To His Excellency the President of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, I address you with a deep pain and an immense shame, as a citizen of Mauritania, Muslim, African and human.. The scenes that are unfolding in our streets today are unworthy of a country that claims to be of Islam, justice and peace. Systematic raids of blacks – whether Mauritanian, Senegalese, Malian or other – are carried out in our neighborhoods by the police and the National Guard. Human beings, our brothers, are hunted, humiliated, thrown into trucks like cattle. They are robbed of their property, brutalized, expelled without any regard for their dignity. This treatment reserved to black foreigners and even to black Mauritanians who, without a piece of identity on them, are assimilated to intruders, is a stain on our national conscience.
Open letter to His Excellency the President of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania (by Alassane Hamady Soma Ba)
