With a 46% poverty rate and slack security situation, Mauritania is an at-risk nation whose significance to global investors and statesmen is at an all-time high.
The sparsely populated Islamic Republic of Mauritania straddles Arabo-Berber and black Africa and is bounded by a 700 km Atlantic coastline and the southern stretch of the Sahara. Once composed entirely of nomadic tribes, prolonged drought and famine in the 1970s and 80s forced a hasty mass sedentarization. Half of all Mauritanians still depend on agriculture and livestock for their livelihood, and the nation’s economic outlook is dismal enough by international standards to qualify for the last-resort Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC). The political and security situations in the country have been highly unstable since independence in 1960, with regular coups d’etats unseating power often enough to cripple any earnest initiatives for economic development.
In the latest of these coups, on August 6 of this year the military seized power from the nation’s first democratically-elected government. International observers will be paying close attention to the junta’s next moves, looking for signs of its political and economic orientation. For this notoriously closed country, where the press is tightly controlled, is at a crossroads that is both political and economic. The Mauritania that has just been usurped is both a contested front in the war on terror and a trove of unexploited natural resources within a world of dwindling supplies.
Economic mirages
What is really at stake in the constant shifting of power among Mauritania’s Mauresque elite is control over the nation’s extensive natural resources. Mauritania’s coastal waters are among the richest fishing grounds in the world, and are full of the coveted king prawns, among others. The country also has a thriving iron ore mining industry, with one of the world’s longest trains (2.5 km) carrying rich deposits from the Zouerat mines across the Sahara to Nouadhibou on the Atlantic coast. Iron mining and commercial fishing are key sources of revenue and accounted for 19% of GDP in 2005.
But the revenue earned from fish and iron ore is small change compared to the wealth the country’s vast oil reserves could generate. There are varying accounts of just how large Mauritania’s reserves of oil really are, and estimates by the Australian company Woodside, which was the first to discover oil in Mauritania in 2001, have been downsized from 120 million barrels of Proven and Probable (2P) reserves in 2001 to 53 million barrels in 2006, with another downward adjustment to 34 million barrels in 2007. While it is hard to find a reliable number for the country’s reserves, what is known is foreign oil companies including Total, CNPC, and Petronas have all invested in exploration measures in recent years.
Allegations of a lack of transparency in the incorporation of several amendments to Mauritania’s first oil contract, signed by Woodside and former oil minister Zeidane Ould Hmeida, prompted an Australian investigation into the company and the arrest by Mauritanian authorities of Hmeida on charges of “serious crimes against the country’s essential economic interests.” The Australian investigation was dropped in 2008 due to insufficient evidence, but the events have damaged the credibility of the state’s management of its oil reserves among Mauritanians.
Driss Choukri, a Moroccan social science researcher specializing in Mauritania, expressed the collective disappointment, stating “they said they discovered huge reserves of oil in northern Mauritania and it was very promising. People were waiting for it to be exploited, and we were saying that one day you would find Mauritanians being like Kuwaitis.” He views the recurring political upheavals as a struggle for control over awarding highly lucrative oil contracts. “The coup is related to the wealth that is in the country — in the fishing, in the iron, in the reality that whoever is in power is going to exploit the oil. I think the transitional government did not go far enough into the issue of oil in the north because they are waiting for the situation to get stable. But it never stabilizes.”
Mauritania began producing crude oil in 2006 at the Woodside Chinguetti field, which is now controlled by Malaysia’s Petronas, but this field’s output has since dropped off from 75,000 bpd to 11,500 bpd. Nevertheless, judging by Mauritania’s sudden popularity among foreign companies and diplomats, hopes remain high for the exploitation of considerable oil reserves. Foreign companies like Total, Exxon, and the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) are currently conducting geo-physical studies and preparing seismic tests in the desert region of the Taoudenit basin, according to energy minister Mohamed El Moctar Ould Mohamed El Hacen, who called this basin one of the greatest in the world. South Africa is using diplomatic relations to cozy up to Mauritania in the hopes of winning an eventual supply contract on the African continent. Total, which holds 60% share in permits to explore the Taoudenit basin after ceding 20% of permits to Algeria’s Sonatrach and another 20% to Qatar Petroleum International, plans to begin drilling exploration wells in 2009.
Political challenges
The ruling military junta is led by the enigmatic General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, who has figured prominently in Mauritania’s ruling elite since the 2005 coup d’etat, which put an end to then-president Taya’s 21-year corrupt and dictatorial regime. In the case of the 2005 coup, the military junta held power for a brief period of time before winning international approval by organizing Mauritania’s first democratic elections in 2007. Since the same figures who organized the 2005 coup led the 2008 one, most are hopeful that Abdel Aziz will make good on his promises of elections and transition from military to democratic civilian rule.
“He will be president until things are stable,” said one Mauritanian businessman who is from the same tribe as Abdel Aziz and asked to remain anonymous. This source hopes to see democracy reinstated soon. “The people of Mauritania can elect their new president as soon as the prior president and his agenda have been reconsidered. There is some opposition, but only from ex-political figures, with hardly any followers among regular everyday people, who are living their lives regardless.”
But if the military succeeded in creating the appearance of democratic governance by holding fair elections in 2007, the 2008 coup, in which the military overthrew the very president it had backed in elections just one year prior, reveals that the military may not yet be ready to relinquish its power over key domains like security and the economy.
Abdel Aziz has leveled charges of corruption and failure to improve the country’s security situation against Abdellahi’s deposed democratic government. The country’s unchanging, extreme poverty has been blamed for the growing radicalization of its youth and numerous reports indicate that Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which grew out of Algeria’s GSPC among other groups, has flourished in this Wild West outlaw atmosphere. AQIM claims responsibility for a spate of recent attacks in the country, including the killing of four French tourists in 2007, attacks on Mauritanian soldiers in 2005, and an attack on the Israeli embassy in February 2008. During Ramadan of this year, in a meaningful warning to the military rule, AQIM abducted 12 Mauritanian soldiers and cut their heads off, making good on its promise to carry out a full-scale ‘holy war’ against the regime. Abdel Aziz has vowed the military junta will improve the security situation and organize the next round of democratic elections.
Just weeks after the coup, AQIM’s leader Abu Musab Abdul Wadud accused France, the US and Israel of secretly supporting the regime change, adding that Mauritania has become “a nest of foreign intelligence” controlled by Israel’s Mossad. Intelligence reports indicate that the Mauritanian military has received funding and training from the US government, which increased covert military operations in North Africa as part of its Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative. The Center for Defense Information reported that International Military Education and Training assistance and other programs to provide counterterrorism training and funding to the Mauritanian military increased six-fold in the five years after September 11, 2001.
In the wake of the most recent coup, the international community has been merciless in its condemnation of what it sees as an assault on democracy. The African Union has called for the reinstatement of Abdellahi, and the European Union, the US and World Bank have restricted aid, using the threat of economic sanctions to demand a return to constitutional rule. Commenting on these threats, Prime Minister Moulaye Ould Mohamed Laghdaf, appointed to head the interim government, told Reuters, “If that unfortunately has to happen, we’ll have to turn to other partners, the Arab countries and Arab social and economic development funds, or even the Islamic Development Bank — these have not suspended their aid.”
With AQIM and the US both zeroing in on Mauritania as a crucial new front in the ‘war on terror’, the legacy of the 2008 coup d’etat will have more to do with the battle between pro and anti-Western forces than an assault on the rule of a budding African democracy.
