Nouakchott, Mauritania: On August fourth Mauritanian anti-slavery activists staged a sit-in before a Nouakchott police station to prevent them from releasing a woman the public prosecutor had just indicted for slavery. The police intervened. Thirteen abolitionists were hospitalized and nine arrested with one sentenced to prison for “unauthorized gathering and rebellion”. The suspected slave owner has disappeared as has the young girl allegedly enslaved.

The Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement in Mauritania (IRAM) says there are still 600 thousand slaves in Mauritania, almost one in five of the country’s 3.2 million people, despite a law voted in September 2007 making slavery a criminal offense, punishable by ten years in prison. “Nothing has changed in Mauritania,” says Balla Touré, an agricultural engineer and IRAM secretary for foreign relations. “No slave owners have been jailed.”

Western diplomatic sources disagree with the figure saying the number of slaves is much lower. They do admit the government shows little enthusiasm in enforcing the 2007 law. “No cases have been successfully prosecuted under the anti-slavery law despite the fact that de facto slavery exists in Mauritania,” writes the US State Department in its 2010 Human Rights Report.

But a high ranking US Embassy official in Nouakchott tells me they received confirmation one slave owner did go to jail this year although this is not information they verified in person.

The truth is slavery continues unpunished but nobody knows the real number of slaves in the country and investigating is very difficult. The French based NGO, SOS – Esclaves, estimates “approximately 18% of the Mauritania’s population lives in slavery.”

If you wanted to investigate, you would have to go out into the desert villages. Balla Touré says you can find communities of ten thousand people where “150 are the owners and the rest are slaves.” Western embassies have told their nationals most of Mauritania is off-limits because of the danger of being kidnapped by bandits or al-Qaeda. A slave owner could easily see that a bothersome reporter was disappeared.

The government is also determined to keep slavery out of the limelight. As of this writing CNN has been waiting for over five weeks to get a visa to do a story for their modern slavery series. US Embassy efforts have not worked. CNN may have to forego a slave story on the country which is perhaps the world’s biggest slave state.

Three ethnicities and two races

Meriéme Mint Sa'ada who was born a slave is now claiming her rights and freedom with the help of SOS Esclaves. Courtesy Anti-Slavery International

The slaves and descendents of slaves are a group called the Haratine. They are of sub-Saharan origin but after centuries of servitude took on Moorish culture and language, the Hassaniya dialect of Arabic. They make up between 40% and 50% of the population. “Ninety-nine percent of them are illiterate,” says Mohamed O., the son of a former slave owning family who denies slavery is still widespread in the country.

The Haratine are Black but have little in common with Mauritania’s more educated Black Africans who make up about 30% of the population and live in the South along the Senegal River. What the two share is perhaps the poverty imposed by a regime dominated by a minority of wealthy White Moors.

But the racism goes both ways. “All those in government are slave owners,” says Salé, a Haratine militant with IRAM. “White Moors own everything,” adds Bella Touré who is not a Haratine but a Pulaar speaking Black from the south. “My condition as a Black,” he explains, “is linked to the condition of the slaves.”

Tourad, a rare educated Haratine and a teacher, insists the White Moors are attached to slavery more than anything else. “The Army, Gendarmes and Police are all led by Whites,” Touad says, “while 99% of their personnel is Black.” These figures are contested by progressive Moors who point to the occasional successful Black.” Six of the country’s 40 diplomats are Black I am told, although it does not mean they are Haratine which makes sense if less than five percent of the slave caste ever received any schooling.

IRAM, unlike the two other anti-slavery groups in the country, is made up of young, mostly Haratine, people. Their radicalization has western embassies worried that it could create political and ethnic instability. “The IRAM Chairman, Biram Ould Dah Ould Abeid, said recently he “will bring down the government,” a US embassy official warned me. “This is not the language of an NGO.”

Many IRAM members were either babies or not even born in 1989 when deadly ethnic and racial violence broke out in Mauritania and almost led to armed conflict with Senegal. The 12 young men I met are angry and therefore impatient and lack the historical perspective of their elders who remember all too well the bloodshed of a generation ago. The Moor run military and police are better equipped and trained than ever thanks to the west — France and the US in particular.

Don’t rock the ‘war on terrorism’ boat

Activist Biram Oula Dah Ould Abeid. Source: rmibiladi.com

Mauritania is a major ally of the US and France in the fight against al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, AQMI, and any instability in Mauritania could hurt American efforts in the ‘War on Terrorism’. All talk of slavery in the country could push western public opinion against foreign aid to the regime of General Ould Abed Aziz who seized power in a coup d’état in 2008.

IRAM members say the government has offered them “money and jobs on numerous occasions” if they would scale back their anti-slavery activities. The US embassy encourages them to be more moderate in their actions and words. IRAM’s Chairman is even being offered a trip to the US to meet with NGOs and discuss their practices in the hopes it will help temper his language.

The situation between Black Mauritanians and White Moors is tense. “White Moors have fired 60 thousand Black workers in the past few months out of fear,” says Mohamed O., a former official with the Information Ministry. In April Moorish students and Blacks clashed at Nouakchott University over what the Blacks called “the complete Arabisation of the Administration.” The Moors want to see Arabic take over while the Blacks, who in this case are not Hassaniya speaking Haratine, are better versed in French and insist both official languages be used. The linguistic battle is just another element indicating extreme ethnic animosity.

This is the powder keg of racial and ethnic tension western diplomats do not want to see people like IRAM ignite. A racial explosion with a background of slavery could raise questions back home about the intense military cooperation Washington and Paris enjoy with the Mauritanian regime.

Mohamed O. admits there is a Haratine problem but says it is not ongoing slavery. “Nothing has been done to help the Haratine integrate society,” he says.

Corruption does not help. In August 2010, the Human Rights Commissioner, Mohamed Lemine Ould Daddeh, was fired when he was unable to reimburse nearly one million dollars that went missing. This is the amount of money set aside for the assimilation of the Haratine.

Balla Touré says in villages where slavery exists the master holds on to the voter registration cards of his ‘slaves’ and negotiates the way they will vote with the politician who offers the most favors. This, along with tribal loyalties, could explain why a candidate obtains impossibly high percentages in different regions. Such practices make a mockery of democracy in Mauritania, a country which Transparency International lists among the most corrupt in the world: n° 148 out of 178.

Meriéme Mint Hamadi was taken from her mother as a child and was forced to carry out all the domestic work for her master. Courtesy Anti-Slavery International

Those who see slavery in Mauritania as a thing of the past say what destroyed the institution was the drought of the 1970s and not the never enforced 1981 presidential decree abolishing the practice, and even less the un-enforced 2007 law. The drought wiped out the country’s livestock, litterally millions of head, and devastated agriculture. “The master became poorer than their slaves,” Mohamed O. says. The result was the slave owners abandoned their slaves and flooded into Nouakchott leaving the helpless to fend for themselves.

Those Haratine who found themselves abandoned did not fare well and many followed their masters to the city. Under slavery “the master took care of the slaves needs,” Mohamed O. says, “his food, clothing and health. All of a sudden that stopped.”

But activists deny recurrent drought ended the practice. “If slavery disappeared,” asks Moulai, a Haratine now in Nouakchott, “then who takes care of their livestock in the countryside?” Still today, they say, any child born to a slave belongs to the master, even if the former slave’s freedom was bought. In Mauritania “slavery is an inherited status,” the NGO Anti-Slavery International writes.

The situation is complicated. Many Haratine fear leaving their masters with no way to survive on their own. In the early 1970s Mohamed O. asked Maria, the slave who breast fed him and his siblings, why she did not go away and live her own life as a free person. “She grabbed her breast in her hand and said ‘I fed you from here and now that you are a big boy you want to send me away?’” The scene still brings tears to Mohamed O’s eyes today, as it did to Maria’s all those years ago.

It is not rare for people like Mohamed O. to receive phone calls about people who are in trouble and say their father or grandfather was a slave of his family’s 40 years ago. Mohamed O. feels obliged to help “people I don’t even know. I am paying for sins I never committed.”

The West is concerned about the instability Islamic guerrillas could cause in the region and they have found a willing ally in President-General Ould Abdel Aziz but they may not be seeing an even more pressing cause of instability: the anger of a generation of young Blacks left out by a small minority of Moors who own and control the country. These Blacks are becoming more vocal, more active and more radical.

By George Kazolias

George Kazolias is an American Journalist based in Paris and a Professor of Global Communications at the American University in Paris. He runs the blog kazodaily.

But the authorities, and their western backers, would have us believe that when five private press groups get a license to broadcast radio and TV for the first time this October, it will represent a major change. This opening of the airwaves is Sahara sand in our eyes to hide the real racial nature of a regime which has become an important actor in “the war on terrorism”.

The first question is who will get a license? One of the five will certainly be Nouakchott Info, a press group which, according to my sources, is owned by General Muhammud Ould al-Ghazwany, military Chief-of-staff and head of the Presidential Guard. He is a long time close associate of General Ould Abdel-Aziz who seized power in 2008 from the only government which came close to being democratically elected in the country since independence in 1960. General al-Ghazwany made his money in mysterious ways as a military officer during the 20 year rule of Ould Taya who took power in a Coup in 1984 and was himself ousted in a coup in 2005. (1)

Secondly, these radio and TV stations will broadcast nationally over the government owned and managed transmitters so even if only close (Maure?) associates get a license, they can be turned off at a minute’s notice. (2) This also means that there will be no local news or community service which only FM could afford. Moreover, it practically assures that the major media groups will continue to work in languages few Mauritanians master such a classical Arabic which some of the White Maures learned as children in Koranic schools or French. Most Maures (30% of the population) and the (ex?) slave and illiterate caste, the Haratine (40% of the population) speak Hassaniya Arabic. (3) Other sub Saharan Blacks speak different languages.

There are 12 daily newspapers registered in Mauritania which come out regularly. (4) They are printed on the government owned press and each one is limited to eight pages and one thousand copies with no distribution service. They sell for one dollar a piece (half a day’s wages for over half the country) and are written in classical Arabic or French. The two languages used and the small number of each issue are good indicators of how small is the number of elite Mauritanians who debate the countries future, decide on policies and divide the dividends.

Another group which seems set to get a license is Al Watan (The Nation), a group reportedly financed by Prime Minister Moulaye Mohamed Laghdaf, a White Maure and a longtime ally of General (now President) Ould Abdel-Aziz who appointed him Prime Minister after the 2008 coup and kept him on once Ould Abel-Aziz got himself elected president in 2009. As a leader of the very powerful Tajakant Tribe, Laghdaf’s support is a must.

Saharamedias.net has become very successful, setting up a TV film and production agency which works for such big outsiders as al-Jazeera, al-Arabia and France 24 and has “bureaus” in Rabat, Dakar and Bamako. The group is linked to longtime Education Minister Hasni Ould Didi of a powerful Eastern tribe, the Idalwahli.

(5) The group Essirage (The Light) are openly Islamist and according to my sources get funding from radical Muslim groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and other radicals located in Sudan, Egypt and Turkey. “They have no local financing,” one media expert told me.

If You Want Freedom of the Press, Own One

“There is no independent media in Mauritania,” says Ova M., who once worked in the Information Ministry. “There is just private media.” The Mauritanian media represent the interests of those wealthy people who own it.

Mohamed Salem Ould Haiba writes on the Mauritanian internet news site CRIDEM (www.cridem.org) that you can “count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who have pocketed the wealth” of the country. Although an exaggeration, the number of Mauritanians who control the countries security and financial institutions is extremely small. They are the people own the private media.

This may be one reason why there are no reported cases of censorship under the new government. “We probably have the greatest press freedom of the Arab world,” says Mohammed Mahmud Abu al-Ma-ahi of Nouakchott Info. “What we lack are the means and the financing.” There is no market for publicity in Mauritania.

The government and its western backers can argue that the press groups all have internet sites where readers can access their material and debate policies. But this means little in a country where officially at least half the population is illiterate (much higher if considering French and classical Arabic) and where as many as 60% live on less than two dollars a day. Some sources say that 99% of the Haratine (slave caste) are illiterate. A free internet is no threat to those in power in Mauritania.

Yet, Mauritanian journalists hope the new licenses will lead to greater press freedoms. “The liberalization of the audio-visual is a victory,” says Raky Sy of the National Union of Mauritanian Journalists which counts some 500 members. “But is is extremely limited.”

The West will use this media liberalization to justify increased aid to a government which can easily be called an apartheid regime: the nearly absolute rule of a small White Maure minority to the exclusion of the Black majority. President-General Ould Abel Aziz is a very active member in the fight against al-Qaeda. France and the US would like us to forget he came to power in a coup and runs one of the world’s most corrupt and least transparent countries. The truth is we are nowhere near a real freeing of the airwaves that would benefit Mauritanian citizens and their aspirations for greater democracy and transparency.

Many journalists I spoke to say the private media will be no more informative the the state run radio. “If you want to know the news,” says a longtime reporter with Radio Mauritania, “then you have to look in the Editor-in-chief’s trash bin.”

FM radios are community radios. They cost little to set up, speak the language of the people in their area and speak to their problems. Such radios could articulate the anger of Black Mauritanians at the despotic rule by a minority of White Maures who control the military and the government and pocket the wealth while the majority of the people are left to wallow in their poverty.

We will be able to speak of freedom of the press in Mauritania when people in their own communities are allowed to open and run FM stations without government interference. Under Ould Abdel Aziz, that day is probably still a long ways away.

By George Kazolias

Notes:

1. al-Gazwany continues to profit handsomely. Transparency International lists Mauritania as one of the world’s most corrupt countries, n°143 out of 178.
2. In my listing I count White Maures at 30% of the population. They are the slave holding cast. The other 70% is Black. This breaks down to 40% Haratine, the slave caste of Blacks who, after hundreds of years of servitude to the Berber and Arabic Maures, adopted their language (Hassaniya Arabic) and culture without the status and the 30% of more recent sub-saharan Africans.
3. There is no doubt that slavery still exists in Mauritania. Abolitionists from the mainly Haratine IRAM (Initiative de Résurgence du Mouvement Abolitionniste en Mauritanie) told me there are 600 thousand slaves in the country. The US Embassy in Nouakchott told me the number is much smaller although they could not give me a figure. All seem to agree the government is showing little enthusiasm in enforcing the September 2007 law prohibiting slavery.
4. In all, some 700 titles (weeklies, monthlies etc.) are registered with the government but only around 40 publish regularly. Many are printed only when the owner of the name is paid by someone who wants to take a shot at someone else in public. These ‘pens-for-higher’ are referred to as “Peshmerghas” by serious Mauritanian reporters.
5. In Mauritania racism is never far from the surface even if it is often expressed in codified language. Other Maures refer to the Idawahli as descendants of Jews because of their tight tribal solidarity and their reputation for economizing.

George Kazolias is an American Journalist based in Paris and a Professor of Global Communications at the American University in Paris. He runs the blog kazodaily.

UPDATE: Fassala’s police commissioner has been dismissed. Yesterday students demonstrated outside of the Ministry of the Interior to protest the government’s handling of the incident and were arrested.

It began as an angry protest over water shortages by tribes in Fassala, in Mauritania’s eastern Hodh ash-Sharqi, province and escalated into days of clashes between local people and police and gendarmes. Local tribes met with the local prefect in hopes that he would resolve a dispute over access to a well. The prefect insulted the gathering at which point they set on him and his entourage – according to the newspapers he was ”almost lynched” by the crowd. Police and gendarmes beat back the locals.

In the ruckus, both police and protestors were injured. The police sent reinforcements, escalating the violence; the next day men from the Nema military garrison were sent to assist in putting down the violence using teargas and batons. The locals set fire to the town hall, several municipal builds as well as car.

The demonstrators “categorically deny the existence of any other motivation than the deteriorating economic situation and the authorities ignoring their demands for a solution to these problems through dialogue rather than repression and delinquency.” Newspaper reports say thirty-two local people have been arrested by the Gendarmerie, who stormed houses in the town of (about) 10,000 people on the border with Mali.

Al-Akhbar reports “growing talk of torture of detainees,” citing the experience of two detainees released (providing their names and a list of the names of “those among the most prominent detainees”, though it does not say what for; more on this later, perhaps).

Opposition MPs scolded the government, Prime Minister Moulay Ould Mohamed Laghdef in particular, for economic stagnation and “serious abuse [by this government] with the concerns of the citizen.” One MP, Mohamed Mustafa Ould Badr al-Din of the Union of Forces for Progress (UFP) said the government had taken only piecemeal measures to appease Mauritanians’ demands in hopes of avoiding “a popular uprising as in Tunisia”. Similar protests are said to be appearing in other towns in Hodh ash-Sharqi with arrests being ordered, it is said, by the president himself.

These clashes highlight growing discontent with Mauritania’s always precarious economic situation and the government of Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz. Without going into great detail here (time is brief, expect a mind map/chart in a week or so) there have been mobilizations of student unions, workers and rural people fed up with increasingly austere living conditions and in some cases linked to perceptions of revolts elsewhere in the Arab world.

Organizers (human rights and youth groups) of a demonstration in Zouerate have faced harassment and the confiscation of tents and authorities shut down a market described as a popular gathering place for youth in anticipation of demonstrations — forcing organizers to postpone the demonstration. The protestors’ demands include such things as clean drinking water, opportunities for youth and limitations of environmental pollution resulting from near by iron-ore mines.

Like governments across the region, Mauritania’s leadership is on the defensive: the country has seen a self-immolation, the fall of two major Arab regimes, standing demands from labor groups going back months if not years, public defections and the economic situation remains difficult for average citizens.

Watching his great patron, Mu’amar al-Qadhafi, struggle to hold together his crumbling regime must also weigh heavily on President Ould Abdel Aziz. Libya has been a major supporter of Ould Abdel Aziz financially and politically and these associations are well known (the effect of the recent uprising in Libya on Mauritania’s foreign politics will be considered separately).

Thus, as Mauritanian journalists and opposition figures (as well as religious ones) have forcefully condemn the crackdown on protestors in Libya the government must be watching events closely.

One should not expect an uprising in Mauritania — a place where political violence is exceptional — but there are pressures building from the the regional climate that may produce important developments in the country’s domestic politics in coming weeks and months. More on this later.

Kal is a student of Political Science and Middle Eastern/African Studies. He blogs at The Moor Next Door. Kal can be reached at nourithemoor@gmail.com. TWITTER: themoornextdoor

Barack Obama jabs Guinea's Captain Moussa Dadis Camara

US President Barack Obama has stopped Madagascar, Guinea and Niger from receiving trade benefits for a year. Mr Obama said that each of these countries “have experienced an undemocratic transfer of power” and that they had failed to make “continual progress” in meeting US requirements for The Africa Growth and Opportunity Act. The Act was set up in 2000 ostensibly to offer tangible benefits including job creation for African countries who must adapt their economies to the free market.

The Act requires countries to show they are working towards, among other things, introducing the rule of law and political pluralism, the elimination of barriers to US trade and investment and efforts to combat corruption. However, Mauritania was re-instated to the programme. A coup took place in Mauritania last year, but an election was held his year that, although it returned the coup leader Gen Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz to power, was deemed by observers to be transparent.

Those favoring the African Growth and Opportunity Act bill see it as presenting a new opportunity for Africa in private sector trade and investment. Supporters also argued that the bill expands eligibility of African countries, increase women’s input in growth and development, and promote democracy and good governance within sub-Saharan Africa. Those opposing it cite lack of consultation with African civil society, inadequate support for debt relief initiatives, potential disruption of regional integration, and unrealistic or ill-advised eligibility standards.

Written by Mark Bajkowski.
Mark, born in Poland, is a Jack of all trades, master of none, who lives in New York since 1979. Mark has an unusually wide range of interests and is known to relate well to the people half of his age. Since his early childhood, he felt a curious relation to Africa, which unavoidably brings up the controversial subject of multiple life experiences.