UPDATE: Fassala’s police commissioner has been dismissed. Yesterday students demonstrated outside of the Ministry of the Interior to protest the government’s handling of the incident and were arrested.
It began as an angry protest over water shortages by tribes in Fassala, in Mauritania’s eastern Hodh ash-Sharqi, province and escalated into days of clashes between local people and police and gendarmes. Local tribes met with the local prefect in hopes that he would resolve a dispute over access to a well. The prefect insulted the gathering at which point they set on him and his entourage – according to the newspapers he was ”almost lynched” by the crowd. Police and gendarmes beat back the locals. In the ruckus, both police and protestors were injured. The police sent reinforcements, escalating the violence; the next day men from the Nema military garrison were sent to assist in putting down the violence using teargas and batons. The locals set fire to the town hall, several municipal builds as well as car. The demonstrators “categorically deny the existence of any other motivation than the deteriorating economic situation and the authorities ignoring their demands for a solution to these problems through dialogue rather than repression and delinquency.” Newspaper reports say thirty-two local people have been arrested by the Gendarmerie, who stormed houses in the town of (about) 10,000 people on the border with Mali. Al-Akhbar reports “growing talk of torture of detainees,” citing the experience of two detainees released (providing their names and a list of the names of “those among the most prominent detainees”, though it does not say what for; more on this later, perhaps). Opposition MPs scolded the government, Prime Minister Moulay Ould Mohamed Laghdef in particular, for economic stagnation and “serious abuse [by this government] with the concerns of the citizen.” One MP, Mohamed Mustafa Ould Badr al-Din of the Union of Forces for Progress (UFP) said the government had taken only piecemeal measures to appease Mauritanians’ demands in hopes of avoiding “a popular uprising as in Tunisia”. Similar protests are said to be appearing in other towns in Hodh ash-Sharqi with arrests being ordered, it is said, by the president himself.
