Nouakchott - Mauritania's former military junta leader, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, launched his election campaign on Friday for the presidency by accusing the main opposition of "blocking democracy".
The opposition had just urged its supporters to hold mass street protests against the presidential election due on June 6, in defiance of a ban by the regime organising the poll.
Ould Abdel Aziz, who has resigned from the army, said that while he was "ready to make concessions in the interest of the people", his opponents were not.
Two opposition leaders, Mohamed Ould Moloud, head of the National Front for the Defence of Democracy, and Ahmed Ould Daddah, on Thursday accused the junta of trying to rush them by imposing a hasty poll on its own terms.
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Both urged supporters to mount a "permanent" show of strength on the streets to ensure "a failure of the new electoral putsch by Ould Abdel Aziz," who ousted Mauritania's first democratically-elected president in an August coup.
Ould Abdel Aziz resigned his military commission so that he could run as a candidate in the elections, where he faces three challengers, but the poll is being boycotted by major opposition parties.
"These people, it's they who are blocking democracy," the former general said at Kiffa in the centre of the mainly Sahara desert nation. "We're ready to negotiate but they are not."
The former junta leader said his main rivals were "seeking to have an embargo imposed against their country and are working to starve it."
He added that they "represent nothing."
However, Ould Daddah said "we cannot agree to negotiate under the threat of a campaign. This would be blackmail, forcing our hand to impose an agenda that we reject and consider to be illegal."
Ould Moloud said the opposition wanted the polls postponed "to make the climate more favourable" for democracy.
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