Latest Uprising Shows Fragility Of West Africa
By James Rupert
Washington Post Foreign Service
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast, June 28-A civil war in the small West African country of Guinea-Bissau entered its third week today, underscoring the fragility of states and the interlocking conflicts along a 1,000-mile stretch of the West African coast.
A mutiny by the army in the capital, Bissau, has shattered the city with prolonged duels of artillery, mortar and rocket fire. It has shut down the economy and sent perhaps 300,000 people fleeing into the countryside or to neighboring countries, according to a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency.
An estimated 1,700 troops from neighboring Senegal and Guinea have joined the fight on the side of the government of President Joao Bernardo Vieira. On Friday, Vieira invited West African states to send in the Nigerian-led peacekeeping force that intervened in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
On a continent fraught with wars, the Bissau uprising is notable for filling in a six-nation "war zone" from Senegal to Liberia. Civil wars are underway in three of the six -- Guinea-Bissau, Senegal and Sierra Leone -- and a seven-year war in Liberia ended only last year. All except Senegal have been through at least one military coup since independence, and all six rank among the world's poorest countries.
Just as the Liberian and Sierra Leone wars have been intertwined, with factions on each side getting help across the border, the Guinea-Bissau uprising is entangled in the 15-year-old rebellion in Senegal's Casamance region.
But while the region's other wars stemmed mainly from ethnic rivalries, the Bissau uprising is rooted in the problems of an army unable to pay its soldiers, analysts said. Since the end of the Cold War, African states -- and armies -- have lost most of the aid they once received from the West or the Soviet bloc.
Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony about the size of Switzerland with perhaps a million people, has ranked perennially among the world's 15 least developed nations. Its permanent state of economic crisis seemed to deepen last year when the government abandoned the peso for the French-backed regional currency, the CFA franc -- prompting strikes by civil servants.
Guinea-Bissau's troops are poorly paid, some making the equivalent of $25 a month, said Mamadou Moussa Ba, a radio news director in the Casamance provincial capital, Ziguinchor, who has monitored the Casamance conflict and Guinea-Bissau politics for years.
Guinea-Bissau's army chief of staff, Brig. Gen. Ansumane Mane, launched the revolt June 7 after Vieira fired him for allegedly selling arms to rebels in Casamance. The Casamance rebels have been fighting for independence from Senegal, openly using bases and supply lines in Guinea-Bissau.
The Casamance nationalists get that support in Guinea-Bissau partly because, in the 1960s and '70s, they provided similar help to the Guinea-Bissau struggle against Portugal. Mane and his supporters have said numerous officials in Bissau were selling arms to the Casamance rebels, with Vieira's knowledge. The Guinea-Bissau army has financed itself by trafficking in both arms and marijuana, according to the London-based newsletter Africa Confidential.
Mane's group said Vieira, facing economic and political problems, sought a closer alignment with the more powerful Senegal, which demanded a halt to the arms traffic. So Vieira sacrificed Mane as a scapegoat, Mane's loyalists have told reporters.
Many Guinea-Bissauans feel a "nationalist resentment at Vieira for kowtowing to the Senegalese," said Patrick Smith, editor of Africa Confidential newsletter.
"The soldiers have been very frustrated," Moussa Ba said, and Mane "is quite popular in the ranks." The Guinea-Bissau officer corps has been divided between men who fought in the 1961-74 guerrilla war against Portugal and better educated officers who have received training overseas. Mane "is a man from the war in the bush, uneducated . . . and with a strong personality," Moussa Ba said.
In recent weeks, Senegalese troops and Vieira loyalists have pushed the rebels back toward their main strongholds -- the Bra military camp on the northern edge of Bissau, and the airport. But news agency and radio reports from the city say the rebels are entrenched.
And troops have rebelled beyond the capital. On Saturday, the garrison at Bafata, a main provincial town, split between supporters of Mane and soldiers who declared themselves neutral in the conflict, the Associated Press reported from Bissau. The rebel troops then shot the base commander dead when he continued to back Vieira.
Also on Saturday, the Portuguese and Angolan foreign ministers met Mane in the latest attempt to mediate the conflict, according to news reports from Portugal. There has been no word of progress in any peace talks so far.
Hope this is over by the end of the rain season.
Sapper |
