Amazing NYTimes article about Guinea

February 20, 2007

Discontent in Guinea Nears Boiling Point

By LYDIA POLGREEN

CONAKRY, Guinea, Feb. 18 — For most Guineans, the last straw came two months ago.

On Dec. 16, President Lansana Conté, went to a city jail to liberate two of his close associates: Guinea’s wealthiest businessman and a former top official of the central bank.

That the two had been locked up in the first place, on charges of embezzling $2.6 million of public money, had come very much as a surprise to the long-suffering Guinean people, who have labored in abysmal poverty under the yoke of authoritarian rule for their entire post-colonial history.

Typically such high-level theft went unpunished, if not unnoticed by civil servants, farmers, laborers and students, most of whom get by on less than a dollar a day.

But locking them up, then personally letting them go, was going too far.

“He sent us a message,” said Antoine Bangoura, a secretary struggling to live on his $30 a month government salary. “The government doesn’t care about us. So we sent a message back. We want change. Conté must go.”

Since that December day, Guinea has been racked by rising unrest. Strikes, riots and a brutal military crackdown have killed scores of people in the past month and crippled the country’s already feeble economy. The president declared martial law on Feb. 12, and the situation has reached a smoldering stalemate, with growing calls for Mr. Conté to step down.

Across Africa, autocracy and one-party rule have slowly yielded to open, multiparty democracy. Guinea, one of the last bastions of one-man rule, now seems on the verge of insurrection. No one knows what kind of change will come — a military coup, a people’s uprising, a brutal civil war or some grim combination.

“We all want change,” said Jean-Marie Doré, leader of the Union for the Progress of Guinea, an opposition political party. “The question is how this change will come.”

On Sunday, the government eased a 6 p.m. to noon curfew, allowing movement from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., and the tension on the streets eased slightly after a week of martial law that had kept most people indoors. But little progress has been made on talks between the government and the labor unions. The government has insisted that the strike must end before martial law is lifted, while the unions say martial law must end before negotiations can resume.

At one of Conakry’s two main hospitals, the fetid wards are full of people shot and beaten by security forces during the brutal crackdown. Siaka Konneh lay on a stretcher on the floor, his eyes covered with bandages. He had been trying to deliver oxygen tanks a week before when he got caught in a volley of gunfire.

“I hear the gunshot — pow! — and my two eyes had been closed,” he said, speaking in the English patois he picked up during years spent in neighboring Liberia. “I no see anything again.”

Mr. Konneh, who is 37 and supports six children, four of his own and two of his dead brother’s, said he blamed the president for his desperate situation and the country’s malaise.

“What he done is not good for we people,” he said. “That man gone spoil my life. My children, who will feed them? I am just praying God the man move.”

Aliou Talibé Diallo, a 22-year-old student, said a stray bullet struck him as he slept, going through his knee and out his calf. “We are against this regime,” he said, slumped on a mat in the breezeway in the overflowing hospital ward. “See how they shoot us. I am ready to go to the street and die to force this man to leave this country.”

An investigation by Human Rights Watch found that security forces were raiding and looting private homes in the Conakry suburbs, and had killed at least 22 people since martial law was declared.

The turmoil has been a long time coming. Guinea was one of the first countries in Africa to achieve independence, and its story gives it a place of particular pride in Africa’s postcolonial history. The country’s first president, a charismatic union leader named Sékou Touré, became a hero of anti-imperialism when he, alone among Francophone African leaders, rejected de Gaulle’s offer of permanent union with France in 1958, declaring that Guinea preferred “poverty in freedom to riches in slavery.”

Every Guinean schoolchild learns de Gaulle’s parting sneer — “Adieu, la Guinée” — and the methodical destruction of files and equipment, even the light bulbs, by departing French colonial bureaucrats and businessmen. They left the country’s civil administration and economy in tatters.

France cut Guinea off completely, and in its isolation the nation has bred a deep suspicion of outsiders and a stubborn self-reliance. But the same factors that have kept Guinea poor and isolated have kept it relatively stable.

Mr. Touré’s anti-imperial stance gave Guinea a nationalist character distinct from many of its neighbors. A ruthless and paranoid man who saw plots against him everywhere, Mr. Touré squashed any efforts to organize the population along ethnic lines, largely preventing the kinds of ethnic schisms that have caused civil wars in neighboring countries. He instituted socialist economic policies, which proved disastrous, impoverishing and further isolating Guinea.

Mr. Conté seized power in 1984, after Mr. Touré died while being treated for a heart ailment in Cleveland. By the end of the 1980’s, Guinea had become a reliably pro-Western redoubt, drawing investments in its rich trove of minerals, especially bauxite, an aluminum ore, of which Guinea is one of the world’s largest exporters.

But as investment grew so did corruption, and the feeling that Guinea’s riches, so long locked in the earth, were being plundered by rapacious politicians and international profiteers. People began to agitate for more freedom. In 1993, Guinea held its first presidential election, which Mr. Conté won, as well as subsequent votes in 1998 and 2003, but they have been considered neither free nor fair. The main opposition parties boycotted the last presidential election.

As Mr. Conté’s health has faded — he is a heavy smoker and a diabetic, and has flown to Western hospitals for urgent treatment several times in recent years — the population has become more willing to act out its displeasure with the government.

When he was taken to Switzerland late last year for treatment during a national conference to discuss the country’s political future, people were emboldened to take to the streets to demand change.

“Guineans are known to be able to really take on a lot without complaint,” said Elizabeth Côté, who works with IFES, a nonpartisan democracy-building organization with international financing that has been trying to help Guinea’s political and social institutions map out its future. “But when they are not taking it anymore and going into the streets, I think they are really serious about it.”

But perhaps the greatest danger the crisis in Guinea poses is that it may destabilize its fragile neighbors. Guinea has played a large but shadowy role in the deadly dramas that have unfolded across West Africa in the past decade. Investigations by the United Nations and human rights organizations have found that as much as 80 percent of the weaponry used in the brutal civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone were funneled into the region by European and Iranian arms dealers through corrupt Guinean officials.

West Africa is awash in illegal weapons from the region’s civil wars, and many of them are believed to have ended up here. Thousands of former rebel fighters are floating around the region, ready to fight for the highest bidder.

Violent repression has been a favored tool of the Guinean state for decades. The nonprofit international organization Freedom House, which monitors political and economic freedoms, lists Guinea as one of the least free countries in Africa.

Prof. Djibril Tamsir Niane, an acclaimed historian of West Africa who has chronicled the winds of change across the region, said in an interview at his home here that those winds might finally be gusting across Guinea’s shores.

“There is the will for change,” Dr. Niane said. “The entire population of Conakry was on the streets in January. It is the beginning of a new era.”