As sad as it is, chances are we have not heard the last of such acute instability in Guinea-Bissau. The country is plagued by a history of coups d’etat, weak institutions and general instability. A bit of history about this place:
The African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC) launched a liberation war against the Portuguese colonizers in 1961. Joao Bernardo Vieira, the ex-president is a prominent figure in the liberation movement. In 1974, Guinea-Bissau becomes independent with Luis Cabral as President and Viera (Nino) as Prime Minister. Viera overthrows Cabral in 1980. Vierra is himself overthrown in 1999 and goes into exile in Portugal. Elections are held later that year, but the elected president is overthrown in 2003 by the Army Chief of Staff. Viera returns from Portugal and wins the 2005 election to become President of Guinea Bissau.
Viera and the Army Chief of Staff, Gen Tagme Na Waie, (who had been a member of the junta that sent Viera into exile) hold each other in mutual contempt. The two are at odds for months. Then early in the morning of November 23, dissident soldiers open fire and launch rocket-propelled grenades against the home of the president. The president survives the attack, some of the dissidents are captured and the president is given his own 400-man militia to guard him.
In January a few members of the newly recruited presidential guard open fire near the home of the Army chief of staff, supposedly trying to kill. The president is stripped of his militia.
On March 1, a bomb concealed under the stair case at the army chief’s office goes off, killing him. The next day a group of soldiers attacked the home of the president destroying it in the process. Frederick Forsythe, the British author (Day of the Jackal) was in the country doing research for a novel he’s writing. He told the BBC :
They went to his villa, threw a bomb through the window which hurt him, but didn’t kill him…The roof came down, that hurt him but didn’t kill him either. He struggled out of the rubble and was promptly shot. This, however, still didn’t kill him.They then took him to his mother-in-law’s house and chopped him to bits with machetes.
Guinea Bissau is among the poorest countries in the world. It is 171 out 179 on the human development index. As if Bissau-Guineans do not have enough problems, their country has been taken over by Latin American drug cartels. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime warned that:
[[A]t least 50 tons of cocaine from the Andean countries are transiting West Africa every year, heading north where they are worth almost $2 billion on the streets of European cities. Most cocaine entering Africa from South America makes landfall around Guinea-Bissau in the north and Ghana in the south. Much of the drugs are shipped to Europe by drug mules on commercial flights.
Mix Latin American drugs and drug money with volatile Bissau-Guinean politics and you can’t help but draw the conclusion I did in my first sentence.
