Deep Scars Left by Senegal’s Conflict With Neighboring Mauritania : West Africa: New shopkeepers take over in Dakar. But the impact is devastating along the frontier river.

Soap, sugar, milk--any staple a family might need--is ranged on the shelves around Ngaido Ba in the cramped shop he runs on a corner of one of Dakar’s oldest quarters.

Ba took over the shop just a few months ago after its previous occupants, a Mauritanian family, fled during a wave of attacks last April on thousands of their countrymen living in the Senegalese capital.

“We have everything here,” Ba remarked to a recent visitor, “just like before, when the Mauritanians were here.”

Hundreds of miles away, in the tiny village of Ngaoule on the Senegal River, the undeclared war between Mauritania and Senegal looks a little different.

One evening in January, a stray rifle shot from the Mauritanian side of the river punctured the pirogue from which villager Mamadou Mberry Sarr was fishing and killed him. When the village chief remonstrated with the local army commander, he was asked, “Why did you let the man go out?”

There was no choice, the chief replied. With the farmland and pasture they were accustomed to using on the Mauritanian side now out of bounds, the need to coax a living out of the river is greater than ever.

In the cities, where Mauritanian shopkeepers once controlled as much as 80% of the retail market for consumer goods, the worst fears of the Senegalese about the economic impact of the loss of their shopkeepers have proved unfounded. The stores vacated by fleeing Mauritanians were quickly rented to Syrians, Lebanese and Senegalese, like Ba.

The Mauritanians had operated an unusual credit system for their customers, who would deposit their monthly salary not in a bank but with a shopkeeper, then buy down the balance with daily purchases.

The new shopkeepers have yet to build up the level of trust that would enable them to do business in this way, but there have been few other dislocations.

“We were very afraid of shortages,” one Dakar professional said. “I sent a lot of supplies to my mother, just in case. But nothing happened. According to official accounts, there are more shops now than before.”

But the conflict has had a devastating impact along the 500-mile stretch of the Senegal River that separates the two countries.

Mass deportations and the border closure struck directly at people who lived in one country and pastured their herds in the other. They lost thousands of head of cattle, and farmers were cut off from their fields. All now live in fear of the occasional outbreak of military gunfire from bank to bank.

Several villages have been leveled by what the Senegalese say are unprovoked artillery assaults from the Mauritanian side. Every month brings reports of civilians, including children, killed by gunfire.

“Everyone tells us that Senegal doesn’t want war,” a village chief told a local magazine. “But all that’s happening--isn’t that war?”

The year-old conflict underscores the costly fragility of border relationships throughout Africa. Senegal may be one of the continent’s most peaceful lands, but with the rupture of relations with Mauritania, it is at odds with three of its four neighbors: A 12-year-old conflict with Guinea-Bissau over fishing rights has erupted again in recriminations, and a 1982 agreement on political and economic confederation with Gambia, the snake-shaped river country that bisects Senegal, has been dissolved.

As a result, the fishing industries of Senegal and Guinea-Bissau are stalemated, and Senegal has all but closed the commercially busy border with Gambia, provoking power outages, food shortages and unemployment in Gambia and costing Senegalese truck drivers and shippers millions of dollars in lost consignments.

Relations with the fourth neighbor, Mali, have also been strained by the Mauritanian conflict. Senegal recently complained about Malian workers flooding into Mauritania to take over the jobs given up by expelled Senegalese.

Still, the rupture with Mauritania is viewed as the most serious--and not only here. The violent dispute between the two largely Muslim countries threatens to mar one of the Islamic world’s major showcases: the summit meeting next January in Dakar of the 46-member Organization of the Islamic Conference.

It will be the first time that the summit meeting takes place in a country of black Africa. The meeting is designed to underscore the strength of Islam in this region.

But there are signs here that more than just political ties have been damaged. Many people lament the severing of cultural and historic bonds. Islam reached Senegal through Mauritania, and many of the country’s earliest religious leaders were either Mauritanian or educated in Mauritania. Among Africans in both countries, ethnic distinctions were blurred.

“We were closer to Mauritania than to any other country,” Babacar Toure, owner of the weekly Senegalese magazine Sud-Hebdo, said in a recent interview. “We mixed with them--who is a Senegalese without Mauritanian blood? I saw it as my second homeland. In this newsroom, people cried.”

In the region of the fleuve , as the river is known, there was so little political distinction between villagers that ferry and boat passage was unrestricted. When the two countries jointly built a dam across the river at Diama, near its Atlantic outlet, the pathway over the dam had no immigration or customs authorities at either end.

In part, this freedom was a product of economic necessity. There were herdsmen and farmers on both sides who could not reach their land from their homes without crossing the border.

In a sense, the incident that provoked last year’s violence was a product of that liberty and cooperative spirit. Senegal, Mauritania and Mali have long had a tripartite program to develop both riverbanks, the only land in the arid regions of all three with any potential for agricultural development.

In the last few years the program has improved irrigation in the area, turning desert-like tracts into highly productive rice paddies. In Mauritania, this intensified a racial tension that had never been far below the surface. The country is run politically and controlled economically by its white Berber elite, who look down on their black African countrymen. An attempt by Berbers to displace blacks occupying the southern region eventually provoked a violent confrontation between a handful of Senegalese and Mauritanians over an island in the middle of the river.

The dispute should have been localized and minor, many say in both capitals. But when word reached major Senegalese cities, it galvanized into mobs the idlers and unemployed who have gravitated to places like Dakar.

Simultaneously, the Mauritanians were taking things out on Senegalese laborers in their country. There, however, the violence fed on racial tension. Black Africans carrying legitimate Mauritanian papers were accused of acquiring them fraudulently and deported--if they were not attacked and butchered first.

In the end, tens of thousands of both countries’ citizens were forcibly repatriated to homelands that many had not seen in decades. Many now have new jobs, and they say that not even a political settlement will restore their old life.