Ahmed Abdallah

Ahmed Abdallah ( Arabic أحمد عبد الله عبد الرحمن, DMG Aḥmad ʿAbd Allāh ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān ; * June 12, 1918 in Domoni on the Comoros - Anjouan island ; † November 26, 1989 in Moroni ) was a Comorian politician and President of the Comoros several times.

Life

Ahmed Abdallah came from an Arab family and, after attending primary school, was a worker in the société coloniale de Bambao. Over the years he became a businessman and one of the richest men in the Indian Ocean. He invested a large part of his fortune in France.

The Comoros were captured by English troops in 1943. The British overthrew the government of Vichy France , which ruled the island through a governor from Madagascar. The Comoros returned to the l'Union Française in 1946 with the status of an independent “Territoire français d'outre-mer” French overseas territory . A "Conseil General" (local assembly), controlled by France and made up of 24 elected representatives, took over the business of government. Abdallah was its elected president from 1949 to 1953 and initiated a cautious agrarian reform. In 1959 he was elected Senator for the Comoros to the Senate in Paris as a member of the Gaullist UNR. Like many other French colonies, the Comoros gained partial autonomy under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle as part of the Communauté française in 1961.

Saïd Mohamed Cheikh , leader of the political group of the "Greens", who was a member of the French National Assembly from 1946 to 1961, takes over the business of government. But only the constitution of 1968 granted the individual islands of the Comoros extensive independence. When Said Mohamed Cheikh died in 1970, Saïd Ibrahim Ben Ali succeeded him as head of government.

Abdallah, meanwhile also chairman of the Union Démocratique des Comores (UDC), is its president until the dissolution of the island parliament of the Comoros in October 1971. In order to prevent the Comoros from breaking up, he had always campaigned for independence while maintaining cooperation with the colonial power, and following the elections on December 3, 1972, he was appointed head of government of the Comoros as the successor to Prince Said Mohamed Jaffar . A final "Roadmap to Independence" negotiated with France in 1973 provided for a referendum in 1978. However, since there were violent demonstrations for independence as early as 1973, the independence referendum in the Comoros was brought forward in 1974 . Except for the island of Mayotte, the vast majority of the population voted for independence. Mayotte subsequently remained French. The Comoros then declared their final and complete independence on July 6, 1975.

Abdallah was elected the first President of the independent Comoros. However, it did not last long. On August 3, 1975, Prince Said Jaffar drove him out of office with the help of the French mercenary Bob Denard , who was to be involved in three more of a total of 19 coups. Jaffar, in turn, was driven out by Ali Soilih in 1976 . Abdullah, in turn, succeeded in his turn from exile in Paris in 1978 (again with the help of the mercenary Denard) in a revolt to depose Head of State Soilih and later to murder him. On October 25, 1978, he appointed himself president and, although there were three attempts to oust him by force, he did not resign until his death. Abdallah systematically exploited the land with Denard's help. So he took over the rice trade and increased his fortune considerably by monopolizing the islanders' staple food. He declared the Comoros an Islamic Federal Republic, banned all parties and made the Comoros a one-party dictatorship in 1982 with the new Union Comorienne pour le Progrès (UCP) party, which he controlled. In 1984 he was re-elected unopposed. Abdallah, who based his authoritarian regime on the French mercenaries around Denard, the best business relationships with the apartheid regime in South Africa and the conservative rulers of the Islamic oil states, was shot on November 26, 1989 in the capital Moroni in a firefight between insurgents and soldiers.

Denard was deposed by French troops after a fourth coup in 1995 and fled into exile in South Africa for three years . Denard was arrested in Paris in 1993 and charged with the murder of Abdallah in France in 1999. In the trial his help in the coup could be proven, but he was acquitted on charges of murder for lack of evidence.

Web links

• Ahmed Abdallah Abderemane in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
• Ahmed Abdallah Abderamane. senat.fr. Retrieved on December 22, 2016 (the extensive text on the biography can be opened). 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ President of the Comoros assassinated . In: The daily newspaper . No. 2989 , December 16, 1989, p. 1 ( taz.de ).
2. ↑ The mercenary chief Bob Denard arrested in Paris . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . February 3, 1993, p. 4 .