Voters embrace pro-democracy reforms

Some 96 percent of Mauritanians voted Yes to constitutional changes meant to bring an end to military coups and paving the way for elections next year. Provisional results of the weekend referendum, released on Monday by the Minister of the Interior, said that 76 percent of voters had turned out. The changes put limits of two five-year terms on future presidents, ensuring that power changes hands every decade in a country where the last president remained in office for over twenty years. Residents of the low-rise dusty capital Nouakchott took to the streets to celebrate the referendum victory, holding aloft pictures of the military leader Colonel Ely Ould Mohammed Vall, the main proponent of the changes. The former police chief, Vall seized power in a bloodless coup in August. But the country’s latest in a long line of putchists - Mauritania has recorded some 20 coups or coup attempts since independence from France in 1960 - has promised democracy and says he will handover power to an elected government by 2007. Presidential elections are due to take place in March, with legislative and municipal polls to follow in November. Members of the ruling junta are barred from contesting. Other recent constitutional amendments across Africa - in Chad, Gabon and Uganda - have removed or extended presidential limits, enabling incumbent presidents to prolong their rule through the ballot box. Vall’s predecessor Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya ushered in multi-party elections in the 1990s. But Taya, who also came to power through a coup d’etat, repeatedly secured a healthy majority in polls shrouded in allegations of corruption. Official poll monitors from the African Union said they were satisfied with the way Sunday's referendum had been conducted. “The exercise passed off very well, people turned out spontaneously and the organisation was almost perfect, as was the count,” said Vijay Makhan, head of a team of AU vote-observers. “With this vote, Mauritanians have reached a very important stage in the movement towards democracy,” he added. Mauritanian human rights groups and opposition parties that denounced previous polls in Mauritania, also gave Vall’s referendum the thumbs up. “A serene, transparent and well organised poll,” said SOS esclaves, who carried out their own unofficial monitoring of the ballot. Mauritania is West Africa’s only Islamic Republic. Straddling the western reaches of the Sahara desert, the country became Africa’s newest oil producing nation exporting its first crude in February. Analysts say the oil revenue if properly harnessed could have a dramatic effect on the population of just three million, the majority of whom live on less than US $2 a day according to UN figures.