That didn't take long

A little over a year after the country's first democratic elections, the Mauritanian military has seized power in a coup d'Etat. The elected president Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi has been removed as well as his prime minister. Earlier in the day, the president had tried to remove several senior military officers, including Gen. Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz, who was head of the presidential guard. Gen. Abdelaziz responded by launching the coup.

According to Wikipedia, the US NGO Freedom House had considered Mauritania as one of only two real 'electoral democracies' in the Arab world. The other was the Comoros, the most coup-prone country in Africa.

Fighting slavery in Mauritania

A friend of my family's recently went to Mauritania as a Peace Corps Volunteer. It will be interesting to see how the ardent young feminist handles it. She spent time in the very macho country of El Salvador, so she's probably more ready than most. But Mauritania is one of the most closed societies in the world.

Mauritania banned slavery only in 1980. But it's still believed to be practiced despite the legal abolition.

The new government in the country is proposing a law that would toughen penalties for slavery. The act would be punishable by up to 10 years in prison and thousands of dollars in fines.

However, the domestic anti-slavery NGO SOS Esclaves says the current proposal does not specify contemporary aspects of slavery, such as forced marriage, indentured labor or debt bondage and that 10 years of prison is inadequate.

Observers warn that the new law will be pointless if it remains largely unenforced, like the previous law.

Bernard Freamon, an Islamic legal researcher at Yale University, says slavery will continue even with the new law if there is no strict enforcement.

"The legitimacy of a law like that is going to be undermined, if the people charged with enforcing the law perceive it as something just designed to make people in the human rights community feel better," he noted.

Freamon says some Muslims wrongly interpret the Koran to justify slavery. He says slavery will end only when religious leaders publicly denounce slavery.

"It will disappear because each of the scholars will go back to their mosques, their local imams [local religious leaders]," he added. "They will issue an edict that will be very persuasive and authoritative in terms of the local Muslims in that community."

Freamon adds modern day slavery will also exist as long as there are people desperate for food, health care and housing.

Mauritanian refugees to be repatriated from Senegal

I discovered a very interesting site recently: Telediaspora.net. The site is a regular portal providing the usual news and such, but with an interesting twist. It offers live feed of state television networks from Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Mali and Guinea.

Anyway, I was watching the news from Senegal's RTS and they did a story about rapprochement between Senegal and Mauritania. Banjul's Daily Observer did a story as well.

The two countries fought a border in 1988 that left thousands of mostly black Mauritanians stranded in Senegal and Mali. Even though Senegal had a change in leadership in 2000, no progress was made in the refugee issue until the military that overthrew Mauritanian strongman Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya. Senegalo-Mauritanian relations seem to have thawed since newly elected president Ould Cheikh Abdallahi took over in Mauritania.

The new president recently conducted a two-day visit to Dakar to meet with his Senegalese counterpart Abdoulaye Wade. The two countries' foreign ministers met as well.

Mauritania has agreed to repatriate all Mauritanian refugees trapped in Senegal since 1988, reports The Daily Observer

A joint communique also called for expanding trade and common investment between the two countries and expressed their satisfaction over the progress being made in the construction of the Tangiers-Nouakchott-Dakar Trans-Saharan road and the "encouraging evolution" of the plans for the Tangiers-Casablanca-Nouadhibou -Nouakchott-Dakar sea link.