Mauritania Loosens Islamic Law

NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania, Dec. 26 (AP) - Illegal beer flows freely at the Petit Paris nightclub, where veiled women and men in billowing desert robes slither under strobelights. Prostitutes ply their trade at a hotel next door. Sixteen years after wresting power in a coup d'etat, Mauritania's military-backed regime has stopped enforcing conservative Islam. The government now turns a blind eye to alcohol and extramarital sex, although they remain officially outlawed.

After a bitter falling out with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Mauritania President Maaouya Sid'Ahmed Ould Taya has also traded a one-time alliance with Iraq for improved relations from an unlikely quarter: Israel.

Yet the creeping changes in this Sahara Desert nation of 2.5 million do not include democratic reforms, human rights groups complain.

The country's largest political party is banned and some of its senior members arrested. Local newspapers are censored and foreign journalists followed by government minders. Opposition groups--including Islamic conservatives and black African rights groups--have reacted by staging violent demonstrations with growing regularity.

Critics warn the government crackdown could fragment Ould Taya's increasingly fragile hold on power. The government--which won 1997 elections widely viewed as fraudulent--is dominated by light-skinned Moors, descendants of Arabs and Berbers who make up roughly half of the nation's people. Blacks and mixed-race individuals largely occupy the lower castes of Mauritanian society, and have been given few top government posts.

Many blacks fear an official pogrom such as the one launched by the government in the early 1990s, leading to the reported disappearance of hundreds of blacks, including military officers and foreigners, following a feud with neighboring Senegal.

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