Mauritania

Junta promises new elections

Article published on the 2008-08-07 Latest update 2008-08-07 14:42 TU

General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, in an undated photo.
(Photo : AFP)

The military council that deposed Mauritanian President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi Wednesday promised to hold “free and transparent” elections as soon as possible, in a statement read over national radio Thursday. Meanwhile, governments from around the world condemned the military coup.

“These elections, which will be held in the shortest possible period, will be free and transparent and will bring for the future a continued and harmonious functioning of all constitutional powers,” the statement said.

Mauritania is now run by an eleven-member military council, led by the former head of the Presidential Guard, General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, the statement specified.

The African Union was quick to condemn the coup Wednesday. The EU and the US have issued statements against it, as has UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Abdallahi was ousted after he tried to fire several army officers accused of orchestrating a political crisis. Military convoys that rolled into the capital, Nouakchott, Wednesday morning arrested the president, closed the airport and took control of national television and radio, without a shot being fired. The president continues to be held by the Presidential Guard.

The military has had a role in the government since independence in 1960 and political scientist and activist Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou told RFI that Abdellahi provoked the soldiers by confronting them.

“The President brought it upon himself,” he says.

Mohamedou thinks that the coup leaders can be trusted to restore democratic rule quickly.

“General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz and his colleagues were the members of the military committee for justice and democracy, which in 2005 had taken the country through two years of democratisation," he points out. "So there’s no indication – unless they’ve changed their ways and minds – that this would not follow the same path they engaged upon previously.”

Other political observers aren’t so confident of the military’s good intentions.

“The military, when they took power, promised to usher in a democracy, but they really had in mind something different,” Professor Boubacar N'diayé of the Wooster College, in Ohio, USA, told RFI.

“The transition was conducted in such a manner that they thought that they would just bring in someone and be able to manipulate him from a distance," he says. "I think that President Ould Abdallahi did not understand the dynamics of power. He thought that he could just be in power and ignore the military. Clearly that was a fatal mistake.”

Abdellahi's decree to sack the officers, “was more than a mistake, it was very naive on his part. They [the military] saw it as a provocation, and decided to take action against him,” N'diayé explained.

Local NGO director Nana Tanku condemned the military action and called it a setback to the democratic progress made by the country.

“There are processes of addressing any grievances that people may have," she told RFI. "It’s such a shame that Mauritania is going back to a coup,”

Tanku's Open Society Initiative for West Africa is calling for external intervention in Mauritania.