Source:International Herald Tribune
In one fell swoop, most of the top politicians of this impoverished
West African country surrendered themselves to the cadre of junior
officers who began seizing power Tuesday after the death of the
country's longstanding ruler. The army's rank-and-file seemed to be
lining up behind the junior officers. And the coup leaders swiftly
replaced governors with military commanders.
"We are at your disposal," the country's prime minister said in a live radio address.
Though the young officers essentially shoved aside Guinea's civilian leadership at gunpoint, there was not a lot of complaining among the populace.
When asked if this meant that he supported the coup leaders, Bah answered in an indirect, but telling, way.
"We're acknowledging that they're in power," he said.
Guinea plunged into a political abyss after Lansana Conté, a chain-smoking, diabetic general who ruled the country for 24 iron-fisted years, died Monday, apparently from an illness and with no publicly announced succession plans.
Junior and midranking officers rushed to fill the power gap. They started by storming the radio and television headquarters. They then tightened their grip by taking control of key administrative buildings and army bases in Conakry.
By Wednesday afternoon, the junior officers had announced that their spokesman, Moussa Dadis Camara, an army captain who is thought to be in his mid-40s and used to be in charge of fuel supplies, was the country's new president.
Initially, there had been grumbling by some senior military commanders, who denounced the coup, and by top civilian leaders. But by Thursday, most of them seemed to have either capitulated or gone underground. No one inside Guinea appears to have mounted a challenge to the junior officers, despite widespread condemnation of the coup abroad.
Guinea has been in rocky waters for years. It was a country of immense promise at independence in 1958, with gold, diamonds, verdant banana fields, seemingly limitless aluminum ore and gushing rivers ideal for hydropower. It was considered one of the gems in the French colonial crown.
But Guinea slipped into obscurity under its first ruler, Ahmed Sékou Touré, a revolutionary who espoused Marxist policies and shut out the West. After Touré died, Conté seized power in a military coup very similar to the one that took place this week.
He kept Guinea relatively stable, compared to its neighbors like Liberia and Sierra Leone. But thanks to corruption and mismanagement, the economy was still a shadow of its potential. Conté's health steadily declined, so did the country. Paralyzing strikes erupted last year and dozens of people were killed. In May, junior army officers mutinied, kidnapping a senior officer and demanding better pay.
Given that their country has been ruled by just two presidents, both notorious dictators, for almost all of the past 50 years, many Guineans seemed to welcome the coup, or at least were not outspokenly against it. One word on many lips Thursday seemed reminiscent of a certain political phenomenon an ocean away: change.
"We want change," said Mamadou Aliou Barry, a construction worker in the capital. "What happened yesterday took too long."
Some people on Conakry's streets have even starting calling Camara, the new president, "Obama junior."
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