Guinea Bissau

Diplomats swarm on Guinea Bissau

Article published on the 2009-03-03 Latest update 2009-03-03 14:23 TU

President Joao Bernardo 'Nino' Vieira
(File photo: Reuters)

High-level delegations from the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), and CPLP, the community of the Portuguese-speaking countries are planning on holding meetings in Guinea Bissau on Tuesday, one day after the assassination of President Joao Bernardo 'Nino' Vieira.

"I think that the AU and Ecowas has a unique opportunity to go into Guinea Bissau and try to sort out the tensions between the military and the civilian authorities,"  says Sarjoh Bah, an analyst from New York University Center on International Cooperation.

Meanwhile, the AU Peace and Security Council went into closed-door talks at headquarters in Addis Ababa to decide whether Guinea Bissau should be suspended from the continental body.

"Clearly the leaders on this will have to be the AU and Ecowas," he told RFI, adding that the perpatrators of the assassinations of President Vieira and the army chief must be brought to justice.

"The question of impunity is one that should be clearly dealt with in this case because these are serious crimes," he said.

Reports say that the doctor who conducted the autopsy on Vieira's body said the president had been violently beaten before being shot in the thorax and face. He declined to give his name or further details.

Vieira was gunned down on Monday morning after a bomb attack that killed Guinea Bissau's army chief a few hours before.

The army had said that the assassination was not part of a coup d'état, which others, like Jean Ping, strongly disagreed with. Bah says that this is merely a question of semantics.

"I think it is a fine line between assassinating a president and saying it is not a coup. As far as they are concerned, they are defining a coup in a non-Western sense," he said.

"By that, I mean, as long as they haven't made an attempt to take over the statehouse, they don't see it as a coup and every indication is that this is a tit-for-tat affair," he said.

But trying to determine at this stage what were the motives for both murders is still difficult, says Bah. He believes that the issue was more profound than the ethnic tensions between President Vieira, a member of the minority Pepel ethnic group, and Army chief of staff General Tagme Na Waie, who was part of the Balante group, which is a majority in the country.

"I think it goes beyond the ethnic dimension, which has always been there...we have seen since November last year there was another attempt to assassinate 'Nino'," he said, referring to the late president by his nickname.

Others look to the increasing influence of Latin American drug cartels not only in the region, but in Guinea Bissau itself. Bah reiterated that while both murders were quite bloody-- Na Waie was killed by a bomb and Vieira was shot in the face-- a basic power struggle between the two men seems more feasible.

The Latin American drug trade is always in the background, however, says Bah. "Even within the (Guinean) military you have those sections that play in the pockets of the Latin American cartels, while others are loyal to the rule of law," he said.