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Mauritania

Did Marty Peretz care about the politics of Mauritania until someone pointed out to him that he could use it as a cudgel with which to bash Arabs?  My guess would be no.  Incidentally, how did the “new democracy” of Mauritania come about?  It was the result of a military coup overthrowing the former tyrannical […]

Did Marty Peretz care about the politics of Mauritania until someone pointed out to him that he could use it as a cudgel with which to bash Arabs?  My guess would be no.  Incidentally, how did the “new democracy” of Mauritania come about?  It was the result of a military coup overthrowing the former tyrannical ruler, Taya, who had been more or less “our” man in Nouakchott (if you can imagine such a thing).  This paved the way for the elections that put Abdallahi in power. 

In other words, Mauritanian “democracy,” such as it is, came about initially through non-democratic means and arose out of opposition to a pro-Washington regime, which would seem to make nonsense out of most democratist notions of how U.S.-led democratisation is supposed to work.  The good news is that Mauritania might provide an example of a nation in Africa handling its own internal problems, which is one more argument against meddling in the internal affairs of other African countries.  The bad news, if you like, is that all of this talk about “democracy” in Mauritania is as meaningless as it was when it was being used about Kyrgyzstan.  The causes of past cruelties against the black African population in Mauritania have not been eliminated.  As the leader of the Forces de liberation africaines de Mauritanie puts it:

What is going on [in Mauritania] is neither democracy nor its ‘cousin.’ It is nothing but an evolution of the mechanisms of distribution of power among the Arab-Berber tribes. We have gone from coups d’etat… to tribal alliances with a democratic unction, so as not to alienate the international community… 

Who would have guessed that you cannot establish functioning democracy in tribal societies?  Shocking! 

President Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdallahi attends a rally in Nouakchott, Mauritania March 8, 2007. Abdallahi took over from a military junta as Mauritania's civilian head of state on Thursday, and won a U.S. pledge of closer cooperation with the Islamic Arab-African nation. (Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters)

Marty’s New Role Model!

Update: The CSM story linked to above reminded me that Taya had earned the wrath of his country’s Islamists because he had established ties with Israel, and the new “democratic” president wants to review and possibly end those ties.  As was reported on the day of his inauguration, Abdallahi has had to play to the crowd:

But the tie with Israel is unpopular with most Mauritanians and Abdallahi has said it will be reviewed and debated.

“Mauritania will continue to stand by the struggle of the Palestinian people to recover their legitimate rights on their national soil,” he said in his inauguration speech.  

Funny how democracy works, isn’t it?  Upon learning about this, Peretz will probably insist that the coup and everything that followed were all terrible things that should never have happened.

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