Niamorkono, thanx for sharing. The cycle of coups and general malaise are rooted in the scourge of cardinal imbalances of slavery. When a whole people are regarded as property of their fellow citizens, even sympathetic leaders and governors necessarily begin from a point of warped demographics. Demographics is the bane of development and public services. Therefore, Mauritania, regardless of whatever natural endowments, cannot be structurally or socially tenable. The nation is living on borrowed time, waiting for pestilence and plagues to ravage its fragile ecosystem. Currently, it can only serve as outpost for bedouin raiders, drug courriers, and marauding bands of armed "islamists" preying on the more fertile south of Senegal, Mali, La Guinea, and Burkina Faso. I wish Boulkheir well and I encourage all conscientious muslims of Mauritania to free their religion from gratuitous criminality and vote for Boulkheir.
Haruna.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Fye samateh <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Sat, Jul 18, 2009 8:51 am
Subject: Slavery in Mauritania

Slavery in Mauritania

More than half a million slaves are at the heart of a presidential
election battle in the former French colony of Mauritania.

By Nick Meo in Nouakchott, Mauritania

 

Published: 8:30AM BST 12 Jul 2009

 

A year after she ran away from her master, Barakatu Mint Sayed prays
that the election on July 18 will mark the beginning of the end of
slavery in Mauritania.

 

Her nation is one of the last places on Earth where large numbers of
humans are still kept as property.

 

And like thousands of other slaves and freed slaves across the Saharan
country, her hopes are fixed on an inspiratio
nal candidate, a man born to slave parents who has sworn to put an end
to the practice of "owning" humans if he is elected president.

 

That candidate is Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, a 66-year-old former civil
servant with a strong resemblance to the film actor Morgan Freeman. Mr
Boulk
heir has vowed that in power he would punish slave owners and do
everything he can to free their human property.

 

His prospects of winning power are growing by the day - and he is being
hailed as Mauritania's brightest star by his supporters.

 

"He is the Obama of Mauritania," said Boubacar Messaoud, an architect
and veteran anti-slavery campaigner in the northwest African desert
state. "He is going to bring change, and he represents social justice
and equality."

 

Officially, slavery has long been abolished in Mauritania, b ut the law

has never been enforced and there are an estimated 600,000 slaves,
almost one in five of the country's 3.2 million people, almost 150
years since the American civil war.

 

Change will come too late to heal Mrs Sayed's ruined life. But she
knows that victory for Mr Boulkheir could transform the future for the
daughter and grandchildren whom she had to leave behind in captivity
when she finally summoned the courage to escape.

 

A black African of Mauritania's Haratine caste, she was born into
slavery about 40 years ago - she is illiterate and has only a hazy idea
of time - and grew up as the property o
f an Arabic-speaking Berber family, in an oasis town deep in the
desert.

 

While her master's children went to school, she was cooking, cleaning
and washing from dawn to dusk. She slept on the floor, and suffered
beatings.

 

"Sometimes
 I was too tired by the end of the day to eat my food," Mrs
Sayed said at her new home in the capital, Nouakchott, where she now
works as a paid housekeeper.

 

Aged about 10, she was separated from her mother by being given to a
cousin of the master as a wedding gift. She remembers crying
uncontrollably when they moved to a different town, where she was
forbidden from leaving the master's hou se.

 

Another 20 years later she was separated from her own daughter,
Mulkheir, when the girl was given away as a teenager – a common trauma
for slave families.

 

Mrs Sayed has never seen her three young grandchildren or met her
daughter's husband. In fact she is not sure whether her daughter even
has a husband, or whether Mulkheir's children were fathered by her
master.

 

It is the kind of life that has been endured for centuries by
Mauritania's slaves, since the first marauding Berber raiders rode out
of the desert from the north in the 3rd century to carry off African
villagers.

 

The former slave who would be president believes he can finally bring
such suffering to an end.

 

"All that is needed to free the slaves is willpower," Mr Boulkhe
ir told The Sunday Telegraph at his modest home in the capital.

 

A quietly spoken man with a commanding presence, he has a clean
reputation in an Islamic nation which has suffered years of corrupt
rulers.

 

The acting president and head of the senate, Ba Mamadou Mbare, is not
contesting the election. Of his nine rival candidates, the man Mr
Boulkheir has to beat is the self-appointed president of the Higher
State Council, General Mohammed Ould Abdelaziz, who led a military coup
last year and is the most powerful man in the country. He is the
Arabic-speaking former head of security for Ould Taya - the deposed
dictator who was driven out by an earlier coup in 2005 and now lives in
exile.

 

Gen Abdelaziz - who has removed his uniform to contest the election in
line with the constitution - and his political opponents including Sidi
Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, the president he deposed last year, agreed to
the polls in a deal brokered by Senegal.

 

The junta and its opponents had come under intense pressure from the
international community to re-establish a democratic government, with
the United Nations, European Union and African Union co-sponsoring the
mediation.

 

Gen Abdelaziz's enemies stop short of claiming that he owns slaves – he
was in fact born in poverty and inherited nothing. But they insist that
there are slave-owning masters among the ranks of his wealthy
supporters.

 

The two candidates despise each
other. Their electoral battle, a novelty in a ramshackle capital which
is more used to coups, has enthused its residents, as much as anyone
can be enthused in temperatures of 43 deg
rees centigrade.

 

Its streets, where sand drifts across the tarmac, are plastered with
posters, and nomadic-style tents have been erected in every suburb.
Blaring loudspeakers praise the rival candidates at such volume that
passing camels and donkeys pulling carts are sent into a panic. With
six days to go, diplomats consider the race too close to call.

 

The votes of slaves who have been registered by their masters may make
a critical difference. But campaigners fear that in the great swathes
of the country's dusty hinterland where most of the slaves are kept,
thousands will be compelled to cast their votes for Gen Abdelaziz.

 

Mr Boulkheir's camp hopes it can pull ahead by energising the freed
Haratine – the slave caste which has grown in size and clout in recent
years, especially in the cities, as slaves have gradually been freed or
run away. Once free, they can join the workforce. Fishing, desert
agriculture and iron and gold mining and are the main sources of income
for Mauritanians, who on average earn little more than $2 a day,
although that could rise if offshore oil exploration ever proves
fruitful.

 

Mr Boulkheir also enjoys the kudos of having being jailed three times
by Mauritania's former military dictatorship for advocating democracy
when that looked im
possible in the 1990s.

 

Arabic-speakers as well as black Africans back his bid for power,
attracted by his promise

of build ing democracy after years of economic

stagnation under military misrule and a chaotic series of coups. He is
regarded as the candidate with the best chance of ending conflict
between the black majority and the Berber ruling elite. Slave-holding
has been abolished three times, first by the country's former French
overlords and then twice by different rulers of the independent state,
most recently in 2007. But the law has never been enforced and no slave
owner has ever been prosecuted.

 

"Many slaves have been freed in Mauritania now, and if I am elected I
will speed up the process," Mr Boulkheir said. "Slave owners will be
punished, for the first time in our history. Justice will be
implemented.

 

"I will do everything in my power to end this curse of slavery."

 

In this, he has a deeply personal motivation. Soon after he was born
his mother was beaten almost to death by the master from whom his
parents had run away. They only managed to escape to freedom because of
help from the French authorities.

 

Their son overcame the handicap of his birth to find a job as a civil
servant and rise to a senior rank.

 

He knows that ending slavery will not prove easy, especially in the
vastness of the Sahara where pastoralists and nomads endure a harsh

existence wh ich has barely been touched by t
he modern world.

 

Not all slaves suffer abuse. If they are lucky, masters feed and care
for them as if they are family members, albeit inferior ones, and they
will eat and pray with their slaves.

 

In bondage, the Haratine work as labourers: herding animals; working in
date groves; or doing the household chores while the master's family
laze around.

 

Centuries of indoctrination have persuaded the Sahara's captives that
slavery is religiously ordained - slaves are taught that if they run
away they will be barred from heaven. As a local saying puts it:
"Paradise is under your master's foot." In some remote places a runaway
will still be hunted down by nomad masters.

 

If they are brave enough, boys do often escape when they reach their
late teens, but for women and children it is much harder. They know
that with no skills or education a life of hunger or prostitution is
the realistic alternative to captivity, and many escaped slaves return
to their masters to beg forgiveness.

 

In the oasis towns of the desert masters are still powerful, but after
20 years of international pressure - and encouraged by such Western
organisations as Anti-Slavery International, which help local

campaigners to challenge the entrenched culture - few=2 0are prepared to
discuss slavery openly.

 

A Berber driver, who would only give his first name, Mohammed, defended
slavery. "It is our religion and custom," he said.

 

"Why does t
he international community try to stop it? The20slaves are better off
with their masters. This is their fate. When they leave, they starve."

---

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