'Narco-state president' assassinated in revenge killing

Guinea Bissau President Joao Bernardo Vieira was shot by soldiers after a General was killed in a bomb attack. Photo / AP

The tiny West African nation of Guinea Bissau was a country with "no-one in charge" last night, after the President and army chief of staff were murdered within hours of each other in what appeared to be revenge killings.

Increasingly seen as Africa's first "narco-state", the former Portuguese colony, whose formal economy is based on cashew nuts but whose real income flows from cocaine, has been racked by a bitter power struggle for months.

That conflict came to a brutal head on Sunday night when the army chief of staff, General Batista Tagme Na Waie, was killed by a bomb blast at his headquarters.

The killing provoked a swift response from his soldiers, some of whom stormed the presidential residence in the early hours of yesterday morning, shooting dead Joao Bernardo Vieira.

The gangster-like nature of the killings was underlined by the fact the general had been blown up by a bomb concealed in the staircase to his office while the President's body was still lying in his house, according to witnesses.

An army spokesman, Zamora Induta, said President Vieira was "one of the main people responsible for the death" of the general. He then confirmed the President "was killed by the army as he tried to flee his house, which was being attacked by a group of soldiers".

Guinea Bissau is one of a trio of West African countries that have witnessed violent upheavals in recent months.

In neighbouring Guinea, the sudden death of president Lansana Conte in December sparked a military coup. While last month, further south in the former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea, 16 men were arrested and accused with plotting the overthrow of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.

Each of the Guineas share a history of coups, political assassinations, organised crime and civil war. All three have become mainstays in the cocaine route from Latin America to Europe.

As international leaders and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) bloc called for calm, the 1.6 million residents of the impoverished nation were left to contemplate the end of a very personal blood feud between their head of the army and a politician who openly described himself as "God's gift" to the country.

The pair had been on a historical collision course, with one security source telling Reuters yesterday that "General Tagme always said that his and the President's fate were linked and if he died, so would the President".

That struggle is explained in part by ethnic rivalry, with the general hailing from the Balante group, traditionally dominant in the armed forces, while the President came from the much smaller Papel community.

Mr Vieira had only narrowly survived a previous attempt on his life when soldiers came to "liquidate" him last November. His presidential guard, drawn exclusively from the Papel, fought off the attackers in a three-hour gun battle in which one of them was killed. He responded by arresting more than a dozen Balante military personnel close to the general n all of whom were reportedly released by soldiers yesterday.

The 69-year-old President, himself a military man, had led the troubled country for 23 of the past 29 years. He was a leading figure in the war against the Portuguese forces after joining the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC) in 1960. The PAIGC was to go on to rule the newly independent Guinea Bissau as a one-party state, with Mr Vieira overthrowing the then President, Luis Cabral, in 1980 to assume leadership of the party.

After another coup attempt, this time against him, he launched a purge of ethnic rivals in the military, including General Tagme Na Waie, who spent years in exile on one of the scores of tiny, deserted islands that make up Guinea Bissau's coastal archipelago.

However, the country's malaise runs deeper than personal or ethnic rivalries. Since the abrupt departure of the Portuguese in 1974, Guinea Bissau has experienced what the think-tank Crisis Group calls "a recurrent cycle of political crises and coups d'etat, while criminal networks have proliferated".

The group wrote in a recent report that: "In the absence of effective state and security structures, the country has become a prime transit point for drug trafficking from Latin America to Europe and there remains a real risk of it becoming Africa's first narco-state."

There is mounting concern that relative success stories in the region such as Liberia or Sierra Leone could be destabilised by the upheaval.

Mohamed Ibn Chambas, the head of ECOWAS, said: "It's not only the assassination of a President or a chief of staff, it's the assassination of democracy."

- THE INDEPENDENT