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War on the Circulation of Arms: The "Fire" Against the "Fire"

Guerre Contre La Circulation Des Armes. Le "Feu" Contre Le "Feu"

Authentique (Mauritania)

12 April 2017

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[Translated text]

[…] It must be said that the arms trade has always been present in the centre of Nouakchott in full view of the public authorities. It has developed in recent years since the entry into Mauritania of arsenals looted from Libyan army depots.

In a book entitled "Armes légères et sécurité en Mauritanie, une perspective nationale et régionale", journalists Stéphanie Pézard and Anne-Kathrin Glatz argued that even though the carrying of weapons is strictly forbidden to civilians, the Mauritanian population is very largely armed, with many of its members carrying weapons, with or without state authorisation.

[…] in the discipline of target shooting […] three models of weapons are particularly used for training and championships: Mausers, FN-FALs and G3s. FN-FAL. These are weapons that are loaded with only three cartridges at a time, fired successively. These are decommissioned weapons, i.e. deemed obsolete by the army. Instead of destroying them, it lends them to private individuals.

These loans are normally accompanied by the issue of an official paper from the Ministry of Defence indicating that the weapon, with its specified serial number, is on loan for an indefinite period to a given person and can be recovered at any time.

This document makes it possible to justify, in the event of a control, that the weapon has not been stolen and that its holder is legitimate. It also serves as a permit to carry weapons and exempts the holder from having to go through the Directorate General of National Security, which normally provides these authorisations.

The loan of weapons by the general staff of the army is a common practice. An internal study by the Mauritanian General Directorate of National Security estimated some time ago that 50,000 of the 70,000 or so weapons believed to be in circulation among the Mauritanian population come from the armed forces. These are individual loans, made to Mauritanians of high social class who have contacts with the authorities.

To these "loans" should be added the distributions provided by the government during the various crises that have shaken the Mauritanian state. On several occasions, the government in power wanted to strengthen the defence capacities of certain groups of the population. This was the case during the Sahara War in the late 1970s and during the conflict with Senegal. The weapons distributed were mainly Kalashnikovs and, to a lesser extent, FALs and Iraqi Tariq pistols of 9 mm calibre.

Today, it is almost impossible to determine how many weapons the army has "lent", how many it has distributed and how many have been stolen over the years. And when we know that after the Arab Spring, the disintegration of states such as Libya and with the war in Mali, intense arms trafficking has emerged in the Sahel and the Maghreb sub-region, we can see how tough an operation the Mauritanian public authority intends to carry out, as it has decided to definitively curb the circulation of arms in the country.

ID: N792

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