Word: daddah
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When the four-day summit convened last week, there were some inevitable absentees. Mauritania's President Moktar Ould Daddah, for instance, had been overthrown by a military coup shortly before he was supposed to leave for Nouakchott Airport to catch a plane to Khartoum. Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, as usual, preferred to stay home, sending in his place a quarrelsome delegation that threw the sessions into an occasional uproar by picking fights with neighboring Chad. Nonetheless, 35 leaders of the OAU's 49 member states were on hand, the largest muster in the organization's history...
...Sahara wind. Shortly afterward, as army Land Rovers equipped with machine guns appeared on street corners, the nature of the tempest became clear. Officers of the 15,000-man Mauritanian army, led by Lieut. Colonel Mustapha Ould Mohammed Salek, 42, had overthrown the regime of President Moktar Ould Daddah, 53, the mild-mannered strongman who had ruled the poverty-stricken country of 1.5 million Muslims since it gained independence from France...
...coup-which leaves 22 of Africa's 50 independent countries controlled by the military-was a bloodless one. Daddah was arrested at home and bundled off unharmed to a site outside the capital. Salek, the chief of staff, announced that government was in the hands of an 18-man "Military Committee for National Redress," composed of 16 other officers and a police commissioner...
...officers accused Daddah of corruption, but a more likely reason for the coup was Mauritania's woeful record in the drawn-out guerrilla war it is fighting, alongside Morocco, in the former Spanish Sahara. The two countries moved into the phosphate-rich colony in 1975, when Spain agreed to withdraw its troops. Despite military help from Morocco and France, Mauritania has been battered by the 5,000 members of the Marxistoriented, Algerian-backed, Polisario guerrilla movement, which demands independence for the region...
...French Africa scarcely seem perturbed by the fact that French sales of Mirage jets, submarines, helicopters, AMX-13 light tanks and other arms to South Africa will reach the $2 billion mark within the next four years. As if to underscore the irony, Mauritania's President Muktar Quid Daddah, in an after-dinner tribute last week to President Pompidou, roundly condemned the British government's policy and blithely glossed over the fact that France is Pretoria's principal arms supplier...