DAKAR, May 13, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – The Mauritanian authorities are playing a dangerous game to stifle Islamist opponents by denouncing them as “terrorists”, risking the creation of the very same threat they claim attempting to curb, an international think-tank has warned.

“The international community should realize that the terrorist threat barely even exists in Mauritania and that the wrong policies could help create one,” Reuters Thursday, May 12, quoted as saying a report by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.

Scores of Islamist opposition leaders and activists were detained by Mauritanian police in recent weeks on accusations of “colluding” with the Algerian-based Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), a movement claimed to have links with Al-Qaeda network.

The Mauritanian authorities have claimed that Al-Qaeda is using the GSPC to recruit Mauritanian youths to fight alongside what they name “insurgents” in Iraq, as well as in Afghanistan, Chechnya and the occupied Palestinian territories.

“The government is now in danger of creating the very phenomenon it is warning of by tarring the whole wider Islamic revival in the country with the ‘terrorist’ tag,” Olly Owen, Africa analyst at World Market Research Center, said in the report.

The report further stressed that President Maaouya Ould Sidi’ Ahmed Taya was taking advantage of the US “war on terror” to justify a clampdown on opponents and to try to ingratiate his government with Western powers, particularly Washington.

“By giving credence to the notion that Islamists are linked to armed rebels, Taya runs the risk of leading the state into an impasse, making it dangerously reliant on US backing against growing domestic discontent,” said Robert Malley, Director of Crisis Group’s Middle East and North Africa program.

Around 50 Islamist opposition members are held in detention by the Mauritanian security forces, according to a local human rights group.

The report urged the Mauritanian government to reconsider its policies of stifling the opposition to avoid attracting more sympathizers to the what it terms “Islamist” opposition.

The government should, instead, address the causes of dissent in the country, such as widespread unemployment, high-level corruption and the wide gap between rich and poor, the report added.

“Although Islamism’s political expression remains constricted, the number of its sympathizers is rapidly growing,” the international think-tank said in the report.

“Islamism has found fertile ground in urban poverty, rejection of the corrupt political class and the abortion of the democratic project,” the think-tank said.

The Mauritanian regime of Taya has angered many Arab countries by shifting support from former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein towards Israel and Washington.

In 1999, Mauritania became only the third Arab League state to establish full diplomatic ties with Israel after Egypt and Jordan.