WITNESS: When is a coup not a coup?

Daniel Magnowski is a correspondent for Reuters in West and Central Africa, based in Dakar, Senegal. Before moving to Africa this year, Daniel covered commodities and financial markets for Reuters in London. In the following story he tells of his experience of covering the aftermath of the military coup in Mauritania this month and his encounter with the new junta leader.

By Daniel Magnowski

DAKAR (Reuters) - "First of all," said the mustachioed army general in his pale green uniform, "this is not a military coup."

We were sitting in a reception room in the Mauritanian presidential palace, from which the man opposite me had only days before bundled the country's first freely elected leader, President Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdallahi.

Apparently confused by my skepticism, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz went on to tell me how Abdallahi's overthrow was rather a natural consequence of his poor leadership and a necessary step to get the country back on track.

While Abdel Aziz took charge of the government, the army took charge of the streets.

One youth in fatigues gripped a battered Kalashnikov as our car inched past a roadblock.

Wide-eyed, he waved the gun to show it was his to use, though the direction it pointed in suggested he could do with some training on the rifle range. Soldiers stationed near our apartment found their truck most useful as a shade for sleeping.

The military presence was unobtrusive and life went on as normal in the markets, mosques and coffee shops of Nouakchott.

But among the city's chattering classes, Abdel Aziz's propaganda machine was whirring smoothly.

By turns a leader of a usually liberal think-tank, then a university professor, defended the bloodless coup in language so similar they could have been reading from the same autocue.

Their thesis, that soldiers spiriting away a democratically elected president was an example of political stability in action, seemed to me illogical, but the party line had filtered down to street level too.

"It will be good for the economy," a market trader told us enthusiastically. Meanwhile, the United States halted development aid and Western governments queued up to condemn Abdel Aziz.

Still, if international opinion troubled the head of the junta, he wasn't showing it.

I asked him whether he had been able to convince other countries that his takeover was in fact motivated by a desire for stability and democracy, as he so patiently explained to me.

With a look of offence, he shrugged. "I don't know."

"STORM THE PALACE"

It was all very different to the previous week, when I had been in Nouakchott to cover a meeting of the World Bank where the host nation was repeatedly praised as a democratic success story in Africa -- proof that the bad old days of putsches and dictatorships were over.

Perhaps there will be stability, of a sort. In the immediate aftermath of the coup, there seemed little danger of Mauritania descending into lawlessness or bloodletting.

While some political parties formed a coalition calling for the reinstatement of Abdallahi, they limited their outrage to holding rallies at which Abdallahi's supporters held posters of the president printed for his election campaign.

"Vote Sidi," they read, "the president who reassures". Activists took turns at a microphone to demand a return to democracy.

One party leader turned to me as I jostled for space on the podium. "If we marched on the presidential palace," he said, "nobody would stop us."

I thought of the soldiers I had seen, young, bored or asleep in the draining heat of the desert capital. So why don't you, I asked, looking at the thousand-strong crowd. "Because we want peace."

Abdel Aziz certainly didn't have the air of a man who feared his door being kicked down by a revolutionary mob.

Legs crossed, the camera lights glinting off his shiny black shoes, he seemed more concerned with ridding himself of ignorant journalists who appeared unable to grasp his grand plan.

How, exactly, did he intend to revive Mauritania's stagnant economy, I asked.

"I have a question for you," he countered, after we had overrun our allocated 10 minutes. "Can we finish this interview?"

(Editing by Alistair Thomson and Matthew Tostevin)