IRA on the lookout for a “Bloody Friday”. By Ely Ould Sneiba

IRA on the lookout for a “Bloody Friday”. By Ely Ould Sneiba

In August 2008, President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi was overthrown by a junta. His supporters get together, form the National Front for the Defence of Democracy (FNDD) and place two political figures of national stature at its head: the outgoing President of the National Assembly, Massaoud Ould Boulkheir, and the outgoing Minister Secretary General of the Presidency, Beidiel Ould Houmeid.
The High Council of State, the military committee now in power, is worried by the ferocity of the FNDD and the overflowing charisma of its two Harratin leaders.
It was then that the General Intelligence decided to invent a generational conflict between the old and young Harratin “Guards”. Thus, General Mohamed Ould El Hadi, director of the National Security, invites Ahmed Ould Khattry, director of PROCAPEC (a microfinance institution) and Birame Ould Dah, a clerk, to dinner.
To Ould Khattry, General El Hadi proposes to fight, with his support, Boidiel in Trarza. Ahmed apologizes, as he has no penchant for the Harratin issue, especially as he has succeeded in his career without resorting to it. And to Birame, he recommends addressing Messaoud. He accepts and a deal is made. Therefore, Birame will receive all the political and financial support necessary to carry out his mission.
In this context, websites, mainly those of the Islamists (a component of the FNDD) will play the media role necessary to promote the young leader in search of sensationalism for publicity and fame.
The speech of Birame will be violent, racist, and particularly hateful towards his Arab fellow citizens, and no verbal firebomb is spared. Mission accomplished with success. His sponsors, the Arabs Mohamed Ould Abd El Aziz, Head of State, and Mohamed Ould El Hadi, Director of National Security are happy.
The « Swiss Army knife » will be used again when the opposition decided to boycott the 2014 presidential election. Birame runs for president with their full backing and is awarded a score of 9%, a false one.
But the General Intelligence is sometimes ungrateful: they use their ‘honourable correspondents’ and once they are worn out, they leave them by the wayside of the road.
Birame, inelegantly betrayed, will take revenge on « the Beïdan system ».
Deplorably, it is often by trying to shackle his opponents that President Aziz creates new situations that will be hard to resolve. He funded IRA ( Initiative for the Resurrection of the Abolitionist Movement) to contain President Messaoud. This weapon was taken out from him, and recovered by the Black-Mauritanian nationalists, who pointed it to their Arab fellow citizens asking them to raise hands and surrender to their racial misconception of Mauritania: one State, two instituted races. Moreover, during his reign, General Aziz developed a populist discourse focused on the disparities between rich and poor: an island of opulence surrounded by an ocean of misery. The collusion between IRA and FLAM ( African Liberation Forces of Mauritania) is precisely due to his frustrating attitude towards his opponents.
It was Aziz who brought the fula-tekruri activists from their exile in Europe and the United States with the promise of opening a new page of understanding with them to pave the way for their insertion into political life. As the FLAM had already experienced a split between the FLAM/Rénovateur, who returned to the country during the 2006-2008 transition and positioned themselves in the new political arena, and the hard wing of the movement, who considered that the conditions were not yet met, and remained abroad, Aziz’s offer will cost them another break-up: a part of the flamists remained in exile and another part, mainly the leadership, decided to legalise his action and carry it out on the national territory through the dissolution of FLAM and its transformation into a political party: The Progressive Forces of Change (FPC).
But CPF will not be recognised by the Ministry of Interior.
It is under these conditions that the ex-FLAM will make of IRA its ‘armed wing’ as the IRA is that of Sinn Fein.

Birame, the anti-hero:

FLAM disappointed will adopt, without claiming it, the leader of IRA and put at his disposal its racist agenda, modus operandi, address book in Europe and the United States, notably with the Zionist lobby, in addition to its funding sources, and its relations with the French and Senegalese press.
And as a baptism of fire, Mahatma Gandhi, the « rebel with peaceful strength », is revisited and one of his acts will be cloned: it is when in reaction to the Black Act he burned the colonial registration book and invited his compatriots to do the same. Richard Attenborough’s film titled “Gandhi” (1982) immortalised the burning of these documents, an act of civil disobedience that sparked off the anti-colonial struggle.
On his part, Birame has destroyed by fire, in front of the cameras and in full view of everyone, the books of Malekite law accused of enshrining slavery; a pure provocation that hurts consciences and offends people in their faith, for the sake of shocking through sacrilege.
This violence shocked peaceful minds because it reminds us of the book burning and the inquisition tribunals, a period of intolerance and fanaticism from which Europe had considerably suffered before the Enlightenment.
However, the analogy ends there. “The Great Soul” was non-violent. Gandhi had never insulted the British or incited their hatred, whereas the IRA leader made a big deal out of the hatred of Beidan.
It is a blatant contradiction for verbal abuse is usually the first step toward physical violence, and if it is combined with racial hatred, we are no longer within the register of human rights that the IRA leader claims.
Birame also compares himself to Mandela, the hero of the emancipation of black South Africans and the fall of apartheid!

Here again, there is no truth, Mandela was a conscious and restrained politician, he and racial hatred are the North and South Pole.
To tell the truth, Birame is only the main character of the comic book
« Why the Moor fears water » was written by Kemado Touré with a preface statement by a certain Mr Amadou, both of them from flam.
It is a vicious satire distributed in Senegal in which the author says that the brain of an Arab from Mauritania can heal people in a desperate state of health!
Here is an excerpt:
Figure 1:
Collé, his better half, lifted him and dried his tears:
Calm down, dear. All is not yet lost, there is still hope.
Figure2 :
As I told your wife, your child will come back to life if we coat her body with the brain of a Moor.
Figure 3:
The bathing took place, and the little Moor, despite his parents’ prohibition, was there. As soon as he had done a few dives, he was hit on the head with a stick.
Figure 4:
The skull crashed and the water reddened with blood.
Figure 5:
The Children picked up the brain and quickly went to give it to old Birame who was waiting impatiently.
Well done! Thank you, children.
Figure 6:
Birame, heartbroken, immediately applied some to his daughter’s body, who sneezed three times in a row and opened her eyes.

Get up, my child.

Touré’s comic does not need to be interpreted, the drawing and the dialogue are enough to express most clearly and directly what is required from IRA and the Harratins in general by the FLAM movement.
In this regard, the issue of the fight against the legacy of ancient slavery has become a « free zone » in Mauritania, a shortcut freely taken by anyone who wants to earn a place in the sun. It is used without moderation by the engineers of national discord and the merchants of misfortune who use it as a lever for political and ethnic struggle, and as a means of raising funds. When the FLAM’s outgrowth describes its country as Arab-Muslim apartheid, the semantic field of this outrage goes beyond the simple insult, it is a Freudian projection, it is the subconscious of the anti-Arabs that speaks, and it is an unhoped-for dream that is thus externalised. Anyone who knows these choristers of division knows that a South African-style Mauritania, in the time of Pierre Botha, is the ultimate goal of their alleged struggle against racial segregation. In South Africa, white racists insisted on living with their black compatriots under the same roof but in separate rooms, while Mandela’s brothers fought to break down the walls of the Bantustans in which they had been confined through outright racism. « Truth this side of the Pyrenees, error the other side », said Pascal.
In Mauritania, a land of racial mixing, what IRA and FLAM claim is monstrously wrong. It is the Black African nationalists who reject national cohesion, which they describe as assimilation, and without openly admitting it, they are seeking to erect a negotiated and institutionalised apartheid: a bi-national country where power and wealth are shared out accurately between the ethnic groups, and where institutional linguistic confusion reigns, since national inter-comprehension is not written on their agenda.
In an interview full of hatred and deceits, the anti-Mandela told Iberian readers that apartheid is still going on, just next door, in Mauritania: « What is happening in Mauritania is similar to what happened under the apartheid regime, in that a minority uses the colour of skin to subjugate individuals. Unwritten state racism, but one that has its institutional form all the same, » he argues.
Usually, when the IRA leader takes up his pilgrim’s staff and travels the world, it is for misleading innocent minds and returning pockets full of banknotes, and prizes.
Birame and the flamists struggle for a zebra-like fragmented Mauritania, apartheid erected into a democratic and civilised system.

What has IRA

achieved for the anti-slavery cause to deserve so many international awards?
There is nothing tangible, especially not in the interior of the country, in the most remote areas where slavery is supposed to survive; except, of course,” much ado”, a singularly violent and hateful campaign against the Arab people of Mauritania, a bashing that spares the Black Mauritanians, a population that also had its slavery past.
The fight against « slavery » and « apartheid » in Mauritania » is a « psychological rape » of international opinion, a mystification used by the FLAM-IRA coalition in its deceitful propaganda to shock the international conscience and to attract the sympathy of European countries, those that had supported the white South African regime; whereas the Arabs, and Mauritanians, in particular, had been the greatest supporters of the ANC’s struggle and its leader Nelson Mandela.
The Flam forgets that the Palestinians, the Algerians and all the Arab nationalists Arafat, Nasser, Ben Bella, Boumediene, Gaddafi and all the others had been the precious allies of the ANC and all the African independence movements. As proof, as soon as he was released from prison, Nelson Mandela went to Algeria as a sign of gratitude and made his famous declaration to the press: ‘The Algerian Army Made Me a Man’. Indeed, ANC fighters had received training and logistical and political support ‘from the country of million martyrs’ while they were under embargo by imperialist forces.
It must be said that the Fula-Tekrur Nationalists trapped themselves through exacerbated ethnocentrism and inflated ethnic ego; they had provoked the national fracture, and today they speak of apartheid which exists nowhere else except in the minds of :
– the Harratins who wish to break with their natural Beidan society and create in its place another that would not be culturally Arab because they are of African descent; a lesson in genetics that they are giving to the 35 million inhabitants of the Republic of Sudan and the Phoenicians, ancient Egyptians, Nubians, Berbers…who are integral parts of the Arab Nation without being genetically Arabs;
– the Afro-communitarian activists, the supporters of the Négritude, a Movement created in the 1930s by Senghor and Césaire, the catalysts of ‘Black Nationalism’.
The struggle of these nationalists is centred on the rejection of cultural assimilation, a concept that is very poorly assimilated (the Beïdans are not whites but authentic Africans) and which has made Mauritanian national unity impossible to achieve.
Today, after more than half a century of living together, what are the important elements that constitute the Mauritanian national identity that is being sung in a highly confused cacophony?
What are the common features that form the identity of the Mauritanian Nation?
Some will say Islam, but Mauritanians share this religion with more than one and a half billion people…
Finally, those who maintain the colour line and whose strategic goal is national disunity are themselves the true promoters of racial segregation and separate development.
Ely Ould Sneiba
Translated from « Mauritanie: vous avez dit vivre ensemble ? » PP 140-151