[BRIEF NOTE] On Guinea-Bissau
Mar. 3rd, 2009 05:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThe news from the West African country of Guinea-Bissau hasn't been very encouraging at all.
Guinea-Bissau is the only formerly Portuguese and currently Lusophone country in continental West Africa and and has traditionally been very closely linked with Cape Verde. Unlike that last country, which has maintained a stable democracy since independence and recentlyachieved a middle-income economy, Guinea-Bissau was a neglected corner of the Portuguese empire most notable for an durable guerrilla resistance to Portuguese rule from the mid-1950s on and the introduction of the HIV-2 virus into the general population via the unsterilized needles used in military public health programs. After transitioning from one-party rule in 1991 and a disastrous late 1990s civil war, Guinea-Bissau has become one of the poorest countries in Africa, notable from the linguistic perspective being like Angola a country where colonial language, Portuguese, is displacing other local languages thanks to governmental inertia, and from the political perspective for being terribly unstable and open to crime. The words of the International Crisis Group seem quite accurate..
Guinea-Bissau's National Assembly speaker Raimundo Pereira will take the oath as interim head of state on Tuesday after the assassination of President Joao Bernardo Vieira, a parliamentary communique said.
Vieira was killed in his home on Monday in an apparent revenge attack for the death on Sunday of a key rival, armed forces chief General Batista Tagme Na Wai, throwing the tiny and unstable West African state into confusion.
Envoys from West Africa and Portuguese-speaking nations, including Angola, Sao Tome and Principe and Cape Verde, flew to the capital Bissau on Tuesday in a bid to avert a possible coup or further unrest.
The army has denied any wish to seize power but soldiers guarded strategic locations in the city and it was unclear who controlled the poor former Portuguese colony of 1.6 million, where drug traffickers have fuelled years of instability.
The African Union's Peace and Security Council decided not to suspend Bissau as the attacks did not represent a coup d'etat. Neighbouring Guinea was suspended from the AU after a coup in December following the death of its president.
Guinea-Bissau is the only formerly Portuguese and currently Lusophone country in continental West Africa and and has traditionally been very closely linked with Cape Verde. Unlike that last country, which has maintained a stable democracy since independence and recentlyachieved a middle-income economy, Guinea-Bissau was a neglected corner of the Portuguese empire most notable for an durable guerrilla resistance to Portuguese rule from the mid-1950s on and the introduction of the HIV-2 virus into the general population via the unsterilized needles used in military public health programs. After transitioning from one-party rule in 1991 and a disastrous late 1990s civil war, Guinea-Bissau has become one of the poorest countries in Africa, notable from the linguistic perspective being like Angola a country where colonial language, Portuguese, is displacing other local languages thanks to governmental inertia, and from the political perspective for being terribly unstable and open to crime. The words of the International Crisis Group seem quite accurate..
Since emerging from Portuguese colonial rule in 1974, Guinea-Bissau has experienced a recurrent cycle of political crises and coups d’etat, while criminal networks have proliferated. In the absence of effective state and security structures, the country has become a prime transit point for drug trafficking from Latin America to Europe and there remains a real risk of it becoming Africa’s first narco-state. The signing of a Stability Pact by the three most important political parties in March 2007 brought renewed momentum for social and political reform and raised hopes for a new period of stability. Yet despite this turning point, the threat of institutional crisis is ever present. Significant efforts are required to effect fundamental changes to the way the country is run and offset the risk of growing criminalization and unrest in the future.
