Sept 9 (Reuters) - Political tensions on the coup-prone Indian Ocean archipelago Comoros are discouraging private investment and foreign aid, vital to the impoverished nation.

African Union mediators (AU) are trying to resolve the latest crisis -- a standoff between the national government and authorities in one of the three main islands, Anjouan.

Here are some facts about Comoros.

OFFICIAL NAME: Federal Islamic Republic of the Comoros.

GEOGRAPHY: Area: 2,230 sq. km. The Comoros cover three small volcanic islands, Grande Comore, Anjouan and Moheli, in the Mozambique channel, 300 km (190 miles) northwest of Madagascar and a similar distance east of the African mainland. They declared independence from France in 1975. A fourth island, Mayotte, remains a French territory.

ETHNICITY: The original Malay-Polynesian inhabitants were absorbed by waves of Bantu and Arab migrations. Today, Arab and Bantu groups predominate and co-exist with Indian and Malagasy minorities.

CAPITAL: Moroni on Grande Comore island.

LANGUAGE: French and Arabic are both official languages; Comoran, a Swahili dialect, and Malagasy are also spoken.

RELIGION: The overwhelming majority of the population is Sunni Muslim. There is a small Catholic minority.

POLITICS AND ECONOMY:

* Islamist reformer Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi was elected president last year on a vow to tackle the graft that Comorans complain infects both state and private business on the islands. In June this year, Mohamed Bacar was sworn in as Anjouan's president, vowing to continue defying what he said had been a decade of discrimination against the island.

* Comoros has had some 19 coups or coup attempts since independence. Notorious French mercenary Bob Denard was involved in four of six successful coups, the first of which took place a month after independence. Denard came out of retirement for Comoros' fifth coup in 1995, and the sixth was in April 1999.

* Comoros' population, estimated between 630,000 and 840,000, is growing faster than its economy. Average incomes have been shrinking in real terms for the past 20 years by an estimated 0.5 percent per person per year. As many as 350,000 more Comorians are living in France, many of them in Marseilles.

* Comoros has one of the region's lowest rates of HIV/AIDS, but almost half the population lives in poverty. In 2004, life expectancy at birth was 62.9 years, compared with an average 46.2 in sub-Saharan Africa. The same year, the GDP per capita was $633 compared with $536.9 for the sub-Saharan average.

* Comoros is one of the most indebted countries in the world. At the end of 2005, public debt was estimated to be $266 million, or some 72 percent of GDP. More than 80 percent was owed to multilateral creditors -- the two biggest were the World Bank and the African Development Bank.

* Comoros is one of the world's most remittance-dependent countries. Cash sent to friends and family from overseas was worth an estimated 18.5 percent of GDP in 2005 -- well above exports of goods and services, and more than three times the amount of foreign aid.

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