Issue of race clouds Mauritania election

NOUAKCHOTT, Mar 11 (Reuters) Mohamed, a 22-year-old black Mauritanian who lives in a dusty shantytown in the capital Nouakchott, will not be voting in today's landmark election.

Mohamed is not sure the poll, hailed as the freest in Mauritania's history, will change the lives of the thousands who live in grinding poverty in this racially diverse Islamic state straddling Arab and black Africa on the Sahara's western edge.

The light-skinned Moorish elite, including the military junta which will hand over power to a civilian president to be elected today, deny there is race discrimination.

But the inhabitants of Nouakchott's Gazra and Keube slums -- kilometres of flimsy cardboard, wood and tin shacks spread over refuse-strewn sand -- are almost all black and they say they have suffered discrimination, including slavery, for centuries.

''I pray to the Good God the new president will treat us all equally,'' said Mohamed, only his eyes showing from a black turban as he queued at a standpipe. ''He should take these shacks away, build houses, give us work, electricity, water.'' Aichatou Ahmed, waving flies away from her baby and the shrivelled vegetables she is selling, has the same wish.

''Look at the rubbish around us, these shacks. You won't find that where the white Moors live,'' she said. ''We are frightened to tell the truth''.

Not far away in the wealthy Tevragh Zeina neighbourhood, Moors dressed in traditional blue and white robes clutch mobile phones to their ears while they manoeuvre cars out of elegant villas.

All 19 candidates for the presidency, which will replace the junta that seized power in a 2005 coup, have pledged to bring unity and development to Africa's newest oil producer which also boasts bountiful reserves of iron ore and gold.

SLAVERY PERSISTS The candidates include only three blacks. The social caste system has traditionally placed government, politics and commerce in the hands of mostly white Moors.

Slavery was nominally abolished at independence in 1960 and legally banned again in 1981. Rights groups say it still persists in the interior of this sparsely-populated nation of 3 million inhabitants, many of them nomads.

''There are blacks who accept being slaves of a white Moor in the interior. I can't change that, it's existed for years,'' said 19-year-old white Moor Mohamed Vall Ben Wana, who works at his family's grocery store in Nouakchott.

''God created blacks and whites. If whites are luckier it's God's will'', he said of the poverty in the shanty towns.

Foreigners who ask about the race issue are often brusquely interrupted by light-skinned Moors. ''It's not a problem. All Mauritanians are brothers,'' one said.

Col Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, the outgoing military junta leader, said some politicians manipulated the racial question.

''I don't consider we have a problem of national unity, these are social problems that exist everywhere,'' he told Reuters.

REUTERS SB KP0918