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December 25, 2008

Guinea coup update

It appears that Camara has solidified his coup. A couple of the newest developements are of interest to me.

First, Camara is claiming that he wants to root out corruption and uses some pretty strong language in the process which makes it sound like he might actually be serious about it.

In radio broadcasts Thursday, Camara said he had no intention of being a candidate in the December 2010 vote but that his group wants to re-establish order and crack down on corruption.

"I want to warn anyone who thinks they can try to corrupt me or my agents. Money is of no interest to us," Camara said. "There are already people who are starting to show up with bags of money to try to corrupt us. They've tried to give money to our wives and cars to our children. I will personally go after anyone who tries to corrupt us."

The other thing that is even more interesting to me is a statement Camara made regarding the funeral of Conte, the deceased former dictator.

Camara promised a "grandiose funeral" for Conte on Friday. He died Monday but there has been no funeral despite Muslim custom calling for burial within 24 hours of death.

"How can you leave the body of a president like that without taking care of it?" Camara said. "I saw the body. It's not been treated. It leaves you to think we don't have a single ice room in all of Guinea." (my emphasis)

Camara appears to be using an issue intimately understood by even the least educated Muslim to make a point about how... backwards and undeveloped Conte has left Guinea - this despite holding HALF of the world's reserves of bauxite (used to make Aluminum) as well as meaningful gold, diamond and Iron ore deposits.

If - and it's a big if - that's what Camara was trying to communicate then I'd say it's another tentatively hopeful sign that he's serious about fundamental change for the better. If so, and only time will tell, then it seems to me that he could well end up on the short, shortlist - along with Nelson Mandela - of indigenous African leaders who genuinely care more about their people than they do about enriching themselves.

As I mentioned in the last post, it is significant that this coup appears to have come from junior military officers rather from command officers - who almost surely got their commands because they were loyal not just to Conte but to Conte's ideas. Just recalling off-the-cuff here but it seems to me that similar lower-level military coups around the world have heralded a fundamental change of direction for the country or at least for it's government. Not all have gone the way we Yanks would have liked (think: Gaddafi in Libia or Chavez in Venezuela or Gutierrez in Ecuador). But they do seem to typically represent a rebellion against both the existing government and the existing military leadership.

Posted by Kevin at December 25, 2008 06:23 PM