Guinea: State-Sponsored Forces and Alpha Conde Need to Be Given a “Stand Down” Order, Time for Someone to Stand Up (VIDEO)

It’s been a very bad three days in Guinea.  The security forces, in a violent and deadly fashion. prevented the opposition march last Thursday from proceeding down the Fidel Castro highway.  Tear gas, live bullets, and excitable security officers shooting  as if the marchers were plastic ducks swimming in the pool at the country fair.  Except these targets bleed real blood.  Two dead and several wounded seriously.

But, the day after, Friday, state-sponsored forces (security, Donzos, and RPG militia) burrowed deep into opposition neighborhoods, primarily Peul, and unleashed their terror.  On Friday, there were at least three more extra-judicial killings – all at close range.   The president of the opposition party SARP  was gravely injured by a rock.  Today, the headquarters of Cellou Dalein Diallo’s UFDG party was attacked by security forces with tear gas and shooting while people were inside meeting.  More on this in another post.

To pursue one’s constitutional rights in Guinea, is to stare death in the face.  We know why Alpha Conde upholds and fosters his repressive state:  with the theft of the 2010 election, this is the only way to keep in check the overwhelming majority of Guineans who did not vote for him.  He can only continue this way if the international community continues to support him.  For several years, Guineans showed a lot of deference to members of the international community, thinking its support would be helpful.  But, the international community became increasingly difficult to read as it talked to average Guineans about democracy yet supported a violent and repressive Conde government.  In 2009, reeling from the September 28, massacre and rapes and the worrisome Capt. Dadis Camara and his military junta, the international community wanted, in their next move, to refrain from raising the ire of  Guinea’s 40,000 plus, largely Malinke, army.  This meant that there was only one path for Guinea and the international community was the scout leader.  The next president of Guinea had to be a civilian and a Malinke. France was willing to offer its adopted son of 59 years, Alpha Conde.  Also, the new president had to be “agreeable” about the sharing of Guinea’s resources.  For a very short time, the international community got some of what it was looking for in Conde.  Then, his ethnocentric hate speech and policies to cut Peuls out of every aspect of governance was followed by incarcerations and elimination of Peuls.  Forget the violence agreement.  If Conde makes peace with Peuls, he loses his base of support – Malinkes.  Don’t forget the 2010 election year refrain of the Malinkes, “Anybody but a Peul.” Add to this his nepotism, his skimming off the top of mining deals teed up by his overseers, George Soros and Tony Blair, and the nagging concern about that 2010 election “fraught with problems.” Now the question becomes, “Is Conde more of a problem than he is worth?”  And this is where things are now.  Guineans are asking the international community to choose sides.  When you support a pariah, you become a friend of a pariah.  When you support someone with blood on his hands, it drip all over yours, too.

Following are two videos:  the first is a speech by UFDG party president and opposition leader, Cellou Dalein Diallo, at the April 25 opposition march, where he addresses the international community about the state of Guinea (in French) and the second video is from this past Thursday’s march showing the kids resisting the security forces with rocks – this is an intifada, a very legitimate intifada.

Konate Heading to Equatorial Guinea Today

African Press Agency

Guinean President en route to Equatorial Guinea  

(2010-05-11 01:20:36)

APA – Conakry (Guinea) The interim President of the Guinean transition, General Sekouba Konate is due Tuesday in Malabo, capital of Equatorial Guinea for an official visit as part of the strengthening of mutual friendly ties and bilateral cooperation, a source close to the junta leadership told APA here.

[This item will be updated as more information becomes available]

Is the “Wonga” Running Out for Africa Mercenaries?

10:16 November 24th, 2009
Is the “wonga” running out for Africa’s mercenaries?

Posted by: David Lewis
Tags: Africa Blog, “dogs of war”, Camara, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea, junta, mercenaries, Simon Mann

Africa’s infamous “dogs of war” may still be going strong, but it seems the rewards of the mercenary life aren’t quite what they used to be. 

Only this month, Britain’s Simon Mann won a pardon for his part in a foiled 2004 coup attempt on Equatorial Guinea, an old-style adventure whose glittering prize was the central African state’s multi-billion-dollar oil riches.

Contrast that to reports last week that a band of South African and other mercenaries had flown into the chaos of Guinea to train up a militia loyal to the incumbent junta leader — on a salary put at barely $3,500 a month.

That’s not bad money in most parts of the world, and there were reports that the company involved would have won extra remuneration in the form of minerals from Guinea’s fecund soil.

But it would have been peanuts to Mann, whose Equatorial Guinea coup was known as the “Wonga Plot” after the English slang for the money they hoped to yield in buckets.

While mercenaries are often seen as in the business of bringing governments down, it is not new that they should be trying to prop one up, as is happening in Guinea.

Mann himself is reported to have worked for the Angolan government in the 1990s to help it wrest back control of a key port from rebels, and again for Sierra Leonean authorities in the 2002 civil war there.

But what has changed since then is the economics. Thanks to the steady flow of new oil and mineral finds on the continent, the private security business in Africa is booming. A lot of the real pros now find there is steady money to made in guarding a gold mine in northern Congo, for example.

The more dubious end of the business is now increasingly the preserve of what some describe as cowboys.

“They couldn’t get enough people to do the job,” Henri Boshoff, a military analyst who served in the South African army, told Reuters of the mercenaries hired by Guinean junta leader Captain Moussa Dadis Camara. “(The South Africans) were very desperate. They are not being very well paid.”

The Guinea mercenaries may not be in the same league as Mann and his fellow Wonga plotters, but their capacity to stir up trouble should not be underestimated.

The fact that Camara’s militia is being selected on tribal lines could add an alarming new ethnic dimension to Guinea’s instability.

Security sources also told Reuters that part of their job is to ensure the arrival of arms acquired by the junta in Ukraine in direct contravention of an international arms embargo.

South Africa is keen to get rid of its reputation as a training ground for hired guns and is officially investigating the activities of its nationals in Guinea.

Depending on what it finds, it may have to decide whether they are in breach of its
three-year-old anti-mercenary law that still contains grey areas as to what is mercenary behaviour.

Is it time for a more concerted effort by governments to end the days of Africa’s dogs of war? Or will the wonga run out by itself?

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