DAKAR, Senegal — Guinea’s military government, facing international sanctions and heavy strictures over a mass killing of unarmed demonstrators, is highlighting a recent agreement with a Chinese company that could provide it with billions of dollars.
Mamadi Kallo, the military junta’s secretary of state in charge of public works, confirmed Tuesday that the deal had been in the works for months, but he said it was signed only over the weekend, well after the civilian killings and rapes on Sept. 28.
China has yet to confirm the deal, leading some analysts to suggest that the Guinean government was trying to bolster its legitimacy in the face of international condemnation. But if the deal has progressed as Guinean officials have described, it could clash with the tough positions laid out by the junta’s critics, including France and the United States.
Many nations condemned the massacre and swiftly backed away from any agreements with the military government after its soldiers fired upon protesters in a stadium in the capital, Conakry. On Tuesday, a group comprising the European Union, the African Union and the United Nations, among others, called for the junta’s “withdrawal,” and some of Guinea’s neighbors in West Africa have threatened sanctions.
For the second straight day, shops, businesses and offices stayed shut in Conakry, as residents observed a call by unions to stay home to protest the killings. There was little traffic, and the city was quiet, residents said.
Mr. Kallo said the deal had been signed with a private company, not with the Chinese government. He said the company had agreed to invest “up to $7 billion” in electricity and aviation infrastructure — an enormous sum for a country whose gross domestic product is only $4.5 billion. Electric service in Guinea’s capital is shaky at best, and the country of 10 million people, about the size of Oregon, is virtually without internal air links.
“How the Chinese are to be compensated hasn’t been decided,” Mr. Kallo said.
China has been determined in its pursuit of minerals in Africa, often without consideration of how countries are governed, and analysts said a number of Chinese had been seen in recent months at Guinea’s ministry of mines.
The Chinese approach has made serious headway on a continent where governments are routinely implicated in human rights violations; over the weekend, the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, praised China for “investing in infrastructure and building roads” and criticized the West for merely “handing out development aid.”
Mr. Kallo did not name the company involved in the agreement, but news reports have identified it as the China International Fund, which one expert described as a “semi-independent operator.” Mr. Kallo said the Angolan state oil company, Sonangol, was also part of the deal.
“This has nothing to do with the current situation,” Mr. Kallo said of the deal. “They came here well before the death of the former president,” he said, referring to Lansana Conté, the longtime dictator whose death last December gave rise to the military junta that rules the country.
But the government’s sudden promotion of the agreement, an effort led by the country’s minister of mines in interviews in recent days, has led analysts to say it is an attempt by the military regime to demonstrate that it is not an international pariah. State television has also repeatedly broadcast allusions to the Guinean-Chinese friendship.
Several human rights leaders in Conakry said the quasi public relations offensive would be ineffective because Guineans were still angry, and grieving, over the stadium massacre.
One expert on Africa-China relations, David H. Shinn, a former United States ambassador to Ethiopia and Burkina Faso, said “the announcement remains something of an embarrassment to China and plays into its policy of emphasizing state sovereignty and avoiding interference in governance and human rights issues in other countries.”
Mr. Shinn said the deal “clearly complicates the ability of those in the international community who want to put pressure on Guinea.”
“Certainly the timing of this is unfortunate,” he said. “Obviously, it puts Guinea in a much stronger position than it would have been.”
In Conakry, human rights campaigners had a different view, drawing a sharply unfavorable comparison between the Chinese approach and heavy American criticism of the junta, which they said had broad popular appeal.
The Chinese are “perceived as supporting the dictatorship and the junta and against the will of the people,” said Mamadi Kaba, president of the Guinean branch of the African Assembly for Human Rights. “Guineans are convinced there will never be development unless there is a lot more democracy. So the American support is much more important.”
Thierno Baldé of the Institut de Recherche sur la Démocratie et l’État de Droit, a Conakry good-government group, said: “What the deal signifies is, ‘Since the Western companies don’t want to work with us, we’ll turn to the Chinese and loosen the grip.’
“But people’s preoccupations are definitely elsewhere now,” Mr. Baldé said. “People are definitely more preoccupied with the killings.”Wikio
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