Crossposted from European Tribune.

Mauritania’s army and internal security forces seized power today in a coup, taking advantage of President Maaoya Sid’Ahmed Taya being away for King Fahd’s funeral. The military junta, which calls itself the ‘Military Council for Justice and Democracy,’ claims to have deposed an oppressive regime and pledges to keep free and fair elections within two years. About the former it may be right; but there is no queue to bet one’s last euro on the latter.

A former French colony on the southwestern fringe of North Africa, Mauritania has a tiny population of 2,8 million and the world’s lowest population density. It was never a tremendous magnet for visitors either: “To some, this place is the pits - sand and an overwhelming sense of revulsion,” concludes the ingress to the chapter on Mauritania in Lonely Planet’s guide to Africa. At least the sand part can hardly be argued with. More than 80 % of the country is arid and the Sahara is encroaching on the rest.

There is also petroleum, estimated at more than a billion barrels of oil and 30 billion cubic meters of natural gas. Crude is expected to flow next year, with the usual problematic that entails for a third world country plagued by inequality and rampant corruption even at the outset.

Though officially abolished several times, an 800-year old practice of brutal racist chattel slavery persists in the east. Estimates of the slave population run from 100,000 to a million. Largely, if not exclusively, the slave owners are light-skinned Moors while the slaves are black. Since the institution officially does not exist, the organizations that oppose it have been banned. Mauritania is thus the only country where anti-slavery activists are prosecuted by the police.

The now deposed President Maaoya Sid’Ahmed Taya seized power in 1984 in a bloodless coup, ruling as a military dictator until 1992 when he was elected under a new, democratic constitution established by referendum the year before. He has since been reelected twice in polls the opposition has boycotted and condemned as fraudulent.

In recent years Taya, aligned with the US in the ‘war on terror,’ has been clamping down on Islamist opposition in the guise of ‘fighting terrorism.’ His government claimed to have foiled three attempted coups since 2003. But according to a report by the International Crisis Group, the noted Brussels-based think tank, there is little to connect the opposition with al-Qaeda. Rather, as is usual in the region, moderate Islamists have been denied democratic participation by the regime.

Stay tuned; Mauritania may have more surprises in store.