“This morning’s military insubordination was orchestrated by political circles in the country,” the Prime Minister of Guinea Bissau, Carlos Gomes Junior, told journalists a short while ago, confirming that the protest that broke out at dawn this morning is linked to the failed payment of wages to the Guinean soldiers dispatched to Liberia under the aegis of the UN peacekeeping mission UNMIL. Replying to a question from a reporter, the Premier specified that, according to the “rumours in circulation”, the Party of Social Renewal, the formation of the former President of Guinea Bissau, Kumba Ialà , was allegedly behind the insubordination.
He went on to say that the protest by the soldiers is linked to a “misunderstanding” caused by the “poor circulation of information among military leaders”. Gomes Junior claims that the military leadership knew that the money sent by the UN for the soldiers’ wages had yet “to reach the treasury”.
In effect, the world body had announced that it would only be able to make the final payments in October. The Portuguese news agency ’Lusa’ reports that tension has been confined to the Guinean capital: military sources contacted in Mansoa and Bafatà , the two other main cities in the country, said that they knew nothing about their colleagues’ protest. In any case, life in the capital has returned to normal. “There is a bit of uncertainty but the tension is not widespread; the situation seems to be under control,” said a MISNA source in Bissau.
The renegade soldiers, the Guinean foreign minister Soares Sambu and the UN representative in Bissau, Joao Bernardo Honwana, from Mozambique, are still in a meeting to try to negotiate a solution. Meanwhile, MISNA has received new confirmation concerning the death of a top-ranking officer during the intense gun battle that started the protest at 03.00 this morning. Corroborating sources report that Colonel Domingo de Barros, an aide of the Guinean chief of staff, was killed in the clashes.
So far, there has been no official toll of the shoot-out, but in Bissau there are rumours of other casualties and of an unknown number of injured people. In 1998 the former Portuguese colony - 36.000 square kilometres, 1.2 million inhabitants, 30 local dialects and two national languages " experienced an intense civil conflict that exacerbated an already difficult situation; a new government took office in May with the task of leading the country to normalcy following Ialà ’s bloodless ousting on 14 September 2003 and towards new elections in March 2005. The tiny West African country is one of the poorest in the world, with a gross domestic product of 700 dollars per capita in 2002. [LC]
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MILITARY PROTEST IN BISSAU: PREMIER, “ORCHESTRATED BY POLITICAL CIRCLES
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