Junta faces monstrous task
2003-10-06 16:18
Bissau, Guinea-Bissau - Civil servants haven't been paid in nearly a year. Teachers haven't been paid in two. Soldiers are getting bags of rice instead of paycheques.
What's the military's solution? A bloodless coup.
The junta that seized power in the tiny West African country of Guinea-Bissau last month is hoping to turn around a wrecked economy and bring back foreign aid and investment after years of decline - much of it blamed on ousted President Kumba Yala.
But in a bankrupt country facing renewed international scepticism in the wake of a September 14 coup, it won't be easy.
Army Chief of Staff General Verissimo Correia Seabra - who has briefly named himself president - brushed off questions about where he'd get the money to pay state salaries.
Three officers sitting beside him in his office chuckled, and Seabra said in a low grumble: "Ask me again in two months. You'll see."
Foreign donors cut off most aid to the country after a 1998-99 civil war. Yala, who was elected president in 2000, failed to win it back.
Opponents complained his rule had become increasingly erratic, and diplomats were increasingly critical. Yala sacked prime ministers and top judges at will, and had opponents and journalists summarily arrested. In 2002, he dissolved parliament, but delayed elections to replace it three times.
Yala, a former philosophy professor, did little to stop a teacher's strike from shutting down public schools nationwide in April 2002. Classes haven't been held since.
"It's a disaster," said 23-year-old Onivaldo Gomes, a would-be student now doing construction work. "I should have graduated four years ago."
Composed mostly of jungles that merge into swamps jutting into the Atlantic Ocean, Guinea-Bissau - ranked 167 out of 173 nations on the United Nations' Human Development Index - relies heavily on cashew nut production and fishing for income.
Only one bank
Bissau, the capital, has no port or beaches, only mud shores topped with stranded, rusting boats. Destroyed tarmac roads are splattered with potholes around which cars patiently and persistently zigzag.
At night, most of the country plunges into darkness because electricity is so scarce. Cell phones are non-existent. And banks? The country only has one.
So desperate are most people for change that even a coup offers the possibility of hope.
"Life was going backward, not forward," said Malan Manata, a smartly dressed 73-year-old who was among thousands recently celebrating Yala's downfall in Bissau's rutted streets.
Despite the poverty, Bissau is a pleasant town filled both with tin-roof shacks and orange terra-cotta rooftops - in the style of Portuguese settlers who ruled until a 1960s guerrilla war paved the way for independence in 1974.
Business is dire
For those who can afford the luxury, a handful of nightclubs and one casino are open late, but business is dire.
"I don't make money here. It's not profitable anymore," said Jean-Claude Lys, the Belgian owner of the upscale O Bistro restaurant, decorated with African masks and a floodlit white bust of Vladimir Lenin that he looted from the destroyed Russian Embassy.
Under regional pressure to put a civilian face on the military junta, army chiefs on Wednesday appointed a transitional government, naming businessman Henrique Rosa as interim president and a contested political party leader, Artur Sanha, as caretaker prime minister.
Seabra insisted the 25-member junta had no interest in retaining power and said elections would be held - eventually - a move he said would restore foreign and local confidence in the country.
For Guinea-Bissau, where power has long been concentrated - publicly and privately - in the hands of a handful of military chiefs, the scenario is unnervingly familiar.
The country's last junta leader, General Ansumane Mane, seized power in 1999 after an 11-month war and oversaw the elections that brought Yala to power in 2000.
Asked if the military would overthrow the next government if need be, Seabra smiled, glancing briefly at the portrait of Yala still on the wall behind his desk.
"I think they'll have an example to follow now."
- AP