unity, which fused the PRM, Nadha,
and several smaller groups into the Parti du Peuple Mauritanien
(PPM), of which he was again the undisputed leader.
The PPM, like so many of its counterparts in the developing
world, quickly secured a monopoly over Mauritania’s governmental
apparatus, and decision-making soon was almost entirely confined
to a small circle of Ould Daddah supporters, the Bureau Politique
National (BPN). Still, rival politicians continued their activities
(sometimes within the PPM itself), and Ould Daddah decided that
this situation must end, both to ensure the unity of the country and to
facilitate his own role (as he saw it) as a “chieftain” capable of balancing various ethnic, tribal, and regional interests and to keep them
from being exploited selfishly by other political parties. So on 28–29
January 1964, he called loyal BPN members together at the so-called
Kaédi Conference, which led directly to the outlawing of all non-
MOKHTAR OULD DADDAH
• 347
PPM political parties. Also at Kaédi, the PPM was sternly reminded
by the head of state to lessen the distance between it and ordinary
Mauritanians, and that corruption had to be stamped out. Mauritania
effectively became a one-party dictatorship, and although the state
did not immediately become repressive, Ould Daddah was willing, if
the occasion demanded it, to use the Mauritanian police and armed
forces to quell strikes and demonstrations, particularly those connected with his Arabization policy instituted in the mid-1960s and
unrest at the country’s iron ore facilities later in the decade.
From 1964 to early in the 1970s, Mokhtar Ould Daddah’s regime
accumulated considerable achievements. Exports of iron ore, carried out by the Société Anonyme des Mines de Fer de Mauritanie
(MIFERMA), a French-controlled company, yielded a large revenue
stream, as did (for a short time) a copper mine near the inland town of
Akjoujt. Some progress was also made in the construction of roads,
the supply of water and electricity to the country’s towns and villages,
and improvements to ports and the communications infrastructure.
But agriculture was neglected, as Ould Daddah adhered to the thenprevailing belief in the Third World that priority should be given
to industrial development projects at the expense of rural areas.
In foreign affairs, too, Ould Daddah succeeded in getting a greater
number of states—especially Arab/Islamic ones—to acknowledge the
legitimacy of Mauritania, and he was one of the few North African
leaders to take seriously the Organization of African Unity (OAU).
His efforts to align Mauritania with the Arabic-speaking world, moreover, received a massive boost in April 1970, when Morocco’s King
Hassan II dropped his claim to the country and formally established
diplomatic ties. Ould Daddah displayed abroad many of the same
political skills he used domestically in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
He sought—and usually received—development assistance, loans,
and grants from many Arab leaders with little regard for their own
political leanings; he was able, for example, to sustain a close relationship with Algeria’s left-leaning leader, Houari Boumedienne, while
at the same time cultivating a web of beneficial ties to Saudi Arabia
and the other conservative Gulf monarchies. Finally, bolstered by this
friendlier international environment (and, importantly, urged on by
a tide of adverse public opinion at home), Ould Daddah embarked
on a strategy of ending France’s privileged position in Mauritania’s
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MOKHTAR OULD DADDAH
economy: nationalizing MIFERMA in 1974, revising French–Mauritanian economic and military arrangements that dated to 1960, and,
on 30 June 1973, leaving the French-controlled Communauté Financière Africaine (CFA) and issuing a separate Mauritanian currency,
the ouguiya. For a thinly populated, ethnically diverse territory that
many observers only a few years earlier had been calling an artificial
construct that could not survive, Mauritania under the stewardship of
Mokhtar Ould Daddah attracted little but praise from other developing
countries, and the country’s future appeared to be reasonably bright.
The president, however, had not forgotten his territorial claim to the
adjacent Spanish colony of Western Sahara, which he had first enunciated in 1957, and it was this preoccupation that was to prove his undoing. In 1973 and 1974, when it became apparent that Spain’s determination to remain in its desert dependency was waning, Ould Daddah,
after a period of some indecision, moved to cement his relations with
Morocco, Western Sahara’s coclaimant, and agreed with King Hassan
to partition the territory, with Rabat getting the northern (and mineralrich) two-thirds of Western Sahara, and Mauritania receiving Tiris
el-Gharbia, a largely useless expanse of desert. This arrangement was
formalized by the Madrid Agreement of 14 November 1975. In opting for partition and annexation of Western Sahara, Mauritania, like
Morocco, ignored the demand of the nascent Western Saharan nationalist movement, the Polisario Front, that “Spanish Sahara” become a
fully independent country. The Western Sahara conflict soon swung
into high gear, with Polisario guerrilla forces beginning a wide-ranging and highly destructive military campaign against Mauritania’s
fragile economy and small army. Beginning in late 1975, almost
every Mauritanian population center was set upon by well-armed
Polisario units, often bringing iron ore exports to a halt due to raids
on the mining town of Zouérate as well as on the long and vulnerable railway line running to the commercial center of Nouadhibou.
Budgetary problems also multiplied, as the size of the armed forces
had to be quadrupled virtually overnight. From 1976 to 1978, President
Ould Daddah suffered one humiliation after another. His residence in
Nouakchott was twice attacked by Polisario (see NOUAKCHOTT
RAIDS), his standing at the United Nations suffered greatly, and he
was forced to ally himself ever more closely with Morocco and France,
from whom he had proudly distanced himself only a few years before.
MOKHTAR OULD DADDAH
• 349
But all the diplomatic gambits, internal reorganizations, and calls for
outside military assistance (including a series of French air strikes
against the Polisario Front, code-named Opération Lamantin), could
not save Mauritania from its dire circumstances. And for good measure, the one-party PPM regime, which had earlier helped to channel
the aspirations of many Mauritanian citizens, now effectively blocked
any discussion of political alternatives.
The end of Mokhtar Ould Daddah’s presidency came in the early
hours of 10 July 1978. A specially selected force of the demoralized
Mauritanian army, led by Col. Mustapha Ould Mohammed Salek,
deposed him, abolished the PPM and the toothless Assemblée Nationale, and suspended the 1961 constitution. Ould Daddah was arrested
without violence by the armed forces, which then began to govern the
country through a council of high-ranking officers, the Comité Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN). The former head of state
spent the next 13 months in detention, part of it in the remote town of
Oualata, but in August 1979 he was released, and two months later he
was permitted to go into exile in France, where he was given political
asylum by the government of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. The
former president made no secret of his dissatisfaction with political
events back home, and for a time (until about 1981) he was loosely
affiliated with an exiled opposition group, the Alliance pour une
Mauritanie Démocratique (AMD). Ould Daddah, however, reportedly became unhappy with the constant infighting within the AMD’s
ranks, and the accession to power of François Mitterrand as French
president in 1981 made him somewhat less welcome in France, so
he moved (temporarily, it turned out) to Tunisia. In November 1980,
he was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia on charges of high
treason and economic mismanagement, lodged by the new head of
state, Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah. He remained a
wanted man in Mauritania until December 1984, when Ould Heydallah was ousted and replaced by Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed
Taya, who promptly amnestied Mokhtar Ould Daddah and many
other Mauritanians. Despite this, Ould Daddah chose not to return
home but instead continued to live in retirement in Nice, France.
With Mokhtar Ould Daddah now living outside his homeland on
a seemingly permanent basis, and with a whole generation of Mauritanians having come of age since his overthrow in 1978, his political
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influence might have been thought to have been in eclipse, notwithstanding the fact that his brother, Ahmed Ould Daddah, was one of
the foremost leaders of the opposition to President Ould Taya and
the head of a major political party, the Union des Forces Démocratiques (UFD). But this situation suddenly changed in early 1995. In
January, Ould Daddah began giving a series of interviews with the
news media, breaking a 17-year silence. A French radio address he
recorded merely called for a renewed sense of national unity among
all Mauritanians, but in a lengthy interview he gave to the Moroccan
weekly Maroc-Hebdo during a visit to that country, he stated that
conditions under the Mauritanian Second Republic were worsening
on several fronts, urged the opposition parties to coordinate their
positions and activities, and stated that a free press and liberty of
expression in general did not exist in Mauritania.
If the former president had hoped by these statements to generate a
more effective counterpoise to the government, his pronouncements
achieved nearly the opposite effect, in the view of most observers.
Nationalists noted that Ould Daddah had traveled to Morocco rather
than Mauritania to make his most controversial statements, a fact
that motivated others to close ranks behind President Ould Taya and
his governing Parti Républicain, Démocratique et Social (PRDS),
including some in his brother Ahmed’s UFD. Then, in late February
1996, the government itself stepped into the fray, alleging that Ould
Daddah had spurned its offer of renewed Mauritanian citizenship as
well as certain other perquisites as inducements for him to return
home. The prime minister at the time, Sidi Mohamed Ould Boubacar, severely criticized him (although without mentioning him by
name), in what was thought to be the manifestation of a newfound
governmental reluctance to have Ould Daddah inject himself more
decisively into the political scene by returning to the country.
Matters essentially rested at this juncture until July 2001, when the
regime agreed that Ould Daddah could return to Nouakchott and make
use of a refurbished state-owned residence as well as official vehicles
and living expenses. Consequently, on 17 July Ould Daddah boarded
a regular Air France airliner in Paris and landed at the Nouakchott
airport a few hours later. He was met and applauded by tens of thousands of Mauritanians, and he promised them he would play no overt
political role, saying instead that he would serve as a “counselor” or
MOOR/MOORISH
• 351
“arbiter” if called upon to do so. Nearly 80 years of age by this time,
he turned his attention to writing his memoirs, La Mauritanie contre
vents et marées, and on 14 October 2003, just a few weeks after their
publication, Mokhtar Ould Daddah died in a Paris hospital.
MOOR/MOORISH (variant: Maure). The preponderant ethnic group
in Mauritania (and from whom the country takes it name), the Moorish
peoples are in most cases of Arab or Berber extraction who use Hassaniyya Arabic as their lingua franca and live primarily in the Saharan
north of Mauritania, in the administrative régions of Adrar, DakhletNouadhibou, Inchiri, Tagant, Tiris Zemmour, and Trarza. Except
for the substantial numbers of “Black Moors,” known as haratines,
the Moors tend to be light-skinned and possess “Caucasian” features,
although significant intermarriage has taken place among “white,” or
Beydane, Moors, and the haratines. Furthermore, even if the differences between “white and “black” Moors were set aside, the ArabBerber community is far from monolithic; indeed, their society was
traditionally highly stratified and segmented.
Modern Moorish life in Mauritania derives its character primarily
from the outcome of the Char Bobha, or Thirty Years’ War, fought
between 1644 and 1674 between the Berbers, who formerly comprised
the Sanhadja Confederation, and the Arab warriors from the east. That
conflict, which ended in utter defeat for the Berbers under the leadership of Nasir ed-Din, a noted Islamic cleric, forced them to “abandon
the sword for the book” and become tributaries of the victorious Arabs, most prominently the Beni Hassan, who ranked at the top of the
rapidly developing caste system and were collectively termed hassan,
or warrior, tribes. Some defeated Berbers (and some Arabs also) zealously devoted themselves to Islamic scholarship in an attempt to retain
their social status, becoming zawiya (or marabouts, as they were called
by French colonialists), and were respected for their erudition as they
came to occupy a position just below the hassan. Over the years, the
zawiya tended to intermarry less than other castes.
Below the hassan and the zawiya were the znaga, or tributary vassals. Made up for the most part of the defeated Sanhadja and other
Berbers, they were firmly subordinate to the hassan tribes, spoke a
different dialect of Hassaniyya Arabic, and were obliged from time
to time to pay tribute (known as horma), which could involve the
352 •
MOOR/MOORISH
provision of goods, personal services, or the education of children.
The znaga were also divided into religious and warrior classes based
primarily on their occupations before or during the Char Bobha.
Some znaga were also impressed into slavery by their hassan counterparts, although it appears that this practice (as distinct from black
Moorish slavery to the Beydanes) died out in the early 20th century.
The znaga, more so than the hassan or the zawiya, have intermarried
extensively with Black Africans over the decades.
Ranking below all three groups of Moors are the so-called “occupational” castes, though their members’ particular designations often
do not describe current employment but rather a reputed historical
status. These include artisans, craftsmen, weavers, tailors, and other
practitioners of manual trades such as carpenters. Despite their lower
standing, the talents of the craftsmen made them valuable to the dominant groups, and in many cases they were allowed to live with other
Moors almost as equals, a trend that gathered force after the arrival of
the French. The occupational castes contained a final subgroup, the
entertainers, including bards (poets), musicians, and storytellers, who
were valued in Moorish society but were nonetheless viewed with
suspicion due to their knowledge of recondite subjects and alleged
access to mystical or occult powers. As a result, “noble” Moors often
had entertainers or mystics as companions, providing the protection
that such persons were supposed to bring but without altering the
patron–client relationship. Remaining outside the caste system
almost entirely were occupations such as nomadic hunters and fishermen; in fact, the only Moorish tribe to engage in fishing to any
degree were the Imraguen, believed to be Berbers traditionally dependent on a hassan tribe, the Oulad Bou Sbaa.
Also near the bottom of Moor society were the haratines, who
gradually gained their freedom from their “white” masters. In the
process, they came to identify themselves almost entirely with Moorish culture. Due to a lack of economic opportunities, the haratines
often still worked for their former masters, blurring the line between
actual slavery (the persistence of which is a fiercely controversial issue even in the early 21st century) and a merely servile status.
Whatever their place in the complex Moorish world, all the groups
had several attributes in common: the predominance of patrilineal
kinship groups (and often extended families), the existence of po-
MOOR/MOORISH
• 353
lygyny, and the historical preference for marriage within one’s own
clan or kinship group, although marriage within a prescribed degree
of consanguinity is strictly enjoined. In addition, most Moors were
traditionally partly or wholly nomadic. But with the onset of desertification in Mauritania during the 1970s and 1980s, many were forced
to abandon their way of life and congregate in the country’s cities and
towns, especially the capital, Nouakchott, which by the 1990s had
become a crossroads for all Mauritanians, Beydane, haratine, and
Black African alike.
Following is a list of the principal Moorish tribes, confederations,
and subtribes (fractions) in Mauritania, some of whose members
were also found in neighboring Western Sahara and to some extent in
northern Mali. The list is divided between tribes that were traditionally warriors (hassan) and those of a religious/monastic inclination
(zawiya). It should also be kept in mind that the two large (hassan)
Reguibat confederations counted a certain number of zawiya among
their number, and some tribes (notably the Semassides of the Adrar)
devoted themselves mostly to commerce and trade, although they are
classed here as monastic.
Hassan Tribes
Brakna (includes the Ahel Yahya Ould Sidi Othman, the Oulad
Abdallah, the Oulad Ahmed, and the Oulad Mormach)
Idaw Aych
Kunta (also includes zawiya)
Mechdouf
Oulad Allouch
Oulad Ammoni (includes the Oulad Akshar and the Oulad Gaylan)
Oulad Bou Sbaa (includes the Imraguen)
Oulad Delim
Oulad Lab
Oulad Nasir
Reguibat ech-Charg (also called Lgouacem; includes the Ahel Brahim Oulad Daoud, the Lebouihat, the Laiacha, and the Foqra)
Reguibat es-Sahel (includes the Oulad Moussa, the Souaad, the
Lemouedenin, the Oulad Borhim, the Oulad Cheikh, the Thaalat,
and the Oulad Taleb)
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MOROCCAN–MAURITANIAN CONVENTIONS
Trarza (includes the Oulad Damman, the Oulad Ben Dammam, the
Ahel Mohammed, and the el-Hbib)
Zawiya Tribes
Ahel Berikallah
Ahel Mohammed Fadel
Ahel Néma
Ahel Oualata
Ahel Sidi Mahmoud
Deiman
Djeiliba
Ihab Lahsen
Idaw Ali
Idaw el-Hadj
Ideiboussat
Ideikoub
Idjeijba
Laghlal
Messouma
Oulad Berri
Semassides
Tadjakant
Tagat
Tagnit
Tagounant
Tendgha
Tinaoudjuou
MOROCCAN–MAURITANIAN CONVENTIONS (of 14 April
1976). Pursuant to the Madrid Agreement of 14 November 1975,
Morocco and Mauritania consented to drop their simultaneous
claims to the entire territory of Western Sahara and to partition it
between them. However, the actual boundary of the Moroccan and
Mauritanian zones remained unsettled until 14 April 1976, when an
agreement was signed in Fez, Morocco, in the presence of the two
countries’ heads of state, King Hassan II and President Mokhtar
Ould Daddah. The convention stated that “the frontier between the
MOROCCAN–MAURITANIAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE
• 355
two countries shall be drawn by a straight line from the intersection
of the 24th parallel north and the Atlantic coast to the intersections
of the 23rd parallel north and the 13th meridian west, the intersection
of this straight line with the present frontier of the Islamic Republic
of Mauritania constituting the southeast limit of the frontier of the
Kingdom of Morocco.” In practical terms, this meant that the new
Mauritanian border would extend from the coast north of Dakhla
to the prior border in the general vicinity of the towns of F’Derik
and Zouérate. All told, Morocco received two-thirds of Western
Sahara (and the lion’s share of the territory’s natural resources),
while Mauritania received the southern one-third, practically bereft
of resources, which was called Tiris el-Gharbia.
Three and one-half years later, when Mauritania relinquished
its claim to Western Sahara to the Polisario Front by signing the
Algiers Agreement, Morocco unilaterally annexed Tiris el-Gharbia
and renamed it Oued ed-Dahab. The 1976 boundary line set forth by
the convention then lost whatever limited significance it previously
had, because Moroccan troops had always been present within the
Mauritanian sector, assisting in its defense.
MOROCCAN–MAURITANIAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE. When
the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara was divided between
Morocco and Mauritania by the Madrid Agreement in November
1975, it was believed that Mauritania could occupy its allotted share
of the territory without substantial outside assistance. But Mauritania’s president, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, had badly underestimated
the fighting skill and determination of the proindependence Polisario Front. As a consequence, Ould Daddah was obliged almost
from the start to allow Moroccan soldiers to assist their Mauritanian
counterparts in defending Tiris el-Gharbia. Later on the situation
deteriorated, with Polisario guerrillas ranging far and wide across
Mauritania, hitting and disabling the economically vital railway line
from the interior to the Atlantic coast and even twice attacking the
capital city (see NOUAKCHOTT RAIDS). On 1 May 1977, Polisario made a devastating attack on Zouérate, and as uncomfortable as
it was for Ould Daddah to seek outside help, he believed he had no
choice. On 13 May, a joint Moroccan–Mauritanian Defense Committee was set up and met on a monthly basis until the overthrow
356 •
MOUVEMENT NATIONAL DÉMOCRATIQUE
of President Ould Daddah by members of his armed forces on 10
July 1978.
The agreement essentially merged the two states’ military high
commands and, for the first time, permitted Morocco to place its own
troops inside Mauritania’s pre-1976 borders. By December 1977,
there were approximately 6,000 troops of Morocco’s Forces Armées
Royales (FAR) in Mauritania proper, based at Akjoujt, Atar, Bir
Moghrein, F’Derik, and Nouadhibou. In addition, the FAR’s U.S.built Northrup F-5 fighter jets were stationed at the Nouadhibou
airport, and Moroccans were posted along the vulnerable rail line
in the north. Although the capital, Nouakchott, never hosted Moroccan troops, their presence gave considerable pause to the post-Ould
Daddah government, the Comité Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN), which was actively seeking a dignified exit from the
Western Sahara conflict without unduly antagonizing Morocco. After the 10 July 1978 coup, most Moroccan soldiers were withdrawn,
after reaching a peak strength of about 9,000. The agreement on the
joint defense committee was renounced by the CMRN’s successor
body, the Comité Militaire de Salut National (CMSN), on 23 August 1979, a fortnight after the signing of the Algiers Agreement, by
which Mauritania made peace with the Polisario Front and gave up
its claim to Western Sahara. The last Moroccans, at Bir Moghrein,
stayed in place until 26 December 1979, when they were finally repatriated after strenuous Mauritanian protests.
MOUVEMENT NATIONAL DÉMOCRATIQUE (MND). A relatively small yet unusually durable and influential political group, the
National Democratic Movement was founded in 1968 as a semiclandestine organization, because the Mauritanian head of state at the
time, President Mokhtar Ould Daddah, tolerated no political activity outside of his own tightly controlled Parti du Peuple Mauritanien (PPM). At its inception, the MND espoused a fairly left-wing
agenda and articulated strong opposition to President Ould Daddah’s
domestic polices and foreign relations alignments, considering them
inordinately conservative and pro-Western. The northern areas of the
country, in particular the economic center of Nouadhibou and the
inland iron ore mining town of Zouérate, proved to be fertile ground
for the MND, and the movement cemented a strong following there
MOUVEMENT NATIONAL DÉMOCRATIQUE
• 357
by the end of the 1960s among both the Mauritanian and Western
Saharan communities there.
President Ould Daddah, once he learned of the MND’s existence,
dealt with it in characteristic fashion. An MND-influenced strike by
iron ore workers in 1968 in Zouérate was forcibly suppressed, with
the loss of several lives at the hands of Mauritania’s police and army.
In the longer run, the MND’s platform and activities impelled Ould
Daddah to carry out a fairly far-reaching reorientation of the country’s
economy and external affairs, including the nationalization of the
French-controlled iron ore facilities, withdrawal from the Communauté Financière Africaine (CFA) currency zone dominated by
France, the subsequent issuance of a new purely Mauritanian currency, the ouguiya, and, finally, an increased hospitality toward some
of the more “radical” states of the Arab League. These steps, carried
out mostly in 1972 and 1973, marked a high point in the MND’s influence, yet the group was unable to capitalize on it due to ideological
differences inside the organization—the MND harbored small proSoviet and pro-Chinese Marxist sympathizers—which manifested
themselves by 1975 on the subject of the developing Western Sahara
conflict. The conflict pitted Morocco’s King Hassan II and President
Ould Daddah against the proindependence Polisario Front, which
had been founded in May 1973 and had always enjoyed backing from
many militant MND members; many Western Saharan workers and
students counted themselves among the group’s adherents. However,
the moderates and conservatives within the MND were clearly in the
ascendancy by August 1975, as in that month the MND voted overwhelmingly to merge with the ruling PPM, reflecting its satisfaction
with Ould Daddah’s “progressive” policies. The MND, as part of the
merger agreement, assented to Mauritania’s ill-fated annexation of
the southern one-third of Western Sahara, a step formalized in the
Madrid Agreement signed by Spain, Morocco, and Mauritania on 14
November 1975. Only the Marxist minority within the MND refused
to merge with the PPM; it continued to openly support Polisario’s
independence goals and thus made itself a target for continued government repression over the next several years.
The coup d’état of 10 July 1978, which deposed President Ould
Daddah and inaugurated a long period of direct military rule by senior Mauritanian military officers, caused the remnants of the MND
358 •
MOUVEMENT NATIONAL DÉMOCRATIQUE
to retreat even further underground and into exile, although it did
manage to regain its separate identity after the PPM was outlawed by
the ruling armed forces junta, the Comité Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN). Still keeping a very low profile, the MND
was still thought to command sympathy among businesspeople,
students, civil servants, and even some military personnel, and its
openness to both Black African and Moorish Mauritanians may have
helped to lessen the racial and ethnic tensions within the country at
a critical time. The president of Mauritania from 1980 to 1984, Col.
Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah, however, had little tolerance for the MND, and repressed it as he did most other independent
political and civil society groupings during his turbulent tenure. The
movement, consequently, enthusiastically welcomed the nonviolent
“restructuring” on 12 December 1984 of the governing Comité
Militaire de Salut National (CMSN), which ousted Ould Heydallah and installed Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya as head of
state, although from 1984 to 1991 the MND led a somewhat nomadic
existence, surviving more as a “tendency” or a coalition partner with
other organizations than as an independent entity.
The Mauritanian Second Republic and the period leading to it in
1991 and early 1992 marked yet another chapter in the long history
of the National Democratic Movement. As soon as President Ould
Taya announced in April 1991 that multiple political parties would
be legalized for the first time in the country’s history and that parliamentary and presidential elections would be conducted the following
year, the MND swung into action, affiliating itself with a hastily organized illegal opposition group, the Front Démocratique Uni des
Forces du Changement (FDUC), which was quickly suppressed by
the CMSN after it was held responsible for a wave of unrest that hit
Mauritania in June 1991, including in the old MND stomping ground
of Nouadhibou. After this the MND’s followers tended once again
to disperse into various segments of Mauritanian politics and society
(including, it was still thought, the army and civil service), but the
greatest number of MND members attached themselves to what was
the country’s largest legal opposition party during 1992–1997, the
Union des Forces Démocratiques (UFD) headed by Ahmed Ould
Daddah. Even here, however, the MND sometimes had difficulty,
as was made evident in January 1997, when Mustapha Ould Bédre-
MUSTAPHA OULD MOHAMMED SALEK
• 359
dine (who had by now emerged as the MND’s leader) threatened
to withdraw from the UFD out of dissatisfaction with some of the
party’s positions. This threat was not carried out immediately, but
in late 1997, reacting to Ahmed Ould Daddah’s decision to admit
into the UFD certain members of the basically pan-Arabist Alliance Populaire Progressiste (APP) who had been expelled from the
ruling Parti Républicain, Démocratique et Social (PRDS), Ould
Bédredine made good on his earlier promise, accusing Ould Daddah
of diluting the UFD’s strength by admitting into its ranks persons
who allegedly did not share its values. Then, in a somewhat surprising move, Ould Bédredine formed his own political organization in
August 1998, also to be called the UFD, causing most observers to
identify Ahmed Ould Daddah’s group as the UFD(A) and Mustapha
Ould Bédredine’s new party as the UFD(B), even though the latter
organization was believed to be largely a surrogate for the MND.
MUSTAPHA OULD MOHAMMED SALEK (1936– ). Born in
Kiffa, Mauritania’s first military president joined the infant country’s
armed forces in 1961 and rose rapidly through the military hierarchy,
especially after he was favored with officer training in France at the
Saumur and St. Maxen academies in the mid-1960s. After a stint of
less than two years as army chief of staff (chef d’état major), he was
tapped by the Mauritanian president, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, to serve
as director of the main state trading company, the Société Nationale
d’Importation et d’Exportation (SONIMEX). But soon after Mauritania became embroiled in the Western Sahara conflict against
the proindependence Polisario Front, Ould Salek was recalled to active army duty and took an active part in the defense of Nouakchott
against an embarrassing Polisario guerrilla attack in June 1976 (see
NOUAKCHOTT RAIDS). On 15 July 1977, as a sign that President
Ould Daddah reposed great confidence in his military skills, Col. Ould
Salek was appointed commander of the critical Third Military Region,
which entailed responsibility for defending the northern towns of
Akjoujt, Atar, and Chinguetti against Polisario raids. Mauritania’s
dismal battlefield fortunes were not improved, however, and by early
1978 Ould Salek was reappointed, for the second time in his career,
to the post of army chief of staff, where he no doubt formed a unique
perspective on the increasingly futile Saharan war.
360 •
MUSTAPHA OULD MOHAMMED SALEK
On 10 July 1978, Mustapha Ould Mohammed Salek was the leader
of the bloodless coup that deposed Mokhtar Ould Daddah and instituted governance by an army council, the Comité Militaire de Redressement National (CMRN). As the new head of state, Ould Salek
set about seeking an honorable exit from the Western Saharan war,
but although his regime was helped by a unilateral Polisario cease-fire
regarding Mauritanian targets, instituted shortly after the July putsch,
a lasting solution to the Saharan quagmire was to prove very difficult
to achieve, and it was a task for which Ould Salek would ultimately
prove unsuited. Not only did he and the CMRN have to contend with
the presence of 9,000 or so Moroccan troops on Mauritanian soil assisting in the country’s defense, but the economic situation was dire,
due in no small part to the nonoperational status of the critical iron ore
mining and transportation facilities in the north. Further complicating
matters was Ould Salek’s preference for a “global” peace settlement of
the Western Sahara problem that would include not only Mauritania,
Morocco, and the Polisario Front, but also France and Algeria. This
proved a totally unrealistic goal, and the strain of the situation was
beginning to wear heavily on Ould Salek and his military colleagues.
In what turned out to be a final gambit to retain control of the
government, Col. Ould Salek prevailed on the CMRN to grant him
absolute powers, effective 20 March 1979. In addition, Ould Salek
handpicked a National Consultative Council to advise the CMRN
on policy questions, but black Mauritanians were allegedly underrepresented on the council, and in any event, 40 of its 104 members
boycotted its meetings. Less than two weeks later (on 5 April), Ould
Salek found himself the victim of a nonviolent “palace revolution,”
which stripped him of all but the (titular) office of head of state and
installed Lt.-Col. Ahmed Ould Bouceif as prime minister. A month
later, Ould Salek was ousted from the nominal presidential post
as well, relinquishing it to Lt.-Col. Mohammed Mahmoud Ould
Louly, who in turn was subordinate to the powerful minister of defense, Lt.-Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould Heydallah.
After June 1979, Col. Ould Salek was largely out of the political
spotlight, but he enjoyed enough favor within the newly constituted
Comité Militaire de Salut National (CMSN) to be invited to certain
ceremonial functions. However, he made no secret of his opposition
to many of the governing junta’s policies, and on 6 February 1982 he
NAVY
• 361
became involved in an abortive plot to overthrow Ould Heydallah,
for which he was tried and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. In
December 1984, shortly after Ould Heydallah had been himself overthrown and replaced with Col. Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya,
Ould Salek was released, along with many other political prisoners.
In a surprising move, Ould Salek briefly regained public prominence
in January 1992, when he made a wildcat run for the Mauritanian
presidency in the country’s first contestable elections since independence. But he polled only 15,735 votes, less than 3 percent of the
total. See also ARMED FORCES.
–N–
NATIONAL GUARD. Responsible for the maintenance of law and order primarily in the rural areas of Mauritania, the Garde National is a
small and lightly equipped paramilitary law enforcement unit. Under
the supervision of the Ministry of the Interior, the force comprises
approximately 2,000 men, with another 1,000 auxiliary members
available if needed.
NAVY. The Marine Mauritanienne was established on 25 January 1966 as
part of a series of measures taken by President Mokhtar Ould Daddah
to increase the country’s autonomy vis-à-vis France, the former colonial power. The Mauritanian Navy remained one of the smallest and
least capable in the region into the early 21st century, comprising only
620 sailors and 200 marines (of whom about 40 were officers), with a
very small number of capable vessels. The flagship of the fleet in 2008
was the Aboubekr Ben Amer, a French-built, 177-meter-long patrol
ship with a displacement of 374 tons and a range of 4,500 nautical
miles. Constructed at the shipyard of Leroux and Lotz, it was commissioned in April 1994 and had a maximum speed of 23 knots. For cost
and other reasons, however, an option on a second similar ship was not
pursued (although the ship was refurbished in France in 2001), leaving
the navy with only four other ships believed to be serviceable:
• The En-Nasr, a Patra-class large patrol ship, formerly a French
vessel, launched in 1981 and transferred to Mauritania a year
later. It was 132 meters long, had a displacement of 147.5 tons,
362 •
NÉMA
and a top speed of about 26 knots. It had a comparatively limited
range of 1,750 miles.
• The Foum-Legleita, a Spanish-built oceangoing tug constructed
in 1964 and sold to Mauritania in 2000. It had a crew complement of 60, a range of 4,640 nautical miles, a displacement of
1,069 tons, and a length of 183.5 meters. It mounted two Oerlikon deck guns of 20mm each.
• The Limam el-Hadrami, a smaller patrol vessel with a 430-ton
displacement, delivered from the People’s Republic of China
(PRC) in April 2002; it was 198.6 meters long and had a top
speed of 20 knots.
• The Arguin, a German-built 1,000-ton displacement ship ordered
by Mauritania in 1998 and commissioned in July 2000. It was
nearly 180 meters long and could steam at 20 knots with a crew
of 13. It was equipped, interestingly, with a “daughter” interception boat mounted on a ramp located amidships; the dependent
ship appeared to be a large, high-speed Zodiac-type craft.
Most of the rest of Mauritania’s naval strength appeared to be out
of commission by the year 2000, although it was possible that one or
more 15-ton displacement Mandovi-class inshore patrol craft were
available for duty; these ships were only 49 meters in length and had
a top speed of 24 knots.
Even with this expanded number of (sometimes) available vessels,
the Mauritanian navy remained little more than a symbolic presence,
a costly shortcoming given the apparently widespread poaching of
the country’s fisheries, the country’s declaration of an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) extending 200 nautical miles from shore, the developing seaborne refugee problem, and the need to patrol Mauritania’s
new offshore petroleum facilities. Some assistance to the navy was
provided by the Mauritanian air force, which possessed a few relatively long-range maritime surveillance planes, and naval training was
provided by France, the United States, and Algeria, supplementing the
navy’s own small training college located at Nouadhibou, its primary
(and virtually only) operational base.
NÉMA. Mauritania’s easternmost major population center and the
administrative capital of the région of Hodh ech-Chargui, Néma
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had roughly 19,000 people in 1977 but significantly fewer (13,759)
by the year 2000. By Mauritanian standards, the climate is relatively
equable, with the often-extreme heat tempered by a hivernage typically lasting from June to October. Even in the early 21st century,
amenities in Néma were scarce. The town had virtually no hotels
and only a few markets and filling stations despite its location at the
terminus of the Route de l’Espoir (Trans-Mauritanian Highway),
running 1,100 kilometers from Nouakchott. Néma also had an improved airport, completed with West German assistance in the early
1980s, albeit with only infrequent service.
NEWSPAPERS. Although newspapers have been published in Mauritania since before the country’s independence, the continued low
level of literacy in the country, coupled with pervasive harassment
and censorship by the authorities even under the supposedly pluralistic Second Republic (1992–2005), has severely limited their importance. The press, however, did play an important role in the political
mobilization of the territory prior to 1960, when Al-Ittafaq, which had
been founded in 1948 as Mauritania’s first newspaper, served as an
effective conduit for the ambitions of future president Mokhtar Ould
Daddah and his Union Progressiste Mauritanienne (UPM). But after 1960, newspapers and magazines steadily became fewer in number
and more restricted; by the time President Ould Daddah was ousted by
a military coup in July 1978, the only daily newspaper of consequence
was Ech-Chaab (The People), a French-Arabic publication issued by
the government, which of course closely regulated its content.
In early 1991, there seemed to be the promise of a freer atmosphere for independent newspapers, but these hopes were dashed by
President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya. Despite press freedom
existing in principle under the Mauritanian constitution of 20 July
1991, the authorities reserved to themselves an exceedingly powerful tool to restrain the autonomy of the independent print media: the
notorious Article 11 of the Press Law of 1991, which gave the Interior Ministry nearly untrammeled power to engage in prior review of
articles and to suppress publications that were either derogatory to
the state or insulting to Islam, the terms of review being quite vague
and in practice never adequately explained. In spite of the realization
that freedom of the press would be dependent on the whims of the
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government, and that oversight by Mauritania’s legal system would
be scant, over three dozen independent newspapers and magazines
sprang up by the mid-1990s, some admittedly not being issued more
than once or twice before falling into bankruptcy or succumbing to
other difficulties, including negative official attitudes and the perception that some outlets existed solely to promote the policy platforms
of certain political parties. Moreover, the Mauritanian independent
press sector faced a myriad of problems unrelated to the censorship of the Ould Taya regime: a low readership base due to dismal
literacy rates, poor advertising revenues in a sparsely populated and
impoverished country, shortages of newsprint and qualified staff, and
disputes (whether politically motivated or not) with the state-owned
Imprimêrie Nationale, which controlled most printing facilities. In
addition, broader societal factors were at work that may have ensured
a high level of self-censorship. Out of reluctance to offend powerful
tribal or regional interests, many journalists, it was believed, were
less than forthcoming in their writing. Yahya Ould Béchir, the editor
of the Arabic-language weekly Al-Bayane, candidly offered his opinion in late 1992 that “it is not the Interior Ministry which operates
the censorship. It is the population itself. Say something unpleasant
about someone and the whole tribe will be on your back.”
But it was official repression that accounted for the great majority
of the difficulties of the independent newspapers between 1992 and
2005, and was the one aspect of their operation that drew the most
international publicity. Probably the most pervasive case of harassment revolved around Mauritanie Nouvelles, whose editor, Bah Ould
Salek, consistently attempted to challenge the Ould Taya government
and paid a heavy personal and professional price for doing so. In February 1994, for example, disputes with the state-run printing house
caused the magazine to vanish from circulation for several months,
and in October–November 1995 it was shut down by the authorities,
who gave no reason for their actions. In March 1996, Mauritanie
Nouvelles was again banned for three months, the government saying
only that it “manifested a desire to sow subversion and attack the interests of the country” after Ould Salek tried to throw an unflattering
light on the activities of Mohamed Lemine Salem Ould Dah, the
hard-line interior minister. In July 1996, the magazine was proscribed
once more, the regime breaking new ground in this instance by disap-
NEWSPAPERS
• 365
proving of a projected article that criticized France’s African policies,
France being, of course, a key ally of Mauritania. Mauritanie Nouvelles suffered through additional banning orders in December 1996
and in May and October 1997, the latter precluding it (undoubtedly
by design) from covering the December 1997 presidential elections.
In January 1998, Ould Salek finally gave up, announcing that he was
permanently suspending all efforts to issue his magazine. Ould Salek
had only limited success in rallying public opinion against censorship; as chairman of the seven-member Association Nationale de
la Presse Indépendante (ANPI), he called a three-month newspaper
strike in August 1994 as a gesture of protest, but was forced to cancel
it a short time later because it was not widely observed.
The case of Al-Akhbar, a weekly newspaper under the editorship
of Amel Mint Daddah (a relation of former president Mokhtar Ould
Daddah and of veteran opposition leader Ahmed Ould Daddah), also
served as an illustration of the tactics the government routinely employed to restrict free expression. Primarily in 1996 and 1997, the Interior Ministry delayed its review of certain articles until Al-Akhbar’s
entire print run had been completed, then banned that particular piece
from appearing. Al-Akhbar’s only recourse was to destroy its entire
inventory of that particular issue, losing thousands of dollars in the
process. The six-hour legal time limit imposed on the government for
reviewing newspaper copy was simply ignored, and eventually Mint
Daddah, discouraged by the ordeal, shut down the paper for good. In
May 1994, the authorities also seized an entire issue of Al-Bayane
after it attempted to report on Mauritania’s cloudy human rights situation, and for good measure also closed down Le Calame and L’EveilHebdo, two other outspoken publications. Le Calame was banned
again in November 1995, and in 1997–1998 repression reached new
heights when Le Calame, La Tribune de Nouakchott, Al-Akhbar, and
Teissir were also prohibited from publishing.
From early 1999 to the overthrow of the Ould Taya regime in
August 2005, matters only got worse for independent Mauritanian
newspapers. The establishment of full diplomatic relations with Israel in the summer of 1999, along with a decided pro-Western shift
in the country’s foreign relations and a more friendly relationship
with Morocco’s new monarch, Mohamed VI, meant that negatively
commenting upon these matters, as well as on purely domestic issues,
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NOUADHIBOU
were grounds for immediate censorship. It was criticism of Israel, as
well as of a certain Moroccan official in charge of an Arab-operated
international aid institution, that was widely blamed for the resuspension for three months of both Le Calame and E’Eveil-Hebdo as
well as the shutdown of a newer publication, Nouakchott-Infos. And
in autumn 2000, Le Calame again felt the wrath of the Ministry of
the Interior, this time in the company of newspapers and magazines
such as La Tribune, La Carrefour, Inimich al-Watan, Al-Quds, and
Al-Alam. With repression generally intensifying by 2001, President
Ould Taya began placing a few newspaper editors in detention for
short periods and resorting to the hitherto seldom-used tactic of
lodging libel proceedings against independent newspaper editors,
which often entailed considerable financial costs to the defendants.
Although powerless to affect the situation, foreign nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) continuously took note of conditions in Mauritania and protested in any way they could. In a November 2002
report, one such group, the Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières
(RSF), rated Mauritania very poorly in terms of press freedom; at
115th in the world, it was far behind most of the rest of West Africa
and on a par with the highly repressive governments of Zimbabwe
and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire).
The coup d’état of 3 August 2005, which peacefully removed
President Ould Taya from office and instituted a temporary military
government led by Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, brought with it
pledges of genuine democracy. From August 2005 to early 2007,
press censorship did indeed nearly cease, and in October 2006, the
ruling Conseil Militaire pour la Justice et la Démocratie (CMJD)
began to set up a new and ostensibly autonomous organization to regulate the print media as well as the country’s state-operated radio and
television communications outlets. Dubbed the High Authority of the
Press and Audiovisual Sector, it considerably raised expectations of
real and lasting press freedoms, especially after 19 April 2007, when
the CMJD was disbanded and the Mauritanian Third Republic was
inaugurated under the leadership of an elected civilian president, Sidi
Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi.
NOUADHIBOU. Mauritania’s second-largest city and the economic
center of the country, Nouadhibou—known as Port Étienne during
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the French colonial period—is situated abut halfway down the Cap
Blanc (Ras Nouadhibou) peninsula, which Mauritania shares with
the disputed territory of Western Sahara, and which also includes the
settlement of La Guera. The city of Nouadhibou faces the western
portion of the Baie du Lévrier, one of only a few such protected
areas on the coastline of northwest Africa. As the administrative seat
of the vast and sparsely populated Mauritanian province of DakhletNouadhibou, the city accounts for fully nine-tenths of the province’s
population, an officially reported 72,337 in 2000, substantially more
than the 59,198 in 1988.
One of the most diverse areas in Mauritania from an economic
standpoint, Nouadhibou contains the country’s largest port facility,
used primarily for the important fisheries sector as well as for general cargo purposes. In addition, the Port Minéralier was located
several kilometers south of the city and was used only by ships
receiving shipments of iron ore offloaded from the railway line,
which extended into the interior. The area also supported a great deal
of tourist activity, functioning as a center of deep-sea sport fishing
as well as a starting point for visitors traveling east into the desert
and to the Parc National du Banc d’Arguin to the south. Access
to Nouadhibou was critically enhanced in 2002, when an improved
road linking the city to the capital, Nouakchott, was completed after
years of planning and construction; it remedied what was probably
Mauritania’s most glaring transportation deficiency, particularly
since airline service between Nouakchott and Nouadhibou was not
always frequent or reliable. Although a small port facility near the
city had existed since the French colonial period, it was the newer
Nouadhibou port, initially constructed during the early 1970s, that
received the most attention from international aid donors. In 1983,
an $8 million loan from the World Bank made possible improvements to the fishing port, while in 1987 another reconstruction program raised the capacity of the cargo port to 500,000 tons per year.
Further improvements to the port, however, were slow to materialize
(a dredging and clearance project meant to enhance navigation in
the port zone was cancelled for legal reasons in the spring of 1999),
although a petroleum pipeline extending from the country’s only
oil refinery—also located in Nouadhibou, owned and operated by
Algeria, but dormant since 2000—was proposed in the late 1990s to
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NOUADHIBOU
assist the refueling of fishing vessels. More tangibly, the Mauritanian
government, partially assisted by funding from Japan, began work
in June 2002 on an entirely new fishing quay in Nouadhibou, with a
projected cost of $1.4 million. The project was also slated to include
new cold storage and warehouse facilities in an effort to bring the
fishing port up to the standards of competing facilities such as those
in the Canary Islands.
Like the rest of Mauritania, Nouadhibou has had its share of political and social difficulties since independence. The city was very
tense during the Western Sahara conflict, when fears of an attack
by the Polisario Front (which did not materialize) led then-President
Mokhtar Ould Daddah to allow the stationing of Moroccan troops
near the city. In the early 1980s, the armed forces having toppled Ould
Daddah in a bloodless 1978 coup, French paratroops replaced the Moroccans, as Mauritania’s new leader, Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould
Heydallah, feared a Moroccan attack on Nouadhibou and La Guera
as a consequence of having signed the Algiers Agreement in June
1979, making peace with Polisario and relinquishing any Mauritanian
claims to Western Sahara. During the early 1990s, politically and
economically motivated civil unrest took place in Nouadhibou, and
during the Second Republic (1992–2005), the city gradually became
known as a center of opposition to the increasingly authoritarian head
of state, President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya.
Nouadhibou was not without its social problems as well. With a
large transient population that consisted of immigrants from Europe
as well as other West African states and also the Asian crews of cargo
ships calling at the port, there were concerns about prostitution and
drug abuse by the early 21st century, including worries about the
spread of AIDS/HIV in the area. Finally, Nouadhibou had become a
transit point after the year 2000 for thousands of West African refugees seeking entry into Spain and other countries of the European
Union (EU) through the Canary Islands, a few hundred kilometers
to the northeast, traversed—often with fatal results—by small fishing boats and other makeshift vessels. To attempt to deal with this
blossoming problem, the Mauritanian government, in cooperation
with the EU, constructed special camps to house the migrants until
they could be returned to their countries of origin. But because many
of the refugees were very far from their homes, it was believed that
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• 369
at least some would settle in Nouadhibou more or less permanently,
increasing the burdens placed on the city.
NOUAKCHOTT. As Mauritania was preparing for independence
from France in the late 1950s, the country—almost alone among the
emerging nations of the Afro-Asian world—had no capital city of
its own. Indeed, Mauritania was then administered from St. Louis,
located in Senegal just across the Senegal River. Moreover, the leading Mauritanian politician (and future president), Mokhtar Ould
Daddah, was desirous that any capital city serve as a modern symbol
of national purpose and unity, which effectively precluded using several other cities and towns in the interior of the country as the seat of
government. In addition, there was the sensitive question of whether
the capital would be located in an area predominantly populated by
Arab Moors or non-Arab Black Africans.
After a period of considerable study, Ould Daddah and his French
and Mauritanian advisers settled on a site roughly halfway between
St. Louis and the economic center of Port Étienne, later renamed
Nouadhibou. Located on a small hill about six kilometers east of the
Atlantic coast, Nouakchott (translated generally as “the place of the
winds”) was at the time little more than a sparsely populated ksar (fortified village) surrounded by flat, arid, and sandy terrain punctuated
by grassland. With French help, construction was begun in March
1958, and the rudiments of Mauritania’s new capital were complete at
the time of the country’s formal independence on 28 November 1960.
Nouakchott was initially designed to accommodate 15,000 people at
most, as Ould Daddah understood that most commerce and other aspects of daily life would continue to be conducted elsewhere. A short
distance west of the old ksar, Nouakchott’s business district was laid
out with broad, gridlike streets but had little in the way of significant
or impressive architecture apart from a few mosques. A short distance
south of this area lay the cinqième (fifth) district, which within a few
years had a large open-air market and new housing developments.
Both the fifth district and the business center tended, by the 1970s, to
eclipse the old ksar in importance, and the headquarters of the various
Mauritanian governmental ministries, as well as its parastatal commercial enterprises, were located there. Nouakchott’s earlier years
were fairly serene (if austere by the standards of other cities), and
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visitors often remarked on the relaxed and orderly pace of life in its
streets.
In the mid-1970s, Nouakchott’s situation began to deteriorate.
Years of drought made large swaths of land in the interior uncultivable, and the desertification process, which proceeded seemingly
inexorably from north to south, made the prospects for agriculture
(and to a lesser extent, livestock herding) bleak, probably for the
indefinite future. To escape their predicament—and mirroring the
behavior of countless people the world over—a sizeable proportion
of the Mauritanian population moved to the capital and its environs,
where they contributed to some of the most severe problems of urbanization (or over-urbanization) in postcolonial African history.
Some commentators (including the California-based urbanologist
and social critic Mike Davis) saw Nouakchott’s new slum areas as a
less prominent but still disturbing manifestation of explosive urban
population growth throughout West Africa. From 1975 to 1990,
Nouakchott’s population grew by leaps and bounds. Official census
figures from 1977 showed 134,000 persons, already a strain on the
city’s limited facilities, and by 1988, 393,325 people were on the
rolls. Even worse, by the year 2000, 558,195 people officially lived
within the nine arrondissements (Ksar, Teyarett, Tavragh Zeina,
Toujounine, ‘Arafat, Sebkha, El-Mina, Dar Naim, and Riyadh) comprising the city, and this number (like those before it) was widely
considered to be an underestimate due to the fact that many new arrivals either sporadically moved into or out of the capital district or
elected never to establish any contact with or draw the notice of the
authorities. By the 1980s, Nouakchott—which had come to acquire
its own local government in the 1960s although it was nominally
part of Trarza province—was badly overtaxed by this population
boom, as newcomers continued to erect crude houses and tents on
the outskirts of areas built up by those who had come before. Access to sanitary facilities and clean water resources, as well as food,
became a severe problem, and recourse was had to international aid
donors to attempt to preserve the health and lives of what amounted
to hundreds of thousands of internal migrants. Unemployment was
extremely high, and the degree of social dislocation for Mauritanians
who had followed either a nomadic or agriculture-based way of life
for centuries can only be guessed at.
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The relatively compact character of Nouakchott (about 1,000 square
kilometers), however, did have a few advantages, although even these
were to be largely vitiated by the 1990s. Because Nouakchott was
the national capital and had its own large airport, a modern port
facility, and a relatively developed road network, the distribution of
foodstuffs and other aid was made much less difficult than it would
otherwise have been. Few or no deaths from starvation were recorded
in the Nouakchott area for several years, until the sheer growth in the
city’s population made the humanitarian situation (and health and
sanitary conditions) even more desperate. Also on the positive side,
the desert/coastal location of the capital ensured that it would—for a
while at least—remain healthier than southern Mauritania especially,
and the city appeared to have a low potential for natural disasters,
although periodic heavy rainfall flooded some areas and, with an
elevation only a few meters above sea level, the vulnerability of the
Nouakchott area to a tsunami generated by an underwater earthquake
was glaringly obvious. Sand dunes often worked their way into homes
and offices by the 1980s, and the irifi sometimes reduced visibility for
hours at a time. The city’s relative isolation from the rest of Mauritania had been partially ameliorated by the early 21st century, due to an
improved airport, the completion of the Friendship Port in 1986, and
improved roads that extended to Rosso in the south, Atar and Nouadhibou to the north, and the country’s far eastern provinces. The city’s
coastal zone also hosted a thriving fisheries sector, and in general,
Nouakchott was the place where the majority of the young nation’s
attempted industrial development was concentrated.
By 2008, Nouakchott was perhaps the best location in all of Mauritania where the effects not only of urbanization and the eclipse of
agriculture but the consequences of uneven economic development
could be seen. Extremely large houses for wealthier Mauritanians
were steadily being constructed in the Tavargh Zeina district, while
the number of shantytowns continued to proliferate on the city’s
fringes. Many sections of Nouakchott—even the more prosperous
ones—appeared to be deteriorating for want of maintenance, and
remarkably, it was only in the late 1990s that most of the streets of
the capital were named and permanent structures numbered as was
the practice in the West. Before this, personal addresses were known
often by word of mouth, by post office box number, or by the parcel
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of land on which the dwellings were located. In sum, Nouakchott
did acquire at least the veneer of modernity by the 1990s; had some
cultural life; had a considerable commercial and tourist-related infrastructure; and was the home of nearly all the country’s political
parties, newspapers, and radio and television stations, even as many
questions remained about its future viability.
NOUAKCHOTT RAIDS (of June 1976 and July 1977). On two occasions roughly one year apart during Mauritania’s involvement in
the Western Sahara conflict, the guerrilla fighters of the Polisario
Front mounted brazen attacks against the Mauritanian capital city of
Nouakchott. Although the raids were of little military significance by
themselves (they inflicted no civilian casualties and caused only slight
property damage), they made clear to the government of President
Mokhtar Ould Daddah that Polisario forces could strike virtually
anywhere within the country at will in their campaign to compel Mauritania’s pullout from Tiris el-Gharbia, as its allotted share of Western Sahara was known. The attacks were also intended to heighten
Polisario’s diplomatic profile with respect to Western Sahara, both at
the United Nations and the Organization of African Unity (OAU).
The first raid, which took place on 8 June 1976, was the more
significant of the two (and the most costly for Polisario). Seven days
earlier (on 2 June), Polisario’s leader, El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed,
personally led a force of several hundred guerrillas in the direction
of the Mauritanian capital, hundreds of kilometers southwest of the
group’s rear bases in the Tindouf region of Algeria. Crucially, most
of Mauritania’s armed forces were stationed far to the north, leaving
Nouakchott practically undefended. On 5 June, however, a pilot in
the country’s small air force spotted what turned out to be a Polisario diversionary column near the town of Zouérate, and subsequent
Mauritanian engagements with this force revealed the front’s true
objective. Consequently, the commander of the Zouérate region, Lt.Col. Ahmed Ould Bouceif, quickly dispatched 400 of his men to try
to beat Polisario to Nouakchott. But this was a race they did not win.
The Western Saharan guerrillas reached the northern outskirts of the
capital by the morning of 8 June, shelling the grounds of President
Ould Daddah’s residence for 30 minutes before withdrawing. On their
way home, however, the retreating Polisario units were cornered by
OPÉRATION LAMANTIN
• 373
Ould Bouceif’s troops near the settlement of Bennichab (located in
the administrative région of Inchiri) on 9 June, and hundreds of insurgents were killed in the ensuing battle. Another Mauritanian commander (and future president), Lt.-Col. Mohammed Khouna Ould
Heydallah, also successfully attacked a Polisario force in northern
Mauritania that had intended to relieve the Nouakchott raiders.
The second Nouakchott raid took place on 3 July 1977. Unlike the
first attack, this one was staged from within Western Sahara itself.
After firing several mortar rounds into the presidential compound,
Polisario’s fighters retreated nearly without casualties. Coming
barely two months after a devastating Polisario attack on the iron ore
mining facilities at Zouérate, this incursion further demoralized the
Mauritanian officer corps, and the two raids together were believed
to be a significant factor in motivating them to overthrow Mokhtar
Ould Daddah a year later, on 10 July 1978.
–O–
OIL. See PETROLEUM.
OPÉRATION LAMANTIN. The code name given by France to its
aerial campaign against the guerrilla units of the Polisario Front in
late 1977. Opération Lamantin (Sea Cow) was launched in response
to a request by President Mokhtar Ould Daddah, who recognized
that he was facing an increasingly desperate situation caused by
Mauritania’s involvement in the Western Sahara conflict. This
was brought into high relief on 1 May 1977, when Polisario fought
its way into the iron ore mining center of Zouérate, capturing and
holding the town for several hours, causing extensive damage to its
economically vital facilities, killing two French expatriate workers,
and taking six others captive in an attempt to force a change in President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s anti-Polisario policies. The French
took little action until 25 October, when two more French workers,
seconded to the nearby railway line, were also taken prisoner by
the Polisario Front. Two days later, Paris decided on direct military
involvement, in a meeting chaired by Foreign Minister Louis de
Guiringaud, and planning was begun for a series of air strikes against
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Polisario formations in northern Mauritania to try to impede their
hitherto unrestricted freedom of movement there. On 2 November
1977, French Mirage-4 and Breuget-Atlantic reconnaissance planes
began flying over Mauritania in search of Polisario guerrillas.
Over the next few weeks, intensive diplomatic efforts were mounted
in an attempt to free the French prisoners. But the Polisario Front held
firm, hoping to entice France away from its unstinting support for Morocco’s King Hassan II and Mokhtar Ould Daddah. France, in turn,
conceded nothing, and another Polisario raid on the iron ore railway
on 21 November was enough to cause President Giscard d’Estaing
to order the deployment of Jaguar fighter-bombers to the Ouakkam
air base near Dakar, Senegal. By the first of December, six Jaguars
were deployed, along with a pair of Boeing KC-135F midair refueling
planes. The Jaguars first went into action on 2 December, strafing a
Polisario column, which had again attacked the railway. On 12 December, the French raids reached their peak with a two-day campaign
against guerrilla concentrations near Zouérate, resulting in significant
casualties, including Mauritanian prisoners of war captured by Polisario. Another series of Jaguar sorties followed on 18 December, but the
Polisario Front had by this time decided to unconditionally release its
eight French captives under the auspices of the United Nations (UN).
They were duly handed over to UN officials in Algiers on 23 December, and Opération Lamantin stood down.
OPÉRATION OURAGON. A brief and aggressive French–Spanish
military campaign directed against the guerrilla forces of the Army
of Liberation in February 1958. Operation Hurricane, as the French
called the joint operation (the French arm of the assault was called
Ecouvillon [Sponge], and the Spanish called their side of the operation Teide, after the highest mountain in the Canary Islands), was executed partly at the request of Mauritania’s paramount politician and
president-to-be, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, who was worried that the
Army of Liberation’s activities in northern Mauritania would disrupt
his ongoing preparations for the country’s independence from France.
Ould Daddah was also mindful that the Army of Liberation contained
an element known as the Front National de Libération Mauritanien
(FNLM), led by a disaffected political figure, Horma Ould Babana,
who had since the summer of 1956 openly aligned himself with the
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• 375
“Greater Morocco” aspirations of Mohammed Allal el-Fassi, the
leader of the Moroccan Istiqlal (Independence) Party. Fulfillment of
el-Fassi’s territorial designs would entail the nearly complete absorption of Mauritania into Morocco, something Ould Daddah was determined to prevent at any cost. France also had a substantial interest
in subduing the rebels, as they were an embarrassment to Morocco’s
monarch, Mohammed V, who had not yet succeeded in establishing
full control over the southern part of his country, an area that the
Army of Liberation was using to launch its attacks. The Spanish, then
still ensconced in the neighboring territory of Western Sahara, were
also feeling insecure, as the guerrillas were attacking their forces in
the colony and were using it as a sanctuary from which to mount raids
into northern Mauritania. Spain at the time had few troops in its desert
colony outside of those in a few major towns, and even these population centers were sometimes abandoned to the Army of Liberation’s
highly disciplined and motivated fighters.
A collective military effort to rid the region of the guerrillas was the
brainchild of French General Gabriel Bourgund, and it was assented to
by the Spanish officer with responsibility for the area, General Mario
Goméz Zamalloa, on 20 September 1957, at a meeting in Dakar, Senegal. Planning and the process of receiving high-level governmental
approval for the scheme consumed most of the following few months,
but on 10 February 1958, a force of 5,000 French and 9,000 Spanish
troops (with dozens of combat aircraft between them) went into action
against the Army of Liberation in Western Sahara, soon putting the
irregulars to flight and fully securing the territory for Madrid for the
first time since it had established a permanent presence there in the
1880s. Ten days later (on 20 February), additional French and Spanish
units began a four-day “mopping up” operation, occupying Fort Trinquet (later Bir Moghrein) and also the settlement of Ain Ben Tili in
extreme northeast Mauritania, effectively severing the supply lines of
the guerrillas. Permanent bases for the soldiers of both countries were
soon set up, often forcing the Moorish tribes of the region to live for
the first time under direct colonial rule.
Although French and Spanish casualties in the campaign were
light (about a dozen killed and 50 wounded), the losses inflicted on
the Army of Liberation were much higher, and many of its members
were forced to settle in Morocco and elsewhere. The rebel movement,
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already suffering from grave internal dissension, completely disintegrated several months later. Freed from the guerrillas’ distractions,
Mokhtar Ould Daddah was able to hold the Congress of Aleg in May
1958, consolidating several disparate political tendencies in Mauritania into a new organization, the Parti de Regroupement Mauritanien (PRM), which was to lead the country to full independence from
France 18 months later, on 28 November 1960.
ORGANISATION POUR LA MISE EN VALEUR DU FLEUVE
SÉNÉGAL (OMVS). Founded on 29 October 1972, the Senegal
River Development Authority is an international organization comprising Mali, Mauritania, and Senegal; a fourth country, GuineaConakry, declined to participate at first but was admitted to membership in 1987. It was recognized by all OMVS members from the start
that although they derived enormous benefits from their proximity
to the Senegal River and its tributaries (often the origin of the only
water resources in the region), its usefulness for agriculture was
uncertain, because the seasonal flooding of the river, essential for
growing crops, was nearly wholly dependent on an uncertain climate, in particular the hivernage, which produced either excessive
inundation during wet years or none at all during droughts. Moreover, salt water from the Atlantic Ocean enters the Senegal River at
its outlet near St. Louis near the Senegal–Mauritania border, which
had adverse effects on freshwater fisheries as well as long-term soil
quality. Consequently, all three OMVS member states agreed to construct an elaborate and expensive series of dams and water channels
to regulate the flooding of the river, protect population centers such
as the Mauritanian border town of Kaédi from damage during the
wet season, and ensure that additional tracts of arable land would be
created over time. Mauritania, in particular, had a vested interest in
the creation of more farmland, because the process of desertification
had greatly reduced the proportion of its vast territory that was suitable for agriculture and livestock herding.
After a planning process that took several years, it was decided
to construct (with predominantly foreign funding) two major dams
and—in Mauritania’s case, smaller dams, canals, and reservoirs in
the southwest and south-central zones of the country, including on
the Gorgol River, the only significant tributary of the Senegal River
ORGANISATION POUR LA MISE EN VALEUR DU FLEUVE SÉNÉGAL
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inside Mauritanian boundaries. The first of the major projects, the
Diama Dam, was the more straightforward of the two. Located near a
Senegalese village about 50 kilometers inland from the Atlantic coast
at a point where the Senegal River was 400–500 meters wide, this
dam served the purpose of restricting the flow of salt water beyond it,
halting the degradation of the riverbed and the fertile surrounding soil
during periods of dry weather. The dam could also be used to regulate
the seasonal release of water to extend agricultural growing times
in Senegal’s province of Dagana as well as in Mauritania’s Trarza
province. The OMVS was able to open the Diama Dam in 1985, and
it, along with Mauritania’s own Gorgol River scheme, added roughly
30,000 hectares to the country’s stock of cultivable land. This project, like all those envisioned by the OMVS, cost its members dearly
in spite of extensive external financial participation, with Mauritania
paying $100 million for the Gorgol River dams alone.
By far the most contentious water regulation project in the region
was the Manantali Dam. Situated in Mali on the Bofing tributary of
the Senegal River about 250 kilometers south of the Malian town of
Kayes, this dam, when built, created a massive reservoir behind it,
allowing for the controlled release of water downstream and—as envisioned by its planners—creating an additional 400,000 hectares of
arable land in the territories of all three original OMVS participants.
From the beginning, the generation of electricity by hydroelectric
techniques was a key part of the project, although when the Manantali Dam was opened in 1988, it had no provision for power production. These facilities were only started in October 1992 and did not
come into full use until the early years of the 21st century.
From the start, it seems, the Manantali Dam did not live up to the
promises made by its promoters, and in fact it may have diminished
the quality both of human life and the natural environment in the
areas it encompassed. In a scathing report issued in early 1996, the
World Bank (a major financial backer of Manantali) stated that the
failure of the OMVS to periodically open the dam to allow flooding
downstream had deprived farmers of the opportunity to practice their
traditional growing methods, forcing them to switch to irrigation-based
techniques to grow rice and sugar. On the public health front, matters
were little short of disastrous, as the World Bank’s survey found that
the dam had caused the steady growth of bilharzia in the area, a disease
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ORGANISATION POUR LA MISE EN VALEUR DU FLEUVE SÉNÉGAL
that, while virtually absent from the region a decade earlier, had apparently infected nearly everyone in the riverine zone. The snails that
carried the disease could not breed in fast-moving river waters, but the
cessation of annual flooding meant that an abundance of stagnant water
was present, allowing the malady to spread. In the same vein, slowmoving pools of water allowed mosquitoes to breed, heightening the
incidence of malaria, while poor sanitation practices caused outbreaks
of dysentery and cholera. The World Bank threatened to suspend its
credits for the construction of electricity-generating turbines at the
dam site unless and until the problem was remedied, although it did
release money for that purpose in June 1997, evidently satisfied with
the OMVS’s response.
However, problems were not over for the Manantali Dam. In the
spring of 2001, Blue Nile Associates, a consultancy hired by the World
Bank to assess conditions at the dam, reached the startling conclusion
that the dam’s environmental and health consequences were causing
the deaths of more than 8,500 persons per year in Mali, Mauritania,
and Senegal, due to the combined effects of malnutrition and diseases
such as bilharzia and malaria. Reportedly, the head of Blue Nile said
that Manantali was “the worst” dam he had ever encountered in Africa, and according to the report, the politically more influential city
and town dwellers in all three countries decided that the dam would
be used first and foremost for electricity generation at the expense of
irrigation, which meant that the annual flow of water into the Senegal
River basin was far lower than expected, and that soils were acidifying and eroding as a result. Farmers felt, understandably, that the
promises of a better life made to them by the OMVS had been broken,
and many of them were heavily in debt for a variety of reasons. Blue
Nile also calculated that malnutrition levels in the region by 1994
were just as high as they had been in the drought-stricken 1970s and
1980s, and that bilharzia, unknown before 1986, was now endemic.
In spite of this, the hydroelectric aspect of Manantali went forward as
planned, with the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott, being connected
to the dam’s generators in November 2002 (three other Mauritanian
towns were scheduled to be connected to Manantali during 2003). By
2006, it was estimated that 15 percent of the dam’s electricity output
was going to Mauritania, 33 percent to Senegal, and 52 percent to
Mali. Manantali’s capacity was pegged at 200 megawatts of power,
ORGANISATION POUR LA MISE EN VALEUR DU FLEUVE SÉNÉGAL
• 379
at a monetary cost of $500 million and at a human toll that could not,
according to the World Bank, even begin to be tallied.
A third proposal by the OMVS (thought to have originated with
the Senegalese government) nearly brought Senegal and Mauritania
to blows in June 2000. The so-called Vallées Fossiles water diversion
project would have consisted of two channels extending from the
Senegal River and reaching into Senegal itself, the first being about
45 kilometers long and originating near the town of Bakel (opposite
the Mauritanian town of Gouraye), connecting with a tributary of
the Ferlo River, and the second being located about 125 kilometers
downstream at Matam, Senegal, and extending into the Lougguéré
Valley (a location of considerable paleontological significance,
hence the name for the overall project). Both canals would be linked
to existing water management projects inside Senegal and would reduce still further the flowage of water through the Senegal River that
would be available to Mauritanian agriculture. As could be expected,
the regime headed by President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya
was soon in an uproar over the plan, and succeeded—despite an offer
of financial aid by Taiwan—in inducing France’s international aid
agency to block any further funding for Vallées Fossiles in autumn
1997. This, however, was not the end of the story. Relations between
Mauritania and Senegal (as well as within the OMVS itself) became
much more rancorous over the following year—there were severe
disputes during 1997 over the number of each other’s nationals to be
allowed in the OMVS administration—and in January 1998, in an
extraordinary move, the Mauritanian authorities indicted Baba Ould
Sidi Abdallah, the OMVS’s high commissioner and a citizen of Mauritania, on charges of high treason. Allegedly, Ould Sidi Abdallah
had connived in the dismissals of other Mauritanians from the OMVS
and had acquiesced in the Vallées Fossiles scheme. If convicted, he
faced up to 20 years’ imprisonment.
At his trial in Nouakchott in August 1998, Ould Sidi Abdallah
mounted a vigorous defense with the assistance of at least 10 attorneys from Mauritania and other French-speaking nations, led by the
noted French lawyer Jacques Vergès. Interestingly, the defendant did
not deny that he supported the Vallées Fossiles water diversion plan,
but stated that, as an international civil servant, he was duty-bound
to make decisions in what he believed to be the best interests of the
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ORGANISATION POUR LA MISE EN VALEUR DU FLEUVE SÉNÉGAL
organization as a whole, not merely those of his home country. On
the controversial matter of OMVS personnel changes, Ould Sidi
Abdallah noted that six Senegalese and six Malians, as well as six
Mauritanians, had been dismissed by the organization at roughly
the same time, negating any accusations of discrimination against
Mauritanians. The court, clearly impressed by these arguments, acquitted Ould Sidi Abdallah of all charges after only a short period of
deliberation.
Mauritania having received assurances from the government of
Senegalese president Abdou Diouf that Vallées Fossiles had been
abandoned, the matter lay dormant from 1998 until June 2000, when
its suspicions that the project was about to be resuscitated, along with
allegations that Dakar was diverting more than its share of Senegal
River water generally, led directly to the Senegal–Mauritania incident, which for about a week threatened to become a reprise of the
destructive 1989–1990 Senegal–Mauritania crisis. Although outside
mediation swiftly brought the contretemps to an end, the incident was
a significant test for the new president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade,
who had been characterized as strongly anti-Mauritanian while in
opposition but who behaved with considerable restraint throughout
the duration of the problem. He stressed that Vallées Fossiles had
been definitively shelved, and promised President Ould Taya that the
short-lived crisis would not stand in the way of enhanced cooperation
between the two countries in the future.
Irrespective of the quite uneven results of the OMVS’s water
management plans, membership in the organization did have certain
political and foreign relations benefits for Mauritania. The OMVS
virtually forced Mauritania and Senegal to cooperate with one another on matters of mutual interest, formed a counterpoise of sorts to
Nouakchott’s ongoing Arabization programs, and served to anchor
the country at least to some degree in sub-Saharan Africa, although
President Ould Taya’s decision to withdraw from the Economic
Community of West African States (ECOWAS) put a considerable
dent in this as it oriented Mauritania even more strongly in the direction of Arab North Africa. Mauritania’s OMVS activities also symbolized the country’s commitment to purportedly improve the lives
of its non-Arab Black African citizens and so perhaps ameliorate the
country’s distinct ethnic, racial, and tribal cleavages.
OUALATA
• 381
OUALATA (variant: Walata). A small village in Mauritania’s extreme southeast administrative région of Hodh ech-Chargui and
located about 80 kilometers north of the larger town of Néma. Oualata
( population 11,779 in 2000) served as a key commercial crossroads
almost from the start of the recorded history of the area. By the ninth
century A.D., three Berber ethnic groupings, the Gadala, Lemtuna,
and Messufa, had established the Sanhadja Confederation and effectively controlled the trading caravans from the city of Sijilmasa in the
north to the Ghana Empire in the south. Oualata straddled the most efficient route between Sijilmasa and Ghana, and over time evolved into
a trading center in its own right. It also served as an assembly point
for Muslims setting out on the arduous pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca. In
the early 11th century, the Sanhadja Confederation lost its influence
after the introduction of a stricter form of Islam to northwest Africa
and was finally supplanted by the Almoravids after about 1035. Some
of the trading villages along the north–south route did not survive the
Sanhadja period, but Oualata continued to thrive, becoming a center
of Almoravid intellectual life and acquiring a large library of early
Islamic literature and a renowned Islamic school that survives to the
present day. Despite eventually coming to control a huge area extending from Senegal to Spain—and defeating the Ghana Empire along
the way—the Almoravids could not resist the entry of Arab influences
from the east and steadily declined in importance until their final collapse around 1150. In addition, trade routes were shifting away from
the interior and toward the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, where
Europeans were establishing themselves. By 1674, the year of the
formation of the Adrar, Brakna, Tagant, and Trarza Arab dynasties,
Oualata was becoming an increasingly remote provincial backwater,
connected to the rest of Mauritania only by unimproved roads.
In the late 1980s, Oualata suddenly became well known in a far
grimmer context. In September 1988, it was disclosed that 68 mainly
black Mauritanians were being imprisoned under extremely harsh
conditions at a former French fort just outside the town. Some were
members of the armed forces who had been convicted for taking part in an unsuccessful coup attempt hatched in October 1987
against President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, and the rest
were blacks who had been accused of association with the outlawed
Forces de Libération Africaine de Mauritanie (FLAM) and in
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OUALATA
particular helping to draft FLAM’s controversial pamphlet, Manifesto
du Négro-Mauritanien Opprimé. Reportedly, the prisoners were kept
chained for most of the day, subjected to a regimen of forced labor
in an almost unbearable climate, given little food and no medical
care, and regularly beaten by their guards. No communication with
relatives, friends, or legal counsel was allowed. By September 1988,
some inmates were so weak they could move about only by crawling,
and some had taken to eating grass and leaves fetched from the prison
grounds during exercise periods. The human rights organization,
Amnesty International, severely castigated Mauritania with respect to
Oualata. In a November 1989 report on the country, it stated that “it
appears that the cruel and inhuman treatment to which these prisoners
were subjected was inflicted deliberately as an additional, extrajudicial form of punishment, rather than by accident or as a result of the
inefficiency of the guards responsible for these prisoners.”
For at least four Oualata prisoners, the experience proved fatal. It
was alleged—and the government gradually confirmed—that deaths
at the prison had taken place. They included the following:
• Téné Youssouf Guèye, an internationally known, 60-year-old
writer, who came to Oualata with preexisting health problems
after having been convicted in September 1986 of being a
FLAM sympathizer. Serving a four-year term, he died in September 1988 of malnutrition and other causes.
• Bâ Alassane Omar, a black Mauritanian warrant officer serving
a life term for his alleged association with the October 1987
coup plot. He reportedly died on 28 August 1988.
• Abdul Ghandous Bâ, also associated with the events of October
1987, died on 13 September 1988.
• Djigo Tafsirou, an agricultural engineer and a former minister
of health who was convicted in 1986 of being a FLAM militant,
died on 27 September 1988.
The Ould Taya regime reacted to these disclosures by alleging
that at least two of the deaths did not take place at the prison itself,
but rather at a nearby hospital where the inmates were receiving
medical attention. In addition, the government began to allow visits
by journalists and other observers, and apparently punished some
OULD DAH AFFAIR
• 383
prison guards and officers. By early 1989, all of Oualata’s prisoners
had been transferred to another facility, with somewhat better conditions, located at Ayoun el-Atrouss, and the fortress at Oualata was
closed.
OUGUIYA (UM). From 30 June 1973 the primary unit of Mauritania’s
currency after the country’s withdrawal from the Communauté
Financière Africaine (CFA). The ouguiya underwent a steady devaluation after that time (and particularly during the 1990s) despite
at first having had a fixed valuation of 10 to 1 relative to the French
franc. In October 1995, the ouguiya’s exchange rate was about 133
per U.S. dollar, plummeting to 320.3 in March 2000, and recovering
somewhat to 271.5 in mid-2002, and to approximately 260 from 2005
to 2008. These successive devaluations were due to Mauritania’s
often-precarious economic situation as well as the recommendations
of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which advocated that
currencies of developing states not be of fixed valuation. A subunit of
the ouguiya, the khoum—worth one-fifth of one ouguiya—was also
introduced in 1973, but it rarely circulated after the 1980s.
The issuance of Mauritanian currency was the responsibility of
the Banque Centrale de Mauritanie (BCM), and by the early 21st
century there were coins in general use with values of 1, 5, 10, and 20
ouguiyas, and banknotes were circulated with denominations of 100,
200, 500, and 1,000 ouguiyas. By 2004, however, the BCM determined that the older notes, many in circulation for years, were thoroughly worn out and also vulnerable to counterfeiting. Consequently,
on 1 December 2004 the country embarked on a six-month program
to replace all existing notes with new, more secure paper currency.
All the old bills would no longer be legal tender after 31 May 2005,
and at the same time, a new note with a value of 2,000 ouguiyas was
introduced, in recognition of the ouguiya’s reduced worth.
OULD DAH AFFAIR. The severe human rights abuses committed
by the Mauritanian government headed by Col. Maaouiya Ould
Sid’Ahmed Taya between 1987 and 1991 left deep scars on the
country’s people, particularly those of non-Arab Black African
extraction, and, to a lesser extent, the formerly enslaved “Black
384 •
OULD DAH AFFAIR
Moors” or haratines. This period witnessed a dramatic upsurge in
the activities of the Forces de Libération Africaine de Mauritanie
(FLAM); persistent allegations of torture and arbitrary detention of
regime opponents; a series of deaths at the remote prison located at
Oualata; the allegedly forced expulsions of black Mauritanians during the 1989–1990 Senegal–Mauritania crisis; and, finally, an even
greater increase in extrajudicial activities during 1990 and 1991, in
which hundreds of Black Africans and others were either murdered
or badly mistreated in what some observers called a virtual massacre of suspected FLAM members in the country’s civil service and
armed forces. And while the search for justice and accountability
for the victims and survivors of these events led many to welcome
the advent of the ostensibly more democratic Mauritanian Second
Republic in April 1992, the following year saw the enactment of a
sweeping amnesty law, preventing the prosecution of any persons
responsible for human rights violations. This highly controversial
measure, passed by a legislature dominated by President Ould Taya’s
Parti Républicain, Démocratique et Social (PRDS), foreclosed
any proceedings inside Mauritania, but all during the 1990s, more
and more of Ould Taya’s opponents—victims of repression among
them—asked for (and often received) political asylum either in
Western Europe or North America, and over time formulated plans
to initiate legal action against certain Mauritanian officials from the
safety of their new homes.
One of the first known cases of attempted prosecution of an alleged human rights abuser was brought in February 1995, when Lt.Col. Areby Ould Jiddeye, a Mauritanian officer attending a training
course in France, was accused by several exiled citizens of having
had a role in their mistreatment. Rather than bow to their demands
that Ould Jiddeye be placed on trial for his reported misdeeds, the
French government merely permanently expelled him. But this
short-lived incident was just the harbinger of a far more serious
controversy that erupted on 3 July 1999, when, acting on a criminal
complaint filed by two black Mauritanians, a French magistrate sitting in Montpellier ordered the imprisonment of Capt. Ely Ould Dah
(a hartani officer), then attending a military exchange course in the
southern French city. This filing of charges was done pursuant to the
International Convention against Torture (to which France was a sig-
OULD DAH AFFAIR
• 385
natory) and had at its core the allegation that Ould Dah had tortured
the two complainants after they had been accused of complicity in a
plot to overthrow President Ould Taya in 1990 or 1991. The action
was specifically brought as a means of circumventing the 1993 Mauritanian amnesty law.
Mauritania’s response was swift. After issuing a harsh denunciation of France’s action, and after an appeal to President Jacques
Chirac was rejected, the country withdrew all 15 of the other army
officers it then had in France on similar exchange programs (and
soon after entered into an alternate arrangement with Spain for officer training), stating that the terms of the French–Mauritanian
officer exchanges precluded prosecution, and that in any event
the International Convention against Torture did not apply to the
Ould Dah case, because his alleged crimes were committed before
France’s signature was affixed to the treaty. Lowering the diplomatic
temperature somewhat, the French investigating magistrate (juge
d’instruction) decided on 28 September to conditionally release
Capt. Ould Dah from the Montpellier jail, but required him to remain
in the area and to regularly report to the authorities. This came as
a relief to many Mauritanians—and not just those who supported
President Ould Taya—but the leader of Action pour le Changement
(AC), Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, reinforcing his reputation as one
who was willing to challenge conventional wisdom, denounced the
French move, consistent with his longstanding position that those
responsible for human rights abuses should be prosecuted and the
1993 amnesty law be repealed.
In early 2000, what had already been a delicate foreign relations
problem for both Mauritania and France took a much more troubling
turn. On or about 4 April, Ely Ould Dah violated the terms of his
French parole and returned home with the almost certain complicity
of the Mauritanian government, impelled by the fact that not only
did the French judiciary show no signs of dismissing the charges,
but the original judge was making plans to visit Mauritania to gather
evidence. Captain Ould Dah knew he was safe from prosecution due
to the country’s amnesty legislation, and even made a defiant appearance on television just after his arrival. Even though the Montpellier
court issued an international arrest warrant for the absent defendant,
the case effectively came to an end. The political consequences,
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PACTE NATIONAL POUR LA DÉMOCRATIE ET LA DÉVELOPPEMENT
however, were not so swiftly overcome. French anger at President
Ould Taya’s regime was intense, and for a time the Mauritanian head
of state was obliged to modify his travel schedule so as to avoid any
meetings with President Chirac. Also, in what was universally believed to be a fit of pique on the part of the Mauritanian government,
an official of the French embassy in Nouakchott, Georges Gineste,
was expelled from the country based on the specious accusation of
having “facilitated” Ould Dah’s arrest in France, and for a brief time
visa requirements were imposed on French nationals visiting Mauritania. L’affaire Ould Dah (as the incident was soon dubbed) marked
a diplomatic rupture between two states that had formerly been the
closest of allies—and took the better part of two years to heal.
In May 2001, the Ould Dah case briefly rose to prominence once
more. A French magistrate, acting on the same 1999 criminal complaint, ruled that the prosecution of the accused army officer could
proceed in absentia, and warned that a guilty verdict would oblige
Mauritania to extradite him. But a week later, France’s foreign
minister, Hubert Védrine, arrived in Nouakchott to inform President
Ould Taya that military cooperation could resume as soon as Mauritania requested it (although this did not happen until July 2003) and
that the Ould Dah court case should be thought of as existing independently of the overall bilateral relationship. In September 2001,
Jacques Chirac and Maaouiya Ould Taya spoke with one another
for the first time since the eruption of the incident, and the French
defense minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, paid a visit to Mauritania on
6 September 2002 to stress the “excellent” ties between them. The
attempted prosecution of Ely Ould Dah thereafter receded into the
background, but it still had the potential to reemerge in the future,
and in any event would continue to serve as a precedent for the handling of human rights violations in Africa and elsewhere under as-yet
largely untested legal theories of universal jurisdiction.
–P–
PACTE NATIONAL POUR LA DÉMOCRATIE ET LA DÉVELOPPEMENT (PNDD). After several months of preparation, a
new political party, the National Alliance for Democracy and
PACTE NATIONAL POUR LA DÉMOCRATIE ET LA DÉVELOPPEMENT
• 387
Development, was established on 5 January 2008 by the supporters
of Mauritania’s elected civilian president, Sidi Mohamed Ould
Cheikh Abdellahi. Intended to serve as an umbrella grouping of
sorts for all those political groupings and ostensibly independent
personalities who had backed Ould Abdellahi in his successful
bid in early 2007 to become head of state, the proposed new party
attracted instant and vehement opposition from those politicians
who had, for one reason or another, been largely shunted to the
sidelines after the inauguration of the Mauritanian Third Republic
on 19 April 2007. Critics, for example, pointed to the amendments
to the constitution of Mauritania of 20 July 1991 that forbade a
president from simultaneously serving as the leader of any political
group, and the fact that President Ould Abdellahi’s close friend and
colleague, Yahya Ould Ahmed el-Waghef, was chosen to lead the
PNDD was a thinly disguised tactic to evade this prohibition. More
broadly, opponents of the formation of the party saw history repeating itself; namely, the strong possibility that the PNDD would over
time become an organization such as President Mokhtar Ould
Daddah’s Parti du Peuple Mauritanien (PPM), which was the
sole legal party in the country from 1964 to 1978, and especially
President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya’s Parti Républicain,
Démocratique et Social (PRDS), which exercised a de facto monopoly on the political scene during the 1992-2005 Second Republic. In their view, the PNDD could not help but become a vehicle
for the perpetuation of influence by Ould Abdellahi and his backers
by virtue of being the eventual recipient of disproportionate state
resources and patronage.
Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, the speaker of the Assemblée Nationale and the leader of the Alliance Populaire Progressiste (APP),
stated that “although I support party pluralism in principle . . . the establishment of a party that will succeed the former Republican Party
(i.e., the PRDS) is, to me, a serious threat to the future of democracy
in this country. It would even put an end to the democratic dream that
the simple citizen has always had.” Saleh Ould Hanena, a former
officer in the armed forces who lead the unsuccessful coup attempt
of 8–9 June 2003 against President Ould Taya and who was still politically active, was equally blunt. “The governing authorities should
have instead focused on changing some of the desperate conditions of
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PARC NATIONAL DU BANC D’ARGUIN
our people” rather than setting up the PNDD, he said. “In fact, the recreation of this party (referring to the PRDS), with its mechanisms,
philosophy, and figures from the old era, is some sort of re-living of
the past which got us to the point that we all know. We consider that
to be a real threat to democracy.” Ahmed Ould Daddah, another
veteran politician, was likewise critical, and Mustapha Ould Bédredine, a fourth opposition personality, pointed out that the probable
PNDD leader, Ould el-Waghef, was serving as secretary-general to
the Mauritanian presidency at the time, making it almost impossible
for the regime to claim that the new party was truly independent.
Ould el-Waghef, however, stated in the autumn of 2007 that he and
President Ould Abdellahi would not be deterred by these protests,
saying that “the majority is determined to form its political party
regardless of the fears and concerns of the opposition.” Once established, it immediately became a strong competitor to the opposition
groups that commanded substantial representation on the national
legislative level as well as on Mauritania’s provincial and local
governing bodies. A total of 93 members of the National Assembly
and the Senate joined the party, including most of the independent
deputies who had emerged victorious in the parliamentary elections
of 19 November and 3 December 2006. Twenty other propresidential
political parties, some of them admittedly miniscule, also essentially
merged themselves with the PNDD. And although the party’s electoral possibilities remained untested by late 2008, a major sign of the
consolidation of authority around the PNDD and the office of the
president came on 6 May 2008, when prime minister Zeine Ould
Zeidane was dismissed and replaced with Ould el-Waghef, the erstwhile PNDD founding chairman.
PARC NATIONAL DU BANC D’ARGUIN. The Banc d’Arguin
National Park was established in 1974 and encompasses about
12,000 square kilometers along Mauritania’s Atlantic coastline, approximately halfway between Nouakchott and Nouadhibou near
the improved road linking the two cities, which was completed in
2004. The park comprises an arid inland area, many islands, a shallow coastal zone that extends some 60 kilometers from shore, and a
mangrove swamp covering some 3,100 hectares, the latter being an
uncommon remnant of a much earlier time when a considerably more
PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS
• 389
humid climate was the norm throughout the region. The park is also
noted for its great biodiversity. Several million wintering birds are
believed to migrate through the Banc d’Arguin each autumn on their
way to and from Europe and North America. At least 100 species of
birds have been identified, with estimates of the total extending to
250, including flamingoes, pelicans, and herons. As far as other animals are concerned, jackals, hyenas, foxes, cats, seals, and dolphins
are all found there. Finally, there is much to occupy the attention of
archaeologists, as vestiges of both the Neolithic period and the Almoravid Empire exist, mainly on various islands.
In 2008, the park was permanently inhabited only by 1,500 or so
Imraguen fishermen, who lived in the nearby village of Nouamghar;
aside from this, all commercial activity was prohibited. The nearly
pristine character of the area was recognized by the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a
World Heritage Site in 1989, and in March 2001 the Mauritanian government ceremonially donated the park as a “Gift to the World,” with
the then-prime minister, Cheikh el-Avia Ould Mohamed Khouna,
making the donation to UNESCO, the World Wide Fund for Wildlife,
the World Conservation Union, and the International Foundation for
the Banc d’Arguin. Because of its international profile, great natural
beauty, and relative ease of access from Mauritania’s capital city and
from its main economic center, the park was expected to continue to
account for a large share of the country’s tourist income.
PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS (of 19 November and 3 December 2006). The military coup d’état of 3 August 2005, which
toppled the increasingly authoritarian and unpopular government
headed by President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya and installed
in his place the Conseil Militaire pour la Justice et la Démocratie (CMJD) led by the director of national security, Col. Ely Ould
Mohamed Vall, led many Mauritanians to fear for the future of
their political system, given that the so-called Second Republic had
been abolished and the two houses of the country’s legislature, the
Assemblée Nationale and the Senate, had been disbanded. On the
other hand, there were distinct differences between the 2005 coup
and a similar one in July 1978, which had ushered in a period of rule
by the armed forces that lasted nearly 14 years. In the first place,
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the Mauritanian constitution of 20 July 1991 was not suspended, the
political parties existing at the time of Ould Taya’s overthrow were
not banned, and the independent (and often-censored) newspapers
were still allowed to publish. In addition, the CMJD took pains from
the beginning to proclaim its intention to relinquish power within two
years as soon as new elections for both parliament and the presidency
could be held, and that no CMJD member (including Col. Ould Vall)
would be permitted to seek office. Ten months after the coup, the
new regime signified its intentions to revamp Mauritania’s political
life by submitting to a popular referendum on 24 June 2006 a series
of amendments to the 1991 constitution, the main thrust of which was
to restrict all future presidents to two five-year terms and prohibit
them from simultaneously serving in any other position, including as
head of any political party.
Even before the referendum on the constitution, planning was
underway for the new parliament. As had been the case under President Ould Taya, the Ministry of the Interior was slated to conduct
the actual balloting, but this time its work would be supervised by
a National Independent Electoral Commission, which, although its
members were appointed directly by the CMJD (and it was headed
by retired Col. Cheikh Sid’Ahmed Ould Babamine), held out some
hope that the elections would be conducted in a transparent manner.
Also, foreign observer missions would be welcomed into the country
during the elections, something that had not always been the case
under the Ould Taya regime, particularly in its later years. In a fateful
step that would have clear repercussions later on, though, the CMJD
broke with longstanding practice and decided to allow independent
(i.e., not party-affiliated) candidates to stand for the National Assembly and the Senate—formerly, all those seeking parliamentary seats
had been required to have the imprimatur of a legal political group.
In an early sign that the decision to allow independent candidates
(which the opposition parties strongly opposed) would result in a
strong degree of continuity with the former government, many members of the former ruling group under President Ould Taya, the Parti
Républicain, Démocratique et Social (PRDS)—which had by now
been renamed the Parti Républicain pour la Démocratie et le Rénouveau (PRDR)—left the organization in order to stand for election to
parliament ostensibly on their own, which had the effect of reinforc-
PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS
• 391
ing the regional, tribal/ethnic, and patrimonial trends inside Mauritanian society as a whole. The unofficial leader of the independent
candidates was Lemrabott Sidi Mahmoud Ould Cheikh Ahmed,
President Ould Taya’s controversial interior minister between 2001
and 2005. By late October 2006, 441 people had declared their intention to run, with a total of 25 political parties seeking to take part in
the balloting. All candidates who did not receive an absolute majority
of the votes in the first (19 November) round of the elections would
a runoff between the two persons receiving the highest number of
votes, to be held on 3 December.
The parliamentary elections passed largely without incident. Voter
turnout was a respectable 75 percent, and the procedures were free
and fair in the opinion of both domestic observers and European and
North American monitors. The results were probably to the liking of
the military establishment and the former PRDS. The independent
candidates—who were widely thought to represent the former ruling
party, conservative rural interests, moderate Islamic tendencies, or
some combination of the three—won fully 54 of the 95 seats in the reconstituted National Assembly. Next in line, 15 seats were gained by
the Rassemblement des Forces Démocratiques (RFD), led by veteran opposition leader Ahmed Ould Daddah, far more than it or its
banned predecessor, the Union des Forces Démocratiques (UFD),
had ever received under President Ould Taya’s Second Republic. The
Coalition des Forces pour la Changement Démocratique (CFCD), an
eight-party grouping made up of the RFD as well as Messaoud Ould
Boulkheir’s Alliance Populaire Progressiste (APP), received a total
of 14 seats over and above those won by the RFD itself. Seven seats
were won by the PRDR; three seats each were gained by two progovernment groups, the Rassemblement pour la Démocratie et l’Unité
(RDU) and the Union pour le Progrès et la Démocratie (UPD);
four seats went to Saleh Ould Hanena’s Parti Mauritanienne pour
la Unité et le Changement (PMUC), a party formerly known as Les
Cavaliers pour le Changement; and one seat was awarded to the
Front Populaire (FP), a small group run by a prominent political-religious figure, Mohamed Lemine Ch’bih Ould Cheikh Melainine.
Seven other seats went to three other relatively new groups. Elections
for the municipal councils in Mauritania’s 208 arrondissements,
held at the same time, went even better for the opposition parties and
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correspondingly less so for the independents. Control of 63 percent
of the councils was won by the CFCD coalition, marking a notable
reverse for the PRDR, which, when it was known as the PRDS, had
little difficulty (outside of Nouakchott and a few other places) maintaining a stranglehold on local affairs.
Elections for the Mauritanian Senate were also held in two phases,
on 21 January and 4 February 2007. This round of balloting did not
generate nearly the level of interest as that for the National Assembly, because voting was restricted to mayors of cities and towns and
members of municipal councils. Once again, independent candidates
did well, winning 34 out of 52 contests, with the CFCD opposition
receiving 15 seats and the PRDR, 3. One constituency had the results
of its senatorial election annulled by the Mauritanian Constitutional
Council, while three additional seats were reserved for those citizens
of the country residing abroad; they were to be filled at a later time.
In a strong indication of at least some degree of continuity with the
former administration, it was revealed that of the independents in the
Senate, two seats were held by the wives of CMJD members, while
three more were won by brothers of serving members of the ruling
army committee. Most CMJD members, incidentally, retained their
positions in the armed forces after the advent of civilian government
and the retirement of Col. Ould Vall.
The parliamentary elections of late 2006 were a prelude to the
presidential election of 11 and 25 March 2007, which in the first
round pitted 20 candidates against one another and in the second
round matched Ahmed Ould Daddah against a newcomer to Mauritanian politics, Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdellahi. Ould Abdellahi triumphed on 25 March by a narrow margin and on 19 April
2007 was inaugurated as the first head of state of the Mauritanian
Third Republic.
PARTI DE JUSTICE MAURITANIENNE (PJM). A small, clandestine political party formed in 1974 at a time of unprecedented opposition to the single-party rule of President Mokhtar Ould Daddah’s
Parti du Peuple Mauritanien (PPM). The Party of Mauritanian
Justice was somewhat more conservative than its counterparts within
the country at the time and favored a federative arrangement among
Mauritania, Senegal, and Morocco as a way of tackling various
PARTI DE REGROUPEMENT MAURITANIEN
• 393
problems of economic development. It also favored a greater role for
Islam in public life and condemned the PPM’s monopoly of political authority. Always a group with very limited influence, the PJM
survived into the early 1980s as one of the several component parts of
the exiled Alliance pour une Mauritanie Démocratique (AMD).
PARTI DE L’AVANT-GARDE NATIONALE (PAGN). See ARAB
BAATH SOCIALIST PARTY (ABSP).
PARTI DE REGROUPEMENT MAURITANIEN (PRM). In May
1958, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, the leader of the Union Progressiste
Mauritanienne (UPM), decided to reconcile the various political
tendencies in Mauritania and form a single, inclusive organization
that would add credibility to the country’s quest for independence
from France, and—not coincidentally—increase his own chances
of acquiring predominant political authority. In a coup de grâce that
manifested considerable political skill, Ould Daddah, at the Congress of Aleg, persuaded the UPM, the Entente Mauritanienne,
and the black nationalist Bloc Démocratique du Gorgol (BDG) to
abandon their separate identities and form the Mauritanian Regroupment Party. Although it was nominally headed by Sidi el-Mokhtar
N’Diaye, Ould Daddah exerted decisive influence in the party
through his post as secretary-general.
The platform of the PRM was strongly nationalistic. It rejected
both Morocco’s territorial claim to Mauritania and all proposals for
a federation or merger of the country with any other state. The PRM,
however, did favor joining the French Community once Mauritanian
independence was achieved, thereby placating traditional Francophile elements within both the Entente and the UPM. The party also
insisted upon a political balance between the Moorish tribes of the
north and the Black Africans who lived in or near the Senegal River
Valley. To ensure the fulfillment of all these policy positions, Ould
Daddah set up local PRM party committees open to any citizen, but
these were only a fiction, as mainly older and more conservative
ex-UPM politicians continued to exercise real power. Moreover, the
PRM soon showed signs of authoritarianism, expelling, at a party
congress in Nouakchott in July 1958, its more radical, anti-French,
and Arab nationalist members, who just two months later—in a blow
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PARTI DES KHADIHINES DE MAURITANIE
to the unity that Ould Daddah had sought to achieve—set up the
Nadha Party (An-Nadha al-Wataniyya al-Mauritaniya), which
soon obtained considerable popular backing. Undaunted, the future
Mauritanian head of state managed to engineer an overwhelming
vote in favor of membership in the French Community after independence (getting a reported 302,018 votes in favor to only 19,126
opposed in balloting held on 28 September 1958), afterward adopting
a more flexible attitude toward France and revamping the structure
and functioning of the PRM.
Soon after these changes, Ould Daddah proclaimed the existence
of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania in October 1958. By this time,
fortuitously, support for Nadha had greatly declined, and the PRM
was able to capture all 40 seats in elections to the Assemblée Nationale, although this victory was not achieved without the proscription
of all non-PRM political activity and the tight control by Ould Daddah
loyalists of the electoral lists. After the attainment of Mauritanian
independence on 28 November 1960, most of the country’s politicians rallied behind Mokhtar Ould Daddah, who reciprocated their
support by naming Nadha members to his Conseil des Ministres in
September 1961. The following month (on 4 October), Ould Daddah
organized the Congress of Unity, which merged the remnants of
Nadha, the Union Nationale Mauritanienne (UNM), and the Union
Socialiste des Musulmans Mauritaniens (USMM) into another new
political organization, the Parti du Peuple Mauritanien (PPM).
PARTI DES KHADIHINES DE MAURITANIE (PKM). The Proletarian Party of Mauritania, a small and clandestine Marxist-Leninist
movement, was founded in 1973 at a time when public discontent was
increasing with the policies of President Mokhtar Ould Daddah,
whose conservative outlook had alienated many younger Mauritanians. The Khadihine Party advocated the overthrow of Ould Daddah’s
“feudal” and “imperialist” government, but somewhat paradoxically,
blended a Marxist platform with a denunciation of Ould Daddah for
not adhering to the precepts of Islam. The PKM also criticized the
monopolization of Mauritanian political life by the Parti du Peuple
Mauritanien (PPM) and urged the legalization of multiple political parties and trade and youth associations. From time to time, the
Khadihine Party was loosely allied with the larger and more moder-
PARTI DU PEUPLE MAURITANIEN
• 395
ate Mouvement National Démocratique (MND), which had been
set up in 1968 as an “umbrella” organization with various tendencies
contained within it. Never well-organized and with only a thin base
of popular support, the PKM fell into rapid decline after about 1975,
although elements of the group were later to be affiliated with the
exiled Alliance pour une Mauritanie Démocratique (AMD) in the
early 1980s. A prominent PKM leader, Mustapha Ould Obeidrahmane, went on to enjoy a successful business career in the 1990s
before emerging as a moderate-to-conservative political figure in the
early 21st century.
PARTI DU PEUPLE MAURITANIEN (PPM). Known commonly in
Arabic as the Hizb ech-Chaab al-Moritany, the Mauritanian People’s
Party was established under the guidance of President Mokhtar
Ould Daddah at the Congress of Unity in October 1961, less than a
year after the country’s independence from France. At the congress,
a wide variety of political tendencies, including Ould Daddah’s
own Parti de Regroupement Mauritanien (PRM), An-Nadha alWataniyya al-Mauritaniya (Nadha), the Union Nationale Mauritanienne (UNM), and the small Union Socialiste des Musulmans
Mauritaniens (USMM), were merged to form the PPM. This was
evidence not only of Mokhtar Ould Daddah’s skill at co-opting his
opponents, but also of the effects of his insistence that only a single
political party could preserve the unity of the fledgling nation. On
25 December 1961—just two months after the Congress of Unity—
the PPM was designated the country’s sole legal political grouping,
which meant that any dissent from President Ould Daddah’s policies
could come only from within the party.
Although the PPM was ostensibly democratic, in the sense that all
its leaders and governing bodies were elected, the reality was quite
different. The lack of any legal opposition and the screening of all
candidates by the president and his protégés made democracy little
more than a fiction. In practice, most decision making was entrusted
to the Bureau Politique National (BPN), a small, dedicated group
of Ould Daddah loyalists who gradually took over many state, as well
as party, functions. Below the BPN were locally based committees
in each of the cercles (later, régions) of the country, with all of them
meeting periodically in a “federation” that was firmly subordinate to
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PARTI DU PEUPLE MAURITANIEN
the BPN. The PPM also demonstrated from an early date its determination to reach into other facets of Mauritanian life. The Union
des Travailleurs Mauritaniens (UTM) and the Union National des
Femmes Mauritaniennes (UNFM), respectively the state trade union
and the main women’s organization, were soon operating under the
PPM banner.
On 28–29 January 1964, another major step was taken on the
PPM’s path to becoming a virtually dictatorial “vanguard” party under the control of President Ould Daddah. At the Kaédi Conference,
which was held under stringent security conditions and bypassed the
Assemblée Nationale set up under the 1961 Mauritanian constitution, Ould Daddah delivered a stern lecture to the PPM’s most reliable members, warning them of the dangers of “electoralism” (that
is, trading votes for favors in the legislature) and castigating them
for their alleged unresponsiveness to public opinion. Henceforth,
every deputy in the National Assembly (which also had its separate
budget abolished) would be selected from an approved list, relegating the country’s parliament, a hotbed of opposition, to the sidelines.
Moreover, each member of parliament, as well as every government
employee and PPM member, would be required to submit—before
taking up his or her post—an undated letter of resignation that the
head of state could invoke at will.
After the Kaédi Conference, state and party were almost entirely
merged. National policies, including those affecting the country’s
economy, foreign relations, and such issues as Arabization in
the educational sphere, were formulated by Mokhtar Ould Daddah
and his trusted assistants with no popular consultation. The PPM’s
monopoly of power did not, however, ensure long-term social harmony. By the late 1960s, the continued control of a large part of the
Mauritanian economy by France caused massive protests and the
formation of illegal opposition political parties. Although President
Ould Daddah effectively overcame this instability by the early 1970s
through a combination of repression, “radical” public pronouncements, and the nationalization of the French-dominated iron ore
mining consortium, Mauritania did not become more democratic
as a result, because the PPM was by now nearly coterminous with
the state bureaucracy, and Ould Daddah’s reelection in a series of
pro forma exercises was always a foregone conclusion. With regard
PARTI MAURITANIEN POUR LE RÉNOUVEAU
• 397
to the adjacent Spanish colony of Western Sahara, the PPM was
similarly subservient. After President Ould Daddah had decided in
principle to annex the southern one-third of the territory while ceding
to Morocco’s King Hassan II the remainder, the PPM, at its Fourth
Congress, held in Nouakchott on 15–20 August 1975, endorsed
Ould Daddah’s “wise and lucid policy pursued with a view to the
liberation and return to the mother country that part of our national
territory which is still occupied.”
By this action, however, the PPM had ensured that its days would
thenceforth be numbered. The Western Sahara conflict between the
Mauritanian armed forces and the guerrillas of the Polisario Front
(who demanded an independent Western Sahara) nearly destroyed the
country’s fragile export-based economy and caused the resurgence of
the social tensions that the Mauritanian People’s Party had sought to
submerge. In the midst of punishing Polisario attacks on Mauritanian
targets, President Ould Daddah was overthrown on 10 July 1978, in
a bloodless coup mounted by disaffected army officers. The PPM
was immediately outlawed, as was all other political activity. Many
PPM officials, like Mokhtar Ould Daddah himself, eventually wound
up in exile, where they were a significant force in the ranks of the
opposition Alliance pour une Mauritanie Démocratique (AMD)
in the 1980s.
PARTI MAURITANIEN POUR LE RÉNOUVEAU (PMR). A
small yet resilient opposition political party, the Mauritanian
Renewal Party was founded in 1991 amid an unprecedented liberalization of Mauritania’s internal affairs undertaken by President
Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya. Unlike many of its opposition
counterparts, the PMR chose not to boycott the March 1992 parliamentary elections after Ould Taya emerged victorious in the January
presidential balloting, but ended up with only one seat in an Assemblée Nationale dominated by the head of state’s Parti Républicain,
Démocratique et Social (PRDS), a position it moreover had lost
by October 1996. In the early 1990s, Mohammed Khouna Ould
Heydallah, a former colonel in the Mauritanian armed forces who
had served as the country’s president between 1980 and 1984, was
active in the affairs of the PMR, but Ould Heydallah gradually drifted
away from the party later in the decade, allowing the leadership of
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PARTI RÉPUBLICAIN, DÉMOCRATIQUE ET SOCIAL
the group to be assumed by Moulay el-Hacen Ould Jiyed, a mining
engineer from Atar. Ould Jiyed, in fact, soon proved himself to be
a persistent candidate for the presidency, running against Ould Taya
in December 1997 but winning only 8,165 votes (0.93 percent of the
total). He once more challenged the by-now firmly entrenched leader
on 7 November 2003, when he performed only marginally better, getting 9,909 votes, a mere 1.5 percent of the total ballots cast.
In between Ould Jiyed’s 1997 and 2003 candidacies, the PMR had
openly aligned itself with the ruling PRDS (like several other opponents of President Ould Taya). However, on 15 June 2001, one day
after prominent Mauritanian dissident (and fellow onetime presidential aspirant) Mohamed Lemine Ch’bih Ould Cheikh Melainine
was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment on what were widely
thought to be trumped-up charges of collaborating with Libya and
other foreign interests, Ould Jiyed announced that the PMR would
no longer be allied with the government, saying that the experience
had been “negative” and that his group would henceforth participate
in local and parliamentary elections as an alternative to the regime
in power. After the coup d’état of 3 August 2005, which unseated
President Ould Taya and installed a temporary military government
in his place, the PMR remained active, participating in the first round
of the presidential election of 11 and 25 March 2007. However,
the party’s candidate, Rajel dit Rachid Moustaph, received only
1,977 votes—just 0.27 percent of the total. Ould Jiyed, the former
PMR leader, also ran for president under another party’s banner, but
he also did poorly, winning 2,535 votes, only 0.34 percent of the
794,979 ballots cast.
PARTI RÉPUBLICAIN, DÉMOCRATIQUE ET SOCIAL (PRDS).
The Republican and Democratic Social Party, Mauritania’s paramount political organization from the inception of the country’s
Second Republic until August 2005. The PRDS was founded on
25 August 1991, a few months after President Maaouiya Ould
Sid’Ahmed Taya announced that for the first time since Mauritanian
independence in 1960, multiple political parties would be permitted
to function and that contestable elections would be held for the presidency and a bicameral legislative branch. From the beginning, Ould
Taya maintained a tight grip on the party, although it was nominally
PARTI RÉPUBLICAIN, DÉMOCRATIQUE ET SOCIAL
• 399
led from 1991 to 1996 by Cheikh Sid’Ahmed Ould Baba, a former
interior minister, foreign minister, former armed forces officer, and
personal friend of the president. Moreover, from 1996 to 2001 the
party’s secretary-generalship (as opposed to the party presidency,
which was always held by the head of state), was in the hands of
another Ould Taya loyalist, former prime minister Sidi Mohamed
Ould Boubacar.
As the PRDS candidate for president in the election held on 17
January 1992, Maaouiya Ould Taya easily triumphed over all his
rivals, and, aided by a boycott of the March–April 1992 balloting for
the Mauritanian Assemblée Nationale and Senate by the main opposition group, Ahmed Ould Daddah’s Union des Forces Démocratiques (UFD), the PRDS swept those elections as well, winning 67
of the 79 seats in the National Assembly and 36 of 56 places in the
Senate. From this time forward, many opposition figures claimed that
a PRDS victory was a virtually foregone conclusion in most areas of
the country, given its alignment with the president and its resultant
access to extensive sources of funding and dedicated personnel. Two
years later, these suspicions were seemingly confirmed when the party
prevailed outright in all but 36 (of 208) arrondissements throughout
Mauritania, although in régions where large numbers of black Mauritanians lived—such as Brakna, Gorgol, and Guidimaka—memories
of the human rights violations committed by the government during
the 1989–1990 Senegal–Mauritania crisis were still fresh and voters
were thus more friendly to non-PRDS groups throughout the 1990s.
From April 1994 (when the PRDS captured all but 1 of the 17 contested senatorial seats in the biennial elections to that body) to 2001
and 2004, when it garnered 64 of the 81 seats in the National Assembly and 45 of 54 seats in the Senate, respectively, the PRDS was
never threatened with serious competition by any rival group, and thus
posed few parliamentary obstacles to the execution of any of President
Ould Taya’s policies, whether domestic (primarily with respect to the
economy) or in the area of foreign relations.
In addition, the party was greatly strengthened by the great amount
of dissension in the ranks of the UFD and over time was able to count
on the support of certain other groups, which would sometimes offer
candidates for various parliamentary seats in alliance with the PRDS.
For example, the Rassemblement pour la Démocratie et l’Unité
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(RDU), also set up in 1991, was aligned with the PRDS virtually
from the beginning of the democratization process, and dissatisfaction with the UFD brought some of that party’s members into the
PRDS fold as well, particularly in the 1993–1996 time frame. Two
other parties formerly opposed to the Ould Taya regime, Hamdi
Ould Mouknass’s Union pour le Progrès et la Démocratie (UPD)
and a smaller organization, the Parti Mauritanien pour le Rénouveau (PMR), also rallied to the ruling party between 1997 and
1999. The PMR, however, left the presidential coalition in June 2001
after the conviction and jailing (on dubious charges) of Mohamed
Lemine Ch’bih Ould Cheikh Melainine, a prominent opposition
leader who had performed fairly well in elections against President
Ould Taya in 1997.
For all its apparent power and influence at the highest levels of
government, the PRDS in reality never superseded the state bureaucracy, which the president supervised intensively. Nor was the party
immune from the various political and social currents affecting Mauritania gen