An unprofessional, divided and coup-prone military

Since taking power in 1978, the Mauritanian military has become, over the years, arguably one of the most dysfunctional security establishments in Africa. Up to then the military was a small unassuming cohesive institution largely spared the ‘racial’, cultural/ethnic, regional and ideological cleavages which by then threatened the very fabric of the country. Soon, particularly after the 1984 coup, these lines of fracture found their way into the military establishment, along with fierce personal rivalries. Similarly to its African counterparts, Mauritania's officer corps rapidly became corrupted by the exercise of power, and the allure of wealth accumulation. These tendencies compounded and developed into the ‘de-professionalisation’ of the officer corps, and fostered an attitude of scorn for civilians and their institutions. In the 1980s and 1990s, Ould Taya purposely exploited and exacerbated these tendencies and dysfunctions.

After purging the military of non-Arab officers after their clumsy 1987 coup plot, he sought to thoroughly ‘Arabise’ all branches of the armed forces, sending hundreds of select officers for training in military schools in Arab countries such as Iraq, Syria, Morocco and Algeria. This accentuated their politicisation, disregard for military professionalism, and proliferation of Arab nationalist (Nasserist and Ba'ath) and Islamist groups in the military. Anthony Pazzanita (Reference Pazzanita1992) documents this situation. The armed forces also fell victim to Ould Taya's calculations, as he became more preoccupied with the survival of his regime when political and armed opposition grew after 2002. After a bloody coup attempt in 2003, led by Nasserist officers from the Oulad Nacer and Laghlal tribes from the south-east of the country, he beefed up the BASEP, promoted ultra loyal officers from his own and allied (northern) tribes, and weakened other branches of the military. Some of these officers were typically positioned in strategic commands or made heads of key parastatals, and given a free hand to use public funds as they pleased. This weakened the military institution and increased the resentment of many junior officers left out of promotions and the largesse of the regime. In turn, these divisions were to destabilise relations between the regime and the security apparatus, as regime survival became dependent on the fealty of a few men, in particular the commander of the BASEP Colonel Ould Abdel Aziz, whose cousin (also from the commercially prosperous Oulad Bousbaa tribe) happened to be the director of National Security. It did not help that this tribe was locked in fierce competition over shares of the economy, in particular the newly discovered oil sector. When the pair easily took power on 6 August 2005, as numbers one and two of the junta, they were not about to hand over power to what they could only see as another coalition necessarily based on tribal, commercial, regional, ideological or other interests. Historically, it has always been a tall order for post-coup African militaries to steer their country towards a genuine democracy. In 2005, Mauritania's armed and security forces were less equipped than most of their counterparts to do so.

The parliamentary electionFootnote ⁷

Whatever else can be said about this election, it is undeniable that it produced, with a voter participation rate of 73·42% (first round) and 69·49% (second round), the most politically plural National Assembly ever in Mauritania's post-colonial history. No less than sixteen parties and ‘independents’ (supposedly without political affiliation) were represented after the second round of elections on 3 December 2006. In reality, most independents (who ended up winning forty-one seats out of ninety-five) were closely associated with the former regime, and held the highest positions in the organs of its party and allied political formations. Most declined to claim openly their association with the PRDS's successor, the Republican Party for Democracy and Renewal (PRDR), which won seven seats. The military junta's insistence on letting ‘independent’ candidates run for seats may well have cheated the opposition parties under Ould Taya's regime of a majority in the new National Assembly. With an eye to the presidential election (and beyond), this may have been all along a strategy of some prominent members of the junta. Set up to coordinate the activities and stances of the opposition during the transition, the coalition of eleven disparate and often feuding opposition parties, the Coalition of Forces for Democratic Change (CFCD), could obtain only thirty-nine seats. The failure of the opposition to capture a clear majority of the national assembly signalled that the radical change that many Mauritanian must have been hoping for after the coup was unlikely to come fast.

The presidential election

For the first time in their electoral history, Mauritanians were given the opportunity to choose between candidates none of whom was an incumbent or the official candidate of the regime. The MCJD had sworn not to sponsor or back a candidate, and to remain neutral. This only accentuated the importance of this election for the country. However, as would soon become clear, this solemn pledge was much more easily proclaimed than honoured. It must be emphasised that the pledge, very early in the process, was key to preventing what all too often happened in similar circumstances, military leaders conveniently finding, in good conscience, a way to cling to power.

It is fair to say that the country came very close to not holding the election, or holding an entirely different election than it ended up having. Soon after the parliamentary election and the fragmented lower house they produced, persistent rumours had it that the MCJD was already seeking ways and means to prolong the transition, with the help of prominent politicians of the former regime and members of the opposition. The argument was that the parliament, without a clear majority, would make the country ungovernable and vulnerable to breakdown. Elaborate scenarios were cooked up and peddled in the living rooms of elites, including a national unity government led by the opposition leader Ahmed Ould Daddah, with Colonel Ould Mohamed Vall remaining head of state for a while until presidential elections were eventually held. These schemes fell through mainly because no one seemed to be in the mood for overtime for the military, even as other hurdles soon appeared to the holding of a timely, truly free and fair election.

Showing a high degree of political maturity, nearly all parties (and actors) rejected any option other than a transition completed on schedule with a transparent election. It was apparent that the junta, its chairman and its most influential members were having second thoughts about their pledge to abandon power, and were actively seeking avenues to renege on it ‘in style’, so to speak. The MCJD itself started to show worrisome signs of division denoted by the appearance of factions, and the more or less secret activities of some of its members on behalf of other declared presidential candidates. Then came the tipping point.

On 27 January 2007, less than two months before the election, the chairman of the MCJD took even bolder steps to disclose what turned out to be rather clumsy efforts at extending the transition period, by finding a way around his pledge not to hang on to power. In the end, his efforts failed, and served only to galvanise opposition to continuous military rule and unify political actors against his designs, forcing him to backslide. The whole episode only served to illustrate convincingly the limits of entrusting a military leader with ushering in a democracy. Ever the number two of a system he never disavowed, in an address to newly elected mayors Colonel Ould Mohamed Vall first emphatically set the limits of the political debate during the campaign. He proclaimed that the controversial and unpopular diplomatic relations with Israel, the human rights record of the former regime (and the related fate of the former head of state) and Mauritania's withdrawal from ECOWAS should be off the table as presidential campaign topics. Never mind that these just happened to be precisely the three top issues on the mind of Mauritanians and the presidential candidates.

As if this were not astonishing enough, he also went on to introduce the topic of the so-called blank ballots. Suddenly a constitutional scholar, the colonel astounded his audience by explaining that, given the wording of the electoral law, if enough voters manifested their unhappiness with the slate of candidates during the election by casting a ‘blank ballot’ and thus depriving any candidate of 50% of valid votes, the election could be considered not satisfactory and the transition could be extended (and he could presumably run, having fulfilled his pledge not to run in the first poll). The deafening outcry of the political class, unified in its disgust at such a brazen attempt to derail the last stretch of the transition, was such that three days later Colonel Ould Mohamed Vall ‘clarified’ his statements during a hastily called press conference, stating unambiguously that he did not intend to remain beyond the nineteen months of transition agreed on. These important aspects of the March presidential election constituted the backdrop of the campaign, in which no fewer than twenty candidates competed. It ended with the victory of independent candidate Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi in the run-off second round with 52·85% of the votes (24·80% in the first round), against 47·15 (20·69% in the first round) for his challenger, long-time opposition leader Ahmed Ould Daddah.

As in the municipal and parliamentary elections, the presidential election was free of the old-fashioned ballot box stuffing on election day and similar practices, once the staple of elections in Mauritania. However, the same dynamics of tribal politics, and the financial resources ill-gotten during the Ould Taya regime, were used with a vengeance in proportion to the stakes the presidential office represented. These were high not just for the military junta, many of whose members felt vulnerable due to their reported involvement in the repression and looting of the Ould Taya years, but also because of the future plans of the MCJD's soon-to-be-retired chairman, whose political ambitions were made abundantly clear in the ‘blank ballots’ mishap. They were higher still for the hegemonic block made up of oligopolisitic businesses controlled by members of Ould Taya's tribe (the Smasside), their allied tribes (for example the Oulad Bousbaa tribe of numbers one and two in the junta), as well as allies in the financial and administrative sectors of the state. This block was in danger of losing its position should a candidate whom it did not control become president. It was reputedly behind, and bankrolled, the candidacy of Zeine Ould Zeidane, formerly Governor of the Central Bank under Ould Taya and during most of the transition, whose father-in-law was retired general Moulaye Ould Boukhreiss, a long-time army chief of staff and very wealthy power broker. Ould Zeidane was to come in third place in the first round with a very respectable 15·28% of votes cast.

Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi came late to the race as an independent candidate, when it appeared that the discredit of the former ruling party, and the momentum the opposition was enjoying, would combine to propel Ahmed Ould Daddah as the next president. As the long-time opposition leader, president of the RFD party, prominent member of the opposition coalition (CFCD), and the candidate with arguably the most name recognition, Ould Daddah no doubt felt that his time had come. He did succeed in rallying to his cause a few members of the military establishment and in luring some prominent members of the former regime, including high-level civil servants and significant members of the opportunistic urban elites. However, despite his efforts to allay their doubts, including an infamous interview with Jeune Afrique a few days before the election, at the price of embracing the very positions he had decried for a long time (Ould Daddah Reference Ould Daddah2007), many members of the MCJD and the military in general did not trust him. Furthermore, despite his strong signals to the hegemonic business block mentioned above, his indulgence in questionable tribal politics, and his willingness to play to the Arab nationalist sentiment that underlies significant aspects of Mauritanian political culture, Ould Daddah was just not reassuring enough to too many constituencies, including non-Arab Mauritanians who saw a betrayal in some of his pronouncements.

With the strong behind-the-scenes backing of the MCJD's most prominent members, Ould Abdallahi readily rallied to his candidacy most of the ‘independent’ members of parliament (suggesting that he would be able to work with that institution), and the small political formations that gravitated around the party formerly in power. Most importantly, though quite logically, he won the endorsement of the third-placed candidate, and reputed standard-bearer of the former regime coalition, Zeine Ould Zeidane. Much less logically and unexpectedly though, he was able to secure the backing of the fourth-placed candidate Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, and his party, the APP, member of the opposition coalition CFCD, all eleven political formations of which had entered an agreement to support the top vote winner from their ranks. This endorsement ensured Ould Abdallahi's victory and brought about a remarkable realignment of the Mauritanian political game. The ‘price’ of Ould Boulkheir's backing was a pledge by Ould Abdallahi to get his supporters in parliament, particularly the ‘independents’, to elect him to the speakership of the National Assembly, and rapidly pass legislation to criminalise the practice of slavery. The question remained whether the alliance of Ould Abdallahi and Ould Boulkheir and his formation could withstand the inevitable pressure to which it would be submitted. After all, the president's largest support base happened to be core elements of the former regime, including his prime minister, most members of his government, and his closest (military and civilian) advisers.

There was a relatively high turnout (70·2% in the first round, 67·4% in the second), and except in the urban areas such as Nouakchott, Ould Abdallahi won in nearly all the thirteen regions (excluding Trarza, Ould Daddah's region of origin, and Inchiri, with a virtual tie in Dakhlet-Nouadhibou), particularly the vote-rich eastern regions of the country (Electoral Geography 2007). To his credit, despite what would have been well-founded reservations or protest about the polls (and the process) given the underhanded role of the military junta in favour of the victor, Ould Daddah graciously acknowledged defeat, adding a most promising note to the electoral-process part of the military interlude. So, President Ould Abdallahi was ‘democratically elected’ to the general relief and satisfaction of Mauritanians, and of the international community, for which the African Union spoke.Footnote ⁸ After the 19 April 2007 presidential inauguration, and with the transition behind them, Mauritanians had high hopes and expectations indeed. The political and socio-economic challenges, left intact if not exacerbated by the transition, were numerous. What were the most pressing of these challenges, and to what extent could (or did) the new political dispensation address them? The next section seeks to answer these and related questions, and discuss the post-transition developments.

Civil-military relations: the unresolved equation

Since it took power for the first time in 1978, the military has been a fixture in Mauritania's political landscape, and has unsettlingly developed into what Koonings and Kruijt (Reference Koonings and Kruijt2002) would call a ‘political army’, that deludes itself into believing that it is the ‘embodiment of national legitimacy’. This principle seems to have derived from ‘a matter of fact’ phrase used in the communiqué the military junta that staged the first coup in Mauritania's history in July 1978 coined to justify the coup. It became customary for successive military regimes to cultivate this notion to legitimise their power. The policies that resulted from this claim and the Ould Taya policies led to a militarisation of the political culture, a certain cult of brute force, as well as a disproportionately high share of GDP going to the armed forces (5·5%, ranking 14th out of 171 states, in 2005 for example). It also led to an extremely high percentage of the armed forces as a ratio of the total population when compared to neighbouring countries with arguably more compelling security needs (Nationmaster 2007).Footnote ¹⁰ This legacy was indeed worrisome and, like other challenges to the consolidation of democracy, needed to be addressed urgently. Indeed, the determination of members of the junta to continue to run the country even after the March 2007 election and, of course, the 6 August 2008 putsch stem from the military's long-standing sense of entitlement to be the ultimate political decision-making institution. Of course, this sense of entitlement is acted upon by self-seeking officers who often do not have the best interest of the institution at heart.

In November 2005, as the transition got under way, the leader of the junta said on Radio France Internationale, a French radio broadcasting for African audiences, that the future civilian president would have nothing to fear from the army so long as he governed the country correctly, without elaborating on just what the expected ‘correct perspective’ (his phrase) means. In other pronouncements he had, for example, excluded the possibility that military officers, particularly the former head of state, might ever be put on trial. This did little to reassure those who hoped that the 2005 coup would be the very last one.

In spite of his affiliation with influential members of the military, President Ould Abdallahi seemed to be keenly aware of the sword of Damocles hanging over his head even before taking office. His advisors went out of their way to appease the military before the election (Meunier Reference Meunier2007). His appointment of former MCJD strongman Colonel Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz (whom he dutifully promoted General) as his personal chief of staff soon after his election was indicative of the same concerns. This is an issue that clearly weighed heavily on the prospects for a durable democracy in Mauritania, by the time the civilian administration took office. The serious crisis brought on by a handful of parliamentarians who forced the Ould Waghf government to resign in July 2008, with behind-the-scenes manipulation by Generals Ould Abdel Azziz and Ould Ghazouani (newly appointed Chief of Staff of the army) was a clear indication of this post-transition challenge President Ould Abdallahi and Mauritania faced. Though not so obvious, part of the challenge posed by these unhealthy civil-military relations was that these promotions and appointments to key commands were intensely resented by officers who had more seniority and were arguably more meritorious and more respected than the two beneficiaries of what seemed to be a hasty attempt to both reward and pacify these two officers. The 6 August 2008 coup, less than eighteen months after the transition, is the best evidence that building different civil-military relations remains the fundamental challenge. It is not, of course, the only one.

The ‘human rights deficit’

This is indeed a delicate issue, aspects of which go to the fundamental question of what Mauritania is as a nation-state project, and one the transition was supposed to tackle as a priority. Slavery, one of its touchiest manifestations, now no longer denied, was tackled as a part of the deal with Messaoud Ould Boulkheir and his party, during the very first days of the parliamentary session. A new law now criminalises the practice and the state is committed to its eradication, instead of denying its existence. This is certainly a boon for bringing about conditions favourable to the creation of a democratic environment, assuming continued genuine commitment. To his credit, President Ould Abdallahi tackled head on the issue of Black Mauritanians who were deported or driven into exile by the repressive policies of Ould Taya's regime. Within a few months of his inauguration, thousands were brought back home from Senegal, helped to start a new life, and state resources were mobilised to help their reintegration. When the 6 August 2008 coup took place, the entire dossier of the human rights deficit was far from being resolved. The very slow pace of the state bureaucracy in tackling it was criticised by organisations of victims, and blamed on rearguard machinations of the Arab nationalists who dominated it and top military officers. It is undeniable that, by fulfilling his electoral promise to reverse Ould Taya era policies on human rights, Ould Abdallahi did Mauritania some good and helped it cross a major psychological hurdle. It will however take much more to erase completely that ‘deficit’. Given how hamstrung President Ould Abdallahi turned out to be, it will continue to loom large in Mauritanian politics.

Like everything else in this phase of Mauritania's evolution, this issue depended in part on how President Ould Abdallahi could manage the complex political situation bequeathed to him by the military junta. Given the weight of this lingering ‘human rights deficit’ on Mauritanian politics, particularly after the latest coup, with some Arab nationalist officers becoming nervous about some of President Ould Abdallahi's policies in this area, a series of questions can best highlight the precariousness of democracy-building in Mauritania, and the interconnections between the post-transition challenges. Surrounded almost entirely as he was by former Ould Taya loyalists (both civilian and military), could President Ould Abdallahi have sustained the will to carry on tackling the ‘human rights deficit’ dossier, including allowing the trials of major offenders (among them former heads of state)? This was highly unlikely. Could his apparently sincere compassion for the victims and eagerness to get over this albatross of Mauritanian politics for the sake of national unity withstand strong pressure, and not so subtle warnings from state bureaucracies, military officers and business elites? It was more likely that the coalition that brought him to power would also paralyse his actions because of the serious contradictions that existed among its members. Indeed, the June 2008 political crisis abundantly illustrated these contradictions and ultimately hastened his overthrow. His attempts to widen his majority (dominated by the former regime's top lieutenants) in order to moderate Islamist and secular progressive parties exposed his vulnerability, and unleashed a well-orchestrated campaign almost openly led by Generals Ould Adel Aziz and Ould Ghazzouani with the help of some ‘independent’ parliamentarians whom they had manipulated all along.

Yet another party-state?

Here again, pondering a number of questions can best highlight the importance of the issue of a ‘presidential majority party’ to democracy-building in Mauritania. Could President Ould Abdallahi have governed effectively without a formal, ideologically coherent political formation backing him? Without such a formation, would he not have been at the mercy of the unstable coalition that helped to elect him? After these questions were first formulated, President Ould Abdallahi's ideological foot soldiers (chief among them long-time Arab nationalist ideologues such as Ould Ahmed Miske) feverishly busied themselves setting up a ‘presidential’ party named Pacte National pour la Démocracie et le Développement (PNDD, National Pact for Democracy and Development). It soon became evident that this was a carbon copy of Ould Taya's PRDS. Its organs are almost entirely manned by the men and women who ran the party-state of the former regime. Influential members of this party were the main agitators behind President Ould Abdallahi's political woes shortly before his overthrow, proving that the PNDD was and indeed still is an unstable political ‘Molotov Cocktail’. When the 6 August 2008 coup occurred, the party looked very much like the first step towards yet another party-state, analogous to Ould Taya's PRDS (and Moctar Ould Daddah's PPM). It could be argued that the resulting situation could have constituted a peril just as pernicious to democratic consolidation as the military's behind-the-scenes (post-transition) interference, omnipresence and self-arrogated licence to intervene at will. Some of these questions and observations were becoming increasingly salient when President Ould Abdallahi was overthrown.

The institutional crisis that developed in June 2008 and led to the resignation of Ould Ahmed Wadhf's first government, and the ensuing split of the incipient party-state at the instigation of Generals Ould Abdel Aziz and Ould Ghazouani, provided elements of answers to some of them. Even before the coup, these developments augured difficult days ahead for democracy in Mauritania. Indeed, as this article was being reviewed, no longer able to continue to keep the serious rift between him and his top military leaders under control, President Ould Abdallahi sacked four of them, including the two generals. Their predictable reaction was simply to overthrow and put him under house arrest, and proclaim a ‘High Council of State’ (made up of top officers) to replace him as the head of the executive branch. With the 6 August 2008 coup, Mauritania entered yet another period of military rule, and instability and uncertainty about its long-term prospects for democracy.

Corruption and neo-patrimonial economics

For its small population, Mauritania's immense potential (iron ore, fish, copper and more recently off-shore oil) should have translated by now into far better macroeconomic statistics and living standards. According to the World Bank (2007), Mauritania ranked 169th with a per capita Gross National Income of $580, and saw its GDP grow by 5·4% (2·4% per capita) between 2004 and 2005. According to the same report, nearly half the population lived below the poverty line in 2000, and more than 60% lived on 2 dollars a day, all compounded by an extremely uneven distribution of national income with a Gini index of 39. Under Ould Taya, the opposition insisted that rates of growth and projections were exaggerated, poverty rates underestimated, and that all official statistics were based on fraudulent data. It wasn't until December 2005, months after the 2005 coup, that the IMF suspended Mauritania from eligibility for debt relief, accusing it of mismanaging its public finances (IMF 2005). A few months earlier, it had already expressed its ‘concern that weaknesses in, and unavailability of, crucial data’ had made it impossible to conduct ‘a complete assessment of Mauritania's economic performance and policies’ (ibid.).

The first post-election government proclaimed its intention to fight corruption, elaborated a national anti-corruption strategy, even declared 9 December the national anti-corruption day, and adopted a World Bank-inspired anti-poverty strategy. Whether these intentions and preliminary steps would translate into reforms that significantly reduced corruption and eliminated barriers to entry in the various economic and financial activities to those traditionally excluded was yet to be seen when the 6 August 2008 coup occurred. While the rhetoric of reform was plentiful, no prosecution for corruption or removal from office of notoriously predatory elements of the former regime had yet occurred. Indeed, just the opposite happened as 2008 got under way.Footnote ¹¹ The leading figures of the Ould Taya era made a triumphant come back in the ill-fated first Ould El Waghf government (President Ould Abdallahi's second government). There were already signs of the authoritarian nostalgia associated with the perception among the populace in post-authoritarian situations that newly democratically elected leaders lack direction, or are unable or unwilling to meet their needs. In other words, by the 6 August coup, Mauritanians were becoming impatient as they waited for the so-called democracy dividends. The customary promises that follow coups notwithstanding, it is highly unlikely that the military junta-appointed government will bring the needed economic reforms. The coup will indeed result in a further deterioration of the economic situation due to sanctions the international community has threatened in order to reverse the coup.

To assess Mauritania's democratisation prospects up to the 6 August 2008 coup, it was not too early, even under a president just inaugurated, to talk about the end of President Ould Abdallahi's mandate (supposed to end in 2012). Indeed, it was quite relevant to the future of Mauritania and to the manner in which it would address its many challenges to recall that, because of his age, Ould Abdallahi would have been ineligible to stand for a second term (Art. 26 of the Constitution). This may have been one of the main reasons for the support he received in 2006 from the MCJD, particularly its chairman Colonel Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, whose ambition to replicate the itinerary of the current head of state of MaliFootnote ¹² is an open secret. The return to power of a (retired) military officer such as Colonel Vall, even through an election, as the standard-bearer of a party-state set up under a conveniently selected aging ‘transitional’ civilian president would have certainly been a setback for the democratisation process in Mauritania after the salutary 3 August 2005 coup. The transition would have been just another ingenious way, a ‘Mauritanian way’, of using the rhetoric and process of democratisation to attain power, only in a delayed and more acceptable fashion, by carefully selecting a president to keep the presidential seat warm until the military ruler could take it over later through the ballot box.

Of course, no matter how elaborate and ingenious, this scenario did not come to pass. Without a doubt, it was President Ould Abdallahi's refusal to play his part in it that led to the 6 August coup and the stalemate Mauritania's military/political class found itself in after the refusal of the international community, which once again deferred to the African Union, to accept the nullification of so many efforts to finally give Mauritania a chance to turn the page on praetorianism and instability. The international community, with remarkable unanimity, has demanded that the coup be reversed and constitutional order restored.

There is no doubt that Mauritania's peculiar political culture, and President Ould Abdallahi's own indecisiveness and inability to grasp, early enough, the significance for Mauritania's political evolution of his election after three decades of military rule, account for some of his woes and his downfall. Ultimately, Mauritania's current predicament is primarily by design, courtesy of the country's military chiefs who, after all, have been no different from Africa's long line of coup-makers.

* * *

This article has critically examined Mauritania's recent transition, under the tutelage of a military junta, from a quasi-military authoritarian regime to a freely elected civilian regime led by President Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdallahi up to his overthrow on 6 August 2008. It argues that, while the military junta that took power after the 3 August 2005 coup d'état did keep to its word not to hang on to power following the nineteen-month transition period agreed to, it interfered with the democratisation process behind the scenes, to ensure that pre-coup opposition parties did not win. The ballot stuffing of old did not take place, but the transition process imposed by the junta allowed the same pre-coup predatory coalition to use ill-gotten fortunes to maintain its dominance over a now fragmented body politic, enabling the military to remain very much involved in politics after the transition. The junta leader's short tenure in power seems to have whetted his appetite for power, and he and his lieutenants spared no effort to keep the military as a major political actor, and prepare his eventual return to power. Mauritania's transition seemed to resemble a new model of coup-makers promising democracy but scheming to return to power, an ingenious ‘delayed self-succession’ of sorts, barely different from the crude and more familiar ‘civilianisation’ that military leaders used to implement without qualms throughout Africa.

President Ould Abdallahi, a reassuring grandfatherly figure, did take some initiatives that improved the democratisation prospects, even as he faced the same challenges that the military interlude had done nothing to tackle. Among these challenges is the necessity of redesigning civil-military relations, erasing the ‘human rights deficit’, and transforming the corrupt, neo-patrimonial economy still dominated by an entrenched coalition of tribal-military-bureaucratic interests. Because of his age, President Ould Abdallahi would not have been able to run for re-election, and there seemed little doubt that the junta leader, Colonel Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, would have attempted to return to power through the ballot box, whether or not Ould Abdallahi finished his term in office. However, his sudden refusal to play his part in a post-transition democratic regime, intended as an interlude with a civilian figure head and influential former military junta members pulling the strings, seems to have thwarted the original design, thereby forcing the military, an institution united only artificially, to return to power through an old fashion coup d'état on 6 August 2008. While the latest coup, or at least some military interference, was predictable given the history and continued dysfunction of the security apparatus,Footnote ¹³ the outcome of yet another of its adventures in Mauritania's political evolution remains more than ever unpredictable and ominous.