POLITICS-SENEGAL: Blood and Hope in Casamance Region

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Chris Simpson

NYASSIA, Senegal, Jan 29 2003 (IPS) - In recent years, Christmas and New Year has been a dangerous period in Casamance.

Senegal’s southern region is frequently hit by a road ambush or a confrontation between government soldiers and rebel guerrillas, keen to announce their presence and signal their intent as the New Year gets underway.

2003 began quietly, but there was a serious flare up near the town of Nyassia, 25 kilometres west of the regional capital Ziguinchor in the first week of January. The government later confirmed four of its soldiers had been killed and several others wounded. Other sources say casualty figures were much higher.

Nyassia itself is little more than a village, but it has a substantial garrison, defending the main road between Ziguinchor and the coastal resort of Cap Skirring, 70 kilometres west. The road is generally considered, at least for travel during daylight hours, but closes in the early evening.

Army officers in Nyassia stressed the overall security situation was good, blaming the recent violence on a new mine-laying campaign by guerrillas, nominally fighting for the Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance (MFDC), whose southern front operates from bases close by and across the nearby frontier with Guinea-Bissau.

Raoul Manga, who runs a small shop on the main road, says the clashes had taken place a few kilometres away in Kaguite, one of several villages considered off-limits by the local population.

”There are several villages around here that we try not to visit,” says Manga. ”Nyassia itself is safe, but the area near here is heavily mined”.

Despite the Senegalese army’s assertion that the war is coming to an end, the overall military situation remains confused. ”Most of the news we get comes in radio reports from outside the region,” a hotel-owner in Cap Skirring complains. ”There might have been an ambush or an attack in Casamance and we will know nothing about it until the media picks it up in Dakar”, the capital of Senegal.

Part of the confusion derives from the continuing splits within the MFDC, both in terms of the movement’s political leadership and its maintenance of two fronts, north and south.

Since signing a provisional peace agreement in March 2001, the government of President Abdoulaye Wade has consistently maintained that a broader settlement will only be possible once the MFDC has achieved the kind of basic unity and coherence, which have so far proved elusive.

The man still regarded as the MFDC’s main leader is Father Augustin Diamacoune Senghor, who has been replaced by Jean-Marie Biagui at a special meeting in The Gambia in August 2001.

Government delegations visiting Ziguinchor invariably seek out Diamacoune, who is still under a loose kind of ‘house arrest’, and his rival, the former head of the MFDC’s military wing, Sidi Badji. Both men are in their 70s, but mediators in Casamance have noted an intense personal rivalry.

The MFDC’s overall structures are further confused by a strong presence in France, where Jean-Marie Biagui and other MFDC senior figures, including Mamadou Nkrumah Sane, are based.

Rights activist and legal academic Malamine Kourouma has led a campaign by ‘socio-cultural’ forces in Casamance to establish peace at the grassroots. Kourouma, who is also Mayor of Goudomp in Casamance, has been trying to secure across-the-board support for a Paris Convention for Definitive Peace in Casamance, working in both Europe and Senegal.

Kouromouma was also a driving force behind the special ‘Assises’ on Casamance, held in September, which brought together a wide range of cultural and political actors for a wide-ranging discussion on the past and future of the region.

Kourouma is adamant that the prospects for peace are better than ever before.

”The incidents near Nyassia are not good and we need to identify who was responsible for all that,” Kourouma acknowledges. ”But it should not be forgotten that we have had eight months of general calm.” Kourouma says the question of independence for Casamance is a dead issue, while accepting there may be elements in the MFDC still committed to the separatist cause. He acknowledges the importance of the government-MFDC dialogue, but argues that a grassroots campaign is equally important.

”People are learning to speak again after a period of silence. It is only the people of Casamance who can resolve all this and they have to talk with absolute truth, drawing on the spirit of their ancestors,” he says.

Kourouma says the main priority for peacemakers in Casamance, where around 3,000 people have been killed since the rebels launched their bush war in 1982, is to bring in the maquisards, the guerrillas still operating on northern and southern fronts.

There is concern that the MFDC’s political leadership has little direct contact with the fighters in the bush. Kourouma accepts there are real difficulties in bringing the combatants in from the cold, not least because of the lucrative drugs business, which has developed during the conflict and the creation of ‘War Lords’, accountable to no one in rebel areas.

Kourouma says the guerrillas should be renamed forestiers, protectors of the forest, an acknowledgement of the life they have been forced to and the potential for them to play a more constructive role.

The complications involved in establishing a dialogue with the rebels were highlighted during a recent visit by a government delegation. Abdoulaye Faye, who heads the government’s Commission of Peace, met not only Diamacoune, Badji and other MFDC notables, but was also introduced to a group of combatants. But it subsequently emerged that the men had not been active guerrillas for years.