Country: Mauritania
Group: Soninke
Date: 3/30/2021
Team: Mahad Alam (lead), Maya Shrikant, Ethan Pelland, Therin Carr, Thomas Chia
The black population in Mauritania is split into two groups: the black ethnic groups including the Soninke, and the black moors—former slaves who remain tied to their masters post-slavery. Many Soninke have been exiled from their country. In 1989, tensions between the countries of Mauritania and Senegal led to the deportation of thousands of both countries’ nationals (Fleischman, 1994). The Mauritanian government used the dispute to expel Soninke people by accusing them of being Senegalese natives. In addition to the deportations, the Mauritanian government carried out executions, torture, and the confiscation of property from black Mauritanians. Furthermore, the majority of the Beydane government started systematically exiling black Mauritanians under the guise of expelling Senegalese nationals (Fleischman, 1994, p. 18). Those exiled often lost their land to seizure by the government and were unable to regain their property (Fleischman, 1994, p. 142). The United Nations counted 60-65,000 refugees remaining in Senegal, Mali and Chad in 1993 (Minority Rights). Information depicting the details of the Campaign of Terror is consistent across a wide variety of reliable sources. Therefore, the data affirming the forced away code for the Soninke ethnic group is a 3.
Sources
- Fleischman, J. (1994). Mauritania’s Campaign of Terror: State-Sponsored Repression of Black Africans. Human Rights Watch. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/MAURITAN944.PDF
- Minority Rights Group. (2017). Black Africans. Retrieved March 30, 2021, from https://minorityrights.org/minorities/black-africans/