Ahmed Jiddou, 27, and his 7 fellow protest leaders were released late last night after the youth staged a sit-in by the police station where they were held. Hundreds of youth protesters gathered in the Plaza by the police station and kept a very noisy presence in order to pressure the authorities to release the detainees. Another detainee Cheikh Ould Jiddou, 40, (no relation to Ahmed) said that the police did not torture them but questioned them extensively about the protest leadership and its inner workings. The photo above was posted by Ahmed Jiddou himself on his facebook profile to thank those who worried about his safety. “I would like you to worry about Mauritania, free it from the military’s clutches”, adding his call for fellow Mauritanians to “stop the country’s auctioning.” in an oblique reference to the Blokate Square’s sale by the government to General Aziz loyalists in a less than transparent deal.
Ahmed Jiddou, blogger, and February 25 movement activist speaking about his motives to come out to protest.He remains detained in an undisclosed location since his arrest yesterday during the April 25 Day of Rage.
He is a peaceful, nonviolent Mauritanian citizen who was exercising his constitutional right to express his dissent.
Video courtesy of @lissnup
These are photos of the February 25 youth movement members who were arrested yesterday April 25, 2011 by the Mauritanian government in Nouakchott during the Day of Rage protest in downtown Nouakchott. Some of them are held in an undisclosed location. The government still refuses to explain the reasons for their detention and their whereabouts.
Mauritania’s police has a long history of beatings, torture and mistreatment of political prisoners and detainees.
To date no human rights organization outside Mauritania has commented, covered or intervened on behalf of the protesters.
Picture courtesy of @Mauritanidem1
via @Lissnup, a tip of the hat to her all her work supporting the youth in Mauritania. Twitter is indeed the people’s news agency. On another note, when was the last time Mauritania was cover on any American mainstream media outlet?
Video of the protester whose name and age couldn’t be verified by this blogger, shot by the police in the northern city of Zoueirate this morning. The authorities still deny they opened fire. The clashes this morning occurred when the state-owned mining company temping workers stormed a plaza in Zoueirate in order to turn it into a Tahrir Square. The “hournaliya” (daily paid) workers have been protesting their miserable conditions for weeks. The authorities have pushed their complaints under the rug which led to another clash last week between them and the deputy governor. Historically, Zoueirate is a hotbed of labor unions in Mauritania, the shooting and killing of workers on strike in 1974 by the government was one of the turning points of Mauritania’s political history. The trauma from that incident still marks people’s memory till today.
Courtesy of Essirage, this video has a quick roundup of some of the protest yesterday in Nouakchott till noon. The day ended with a violent crack down by the police and the arrest of 8 activists. However, the protest took a more violent turn in the northern city of Zouerate (home to the country’s mining industry) where police opened fire injuring one protester and causing injuries to others. The authorities deny they opened fire.
Yacoub Ould dahoud, the Mauritanian businessman who burned himself on January 17, 2011 in front of the presidential palace in Nouakchott, Mauritania died today. The 41-year old wast motivated by a desire to depose Mauritania’s President, General Aziz and to democratize his country.
His body was supposed to be flown back today from Morocco where his family took him to receive better medical care. It is not clear yet whether the delay is politically motivated – Aziz’s strongest regional ally – as reports indicate that the Moroccan authorities are insisting on conducting an autopsy to determine the causes of his death.
Many Mauritanians this blogger spoke to tonight are convinced that the delay is an act of active collusion designed to help General Aziz win time to manage a public relations fiasco that could potentially lead Mauritanians to take to the streets. This is in the wake of initial protest in the capital city of Nouakchott and other cities against the skyrocketing prices of essential goods.
His death is fueling anger in Mauritania despite an age-old societal aversion towards suicide. Mauritania’s Taqadoumy news website collected reactions of Mauritanians made on Facebook and other source. They reflect a growing outrage fueled by a perceived smear campaign kicked off by General Aziz’s earlier declarations describing Dahoud’s action as “desperate because of [General Aziz's] war on corruption as [Dahoud] hails from a wealthy family.”
Dahoud was not a poor man, nor was he unemployed like his Tunisian counterpart. His Facebook profile accessed today by this blogger shows Dahoud followed very closely the events unfolding in Tunisia culminating with Ben Ali’s ousting by his people. He came from a prominent family and many Mauritanians I spoke with agree that he was driven by the same motivation as Tunisia’s Bouazizi: making a statement about tyranny and the lack of freedom in their socieities. Not so much a question of Dollars and cents.
Influenced & Inspired By Bouazizi
Yacoub posted on his Facebook wall a link to a manifesto (also posted it on Google Docs) in Arabic and French in the wee hours of January 17, 2011 explaining his demands. Proceeded with slogans posted earlier in French calling for General Aziz’s ouster (Aziz Dégage.) His list of demands included a call to end of Mauritania’s military meddling in politics, and for the regime of (coup master) Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz to be deposed. Dahoud also denounced tribalism as well as slavery on his Facebook wall. His manifesto also included jabs at France’s meddling in Mauritanian affairs under Nicholas Sarkozy who many Mauritanians blame for the success of General Aziz’s power grab in 2008 by providing the necessary political cover internationally allowing him to conduct fraudulent elections in 2009 to legitimize his coup d’etat.
Contrary to initial reports from Reuters claiming Dahoud committed this act to protest tribal grievances, his was a genuine political act of pre-planned and meditated dissent, in fact his suicide note states clearly that he sought peaceful constitutional reform and a functioning democracy.
Dahoud's Manifesto
His manifesto opens with:
Extremism and terrorist groups are a result of 50 years of poverty and the loss of hope that rulers’ oppression will end.
Then he further clarifies:
Enough corruption, enough oppression. Mauritania belongs to the people, not to the Generals and their entourage.
To get the corrupt army band from power, enough with corruption, enough oppression. We suffered fifty years of corruption and oppression. Do we and the future generations not deserve one month of steadfastness to dash out of oppression, intellectual, material and physical oppression [?]
Dahoud then listst his demands:
- The release of human rights activists in prison [Biram Ould Dah] who are fighting against slavery
- Eliminating all taxes and tariffs on rice, wheat, cooking oil, sugar, milk and monitoring their obscene price hikes
- Replacing taxes and tariffs on basic goods through more taxation on cigarettes, luxury cars and tariffs on European ships that are pillaging our maritime wealth, as well as taxing telecom companies or Mauritania’s income from gold mining stolen by the Army commanders’ band.
- A constitutional amendment to be submitted to parliament in an emergency session containing the following points:
a- No current or ex member of the military shall be eligible to be elected President of the Republic
b- An independent electoral committee that will organize and supervise elections without intervention from the Interior Ministry- the source of all ills undermining freedoms in our country.
c- Imposing that the choice of the prime minister be the prerogative of the parliamentary block holding the majority in parliament
d- The nomination ministers of: justice, interior, finance, education shall be contingent upon parliament’s approval
e- The nomination of judges and the attorney general shall be contingent upon parliament’s approval
f- The nomination of the members of the constitutional council [the highest court of the land] shall be contingent upon parliament’s approval
g- Calling via a presidential decree for legislative and presidential decree within six months from the decree’s issuance
h- calling parliament in an emergency session to ratify: the constitutional amendments, an amnesty law for the General [Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz], members of the High Council [military junta ruling body] and the ministers in his government before and after the 2009 elections
If you do not accept this offer, then you should face the people’s wrath and be forced out as Ben Ali was.
I take this occasion to beg the people of France to force its rulers to accept the Mauritanian people’s right to self-determination.
Our lives are a small price to pay for Mauritania so that our sons can live in a country with social justice, liberty and democracy.
Yacoub Dahoud
A simple citizen demanding legitimate rights.
Hasn’t the time come for the Mauritanian people to chose freely and seriously who will preside over its destiny, and manage its resources that can easily service its needs instead of alms of hostile foreign governments?
Every now and then, someone in the West comes to make some outlandish claim about the use and potential of Social Media in the Middle East, hint: the Iran Twitter Revolution. This time, it comes from the Middle East from Rami Khouri who writes for Lebanon-based Daily Star. His central claim, in his piece picked by the New York Times (..) is that Arabs who are using social media tools are largely spectators:
Blogging, reading politically racy Web sites, or passing around provocative text messages by cellphone is equally satisfying for many youth. Such activities, though, essentially shift the individual from the realm of participant to the realm of spectator, and transform what would otherwise be an act of political activism — mobilizing, demonstrating or voting — into an act of passive, harmless personal entertainment.
This claim does not stand the test of reality, take for example the recent anti-censorship protest in Tunisia reported on this blog, or even closer to Mr Khouri’s levant, the case of Egyptian citizen Khaled Said whose killing at the hands of Egyptian police officers became a rallying point for those same “passive” Arabs. Khaled Said’s murder was quickly picked up and relayed via twitter, Facebook where a group for him quickly grew to include over 200000 users. Later on, those same “passive” youth took their online virtual activism to the real world by organizing protest demonstrations, sit-ins- flash mobs. Now, hold your breath, just last Sunday the latest protest demonstration took place thousands of miles away from Khaled Said’s native Alexandria, it happened here in the US in New York.
Many of us have grown so used to seeing this cycle unfold in the Middle East over the last few years, however, what is remarkable is that the time it took in 2005 to start an advocacy campaign has been considerably shortened, primarily, due to the scale of users and the growing skill pool: thousands and thousand more Arabs are in fact using Social Media tools. For instance, the Khaled Said tragedy broke out in June, we’re now in the end of July and protest has already been exported outside of the Middle East.
So, it would not be very hard to see why Khouri’s claim here seems bizarre:
We must face the fact that all the new media and hundreds of thousands of young bloggers from Morocco to Iran have not triggered a single significant or lasting change in Arab or Iranian political culture. Not a single one. Zero.
if we only considered the full impact of the Khaled Said campaing (which is just the newest of many): it allowed Egyptian activists to force the government’s hand, the killers are facing trial, and there is an entire new discourse emerging in Egypt crystalizing young Egyptian hopes for their civil rights to be respected: a demand to stop police brutality.
Interestingly, the protest and the sit-ins that happened in Egypt itself were largely driven by young activists without any implication of the existing political parties, thus, it is interesting how new media is giving these activists a voice. Consider for example this new tactic used by young Egyptians to identify police officers who are involved in torture and compiling their names. See the growing “piggipedia” archive on Flickr tracking those police officers. Talk about crowd-sourcing justice..
Without belaboring the point here, Rami Khouri misses the mark entirely on the realities of Middle East Digiactivism.
On the geopolitical side of Mr Khouri’s piece, chiefly his complaint, heard ad nauseam in the region among those very same activists he dismisses so lightly, about the “hypocrisy” of American government’s interest in social media while it supports the very same dictatorships that crush liberties:
One cannot take seriously the United States or any other Western government that funds political activism by young Arabs while it simultaneously provides funds and guns that help cement the power of the very same Arab governments the young social and political activists target for change.
My answer is very simple, these activists might actually NOT, I repeat, NOT NEED US government’s funds or support. They have done fine for themselves so far and grew their skills tremendously. most of them factor already in their game plans that there is no cavalry that will be forthcoming from DC to do a job they already figured how to do for themselves, thank you very much!
Otherwise, check for yourself the scores of Arab bloggers and journalists who are rotting in jails or facing harassment without a peep heard from Washington about them.
That is the unspoken code many of the shakers and movers of Mideast Digiactivists agree on, and Mr Khouri completely ignores: “we don’t care for what you want, we’re doing our own thing, leave us alone.”, I heard that for myself while attenting the Arab Bloggers conference back in December 2009 where I ran a session precisely discussing the issue of funding.
As of now, it looks to me like Washington DC politicians need Middle East activists a heck lot more than Middle Eastern activists need them..
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