No EU visit to Mauritania until president freed: Paris

(PARIS) - France will not send a minister on a visit to Mauritania until the recently overthrown president is freed, the foreign ministry said in Paris Tuesday.

"We want (Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi) freed and it is hard to imagine a visit at ministerial level to a country where the legitimate president was still in prison," ministry spokesman Eric Chevallier said.

Abdallahi, the country's first democratically elected president, was overthrown in a military coup on August 6 condemned by the European Union, the United States and the African Union.

On Monday, representing the EU, French Cooperation Secretary of State Alain Joyandet met junta members in Paris and said later that he hoped to able to visit Mauritania "shortly."

He said he had "obtained the assurance" of the Mauritanian delegation's head, the junta-designated prime minister Moulaye Ould Mohamed Laghdaf, that he would "have the possibility of meeting president Abdallahi," elected in March 2007.

"It is to meet him, but not meet him in prison," the ministry spokesman said.

"It seems difficult to us that a visit could be organised with the legitimate president in jail."

The EU is seeking to bring pressure to bear on the junta headed by General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz to get him to make concessions.

On Monday it gave the junta a month to put forward plans for a return to the provisions of the nation's constitution, failing which sanctions would be applied including a halt to cooperation except for humanitarian aid.

As the current rotating president of the EU, France is favourable to an institutional "compromise" but wants "the legitimate president and prime minister freed and return to the constitutional order," spokesman Chevallier said.

There could then be discussions on the steps that followed, he said.

In Nouakchott, coup opponents said the political crisis could only be resolved by the return to power of Abdallahi, the "legitimate president."

"We see there is a blockage, we want the authors of the coup to know it has failed and that any way out of the crisis has to be the reestablishment of the president in his functions," the head of the antiputsch movement Mohamed Ould Moloud told reporters.