Guinea Boasts of Deal With Chinese Company

October 14, 2009

By ADAM NOSSITER

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.”
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Guinea 'facing new dictatorship'

An opposition rally two weeks ago ended in deadly violence

Guinea is in danger of slipping into dictatorship, the leader of West Africa's economic group, Ecowas, says.

Mohamed Ibn Chambas said the junta, who seized power late last year, was repressing the people with "arbitrary and irresponsible" use of state power.

Ecowas ministers are meeting in Nigeria to try to resolve the crisis in Guinea, sparked when soldiers opened fire on an opposition rally two weeks ago.

Guineans are holding a two-day strike to remember dozens who were killed.

Activists say 157 people were killed by troops, and rights groups have reported that soldiers raped women in the streets.

The government put the number of dead at 57 and said most had died in a stampede.

The AP news agency reports that Agriculture Minister Abdulrahmane Sano has resigned in protest over the killings.

Strident language

The country's military rulers were widely criticised over the shootings - with the US denouncing "vile abuses" perpetrated against their own people.

CAPT MOUSSA DADIS CAMARA Seized power in December 2008 as a little-known army captain Promised democracy, but now shows signs of holding on to power Increasingly erratic behaviour and public humiliation of officials Guinea's erratic military ruler Guinea under Camara: Story so far Eyewitness: 'Bodies were falling'

Critics of the military are hoping that the strike, combined with the Ecowas talks, will increase pressure on junta leader Captain Moussa Dadis Camara to resign.

Ecowas is hosting talks in Abuja where opposition leaders, members of Guinea's military and Ecowas foreign ministers met to try to resolve the crisis.

Opening the meeting, Mr Chambas told delegates Guinea was "characterised by arbitrary and irresponsible use of state power by the military to repress the population".

"The signs are there now that if the military junta has its way it will impose yet another dictatorship on them," the AFP news agency quoted him as saying.

Analysts say it is unusual for Ecowas to use such strident language.

The bloc suspended Guinea after last December's coup, when the military took power shortly after the death of long-term leader Lansana Conte.

The protests two weeks ago were sparked by persistent rumours that Capt Camara intends to stand for president in an election scheduled for next January - something he had previously ruled out.

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U.S. Condemns Mass Killings and Rape in Guinea

October 7, 2009

By ADAM NOSSITER

CONAKRY, Guinea — The Obama administration has injected itself into the crisis in Guinea, taking the unusual step of sending a senior diplomat to protest the mass killings and rapes here last week.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called for “appropriate actions” against a military government that she said “cannot remain in power.”

“It was criminality of the greatest degree, and those who committed such acts should not be given any reason to expect that they will escape justice,” Mrs. Clinton told reporters in Washington. She said that the nation’s leader, Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara, and his government “must turn back to the people the right to choose their own leaders.”

The military seized power here last December, and pressure has been rising as Captain Camara, 45, backed off a pledge not to run in this country’s presidential elections in January. At a demonstration against him on Sept. 28, witnesses said soldiers opened fire on the crowds and raped and sexually assaulted female protesters. Human rights officials estimate that as many as 157 people were killed. The government has put the number at 56.

On Monday, William Fitzgerald, deputy assistant secretary of state, met with Captain Camara for two hours. He said he insisted, in strong language, that Captain Camara was responsible for the violence, despite the military strongman’s repeated denials. Mr. Fitzgerald said he also repeated that Captain Camara should not run in the elections, a key opposition demand.

“The message is, what happened on September 28 is totally unacceptable, from every way you look at it — the killings, the gender violence,” Mr. Fitzgerald said in an interview at the United States Embassy here Tuesday. “I said, ‘Mr. President, whether you like it or not, it’s tied to you. You are responsible for September 28. The buck stops with you.’ ”

The response from the captain was noncommittal, he said.

American pressure is limited in French-speaking West Africa, a region to which it has typically paid scant attention. But Mr. Fitzgerald’s meeting with Captain Camara is seen as significant by Africa experts as an example of President Obama’s push for good governance and human rights on the continent — the focus of a speech he gave in Ghana in July that is still widely commented on.

A month later, Mrs. Clinton traveled to eastern Congo to speak out against the systematic rape of girls and young women amid the sectarian strife there. She has made the fight against mass rape a major theme in a foreign policy that focuses on the plight of women in the developing world.

Mr. Fitzgerald’s visit comes after a week of international expressions of disgust over the violence at the Stade du 28 Septembre here. The stadium is named for the day in 1958 when Guineans voted against an offer of partnership from their colonial master, France, setting the stage for independence days later. Guinea was the first country in French-speaking Africa to declare independence.

The military government has claimed that many victims at the stadium were trampled. On Tuesday, The New York Times obtained photographs showing bodies in a pile and lined up, perhaps as many as 20, with no blood on them. But the bodies shown represent only a portion of the perhaps 160 dead, and scores of witnesses insist that most people were shot.

Days after the protest, the major hospital was still treating people suffering from gunshot wounds, and scores of people say they are still missing loved ones.

Sidya Touré, a former prime minister, who was at the stadium and was beaten by soldiers, said he saw the anonymously circulated pictures and speculated that the government allowed the bodies to be photographed to back their claims.

He said about 20 were indeed trampled in the frenzy of running from the bullets. But he, like many others, is adamant about the shooting.

“Absolutely,” he said in an interview Tuesday night. He said he was seated in the stands, with other opposition leaders.

“I saw people falling in front of me. I said, ‘Why are these people falling?’ ” Then, he said, he looked to his left. “I absolutely saw soldiers firing directly on people.”

France, a traditional partner of Guinea, has suspended military aid, and Sunday its foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said: “It seems to me that today, one can no longer work with Dadis Camara, and there should be an international intervention.”

Captain Camara reacted angrily to these statements, telling reporters Monday that “Guinea is not a subprefecture, is not a neighborhood in France.”

The Economic Community of West African States, an alliance of West African nations, on Monday sent the president of Burkina Faso, Blaise Compaoré, as a mediator between Captain Camara and the opposition. Diplomats and opposition figures here are skeptical, however, about Mr. Compaoré’s chances, as the opposition has insisted on a condition Captain Camara has not been willing to concede: that he not run for president.

American diplomats have previously refused to meet with Captain Camara. The special circumstances of last week’s massacre, however, dictated a meeting, diplomats suggested, and added urgency to their previous insistence that he not run.

“He’s a president in a bubble,” Mr. Fitzgerald said. “I don’t think his advisers are telling him the truth about his popularity and his standing in the world.”

Captain Camara, known for a somewhat disjointed speaking style that is often hard to penetrate, nonetheless “was lucid,” Mr. Fitzgerald said.

“There was no evidence of drinking or drug-taking,” he said.

“In America’s view, Moussa Dadis Camara can’t be president, and we are going to hold him to that,” Mr. Fitzgerald said.

He acknowledged that “America’s leverage is not as strong here as it is in many parts of Africa,” but he said that sanctions, a visa ban and an asset freeze were all possibilities.

“I did say that he was becoming a pariah among world leaders, and that he had to think long and hard about possibly running for president, because the international community would not accept him as a leader,” Mr. Fitzgerald said.

Mark Landler contributed reporting from Washington.
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