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| Mauritania
Mauritania, an impoverished nation spanning the vast, semi-arid Sahel between North and sub-Saharan Africa, was the site of a military coup in August 2005. The international community initially condemned the coup, but the US, Europe and African neighbors have steadily warmed to the new junta’s promises of full restoration of constitutional rule, as well as “free and fair” elections, by March 2007.
The officers overthrew a deeply disliked president, Maaouiya Ould Taya, who himself had seized power by force in 1984. Taya’s regime, never tolerant of political opposition, overreached in the age of the global war on terrorism, for instance, trying to censor Muslim clerics’ sermons and accusing Islamist dissidents of ties to al-Qaeda. The regime’s opponents saw these measures as attempts to curry favor with Washington, since Mauritania has enlisted in the Pentagon’s Pan-Sahel Initiative to interdict radical Islamists hiding in the trackless expanse. These tensions, together with the regime’s unpopular opening of diplomatic relations with Israel in 1999, formed the backdrop to the coup’s success, though the new junta has not altered either policy.
Mauritania’s population is roughly divided into three parts: Arabs, black Africans belonging to tribal groups like the Bambara and Wolof, and the Arabic-speaking Haratine, who have black African ancestry. The Haratine are the most numerous. Under Taya, the Arab-identified state greatly intensified its campaign to “Arabize” the country, clearing black Africans out of the army and civil service and, in 1989, expelling some 100,000 black Africans into Senegal and Mali.
The Taya regime repeatedly denied the persistence of slavery, the practice of which black Africans are the main victims, and decried the efforts of Mauritanian human rights activists to expose the issue internationally. The new junta has been unreceptive to concerns about black African displacement and enslavement—even as the officers reiterate their promises to bring electoral democracy to Mauritania.
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