They Used to Call it "French North Africa" because its Rulers were in France. Of Course Today ... Oh, Wait

NOTE: A version of this article was posted this morning but was subsequently inadvertently deleted. I have reconstituted it as best I could.

As this article (in French) notes, three North African leaders (the Presidents of Algeria and Mauritania and the King of Morocco) have been in France for several weeks.

Algerian President Bouteflika, as we knew, has been in Paris since late April, when he suffered a "minor stroke," from which he is rumored to be in a coma officially said to be "improving day to day" despite no photos having been made public.

Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz has been in Paris as well on a "private visit" since attending a meeting in Brussels on May 15. There is speculation about his health as well; you may recall that last October he was wounded when his own Army shot up the Presidential motorcade in a "tragic accident" which was discovered after the President had "accidentally" been shot five times. He received lengthy treatment in France for that as well.

And King Muhammad VI of Morocco is also on a private visit to Paris since May 10. While there have  been recent rumors about the King's health as well (though he's not yet 50), he may be avoiding the political issues at home produced by the Istiqlal Party's intention to withdraw from the ruling coalition.

Of course, they may all just love Paris in the springtime. But who's watching the store at home?

Lameen Souag Surfaces with Four Posts Worth Noting

I've fairly frequently linked (given the infrequency of his posts) to the linguistic posts of Algerian blogger and Berber/Saharan languages linguist Lameen Souag at his Jabal al-Lughat blog, most recently on his post about a Chinese description of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate.

In recent years he's been a little silent, being the sort of person (though I only know him online) who gets distracted from blogging by distracting stuff like writing and defending a doctoral dissertation, getting married, moving from England to France, starting a teaching career, writing books, and so on. Anyway, he seems to be back with a vengeance. Lately he's been posting frequently, and in fact his last four posts all should have relevance to those with an interest in the Maghreb. Links to each with a few comments;

Learn Tamezret Berber with Cartoons. Tamezret is a small Tamazight (Berber)-speaking town in southern Tunisia, and a center of the Amazigh revival in that country. There are now several sites devoted to its local dialect, including one using cartoons.

The Language of Academia: Algeria and France. Despite a quarter century of Arabization in the primary and secondary schools, half the courses in Algerian universities are still taught in French.

Review: La question linguistique en Algérie. Review of a book by Chafia Yamina Benmayouf (also quoted in the above post). She apparently is an unapologetic Francophone, disdainful of Arabization, and equating French with "modernity." Lameen disagrees:

As for her vision of the future, I would consider it close to a worst-case scenario. Her tactical and qualified support for Algerian Arabic does not entail actually using it for anything important; while rather hostile to Standard Arabic as a medium for university education, she takes it for granted that French is appropriate in that context, and indeed is the perfect vehicle for anything related to modernity. But, frankly, I do not want a French-language-mediated "transfer of modernity from the north shore to the south shore of the Mediterranean" (p. 118); I want an Algeria with the self-confidence and self-awareness to learn from a variety of examples and choose its own path, not mechanically follow in France's footsteps. Nor do I believe that relegating "modernity" to a foreign language is likely to help Algeria achieve it!

Nonetheless, I'm glad I read the book. It's fascinating – if sad – to discover that there exists an Algerian intellectual prepared to take a position this extreme in favour specifically of French; I don't believe I've ever met one. Could one find a corresponding phenomenon in France, I wonder – some professor eagerly advocating for more English in the bureaucracy and the universities, and condemning supporters of French as narrow-minded nationalists?

Didn't they kick the French out 51 years ago? But this is still a controversy in Algeria, were many senor officials still aren't that comfortable in literary Arabic.

Ethnologue Update Comments. There's a new version online of the standard Ethnologue reference on world languages, itself a controversial issue at times; Lameen assesses the improvements (and flaws) of their coverage of North African and Saharan languages. including one Mauritanian language, Imeraguen, which apparently may not even exist.

The Moor on the Mauritanian "Accident"

You will recall that the week began with news that Mauritania's President had been accidentally shot by his own troops. It was the sort of terrible accident where he was shot multiple times when troops accidentally ambushed the Presidential motorcade, apparently mistaking it for  I don't know — some other Presidential motorcade? Anyway, my questioning of the story in my earlier post on the subject.

 The Moor Next Door,who pays a lot of attention to Mauritania, offers some reflections on various scenarios about what might have happened.

Mauritania's President "Accidentally" Shot By Army. Oops: Five Times?

Mauritanian President General Mohammed Ould Abdelaziz was flown to Paris yesterday after being shot by his own Army. Before leaving, he reassured his countrymen that it was an "acccident."

Well, sometimes if a guard doesn't have the safety engaged on his weapon ... oh, no, sorry, some reports say he was shot five times.

Well, if five of his guards didn't have their safeties properly engaged ... oh, no, sorry, apparently, they shot up the Presidential motorcade.

Well, um,  give me a minute here. Okay, would you believe: the Army was out for their weekly maneuver of shooting up random motorcades (hey, what do I know about Mauritanian Army drills?) when the Presidential limousine just happened to ...

Well, I'm sure they'll explain further. No need to be suspicious here. Move along now. Nothing to see here.

The Moor on Mali

Now that Mali has intruded itself into our consciousness (the Algerians, Mauritanians etc. were already quite aware of it) and multiple and rival revolutionary groups have been appearing, it's hard to tell the players without a scorecard. To help interpret the mysteries of MUJWA and other groups, The Moor Next Door offers a primer of sorts.

For All Your Mauritania Needs

I'll admit, in this age of Arab revolutions, I've been neglecting Mauritania. In case you have, too, The Moor Next Door offers us some updates and links.

Tunisian Commentary Around the Web

Everybody's got something to say about Tunisia, and for those of you in need of all-Tunisia-all-the-time commentary, here are some links:

Two veteran hands, Clement M. Henry and Robert Springborg, analyze the revolution from an economic development perspective at Foreign Policy's Middle East Channel.

Scott Lucas continues to liveblog.

The Arabist on Tunisia and the broader region.

Juan Cole weighs in on the new government.

Ellen Laipson of the Stimson Center on the Arab world's first "soft revolution."

And two from The Moor Next Door: his first thoughts on the fall of Ben Ali and a look at the wave of self-immolations, especially the one in Mauritania.

Again, Mauritania Gets No Respect: President is Unperson of Khartoum Summit

Yesterday, Presidents Husni Mubarak of Egypt, Leader of the Revolution Qadhafi of Libya, and President Muhammad Ould ‘Abd al-‘Aziz of Mauritania, met in Khartoum with President ‘Umar al-Bashir of Sudan and his First Vice President (for now), Salva Kiir of southern Sudan, which will vote January 9 on whether to secede. They all promised to respect the results. (We'll see.)

But two key Egyptian papers' differing coverage struck me as interesting. Al-Ahram, government mouthpiece but also the paper of record, mentioned them all and shows them all (link is in Arabic):


Salva Kiir is the one wearing the cool hat.

But Al-Masry al-Youm, an independent and usually a better paper for actual news, reports a four-way summit as if it's between Mubarak, Qadhafi, Bashir, and Salva Kiir. (Article is in Arabic.) Their English page does the same and adds insult to injury by cropping the photo to exclude not only the Mauritanian but Salva Kiir as well:


(Note I'm dependent on the websites for now; the hard copy might be different.) Oddly, both Arabic articles call it a four-way summit in their headlines, but from one you'd assume they mean the four Presidents, and from the other three Presidents and a Vice President.

Now, General Ould ‘Abd al-‘Aziz is no hero of mine; he came to power in a coup and is no great democrat. But he's a fellow Arab head of state: why has he disappeared down the memory hole? I'm sure that a great many Egyptians are not even aware that Mauritania is an Arab country, and few think its leader ranks with Mubarak or Qadhafi. But to make him an unperson in the story? To ignore him completely?

I fear Mauritania, far from the experience of most eastern Arabs, is easily forgotten. Once my wife and I attended a reception for Arab military attaches. The Mauritanian attache was in a corner by himself, so we chatted him up. He was pleased we both knew where his country even was, though neither of us had been there. But clearly Mauritania gets no respect. (Except from Qadhafi, whose attentions are not always welcome.) Why the Mauritanian President was there is of course another question (I suspect Qadhafi is part of the answer), but even if he was a fifth wheel at the summit, at least acknowledge he was there.

The Ba‘thist Tendency in Mauritania

We haven't said much about Mauritania lately (which may be good because it's usually only their tendency to have coups that gets the attention of their neighbors), but Kal over at The Moor Next Door has an informative post on the Ba‘th Party/Tendency in Mauritania. I vaguely knew there were Ba‘this in Mauritania and that the Syrian and Iraqi wings of the Party both had sympathizers, but he's put together a lot of useful, if informal, background detail.

Summertime Arab Coups of the 50s, 60s and 70s: Was it the Weather?

I'm working on a post for tomorrow which will note the 52nd anniversary of the overthrow of the monarchy in Iraq (the July 14 revolution), and last July 23 I reflected on Egypt's comparable moment; which raises another issue: why have so many Middle Eastern coups occurred in the summertime? Is it the heat, or what? Admittedly, coups are mostly a thing of the past in the Arab world today. Syria, which had something like 20-plus coups and attempts between 1949 and 1970, has settled down to being run by Asads for the past 40 years. Other than Mauritania, which keeps the tradition alive, the last successful Arab coup was Sudan's in 1989, 21 years ago. But in the golden age of coups, a lot were in summertime.

This is not as frivolous as it sounds. Last year the North African blogger who calls himself The Moor Next Door took the time and trouble to actually do spreadsheets and graphs of all Arab coups and attempted coups, and sure enough, he found a lot in the summertime: in fact, he found seven in July and five in August. These were by far the most except for the outlier November, which also had seven. (See his post here; a spreadsheet of coups here; and graphs of the data here.)

It does make you wonder. The Free Officers' coups in Egypt and Iraq are not alone: the Ba‘athist coup of July 17, 1968 was the key to the long rule of Saddam Hussein; in Syria, Husni Za‘im was overthrown in August 1949; in July 1963 a Nasserite counter-coup was put down bloodily; in Iraq Bakr Sidqi, who launched the first modern Arab coup in 1936, was assassinated in August 1937; a July 1971 coup in Sudan succeeded until Egyptian troops intervened to restore Ja‘far Numeiri; Sultan Qaboos of Oman deposed his father in July 1970; and so on. Mauritania, the only Arab country that still has coups these days, has had them (among others in other months) in July 1978, August 2005, and August 2008.

So is it the heat, or is all this coincidence?

Mauritania Severs Ties with Israel

Having already expelled the Israeli Embassy last year, Mauritania has now formally severed diplomatic relations with Israel. Once one of only three Arab countries to have full diplomatic relations (along with Egypt and Jordan), the present leadership has been moving towards the break for some time.

Mauritania's Aziz in Tehran

Mauritania is considered pretty peripheral by most Arabs (at least if they've even heard of it), but General Abd al-Aziz, its current military strongman, broke the country's ties with Israel (it used to be a great trivia question: the only Arab states with full diplomatic relations with Israel were Egypt, Jordan — and Mauritania).

Now he's trying to collect. He's been in Turkey (no big problem there) and Iran. Here's The Moor Next Door on the visit. It will be interesting to see what Mauritanian blogger Dekhnstan, who is not General Abd al-Aziz' greatest fan, may have to say.

New English-Language Mauritania Blog

Via The Moor Next Door, a new Mauritanian English-language blog, a new blog by a Mauritanian whose pic and bio are here, and while he doesn't identify himself obviously his links and bio show he's Nasser Weddady, Civil Rights Outreach Director for the American Muslim Council.I'm not revealing anything here that two minutes of Googling won't give the Mauritanian regime. The blog is called Dekhnstan, which The Moor Next Door called a "clever title." Sorry to say it's too clever for my own knowledge. It clearly is used, from some Googlng, for Mauritanians, but I can't give you a better definition right now. It's new to me. Commenters (including TMND) if you see this: please explain. [UPDATE: The Moor Next Door has commented. See the comments thread. And now Nasser's explained it all. So read the comments.] As I expected, it's the word Mauritanians use for Mauritanians (why would they use the name of a Latin province, after all?) and, apparently, Sahrawis (from Western Sahara) also use. He doesn't know the etymology. Anybody else out there? Arabic Wikipedia gives me some type of millet.]

Oh, and he (the Dekhnstan blogger) doesn't much like General Ould Abd al-Aziz.

The Mauritanian Elections

There seem to be real questions about the Mauritanian election results, despite a multi-party agreement to try to hold a fair and free vote. General Abdelaziz has apparently won comfortably.

I pretend no expertise on Mauritania, so for all your Mauritania needs, I refer you to The Moor Next Door, who follows it closely. Most of his posts over the past few days have related to the results.

Some Odds and Ends Worth Reading

I'm not saving the roundups till Friday this week since there's a fair amount of interesting linkage to link to:

• I've already noted that The Moor Next Door is doing good coverage of the Mauritanian elections on July 18, about the only go-to site I know in English (there's more in French, of course). Here's his latest on candidate Messoud Boulkheir, the candidate of Haratine origin (literally "freedmen": descendants of slaves, but Arabic speaking, not sub-Saharan). Besides the obligatory comparison to Barack Obama, there's the curious introduction that might in an American context seem a little patronizing, but probably is fine in Mauritanian context:
  

  If the campaign for the 18 July elections in Mauritania were an American movie, Messoud Boulkheir would be portrayed by Morgan Freeman. But the movie would be somewhat of a departure for Freeman: its ending would evoke cynicism more than hope.

• Marc Lynch's post yesterday on Palestinian elections is a good summary: it looks like Abu Mazen is joining his PM Salam Fayyad in calling for holding them on time and saying he'll step down if Hamas wins: he's calling their bluff, I think, but it's an interesting development.

• If you missed it, I already noted the awkwardness VP Biden created in his seeming "green light" to Israel to attack Iran, which is almost certainly not what he meant. President Obama has again clarified his Vice President's remarks to explain what he really meant. I think Biden is actually a very shrewd foreign policy expert; it's his tendency to speak off the cuff that causes his problems. Perhaps he needs to spend more time in an undisclosed location, like other recent VPs?

• Thanks to The Arabist yet again for citing my Marwa al-Sherbini post; I do basically agree with him that the whole comparison of this to Neda Agha Soltan or any other news item is pointless, but I thought it worth noting the growing controversy in Egypt. And I don't think the issue is that it isn't topping Michael Jackson in the Western media*, but rather that even the German media was pretty silent. As some have noted, this is changing: BBC, Al-Jazeera English, and others are getting the word out. And meanwhile, the Egyptian media seems to have pretty universally adopted the phrase shahidat al-hijab, "martyr of the hijab" (head veil).

• A curious rumor in Egypt of a possible early dissolution of Parliament. I'm dubious: I don't immediately see what benefit the regime could hope to gain from new elections, but perhaps I'm missing something.
  

[*This marks the first mention of Michael Jackson in this Blog. I had hoped to hold out completely, but The Arabist's comments forced my hand. Personally, I still miss Elvis.]

Mauritania's Election

I won't even pretend to expertise on Mauritania. But with its rescheduled elections approaching, I will refer you to this update from Kal at The Moor Next Door, who appears to actually understand what's going on. I commend it to you.

Mauritanian Political Deal Moves Election to July

I've only posted occasionally on Mauritania, and barely mentioned their upcoming Presidential election which seemed to be a coronation: the leader of last year's coup running against three minor figures. But now, thanks to Senegalese mediation (after African Union and Libyan and Qatari mediation had all given up), there's a deal. The Presidential election has been shifted to July 18. The President ousted last year will resign and all parties will run in the election. If it works, it may be a sign that regular coups are outmoded in Mauritania as they are in most of the region now. For details you'll find an account here, more on the subject here., and a blog post here.

New Arab Reform Bulletin Up

The Carnegie Endowment has a new issue of the Arab Reform Bulletin up. It's always a good survey of issues regarding elections, democratization and human rights issues.

Of particular note is a good backgrounder on the upcoming elections in Mauritania, in which the leader of the latest coup is running for President. It's a country many of us know little about so it's useful to have this for reference.

Lots of Suggested Weekend Reading

As I've done on other Fridays, before I take the weekend off I'll leave you with some interesting and important links for your edification and diversion (though if stuff happens I'll post again later):

• I've already mentioned the recent coming apart of the Syrian exiled opposition. Josh Landis at Syria Comment — the blog for Syrian issues — posts a couple of articles (one of them in Arabic) that go into the nitty-gritty details. Highly recommended.

• Natan Sharansky will be the new head of the Jewish Agency. Heroic as he was when he was being held by the Soviets, since coming to Israel he has been pretty hardline at times. Putting him in charge of a major fundraising agency would seem ill-advised, almost like making somebody like Avigdor Lieberman your chief diplomat. Oh, wait . . .

• Speaking of Lieberman, this interview isn't very cheering. He tells the Jerusalem Post that he's been meeting with all these foreign representatives (he's Foreign Minister, isn't that his job?) and (he seems shocked, shocked) they keep using all these slogans about "land for peace" and a "two-state solution." Umm, yes, those "slogans" do seem pretty widespread among just about everybody, including a lot of Israelis, and there is that "roadmap" we keep talking about that speaks of both. The real issue, he seems to suggest, is Iran. So why is everybody talking about land for peace? (But if Israel had peace with Syria and the Palestinians, how would Iran be able to retain a foothold in the Levant? Wouldn't a Syrian peace undermine Hizbullah and Hamas? Oh, sorry, I guess that's a slogan. Must avoid those.) The whole interview will appear Tuesday, apparently. Pardon me if I keep thinking that somewhere out there, the late Abba Eban is picking up RPM speed as he rolls over in his grave.

• The Moor Next Door gives us a brief update on events in Mauritania, where the current military strongman recently "stepped down" (not really) so he can run for President. Since very few of us have any experience of Mauritania, and with the exception of Brother Leader Qadhafi (who is on a Mauritania kick lately as a "mediator" between factions) and, occasionally, the Moroccans and Algerians, nobody in the Arab world pays much attention to this Arab country either, it's useful to have these updates. I recall a good many years ago being at a reception for Arab military attachés and chatting up the Mauritanian military attaché because the poor fellow, a colonel I think, was standing all alone. None of his Arab brethren were talking to him. Or seemed to know who he was.
  

• I mentioned earlier (in last Friday's roundup, in fact) that Lebanon was dealing with a sensational Israeli spy case involving a General of the security services who had been identified only as "General Adib" by his first name: now he's been indicted and fully identified, and his wife and nephew are also charged.

• Walid Jumblatt, the Druze za‘im of Mount Lebanon (and I've always contended the best translation of za‘im is "Godfather" in the Corleone sense, but that's another issue: officially it means "leader" or maybe "boss") has alienated his Maronite allies of the moment by saying something bad about the Maronites in a discussion with Druze elders. He has apologized. I had to read about five different sites trying to find out what he was apologizing for, since it's generally been reported as one of those "I misspoke, I apologize" stories that never say what he actually said. This is the only thing I've found yet, in the Daily Star, that (while burying the lede) suggests he called the Maronites a "bad race." I need to find the Arabic for this since I'm still unclear what he actually said. I thought they were a religion.
  

Mauritania Suspends Israeli Ties

It looks like I'm going to lose the opportunity to pose one of my favorite trivia questions: besides Egypt and Jordan, what other Arab state has full diplomatic relations with Israel?

The answer, Mauritania, may now be in doubt: in January they withdrew their own Ambassador from Israel to protest its actions in Gaza, and now they have asked the Israeli Ambassador in Nouakchott to leave.

The present Mauritanian regime, which took power in 2008, and its predecessors have been uncomfortable with the Israeli tie, which was formed back in 1999 when the peace process seemed a lot closer to achieving something than it does now, and when the long-ruling Maaouiya Ould Sid Ahmed Taya was still in power in Mauritania.