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By Jon Boyle
Reuters AlertNet
http://www.alertnet.org/
Friday, June 13, 2003

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NOUAKCHOTT, June 13 (Reuters) - The army unit spearheading a failed coup in Mauritania this month was equipped long ago by Saddam Hussein and its leader was known to be close to Iraq's Arab nationalist Baath party, diplomats said.

The northwest African country is trying to fathom the most violent attempt to seize power since independence in 1960, and crushing poverty appears as much a cause as growing political and religious discontent.

President Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya's government has not said why it thinks the plotters launched their attempted coup, and suspected coup leader Saleh Ould Hanenna is on the run.

The coup attempt followed the arrest of dozens of Islamists and Baath party activists amid restive signs after the U.S.-led war on Saddam.

But diplomats also cite questions over democracy, deeply unpopular ties with Israel and a famine that has touched a third of the desert country's nearly three million people.

"The coup leaders thought there were pockets of discontent in a number of areas and everybody would come out of the woodwork against Taya and support them," a Western diplomat said. "They severely miscalculated on that."

But the rebels came close to succeeding.

At one point they reached the presidential palace and took radio and television stations -- standard targets for an African coup -- but reinforcements from the interior put them to flight on Monday before they had issued a rallying cry.

SADDAM'S TANKS

The tanks used by the armoured unit that led the coup plot were gifts from Saddam's Iraq and officers had been there to train. Baghdad was one of Taya's few friends after he took power in a 1984 coup.

"At the time, Mauritania was on everybody's blacklist. The only country that provided some support and arms was Iraq," said British Honorary Consul Nancy Abeiderrahmane, who runs a dairy business in the capital.

Taya backed Iraq during the first Gulf War, but afterwards shifted to the pro-Western camp -- becoming only the third Arab League country to establish full diplomatic ties with Israel in 1999.

Mauritania was not critical of the war to topple Saddam but did not openly back it either. At one point it was suggested by diplomats as a possible option for exile.

Hanenna, a colonel, was dismissed from the army in a purge of Baathists opposed to ties with Israel and at a time when Taya's officials believed talk of a coup was in the wind.

But even many of the government's critics think that the Baath party links, or alternatively a possible Islamist connection, might not have been as important as simple poverty in pushing serving and retired soldiers to try to seize power.

After being sacked, Hanenna had worked as a driver. There were continual rumblings in his former unit about low pay and poor conditions in a country where average income is barely a dollar a day.

"This frustration drove him to take up arms against his brothers and Mauritania's democratic institutions," said Lemrabott Ould Sid'Ahmed, who runs a newspaper critical of the government.

"When people are hungry, they devour their leaders. That's what happened in Mauritania," he said.

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Direct Link:
--http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L13452039.htm

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