Welcome back Galleh. We missed you. How so prophetic and visionary. As a
rejoinder, the only proverbial rose I see in the AU dung heap is Amadou Toumani
Toure of Mali, a landlocked country with meagre resources. Indeed Galleh you
are not saying that military men ought not be president. You are indeed
sharing that because of the instruments of intimidation and oppression at their
beckon call, they have a higher tendency of stripping the citizenry of their
liberties and that there must be a mechanism whereby the military is divorced
from the "military" institutionally when a military officer or officers stage
a coup. And this is not to say that the government ousted ought not to have
been ousted.
I was also reading Mr. Sidibeh's trademark eloquent and gracious
eulogy/Memoriam of Adama Faburay just a few moments ago. There, Mr. Sidibeh informs us
that part of Adama's work in MOJA-G was to innoculate the citizenry against
tendencies of graft and graffignette. Could it be that African minds are
finally merging and ready to break the cycle of insiduous patronnage and ominous
confetti? I think so. This is how renaissance begins. The learned and sober are
not afraid to speak their minds, independent of ephemeral and patriarchal
considerations. It makes me proud once again to be an African and a Gambian.
The inspiration in incremental sobriety keeps me going.
Thank you for you.
Haruna.
In a message dated 8/7/2008 8:43:16 P.M. Mountain Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
INTRODUCTION: In 2005, a military coup in Mauritania ousted the government
of Maaouya Ould Taya, who had ruled the country for twenty years. The
so-called International Community, including our farce of an African Union made their
usual guttural noises. The soldiers who ousted him promised to hand over
power to a civilian government after a two-year transition period. They did. In
March 2007, the just-ousted president Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi was elected.
But it was predictable that the soldiers would come back. They have. I wrote
the following article shortly after the 2005 coup and just wanted to share
it again with our online communities. Three years have passed and Mr. Vall,
the leader of the 1995 coup, has not yet featured prominently in this recent
coup. But the issues raised three years ago in this piece remain relevant. Read
on.
Mauritania: An All Too Familiar Story
By Baba Galleh Jallow
The recent coup that ousted Mauritanian despot Maaouya Ould Taya has
elicited the usual hue and cry: condemnations from the international community,
calls for the soldiers to return immediately to barracks. The African Union,
which makes the most noise when such situations arise, expressed its utter
indignation by suspending the country from the organization until it returns to
democratic constitutional rule. And, as usual, the “new” military rulers, who
had been Ould Taya’s weapon of oppression for the past twenty years, have
promised to return the country to civilian rule within two years. Already, the
military council is talking about the drafting of a new constitution and making
all the usual pacifying noises.
The current scenario in Mauritania is all too familiar to observers of
African politics. Total disenchantment with an African despot who’s been in power
for decades provides an excuse for a group of semi-illiterate soldiers to
seize power. To appease the world, the soldiers declare that they are only out
to root out corruption and return the country to civilian rule within a few
years. The condemnations continue for some time and then die down, replaced by
the sleepy and indifferent silence of the pre-coup days. The soldiers taste
power and find it sweeter than their wildest imaginations. And then yes -
there is an easy way out: They will return the country to civilian rule all
right. All they need to do is throw off their military fatigues and slip into
civilian tails and ties, or twenty-meter grand boubous, complete with swords,
beads, and small white caps to demonstrate just how civilian and pious they had
suddenly become. And then of course, elections are held and who comes out
with a landslide victory than the God-sent savior, the very choice of the
people, the neo-military despot? And so the tragedy continues.
In the case of Mauritania, the situation is even more predictable owing to
the fact that within the next twelve months, the country would be producing
75, 000 barrels of crude oil per day and is hoping to find more lucrative oil
reserves offshore. Is it not likely that the soldiers actually had the
impending oil windfall in full view as they hatched their plan to oust Ould Taya? Of
course they knew about the oil. And of course they want to get richer than
they already are. And certainly, by the end of their stated transition period
of two years, the oil would have been flowing and Mr. Vall, the “new”
leader, would hate to imagine simply handing over all that power and access to
unlimited riches to another person while he himself could very well handle it.
How could he turn his back and return to being a subservient soldier under some
civilian pretender who would probably see him as a threat and get him killed
or locked up on some flimsy excuse?
So, of course, the soldiers will NOT return to barracks. Yes, they will hand
over power to themselves, like all military despots do in Africa: Togo’s
Eyadema, Sudan’s El Bashir, Gambia’s Jammeh, Central African Republic’s
Bokassa, Uganda’s Museveni. The list is long. All those soldiers who had seized
power with the now outmoded excuse of saving the country, only to cling on to
power and become more corrupt, more ruthless and more deserving of condemnation
that the despots they removed. The story is all too familiar for elaboration.
Suffice it to say that if the African Union, the United States and European
Union want to stop the occurrence of military coups on the continent, they
have to stop the prevalence of the conditions that cause military coups in
Africa. They have to help the people of this beleaguered continent end the ugly
specter of never-ending sultanism, one-man rule. They have to insist on the
building of workable democratic institutions that will make it impossible for
any despot to stay in power beyond two terms, or change the constitution at
will to run yet again, as Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni so shamefully did a couple
of months ago, as Togo’s Eyadema did all through his thirty-six years in
power, as Zimbabwe’s Mugabe continues to do, as Guinea’s Lansana Conteh is
doing, as Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh is doing. So long as despots are allowed to stay
in power indefinitely, there will be coups in Africa and the soldiers will
never return to barracks because they can become civilians anytime. The
elections conducted by these despots are a sham. Some of them go so far as to
declare, long before the polls, that they will win the elections, that they will
never allow the opposition to rule this country. Gambia’s Jammeh is very fond of
making this ugly declaration. These dictators feel that they actually own
their countries and have a natural right to stay in power forever. They exert
full control over all arms of government - the legislature, the judiciary, the
cabinet, the security forces, the public media, foreign policy. They assume
the identity of the state itself and become the personification of the law
itself. They become gods in their own right and specialize in bullying
everybody else into subservience. Is it any wonder that someday, while their backs
are turned, a cowardly group of soldiers will muster enough courage to seize
power, and then turn themselves into saviors and heroes and fearless lions over
night?
Of course, the African Union is made up largely of so-called leaders of this
ilk. They will condemn the coup because they are afraid of being removed
themselves. If the African Union cannot tell Robert Mugabe the truth, if it
cannot tell Lansana Conteh to step down and hand over power before that country
slides into chaos, if it cannot condemn the blatant impunity with which Yahya
Jammeh rides over the breaking backs of Gambians, if the African Union is
silent in the face of all the innumerable abuses perpetrated against the people
of this continent by power hungry despots, then it has no right to condemn
the seizure of power by power-hungry soldiers in Mauritania or anywhere else.
Clearly, what we have here is a case of the thief looking for the thief,
dictators condemning dictatorship, abusers of power condemning the abuse of power.
In fact, one finds it ridiculous to call on the African Union to do anything
constructive, because it is made up of leaders who have no intention of
looking the truth in the eye, because the truth is that they themselves are
guilty of the same crimes for which they condemn others.
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