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P 161625Z MAR 06 ZDK RUEHPC CTG SVC ONLY
FM AMEMBASSY DAKAR
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC PRIORITY 4602
INFO RUEHZK/ECOWAS COLLECTIVE
RUEHRB/AMEMBASSY RABAT 0759
RUEHMD/AMEMBASSY MADRID 0101
RUEHRO/AMEMBASSY ROME 0622

S E C R E T SECTION 01 OF 04 DAKAR 000681 
 
SIPDIS 
 
SIPDIS 
 
DEPARTMENT FOR AF, AF/W, INR/AA, AND DS/IP/ITA 
PARIS FOR D'ELIA 
 
E.O.  12958: DECL: 03/15/16 
TAGS: PINS PGOV PINR ASEC CASC SG
SUBJECT:A (MERCIFULLY BRIEF) HISTORY OF VIOLENCE 
 
REF:  DAKAR 1243 
 
DAKAR 00000681  001.2 OF 004 
 
 
CLASSIFIED BY POLITICAL COUNSELOR ROY L. WHITAKER, FOR 
REASONS 1.4 (B) AND (D). 
 
SUMMARY 
------- 
¶1.  (C)  Senegal is rightly known as an orderly place of 
dialog and consensus, but its elections have not always 
been without incident.  Concern at possible unrest or 
repression in the coming presidential and legislative 
campaigns has been sparked by four events:  a new book 
tracing political violence since Independence; unruly 
student protests in Dakar and Saint Louis and a forceful 
police reaction; mutual charges of political thuggery 
between President Wade and a prominent leftist ex-ally; 
and tensions or in one case serious roughhousing between 
rival factions of Wade's ruling Democratic Party of 
Senegal (PDS).  END SUMMARY. 
 
BRINGING THE PRESIDENT TO BOOK 
------------------------------ 
¶2.  (C)  Marcel Mendy, author of two books on Wade's rise 
and first years in power (Reftel), has just published "La 
Violence Politique au Senegal: de 1960 a 2003."  Mendy 
works for the Interior Ministry, and his book is written 
in carefully measured nuance. 
 
¶3.  (U)  Mendy argues that violence has erupted usually 
at specific stages in Senegal's electoral process: 
 
  --  1) During "leadership renewal" (renouvellement des 
instances de base), when parties sell membership cards 
that provide the right to select leaders from 
neighborhood to village, borough, department, regional 
and national levels.  Battles between "tendencies" in the 
ruling party tend to be especially fierce; 
  --  2) "Investiture" of candidates for parliament, 
which gives party factions a last chance to compete for 
top jobs; 
  --  3)  A one-month campaign offers the possibility of 
conflict, although in fact Mendy's survey provides few 
examples of violence at this stage; and, 
  --  4)  Election results have been followed either by 
an immediate wave of opposition protest violence, as in 
the presidential election of 1988; or by a months-long 
series of incidents which may or may not have been 
directly linked to the election outcome, as in 1993-94. 
 
¶4.  (C)  We asked Mendy over lunch about his analysis and 
prognosis for the coming election and found that in 
private he is scathing and pessimistic.  He believes 
overt violence is inherent in Senegal's personality-based 
(or "clientelist") politics, that this campaign or its 
aftermath could be violent, but that violence will 
probably not come from the opposition.  While Socialist 
and leftist leaders have warned loudly that they will 
"take to the streets" in case they conclude the election 
was unfair, he discounts their ability or willingness to 
do so.  "Socialists," he says, after 40 years in power, 
"are all meek accountants or office managers." 
 
¶5.   (S)  In contrast, Mendy explains, PDS leaders "have 
come in off the street.  They have no other careers or 
prospects.  Losing a government post means losing 
everything, and they will not tolerate it."   Wade and 
the PDS, moreover, have always considered violence 
appropriate to their political arsenal, he contends, and 
have kept gangs of ruffians to do the rough work. 
(Wade's well-known "calots bleus" were largely integrated 
into police or gendarmerie after 2000, but some were 
recruited as bodyguards by local PDS bosses.)  Wade would 
probably not order violence, Mendy says, and it remains 
to be seen if he would allow or discourage it, but the 
problem is that, once PDS violence starts, Wade "will not 
be able to stop it even if he wants to." 
 
SOMETHING ROTTEN ON CAMPUS 
-------------------------- 
¶6.  (SBU)  The March 2 cover of "Nouvel Horizon," 
Senegal's main newsmagazine is entitled "Why the 
University is Burning."  It features a lone, helmeted 
gendarme with tear gas grenade launcher, standing tense 
and at the ready on a nearly deserted street strewn with 
rocks and bricks with fire and billowing smoke in the 
distance.  In fact, student protest, with heavy rock 
throwing, proceeded in two waves.  The first provoked 
 
DAKAR 00000681  002.2 OF 004 
 
 
hardly any police reaction save an attempt to protect 
nearby main roads.  In the second, however, students were 
by most accounts more unuly than they have been in 
years.  Some antagonied police (dropping boiling water 
on them, for eample), and police reacted with an unusual 
degreeof force, causing numerous injuries including some 
serious ones.  Sympathy protests were held in Sant 
Louis, and police response there was muscularas well. 
 
¶7.  (U)  The immediate cause of the prtests was a 
complaint that the campus cafeteria's meat was spoiled 
and "covered with worms."  Daka's campus, built for 
6,000 students, now has 47,500.  Campus housing, with 
beds for 5,200, now holds over 20,000: there is said to 
be "sub-letting of bed or floor space."  In large classes 
throughout the Faculties of Letters, Law and Management, 
students must often stand for lectures.  The Faculties of 
Medicine and Pharmacy are also said to be deteriorating. 
 
¶8.  (C)  In tandem with infrastructure deficiencies, 
there is deepening politicization.  In the past, student 
politics was relatively simple:  each party had its 
militants.  Interior Minister NGom seems to believe the 
old model holds true.  With the opposition in mind, he 
declared: "There is clearly serious reason to believe the 
student movement has been infiltrated and taken over. 
Clandestine forces have made student movements their 
instruments in order to achieve, for undisclosed ends, 
the destabilization of authority."  Students and others 
on campus doubt that NGom understands what is happening. 
 
¶9.  (C)  University Ombudsman, Bouba Diop, formerly head 
of the CONGAD umbrella group of NGO's, is charged with 
reconciling different and competing campus interests. 
Yet Diop tells us there is no single association with 
authority to negotiate on students' behalf.  Politics is 
amorphous, disorganized, dispersed... about the only such 
word he did not use was chaotic.  Student rivalries are 
cross-cutting:  faculty versus faculty, religious versus 
secular, political party versus party, and, extremely 
severe, between warring factions of the ruling PDS. 
Overall, campus life has degraded into "a culture of 
violence."  A Diop colleague adds that ruffians are 
readily available on campus:  protesters, like other 
Senegalese, sometimes employ unemployed wrestlers as 
bodyguards, he says, while other groups, mostly but not 
exclusively enrolled students, study martial arts to use 
during protests or competition for campus influence.  For 
PDS MP and professors' union head Ngokhobaye Diouf, 
campus congestion "concentrates violence in the student's 
blood." 
 
¶10.  (S)  What most Senegalese who know the university 
agree on is that the campus PDS is badly splintered, to 
some extent reflecting the split between Wade and ex-PM 
Idrissa Seck, and that the PDS has lost whatever campus 
control it had at the start of  Wade's presidency.  The 
founder and long-time leader of PDS university and youth 
movements, ex-Minister of Environment Mamadou Diagne 
Fada, lamented to us that PDS students now reflect 
national-level factional divides.  The university, he 
predicted, must and will be aided financially to get 
through this school year, because "2007 will be turbulent 
on campus, and the government cannot allow two "annees 
blanches" (cancelled school years) in a row. 
 
ONE-TIME ALLIES TRADE RECRIMINATIONS 
------------------------------------ 
¶11.  (C)  Wade charged that student protests were 
inspired by the Opposition in complicity with an unnamed 
country that everyone quickly figured out meant Laurent 
Gbagbo's Cote d'Ivoire.  Almost no one believed the 
foreign-hand accusation, and it was clear Wade was 
fingering his long-time leftist ally Abdoulaye Bathily. 
 
¶12.  (C)  Bathily responded quickly, but to avoid charges 
of libeling the Chief of State, he penned an open letter 
to "PDS Secretary General Wade."  After denying he had 
organized current campus protests, Bathily said that in 
1988, he opposed PDS booby-trapping of cars and tracts 
"calling for armed forces insurrection."  In 1989, he 
accused Wade, "without consulting (coalition allies), you 
called for fighting forces of order with machetes, stones 
and bicycle chains."  Recalling the 1994 killing of a 
constitutional judge and 2003 beating of a young critic, 
Bathily concluded, "observations I have made of your road 
to power, and notably your way of treating adversaries of 
 
DAKAR 00000681  003.2 OF 004 
 
 
the moment, lead me to believe that henchmen who have 
targeted me for the last two years are ... not acting in 
isolation or on their own initiative," but that they are 
"orchestrated by a master's hand." 
 
¶13.  (S)  Over lunch, Bathily and Wade's long-time Labor 
Minister Yero De, emphasized that Wade was accustomed to 
using force, and that he would allow or even order 
supporters to "do anything necessary" to hold onto power 
if the PDS loses the coming presidential election. 
 
EXORCISM IN THE PDS 
------------------- 
¶14.  (C)  There are numerous fault lines within the PDS, 
including:  a) Idrissa Seck's fans versus his enemies; b) 
old-line PDS loyalists versus Socialist turn-coats whom 
Wade has co-opted with senior government positions or 
parliamentary seats; c) local rivalries at the city or 
regional level that have little to do with national 
loyalties; and, increasingly, d) serious differences 
between PM Macky Sall and the machine he is trying to 
establish, versus a line-up of old-time Wade intimates. 
 
¶15.  (C)  PDS "renewal," or selection of new leaders, is 
not going smoothly, but few are surprised by the problems 
PM Macky Sall is having bringing local bosses to heel. 
He was, for example, blocked by a coalition of powerful 
local PDS barons from changing local structures in Saint 
Louis.  At least Sall has not been chased from the 
podium, as happened to Dakar Regional Council President 
Abdoulaye Faye when he tried to manage renewal in Thies. 
A chair-throwing mano-a-mano between Wade's people and 
Seck's hometown fans led to dissolution of the Thies PDS, 
a move even Sall had to admit was "extreme."  There has 
also been some untoward internal PDS scuffling at Dakar's 
tony Meridien Hotel, and in Ziguinchor, invasion of a PDS 
session by a rival faction's toughs "sent everyone 
running in an every-man-for-himself." 
 
¶16.  (S)  Ex-Minister Fada told us he was ousted from the 
cabinet because "neutrality was not enough" for those who 
demanded that he denounce his "good friend Idrissa" Seck. 
The press talks of anti-Seck "falcons" around Wade, Fada 
said, but there are really only two:  PM Sall and Wade's 
son Karim.  With sophisticated contempt, Fada described 
Sall's attempts to renew the PDS as contrary to law and 
PDS practice and without regard to those who fought for 
so long for Abdoulaye Wade.   "Who says," he demanded 
rhetorically, "that Macky Sall has the right to head the 
party, while Aminata Tall, Assembly President Pape Diop 
and I are left outside?"  (Tall "resigned" her Ministry 
March 14 after bitter exchanges with the PM.)  Fada 
foresees disappointed PDS loyalists simply staying home 
during the elections, and said there is speculation that 
a new Liberal party could be formed outside the PDS. 
 
COMMENT 
------- 
¶17.  (S)  Fortunately for Senegal, predictions or threats 
of violence are more frequent than violence itself. 
Senegalese, though, are political hypochondriacs who love 
to fret about possible post-election violent scenarios 
that include:  a) Wade wins the presidency but loses 
Parliament, leading to a period of government stasis and 
opposition attempts to weaken Wade by taking to the 
streets; b) Wade wins Parliament and Presidency in what 
is perceived to be a rigged election; opposition protests 
are reinforced by popular discontent; and Ousmane NGom's 
Interior Ministry uses force at its disposal to restore 
calm; or, c) in the worse case scenario, Wade loses the 
Presidency; PDS hard-line ministers use force to retain 
power; and Wade permits them free rein or tries but fails 
to restrain them.  None of these pessimistic scenarios 
reflects or even allows for Wade's long-term commitment 
to democratic governance and free elections. 
 
¶18.  (S)  What we can expect over the next year are more 
bitter disputes within the PDS and possibly some 
physicality during current organizational "renewals" or 
when parliamentary candidates are chosen toward the end 
of the year.  In areas where Seck's fans are strong, like 
Thies, factional violence is possible but should not 
greatly affect community peace.  Aminata Tall is a wild 
card in the process.  Interior Minister Ousmane NGom and 
Justice Minister Cheikh Tidjane Sy also have roles to 
play.  More probable is intensified protest or conflict 
at a Dakar university campus increasingly characterized 
 
DAKAR 00000681  004.3 OF 004 
 
 
by uncontrolled growth, inadequate budgets, an unable-to- 
cope management, proliferation of uncoordinated and 
competing student political groups, a religious 
component, and gestation of a "culture of violence" in a 
small confined space. 
 
¶19.  (S)  If the government approaches the university as 
a social order problem to be resolved, it no doubt has 
the capacity and even the funding to start working toward 
a solution.  There is concern though, that Wade and PM 
Sall will instead see virtually everything over the next 
year through the prism of elections and the search for 
political advantage. 
Jackson