Guinea’s
military leaders appointed a veteran opposition figure as prime
minister on Monday, a critical step in the transition to elections and
civilian government later in the year, officials and news agencies
reported.
The opposition figure, Jean-Marie Doré, was the choice of both a
coalition of opponents of the military government, and the current
military junta itself. Mr. Doré, in his 70s and the leader of the opposition coalition,
which is called the Forces Vives, is from the same ethnic group as the
country’s military dictator, Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara. Soldiers from that group are thought to have played a leading role in the massacre, beatings and rapes of regime opponents in a stadium
in the capital, Conakry, on Sept. 28. The ethnic group, from Guinea’s
remote forest regions, is considered a particularly volatile element in
the country’s armed forces, and Mr. Doré’s new role is considered a
potentially peacemaking one.
“It was the Forces Vives that proposed Jean-Marie Doré. We are
satisfied,” said Oury Bah, vice president of the political party Union
of Democratic Forces in Guinea. Late last week Guinea’s military leaders
and the coalition agreed to establish an interim government together,
while Captain Camara, wounded in an assassination attempt early in
December, announced that he would go into exile.
The deal caps a period of deep unrest in this West African country of
10 million people, a leading bauxite exporter whose people are among
the world’s poorest. Captain Camara took over in a coup
13 months ago and ruled in an increasingly arbitrary way from his
army-base headquarters. The September massacre, in which at least 156
people were killed by soldiers, resulted in intense pressure on the junta as both the United Nations and the International Criminal Court spoke of potential crimes against humanity.
Captain Camara, shot by one of his own guards, flew to Morocco for
treatment while power was assumed by his deputy, Gen. Sékouba Konaté.
The general, regarded as more flexible than the wounded autocrat, took
part in the negotiations that led to last week’s deal. But whether the troubled country finds peace in the months leading up
to the elections is an open question. Mr. Bah, for one, was sharply
critical of the proposed composition of the new government, which will
have 10 ministers each from the military junta, the opposition and the
different regions of the country.
That arrangement will effectively handcuff the prime minister, he
said. “It’s as if the prime minister has no real power. We can’t accept
this in the transition,” he said.
The army’s future role is also unclear. There is a strong
possibility that it will remain “the power behind power,” said Mike
McGovern, a Yale anthropologist and an expert on Guinea.
Mr. Doré has long been on the political scene in Guinea as an
unpredictable opponent of the country’s military rulers. He has publicly
proclaimed his friendship with the Liberian warlord Charles Taylor, according to Mr. McGovern, but was among those beaten at the stadium in September.
In an interview
shortly after Mr. Doré produced the bloodstained clothes he was
wearing at the time, he said, “With violence they forced me to my
knees.” He was strongly critical of the military government. “The country is
in a trap,” he said. “There’s a disjunction between the work that must
be done, and the people doing it. The competencies at hand are not up to
the job.”
Mr. McGovern said that Mr. Doré had “oscillated over time from being
something of a gadfly in Guinean politics to being over the last year a
pretty solid, level-headed spokesman for the Forces Vives.”
Source: New York Times
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