CETRI
The 3 August 2005 military coup was Mauritania’s best opportunity to turn the
page on decades of the deposed quasi-military regime’s destructive politics. This
article critically analyses relevant aspects of the transition that ensued in the
context of the prevailing models of military withdrawal from politics in Africa.
It also examines the challenges that Mauritania’s short-lived Third Republic
faced. It argues that the transition process did not escape the well-known African
military junta leader’s proclivity to manipulate transitions to fulfil suddenly
awakened self-seeking political ambitions, in violation of solemn promises.
While there was no old-fashioned ballot stuffing to decide electoral outcomes,
Mauritania’s junta leader and his lieutenants spared no effort to keep the military
very much involved in politics, and to perpetuate a strong sense of entitlement
to political power. Originally designed as an ingenious ‘delayed self-succession ’
of sorts, in the end, another coup aborted Mauritania’s democratisation process
and threw its institutions in a tailspin. This only exacerbated the challenges that
have saddled Mauritania’s political system and society for decades – unhealthy
civil-military relations, a dismal ‘human rights deficit ’, terrorism, and a neopatrimonial,
disastrously mismanaged economy.
When President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi (henceforth Ould Abdallahi)
was sworn in on 19 April 2007 as arguably the first truly « freely and fairly » elected president in Mauritania’s history, the military junta in power
since the 3 August 2005 coup seemed to have held its part of the bargain.
The Arab world welcomed its first successful genuine « democratisation process » in recent memory. It was also West Africa’s latest. The defeated
candidate recognised with all observers that the polling was generally free
and fair, and was spared the serious mishaps and outright widespread
cheating for which both regions are known. This happened, of all places,
in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, a country straddling West Africa
and the North African Maghreb, a member of the Arab League since
1973. With the coup, Mauritania had offered itself the best opportunity
to turn the page on decades of destructive politics of exclusion and repression,
dysfunctional civil-military relations, and the transformation of
the state into a criminal enterprise that illustrated Jean-Francois Bayart
and his co-authors’ conceptualisation of the syndrome in Africa (Bayart
1993 ; Bayart et al. 1999). The conclusion of Mauritania’s emergence from
twenty-one years of stubborn quasi-military repressive rule is also of
interest to scholars and practitioners of civil-military relations and democratisation.
A recent article has suggested, a bit prematurely, that it is
« a model for political reform » in Arab North Africa (Zisenwine 2007). It
certainly holds valuable lessons for students of electoral politics and
democratic consolidation in West Africa, if only because, among recent
elections, Mauritania’s are the only ones that took place in the context of a
transition from an unabashed military regime.
The role of the military junta in the transition and in keeping its word
to hold a free and fair election, and to hand over power to an elected
civilian government after an orderly transition, has been praised, indeed
held out as a ‘miracle’ (Sage & Weddady 2007). This article examines
and explains this phenomenon. Its central argument is that, while the
Mauritanian military kept its word not to hang on to power (not without
agonising second thoughts), the outcome was not the democratic change
Mauritanians were yearning for. In fact, the transition process exemplified
the African military junta leader’s familiar proclivity to manipulate
transitions to fulfil suddenly awakened self-seeking political ambitions.
As a result, the challenges that saddled Mauritania’s political system and
society became even more pressing. The article analyses the dynamics
that made it possible for Mauritania to complete its transition and usher
in a new political dispensation, and the context in which this occurred.
It focuses on relevant aspects of the transition, including the various
elections. It also examines briefly the preceding attempt of Mauritania’s
military to « disengage » from politics.
Mauritania’s Third Republic, inaugurated in 2007, faced challenges
that included reforming flawed civil-military relations, tackling the ‘human
rights deficit’, and dismantling the disastrous neo-patrimonial economic
system monopolised by a small Arab-Berber elite. Recent events have reminded us that dealing responsibly with the threat of terrorism in the
volatile Sahel region is definitely another urgent and ominous challenge.
