A former head of state behind bars, for not having, it is said, respected the measures of his judicial control, as part of the ongoing investigation of a corruption case against him. How can one explain this impression of embarrassment that seems to arouse the case of Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz?
It clearly carries a force of gravity that no one can ignore. This imprisonment of the former Mauritanian president is all the less common because he has not yet been convicted. Putting him in custody so easily is therefore puzzling in our Africa, where public opinion does not forget that he remains, one of the few who has left power without complaining, at the end of his second term. We dare not even imagine all the pretexts, the false alibis that some leaders who usually do not want to leave the table, will draw from this Mauritanian news, to try to be embedded forever, by sovereign mockery, if he must their people.
If it was absolutely necessary to imprison this man, it should be explained with pedagogy to the Mauritanians, but also to the African peoples, who have already been captured by regimes that will undoubtedly be even more determined in their confiscating relationship with power. The resignation from the former president’s power was, for all, a pleasant surprise, and many Africans could imagine that they could donate, to free from all his plunder, their president for them, if only that – here they agreed to disappear , and too good, from the stage.
Justice is still needed
That justice must pass is obvious. But during a trial, can a state like Mauritania have no means other than imprisonment to restrict the freedom of movement of the free president? Some people should not see this imprisonment of a former president – who had not just been overthrown – as a humiliation for all the people he still represented almost two years ago.
Obviously, in many demanding democracies, no joke is forgiven for leaders. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been jailed in Israel, and Benjamin Netanyahu is not immune to a similar fate. Jacob Zuma is being prosecuted in South Africa, but sending him to prison would require a lot of pace and skill. That is why it is rare that the need for exemplarity leads so happily to what must be called preventive detention.
For then the exemplarity becomes punitive, and perhaps called at will and, sometimes, temporarily in what some suspect, rightly or wrongly, to be a solution of points between old friends, now encrypted. It is to be hoped that the severity of the law in Mauritania will fall with justice and will not fluctuate according to the profile of the culprits, much like in these anti-corruption operations that send to prison those who embezzled five million, and let the Presidential Palace and ministries show other, which unnecessarily draws billions upon billions from the treasury.
Nothing allows at the moment to question the accuracy of the accusations against the former president
Nothing actually allows it. Because nothing at the moment allows to deny the former president any presumption of innocence. The solidity of democracies under construction depends on the ability of those in power to reserve fair treatment and impartial justice for their worst opponents. To better understand what is at stake here, it would be enough for those who are considering humiliating the former president today to imagine, tomorrow, in his place, by visualizing someone else, harsh and vengeful.
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