Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya
Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya was president of Mauritania from December 1984, when he deposed Haidalla while the president was abroad, to August 2005, when his own guard's commander deposed him while he was at the Saudi king's funeral, twenty-one years. He was the colonel who gave the country its constitution of 1991, its parties and its elections, all of which he won. He expelled sixty thousand of its black citizens to Senegal in 1989 and recognised Israel in 1999. Those are the two things the country argues about him for. He was a Moor from Atar. He was a Saint-Cyr officer who had fought the Polisario in the Western Sahara war that Mauritania lost, chief of staff under Haidalla and his prime minister. The coup of 12 December 1984 was the army's decision that Haidalla's sharia courts, his Libyan friendship and his recognition of the Sahrawi republic had made the country ungovernable. The 1989 events were the crisis of the reign. A quarrel between herders on the Senegal river in April became pogroms against Mauritanians in Dakar and against Senegalese in Nouakchott, two hundred dead on each side. Then came the state's expulsion across the river of tens of thousands of its own black Fulani and Soninke, their land taken, their papers burned. There was the purge of the army's black officers in 1990 and 1991, in which several hundred were killed in the camps at Inal and Jreida, for which an amnesty law of 1993 forbade any prosecution and which the country has not yet accounted for. The politics after 1991 were the multiparty state that the French wanted. There was the constitution of July 1991, the elections of 1992, 1997 and 2003 won with sixty to ninety per cent against oppositions that boycotted or were arrested. The Baathists were purged when he broke with Iraq after the Gulf war, the Islamists arrested when they grew. There was the oil found offshore at Chinguetti in 2001. There were the diplomatic relations with Israel in October 1999, the third Arab state to have them, which brought Washington's friendship and the country's Islamists their cause. The coup attempts of 2003 and 2004 by the officers he had purged failed. The coup of 3 August 2005 by the colonel who had run his security police for twenty years, did not. The country welcomed it in the streets. He was born in Atar. He went to Qatar, where the emir gave him a house and a pension. He lives there. The elections he invented have produced, since, three presidents from the army.
- Lived: 1941 CE – ?
- Nationality: Mauritanian
- Roles: president, army officer, politician
