Guinean president survives assassination attempt
CONAKRY, Guinea
President Alpha Conde was saved because he was sleeping in a
different room when the shooting erupted outside his residence at
around 3 a.m. Rocket-propelled grenades landed inside the compound
and one of his bodyguards was killed, said Francois Louceny Fall,
Conde's chief of staff. The bedroom was ripped apart, Conde said in
an interview with French radio RFI.
The 73-year-old Conde later addressed the nation on state radio,
saying his security detail had "heroically fought starting at 3:10
a.m. until reinforcements arrived." He urged the public to remain
calm and said the attack would not derail the promises he made to
voters seven months ago when he became the first democratically
elected leader in Guinea's 52-year history.
"If your hand is in the hand of God, nothing can happen to you.
... Our enemies can try everything, but they will not stop the
march of the Guinean people," Conde said in his address. "Guinea
is one country. We are united, for we cannot grow if we are not
united. Let us not accept to be divided."
Just hours later, shooting broke out again near his home and
residents say they saw the red-beret-wearing presidential guards
take fighting positions.
Conde was inside meeting with the French ambassador and the
diplomat was forced to lay on the floor to avoid the bullets, the
president said on RFI. A bodyguard who was close to the last two
military leaders and who goes by the nickname "De Gaulle" was
arrested attempting to pierce the police cordon around the house,
Fall told The Associated Press by telephone.
Soldiers fanned out across the capital city, located on a
peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean on Africa's western
coast. They tied ropes between trees at intersections, and traffic
was at a standstill as each car was stopped and drivers were told
to open their trunks. Military helicopters circled overhead. Shops
and schools were closed.
Tens of millions of dollars were invested by the international
community to ensure last year's transparent vote, and a coup would
be a major setback for the region, analysts said.
"It just shows the fragility of the country," said
Guinea-based election expert Elizabeth Cote of the International
Foundation for Election Systems.
In Paris, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe spoke by telephone
Tuesday with Conde to express his nation's support, his ministry
said in a statement. "The return of democracy to Guinea ...
constitutes an example for Africa," Juppe said.
Until last year, Guinea was one of the continent's failed
states, a country with an abominable human rights record whose
destiny was determined not by the ballot box but by the mood of
officers inside the capital's barracks.
The first coup in 1984 brought a colonel who ruled until his
death 24 years later. After his death in 2008, another coup brought
an army captain to power known for his frightening temper and his
taste for televised interrogations of opponents. Capt. Moussa
'Dadis' Camara was deposed a year later when his bodyguard shot him
in the head.
In between, his men led a massacre of pro-democracy protesters
whose bodies were buried in mass graves, according to Human Rights
Watch. Women who had dared question military rule were gang-raped
by soldiers who silenced their cries by stuffing their red berets
in their mouths.
It took the world by surprise when the general who then seized
power in the final month of 2009 agreed to hand over the country to
civilians in the elections that occurred last November.
It should have been a proud moment, but the vote itself was
marred by days of ethnic violence pitting Conde's supporters -- who
are Malinke like him -- against the Peul, the ethnic group of the
defeated candidate.
Frustration has grown since then because Conde has failed to
create an inclusive government, instead stacking it with members of
his ethnicity, and because the country's grinding poverty has not
yet been alleviated despite Guinea's considerable mineral wealth,
which includes the world's largest supply of bauxite, the raw
material used to make aluminum.
Country watchers had long predicted that holding a democratic
vote would be only a first step in ending the army's stranglehold
on Guinea. The bigger question is how the new leader relates to the
military, whose members had total control of state affairs and who
saw their privileges diminished by the election of a civilian
president.
Yale University anthropologist Michael McGovern, an expert on
Guinea, said the country's military quadrupled in size during the
final years of the military regime. It went from 10,000 to over
40,000, he said, as each strongman launched recruitment drives
aimed at filling the ranks with their ethnic kin. The bloated army
has become not only a security risk, but also an enormous drain on
the budget.
Conde told RFI on Tuesday that before he took office some
soldiers took home a salary of 200 to 300 million Guinean francs
($30,000 to $45,000). "Obviously there are some people that will
not be happy but we can't kill our country," he told the radio
station, indicating that his attempts to rein in the military could
be behind the thwarted coup attempt.
Meanwhile the ethnic tensions that were revealed by the vote are
only getting worse. Among the first people to be fired when Conde
won the election was the head of the army, Gen. Nouhou Thiam -- a
Peul. On Tuesday, a military official who asked not to be
identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media
confirmed that Thiam had been arrested alongside De Gaulle, former
bodyguard to both Camara and the general that succeeded him.
"Military violence is something that deeply frightens us,"
said Sidya Toure, who came in third in last year's vote. "We lived
through this in '08, and again in '09. What it shows is that
apparently there is a problem. There are things that remain
unfinished."