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Old Iraqi tanks led impoverished Mauritania's coup
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By Jon Boyle

NOUAKCHOTT, June 13 (Reuters) - The army unit spearheading a failed coup in
Mauritania this month was equipped long ago by Saddam Hussein and its leader
was known to be close to Iraq's Arab nationalist Baath party, diplomats
said.

The northwest African country is trying to fathom the most violent attempt
to seize power since independence in 1960, and crushing poverty appears as
much a cause as growing political and religious discontent.

President Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya's government has not said why it
thinks the plotters launched their attempted coup, and suspected coup leader
Saleh Ould Hanenna is on the run.

The coup attempt followed the arrest of dozens of Islamists and Baath party
activists amid restive signs after the U.S.-led war on Saddam.

But diplomats also cite questions over democracy, deeply unpopular ties with
Israel and a famine that has touched a third of the desert country's nearly
three million people.

"The coup leaders thought there were pockets of discontent in a number of
areas and everybody would come out of the woodwork against Taya and support
them," a Western diplomat said. "They severely miscalculated on that."

But the rebels came close to succeeding.

At one point they reached the presidential palace and took radio and
television stations -- standard targets for an African coup -- but
reinforcements from the interior put them to flight on Monday before they
had issued a rallying cry.

SADDAM'S TANKS

The tanks used by the armoured unit that led the coup plot were gifts from
Saddam's Iraq and officers had been there to train. Baghdad was one of
Taya's few friends after he took power in a 1984 coup.

"At the time, Mauritania was on everybody's blacklist. The only country that
provided some support and arms was Iraq," said British Honorary Consul Nancy
Abeiderrahmane, who runs a dairy business in the capital.

Taya backed Iraq during the first Gulf War, but afterwards shifted to the
pro-Western camp -- becoming only the third Arab League country to establish
full diplomatic ties with Israel in 1999.

Mauritania was not critical of the war to topple Saddam but did not openly
back it either. At one point it was suggested by diplomats as a possible
option for exile.

Hanenna, a colonel, was dismissed from the army in a purge of Baathists
opposed to ties with Israel and at a time when Taya's officials believed
talk of a coup was in the wind.

But even many of the government's critics think that the Baath party links,
or alternatively a possible Islamist connection, might not have been as
important as simple poverty in pushing serving and retired soldiers to try
to seize power.

After being sacked, Hanenna had worked as a driver. There were continual
rumblings in his former unit about low pay and poor conditions in a country
where average income is barely a dollar a day.

"This frustration drove him to take up arms against his brothers and
Mauritania's democratic institutions," said Lemrabott Ould Sid'Ahmed, who
runs a newspaper critical of the government.

"When people are hungry, they devour their leaders. That's what happened in
Mauritania," he said.