NOUAKCHOTT, 14 July 2003 — Mauritania’s president, who survived a coup attempt last month, has accused Islamists in the northwest African country of inciting people to support the failed uprising.
Renegade soldiers in the mainly Muslim country came close to toppling President Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya on June 8, but they were defeated after two days of fighting. The official death toll was 15.
“The assailants made the troops believe that the presidency had been attacked by looters,” the pro-Western president said on Saturday at the formal opening of an iron mine. “At the same time, people in the mosques and elsewhere incited the population to rise up against the authorities by presenting the coup plotters as protectors of Islam and saying it was everybody’s duty to join them,” he added.
The coup attempt followed the arrest of dozens of Islamists and activists of the pan-Arab nationalist Baath party sympathetic to Saddam Hussein amid signs of unrest after the US-led war on Iraq.
Officials have said the man behind the plot was Saleh Ould Hanenna, a former officer who had been dismissed from the army for stirring opposition to Mauritania’s ties with Israel. He is now on the run.
Mauritania, a largely desert country straddling black and Arab Africa, established full diplomatic relations with Israel in 1999 — only the third Arab League state to do so. Taya said he was surprised by the coup attempt. “I could not imagine for a second that one would attempt to destabilize a government which guided the country toward democracy,” he said, warning that the consequences of the uprising were serious.
“It could drag the country into civil war, which would open the way to intervention by foreign forces under the cover of peacekeeping,” he said.
Several high-ranking officials were detained after the coup.
