Old men vie for power in poor desert state

It is rare in Africa for an incumbent head of state to lose a presidential election and President Maaouiya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya of Mauritania is determined to prolong his 19 years of strong-arm-rule in the poll set for 7 November. But diplomats and local politicians say that this time, the 63-year-old army colonel, who came to power in a 1984 coup, may find it more difficult to retain his iron grip on power on this vast desert state of only 2.5 million people. Firstly, they say, new more rigorous voting procedures will make it more difficult to rig the poll in Ould Taya's favour than in the presidential elections of 1992 and 1997. Since the 2001 parliamentary and municipal elections, the government has issued new voter cards which are more difficult to falsify. Furthermore, the complete roll of Mauritania's 1.1 million voters has been published on the internet. And transparent ballot boxes, which are more difficult to stuff discreetly, will be used at the 1,900 polling stations. Secondly, the president's control of the army, a key force in Mauritanian politics, has become more tenuous since a bloody uprising in June. The revolt led to two days of heavy fighting in the capital Nouakchott before the rebel units were defeated. Ould Taya, who during his 19 years in power has graduated from being a firm friend of deposed Iraqi leader Sadaam Hussein to a staunch ally of the United States, enjoys the advantage of a divided opposition. The constitutional court has cleared five candidates to challenge him for a new six-year term. They range from Mauritania's first ever woman presidential candidate to the man Ould Taya overthrew to seize power nearly two decades ago. If no candidate achieves more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round of voting, there will be a run-off between the two leading candidates two weeks later. All the opposition candidates are campaigning for change at the top, greater democracy and less corruption in government. But local analysts say voters are as likely to be swayed by the appeal of individual personalities and subtle ethnic allegiances, as by the candidates' policies. The two-week election campaign, which began on 22 October, is being run in an atmosphere of strictly limited political freedom. The government, which has always been sensitive to media criticism, seized the entire print run of four different weekly newspapers earlier this month, because it objected to their content. It has also banned civil society organisations from forming an independent body to monitor the poll. And it has quietly closed the door to foreign observers. These actions have raised fears that despite reforms to make the election more transparent, Ould Taya may still try to rig the poll in his favour, as opposition politicians have accused him of doing in the past. The three main opposition presidential candidates expressed such concerns in a joint statement at the end of September. Like Ould Taya, they are all old men in their sixties or early seventies. One is Mohamed Khouna Ould Haidalla, 63, a retired army colonel, who ruled this Islamic state that forms a bridge between Sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab world, from 1980 to 1984. He was overthrown by Ould Taya who had until then served as his prime minister. Ould Haidalla has assembled a broad coalition of supporters ranging from reformist liberals to Islamic radicals. The latter are regarded as potential subversives by the present government, which arrested dozens of Islamic clerics earlier this year. Several prominent Ould Taya loyalists have defected to Ould Haidalla's camp, but his campaign has got off to a slow start and shows signs of poor organisation.> Like the present head of state, Ould Haidalla, belongs to the fair-skinned skinned "Bidan" Moorish community, which has formed the ruling elite of Mauritania since independence from France in 1960. The second main challenger to the current head of state is Messaoud Ould Boulkeir, 70, who belongs to the "Harratin" black Moorish community. Until fairly recent times, the Harratins served as slaves to the Bidan. They form a large and growing percentage of the country's population. They are mostly poor and are only lightly represented in the upper echelons of government. Ould Boulkeir served as Minister of Rural Development under Ould Taya in the early 1980s, but subsequently broke with the president and founded his own opposition party, which was banned last year. However, he continues to sit as one of 11 opposition members in Mauritania's 80-seat parliament. Ould Boulkeir is the only Harratin candidate standing in the election. The other five are all Bidan Moors. The black negro tribes of southern Mauritania, which account for nearly a third of the population, are unrepresentative in the poll. Ould Boulkeir has so far proved the most eloquent and lively speaker of all the presidential hopefuls, who have plastered Nouakchott with their posters and filled the main streets with their campaign stalls. Unlike the others, who deliver their speeches in classical Arabic - the country's official language - Ould Boulkeir has chosen to speak in popular local dialects. Playing on the Harratin's traditional role as the underdog of Mauritanian society, he has presented himself as the candidate of the poor and the dispossessed. Ould Boulkeir said in his inaugural campaign speech that he was "the candidate of the people, who feels for and understands those who are hungry, who feels for and understands those who need to learn, who need be looked after, who need a house to live in and a decent life." The third main opposition candidate is Ahmed Ould Daddah, a younger half-brother of Mauritania's first president, Moktar Ould Daddah, who died in a French hospital earlier this month. Ould Daddah headed the central bank until his brother was deposed in a 1978 coup. He went on to work as an economist for the World Bank. The veteran politician, who is now about 70, espouses a social democrat philosophy and commands support in Mauritania's small urban middle class. He was officially credited with a third of the vote when he stood against Ould Taya in the 1992 presidential election. The candidates have each been allocated 90 minutes of air time on state radio and television during the two-week election campaign to spread their message to remote areas of the interior. Ould Taya has meanwhile mobilised the machinery of government to spread his own campaign message of a solid record of achievement in government. The president boasts that he has built new roads and extended the electricity and telephone networks and has put more children into school, while ensuring law and order and national unity. The most striking of the two minor opposition candidates is Aicha Mint Jiddana, the first woman to ever stand as a presidential candidate in Mauritania. The 43-year-old businesswoman is a defector from Ould Taya's Republican Social Democrat Party who has spoken out against forced marriages and female circumcision. Finally, there is Moulaye Ould Jiyed, a former engineer who worked in the fishing industry. Now in his late 50s, he came to prominence as the mayor of the northern iron-mining town of Zouerate. Mauritania ekes out a living from fishing and exports of iron ore, but the country's hopes are pinned on offshore oil. Exploratory drilling in 2001 yielded encouraging results, but the finds have not yet been declared worthy of commercial development. Strong economic growth during the 1990s has given the sparsely populated country an average per capita income of US $1,677, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). This is relatively high by African standards, but most of the population still lives in grinding poverty. Officials of the UN World Food Programme said recently that about 300,000 subsistence farmers in the south of the country would continue to require emergency food next year, despite an exceptionally good rainy season.