Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

A view of the world from an Irish hole

Category: Guinea

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Hanging on to power at all costs in Africa

The problems of legitimacy still continue to plague Africa’s rulers. There are those who are able to claim the mandate of election but who go on to squander the goodwill invested in them by their electorates by pursuing gradually more oppressive policies, accompanied by corruption that enriches their cronies at the expense of the  population. Some of those who are elected are already elderly, yet in spite their growing senility they wish to hold onto power indefinitely, as if by doing so they can defy morality. Africa has always fallen victim to the men with guns. The army of the various states have seldom needed an excuse until recently to seize power, sometimes presenting themselves as national savours charged with undoing the errors of civilian politicians. In time the trappings and perks of power go to their head, and their rule becomes no more than a bloody and cruel kleptocracy. Although no fan of military government it must be said that some of Africa’s best rulers have stemmed from the armies’ ranks.

 I have written recently about the worrying spectre of armed groups in Guinea seeking to overturn the will of the people by attacking the home of the man whom they had elected president, Alpha Conde. A

Niger's president Issoufou

 similarly sinister development has been uncovered in the land-locked and impoverished state of Niger, where a group of middle-ranking officers have been arrested on foot of an attempt to assassinate the recently elected president, Mahamat Issoufou who has used his power to pursue and stamp out corruption within the military – an activity which has won him few friends among the officer corp. It is not unusual amongst the armies of many African states to grow rich by pocketing money intended as salaries for more junior officers and soldiers.

 Keeping it in the family.

Wade

When Abdouilaye Wade was elected president of Senegal in 2000 many saw it as a sign of how the country’s democracy had matured. Wade was a long-time opponent of the (admittedly well-educated) clique who had ruled the country since independence. He was no street-savvy firebrand, but a French-educated lawyer with two PhDs who was fluent in French, English and numerous African languages. He came to the international stage in 2002 for all the right reasons, not because his country had been hit by devastating natural disasters but because his country had not only qualified for that year’s world cup, but had beaten many stronger European teams. A beaming President Wade appeared on television screens around the world holding aloft a football.

 Wade is unfortunately old. He claims to be 85 but even he is unsure. As his time in power has started to drag rumours of corruption have increased. The inevitable popular discontent has been met by repression. Wade had wanted to hand over power to his son Karim, and many believed that he was prepared to use both fair and foul means to bring this about. Riots erupted and the president was compelled to deny any such intention. Plan B was then put into action; Wade would run for a third term in the 2012 president elections, something that was unconstitutional. Once again popular outrage was met by the imposition of a ban on political protests in the capital Dakar and a wave of arrests that have included the popular singer Thiat. While the clampdown is benign by the standards of some rulers, it does seem to augur badly for the country that was starting to generate goodwill for pursuing policies that placed it outside the general tenor of a headlong rush to disaster and national misery.

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Trouble again in Conakry

This week has seen some worrying developments in the West African republic of Guinea. The private residence of democratically elected president Alpha Conde was attacked  at night by armed men, probably intent on assassination. In the event only one person was killed. No faction has claimed responsibility but in the days following the assault a number of high-ranking soldiers have been arrested. Many of these were close to former president Konate who handed over power to Conde last year,. Realistically disgruntled soldiers are the only people with access to weaponry in Guinea at the moment.

 What do these plotters want? I don’t think there is any appetite for a coup in Guinea at the moment. The country has been through too much conflict and has se3en too much innocent blood spilled. President Conde has also been in power for a relatively short while. He has not had time to make any glaring mistakes. As a man of 73 he has suffered a lot at the hands of the country’s former dictators, such as Ahmed Sekou Toure and Lansana Conteh. Neither his age nor his experience would prevent him however, from turning into an aged autocrat. If that were to happen, (and I very much hope for the people of Guinea’s sake that it will not) then it might be time for the men in uniforms to intervene.

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Tragedy in Guinea

The tragic events in Conakry demonstrate how anarchic the country is, and how nearly eight months after seizing power Dadis Camara is not fully in control of the situation.

 Guinea, like many similar African states, shows the truth of Mao Zedong’s belief that power comes from the barrel of a gun. When you give the power that a loaded automatic weapon confers, to illiterate or semi-literate soldiers who may have very short-term but pressing grievances over things like pay, the results can be disastrous.

 No one can excuse what happened in Conakry. I am not going to seek to defend Camara, but the image that is painted of him by the western media, including the BBC, is slightly inaccurate. One recent biographical profile told how he was born in a very remote village but was lure by the bright lights (never that bright considering the omnipresent power-cuts), but far from finding riches, he encountered a different form of poverty, which he sought to allay by selling kola nuts on the street. This attempts to place him in the historical mould of pat leaders like Idi Amin and Samuel Doe, who found that they were able to grab and hold onto power, even though they were barely literate.

 But there’s one big difference. Camara studied law at Conakry’s university, which may not be Oxford or Cambridge does impose certain standards – higher, it must be said, than some institutions calling themselves universities in Nigeria.

 Then we hear about Camara’s quirks of personality and his short temper. This may be true, but such peculiarities are certainly better than the habits of many African leaders, such as lounging in air-conditioned luxury in antique chairs and doing no more than putting out their hands to grasp the most expensive vintage champagnes served in Baccarat goblets – all paid for by their desperately poor compatriots.

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Guinea’s coup

(this post also appears on my African Violets blog)

The reaction of the international community and many commentators to last December’s coup in Guinea shows woeful lack of understanding for African developments. Looking at the event through a really narrow and legalistic framework it has been characterised as an example of a step backward from “democratic” development to a world dominated by men with guns. But where was democracy in Guinea? It was a country whose many resources were being freely pillaged by a corrupt coterie close to the increasingly incapacitated President Conteh. While there were voices raised in opposition to his regime they were too feeble and badly organised to mount any effective resistance, and you got the feeling that, given half the chance, these civilian voices would be just as adept at the grand larceny of the state’s resources.

  Captain Dadis Camara’s coup has the potential of wrenching the country out of this quagmire and offering Guinea and its people an alternative.

 Elections are to be held later this year; indeed Camara wanted to hold them next year when the basic infrastructure for holding a poll might have been put in place, but the solicitous international community insisted that they be held sooner rather than better – as if going through the motions of holding a ballot can introduce democracy in a country with high levels of illiteracy and with no experience of casting ballots or counting them.

 Captain Camara is not standing in the elections. This is a pity, because he has shown himself to have vision beyond what passes for vision among many of Guinea’s politicians – getting rich quickly. He joined the army after his university education, so he must be set apart from semi-literate thugs of the past like Samuel Doe or Idi Amin who used the army as a means of gaining power quite literally through the barrel of a gun.

 He has pledged to hand over power to civilian politicians. Because such people wear business suits the international community feels more comfortable with them than uniformed soldiers. That such besuited figures are often thieves doesn’t seem to worry them – indeed it may be a further common feature.

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February 12, 2009

Coming out for air

I’m sorry I haven’t been blogging for a while. In truth, I’m too exhausted to write much; even an e-mail seems to take it out of me. Anyway I’ve got the feeling that nothing I say matters much. The world continues turning, war and distress multiply and I seem to earn nothing but the smirks of Cavan’s corner-boys.

In Somalia the ship MV Fain that was taken hostage by pirates is being released by its captors, no doubt after the payment of a huge ransom. Anyway what were the pirates going to do with the cargo? You can’t really get rid of dozens of tanks on the “black market”. A new president has been elected but whether he can make a reality of the Somali state, ruled by anarchy for nearly two decades, is anyone’s guess.

In Guinea Dadis Camara seems to be pursuing a policy of questioning the way in which the country’s wealth has been siphoned off, usually into the pockets of multinational mining companies who throw some baksheesh to local officials who ferret the sums away in foreign bank accounts.

And in Zimbabwe a national unity government has finally been agreed between the autumnal patriarch Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai. The country is fucked, there’s 90 per cent unemployment and a major cholera outbreak. What’s more inflation has rendered the national currency into a joke. The perpetrators of political violence still walk tall and their directors are sitting down at last with their victims. The decision by Mugabe to grant Tsvangirai the job of Prime Minister is a little like an offer of a lift in someone’s broken down car.

There are so many wars and conflicts. We all know of the genocide in Gaza, but other wars go unrecorded, such as that in Sri Lanka, which sees the civilian population often made into unwilling human shields by either the Sri Lankan government or the ever more desperate Tamil Tigers.

In the borderlands of Uganda and the Not-So-Democratic Republic of Congo (NDRSC), the grim antics of the Lord’s Resistance Army, has spread from its original nursery bed in the north of Uganda the northeast of the NSDRC. This leaves in its wake burned villages and massacres of church-goers. The LRA has a “no-frills” approach to recruiting soldiers; no one can accuse them of ageism – the younger the better. Indeed their approach to winning friends and influencing people is basic – after seeing your loved ones raped and chopped into pieces, you’ve got two choices – join us or join them.

And as for events closer to home all I can say is that they’re just like a demented pantomime. But then everyone knows this. I don’t know whether anyone else has noticed how incredibly well-fed the pantomime managers are. Our Minister for Finance, for example, who may well tell everyone else to tighten their belts, but can he without giving himself a hernia? The same is true of our prime minister. None of them are showing any signs of the financial squeeze – far from it. A few weeks’ ago there was an edition of RTE’s rural programme Ear to the Ground, in which it was mentioned that the present financial straits affecting many people had led to greater demand from Irish butchers for cheaper cuts of meat. I was glad to see a restaurant critic who said that many of these cuts have a far better taste than the more expensive joints. But something tells me that none of our senior politicians or civil servants are tucking in to oxtail stew. And as for our minister for health! Look, no more nudge-nudge, wink-win, sexist jokes about fatsoes. But the fact is she is obese. Obesity is a medical condition which can be alleviated, but what’s she doing about it? And then there’s her husband, the man who was for so long implicated in the exorbitantly costly mix of Hi-De-Hi and Absolutely Fabulous which was FAS. They were supposed to be finding jobs and training opportunities for the unemployed, but I feel that if Mr Harney had ever been told that he might meet an unemployed youth, maybe from “the wrong side of the tracks”, his response would have been “Heaven forbid.”

Our rulers try to look statesman-like, but they always come across as at best incompetent idiots, at worse as three-card cheats. There was a particularly heart-wrenching interview with a senior banker today in which he revealed that due to the economic downturn his “disclosed” renumeration package would probably be less than 2 million euro this year. Think of it – less than 50 thousand euro a week, ten thousand a day. How can anyone survive on that? Picture his poor children, his desperate spouse no doubt tearing her false blond hair from its roots as all of them have to wrestle with the indignity of approaching the local Vincent de Paul. And with everybody in a bind there is no possibility of picking up some week-end work mowing grass, while the little chizzlers will look in vain for any paper rounds.

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Some guestions answered in Guinea – but not all

Some of the questions posed by the coup in Guinea are being answered, yet some of the biggest remain unresolved.

Captain Camara is not a stalking horse for the whole military establishment, but it is unlikely he was acting solely on his own initiative. He may still therefore be the front man for a faction of the armed forces. It is interesting that the headquarters of the coup appear to be at the Alpha Yayo camp. This is where members of the former regime have been requested to come for their own safety. It is also the headquarters of the elite paratroop BATA batallion, headed by Commandant Sekouba Konate. It is now clear that the Guinean military is far from being a homogenous monolith and is faction-ridden. The head of the armed forces, Diarra Camara (no relation of the coup leader) is a long-time Conteh loyalist, has distanced himself from the coup and had repeated a more-or-less identical mantra that the leaders represented a disgruntled minority.

Yet the situation is very fluid. The plotters did not act with the support of the whole of the army, but they don’t represent a small faction. They are in the process of negotiating with other sections of the military to throw in their lot with them.

Little is known about Captain Dadis Camara. He has told Radio France Internationale that he is a graduate of Conakry University and that he has spent time training in Germany.

But is he really in charge? It is interesting that he is hardly mentioned by name in any of today’s communiques. Is this a sign that the coup plotters are falling out amongst themselves?

The biggest unresolved question is what will happen next? The army is divided; both factions claiming to hold power. Unless one side gives in, which seems unlikely, or is able to persuade the other of the rightness of its position, the horrible spectre of armed conflict, maybe even civil war underlain by ethnic cleavages, appears on the horizon. The coup leaders have already spoken about certain “loyalist generals” who are planning to regain power with the help of mercenaries from neighbouring countries, some of whom they believe are already in the country. This is worrying for Guinea’s neighbours,, many of whom have only just stepped out from the shadow of bloody civil wars, often engendered by unresolved power grabs. It was a coup on Christmas Eve many years ago led by the late General Robert Guei which plunged Cote d’Ivoire into paroxysms of violence.

The next big turning point for Guinea will surely be on Friday when General Conteh’s funeral takes place. Who will turn up and what will they do?

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