Mohamed Khouna Ould Haidalla
Mohamed Khouna Ould Haidalla abolished slavery in the last country on earth to do it, and made no provision to punish anyone for keeping slaves. He was an army officer who came to power in 1980 in one of the run of coups that followed Mauritania's disastrous war in the Western Sahara. The country had annexed the southern third of the territory when Spain withdrew in 1975, could not hold it against the Polisario Front, and renounced the claim in 1979 after the war had bankrupted the state and destroyed the government. The abolition came in July 1981, by ordinance. Slavery in Mauritania is hereditary and descent-based, largely of Haratin people held by Arab-Berber families, and it had already been abolished twice - by the French in 1905 and at independence in 1961 - without effect either time. The 1981 ordinance had the same defect made explicit: it provided compensation for owners and no criminal penalty for ownership. No prosecution was possible until a law of 2007, and the first conviction came in 2011. Estimates of the number still held run into the tens of thousands, and anti-slavery campaigners have been imprisoned more often than slaveholders. He also faced the first serious tensions between the Arabic-speaking north and the black African south over language policy, which broke into expulsions and killings later in the decade. He was deposed in 1984 by his own army chief while out of the country, and ran unsuccessfully for president as a civilian twenty years later.
- Lived: 1940 CE – ?
- Nationality: Mauritanian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
