Union of Democratic Forces (Mauritania)

The Union of Democratic Forces-New Era (Union des Forces Démocratiques-Ère Nouvelle) was a political party in Mauritania, founded in 1991. The secretary-general of the party was Ahmed Ould Daddah. In February 1997 the five-party Front of Opposition Parties (FPO), including the UFD-EN, was formed; it boycotted the December 1997 presidential election, in which President Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya was easily re-elected.

The party was weakened by a number of splits during its existence. In 1998, a faction of the party led by Mohamed Ould Maouloud, which was known as the UFD/B and later became the Union of the Forces of Progress, split from the faction under Daddah's leadership. The UFD-EN under Daddah's leadership boycotted the January 1999 local election, in which the faction under Maouloud participated.

In October 2000, the UFD-EN was dissolved by the government, which alleged that it incited violence and harmed national interests. A successor party, the Rally of Democratic Forces (RFD), was subsequently established, with Daddah as its president.

Famous quotes containing the words union, democratic and/or forces:

    The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.
    Henry George (1839–1897)

    The government will ... go on in the highly democratic method of conscripting American manhood for European slaughter.
    Emma Goldman (1869–1940)

    The popularity of disaster movies ... expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.
    David Mamet (b. 1947)