allAfrica.com: Mauritania: After One Year in Power, Democratic President Gets Vote of Confidence (Page 1 of 2)

Mauritania: After One Year in Power, Democratic President Gets Vote of Confidence

President Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi Ould Cheikh took office as Mauritania's first democratically elected civilian president in 47 years one year ago on 19 April 2007. He marked the completion of his first year in office facing down terrorist threats and a shaky economic outlook. Abdullahi is nonetheless expected to continue on the path of reform, analysts told IRIN.

The path to Abdallahi's presidency was laid by Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, Mauritania's ex military leader, who took power in August 2005 in a bloodless coup ousting President Maaoya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya, who had held onto power for 21 years.

Vall vowed to hold a referendum on constitutional changes and to pave the way for democratic elections in 2007, both of which he achieved ahead of his own schedule, resulting in the election of President Abdallahi in March 2007.

Abdallahi has been credited with furthering Vall's efforts to introduce democracy to Mauritania. He allowed the formation of political and religious associations that had long been banned under President Taya's rule.

"Abdallahi is not a populist president - he has made sensible promises that he can live up to," said Richard Reeve, an independent West Africa analyst.

Prominent Islamist parties such as Tawassoul and the Rally for National Reform and Development have quickly become well established.

"The President has broken a thirty-year taboo by allowing the creation of my party." said Jemil Ould Mansour leader of Tawassoul.

Rights and refugees

President Abdallahi has also lived up to a number of the promises made in his first presidential speech on 29 June 2007, among them to bring an end to slavery which persisted despite a 1981 law criminalising it, and to ensure the Afro-Mauritanian refugees who were expelled from the country in 1989 could return.

Parliament passed a law in August 2007 criminalising slavery and making it an offence punishable with up to ten years in prison. Widely praised by anti-slavery campaign groups, it nonetheless remains to be seen how it will be applied.

"This law is a major breakthrough", Biram Ould Dah of SOS-Slaves told IRIN, "but the judiciary has yet to make progress to enforce it."

The director of FONADH - a Mauritanian forum for human rights groups - Mamadou Moctar Sarr, told IRIN: "Slavery is a difficult thing to identify - it goes on behind closed doors, but since this law was passed we have already seen a stigma around it starting to emerge."

Progress has also been registered on the refugee returns. On 29 January 2008 the first of several thousand Mauritanian refugees started to return home with the help of the government and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), 19 years after fleeing inter-ethnic violence at home.

Fears that the returnees would struggle to reintegrate into Mauritanian communities have proven unfounded.

Economic reforms

The President also vowed in his early stages in office to try to reduce poverty by tackling corruption, bolstering the economy and creating more jobs. Roughly half of the country still lives in poverty according to the World Bank.

It is here that progress has been more limited, according to analysts.

Government statistics released on 22 April showed just under a third of the working-age population is officially unemployed.

"Mauritania rests on a fragile economic base," one diplomat in Nouakchott said.

The country's economic mainstays are still fishing, though its waters have been over-fished, and mineral extraction.

Major oil deposits were discovered in Cinguetti and Tiof in central Mauritania in 2001, and Mauritania's economic growth leaped to 11.4 percent in 2006 as oil production came on-line.

But the sector fell into disarray in 2007 as production tailed off and exploitation groups quibbled over whether surveys of the potential size of Mauritania's oil fields were wrong, or shoddy equipment was to blame for the reduced flow of oil.

Economic growth levels dropped to 0.9 percent in 2007, according to Reuters.

Against this backdrop there is "little economic room for manoeuvre", Reeve said, particularly when compounded by the global reality of the impact of rising food and fuel prices on a country that can only meet 30 percent of its food needs.

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