“Insisting on an ethnic balance in the armed forces of Guinea Bissau is not at all realistic,” says José Manuel Ramos-Horta. Credit: Katalin Muharay/IPS

By Mario Queiroz
LISBON, Oct 2 2013 (IPS)

Guinea Bissau is “close to becoming a failed state,” but not due to ethnic or religious violence, which has never existed in that small West African nation, argues Nobel Peace laureate and United Nations envoy José Manuel Ramos-Horta.

“The Guinea Bissau political leadership has never managed to have good relations with the military and vice versa, and it could be said that today the country is dangerously close to becoming a failed state,” Ramos-Horta, a former president, prime minister and foreign minister of East Timor, said in this interview with IPS during a recent visit to Lisbon.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon named Ramos-Horta as his representative to mediate in Guinea Bissau – which experienced its latest coup in April 2012 – taking into account the East Timor leader’s personal and political credentials in the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP).

But the initial timetable outlined for the country’s return to the path of democracy, which included elections slated for Nov. 24, will not be met due to political and organisational problems, the foreign ministers of seven of the eight CPLP countries acknowledged on Sept. 25.

The seven countries were Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Mozambique, Portugal, and São Tomé and Príncipe (Guinea Bissau is the eighth member of the CPLP).

The CPLP has cut off dialogue with the regime in Guinea Bissau.

Q: Is there a real possibility of peace in that country?

A: I’m realistic and optimistic. To the contrary of what has happened in other parts of the world, including Europe, there has never been ethnic or religious violence in Guinea Bissau.

Churches or mosques have never been set on fire or destroyed and cemeteries have never been desecrated, as has occurred even in the European Union. To guarantee peace and establish democracy, what is urgently needed is for politicians and the military not to push the people too much.

Q: It would seem like the latest coup was the straw that broke the patience of the international community.

A: It’s true. There was not the slightest indication of why that last coup happened, except for the responsibility of these two elites, the political and political-military, for the sequence of violence initiated by João Bernardo “Nino” Vieira in 1980, when he overthrew President Luís Cabral, annulling six years of success in Guinea Bissau after its independence from Portugal.

Some 20 or 30 years ago, coups were routine in Africa. Today, the African Union takes even more radical stances on the defence of democracy than the EU. However, it is necessary to engage in dialogue, pragmatically, with those who have the weapons.

If there is no dialogue, what good is democracy?

It was precisely to have channels of understanding and negotiation that the U.N. secretary-general named me as his representative, and results have already been seen.

Q: Shortly after the coup, the AU, CPLP, EU, United States and United Nations indicated that the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) reacted too mildly to the military’s seizure of power. After nine months in your mission, how do you see things?

A: The positions taken by those institutions and countries were totally correct. And it is also necessary to stress that ECOWAS intervened pragmatically to keep the situation from being further aggravated, and prevented the dissolution of parliament and the elimination of the constitution.

They have invested a great deal of money, but this situation is unsustainable. The important thing at this stage is to hold elections as early as possible, within five or six months I hope, to re-establish the democratic order and to put in place a strategy to help the country recover.

Q: Who is engaged in the dialogue today with the Guinea Bissau regime?

A: There has been no recognition from important governments or organisations, but there is a day-to-day relationship with the United States and Great Britain, which are in dialogue with the regime. Spain kept its ambassador there and France has always been active through its business attaché.

The EU imposed some sanctions, but it maintained its social and humanitarian programmes. Portuguese aid is channeled through non-governmental organisations and churches. Portugal’s position is due to something very simple: its long-standing relationship with the people of Guinea Bissau, who are and will still be there, independently of the regime that is in power.

Q: Besides the enormous fragility of the state, what are Guinea Bissau’s biggest problems?

A: Extreme poverty, with very poor social indicators, persistent political instability, the weaknesses and fissures in the army, the military’s frequent intervention in politics, and in the last few years, the penetration of Latin American drug cartels, in Guinea Bissau as well as many other states in the region, which exacerbates the difficulties in those countries because of the creation of new areas of crime and new tensions and dangers.

Q: With regard to this last problem, it has been said that Guinea Bissau is becoming a “narco-state”.

A: That is nonsense expressed by some academics who write reports that don’t have a strong foundation in reality, which have been repeated by the media without the slightest regard for intellectual rigour.

An academic makes an analysis, a news agency from a big country in the North picks it up, and after that all of the newspapers go to the same source, which may or may not be objective and impartial, since no one has carried out an exhaustive investigation.

Guinea Bissau is just a small country, victim of the drug cartels of Latin America and the mafias of the EU and Russia. They are the ones who are really responsible.

As a representative of the U.N. secretary-general, I cannot give the names of cities that are real centres of drug money laundering, where what you see is great opulence, with mansions, fancy buildings and luxury cars, while in Bissau all you see in the streets are goats and cows.

Q: Another frequently mentioned problem are the supposed “ethnic quotas” within the armed forces, where the Balanta people [the largest ethnic group, making up over one-quarter of the population] are clearly predominant in the leadership.

A: When false problems are raised, big difficulties are created. Guinea Bissau is multiethnic and multicultural, and has several religions. That is a wealth, not a disadvantage.

The Balanta were historically dedicated to agriculture and livestock-raising. But they are also a people with a strong warrior tradition…which forms part of their history.

There are other groups that prefer trade over weapons, and others that prefer to be government officials.

However, Western experts, unfamiliar with the situation there, often say ethnic balance in the armed forces is necessary. This is not at all realistic, because you can’t insist that a merchant become a soldier.

Excerpt:

On Dec. 18, 2007, the approval of a resolution for a moratorium on executions by the United Nations General Assembly was hailed as a milestone in the struggle to abolish the death penalty worldwide. It is true that the United Nations may not impose the abolition of the death penalty, but the moral and political value of the resolution is undeniable.

Since the founding of the abolitionist organisation Hands Off Cain in 1993, 56 of the 97 retentionist States that were members of the U.N. at that time have abandoned the practice of the death penalty. Fifteen of them have done so since 2006, the year following the re-launching of the initiative at the U.N. General Assembly. Three more countries (Palau, East-Timor and Tuvalu) that became members of the U.N. after 1993 are also abolitionist.

On the eve of the fourth U.N. General Assembly vote on the death penalty resolution, expected later this year, it is important to review the current situation.

There are 154 countries and territories that, to varying degrees, have decided to renounce the death penalty. Of these: 100 are totally abolitionist, seven are abolitionist for ordinary crimes, five have a moratorium on executions in place and 42 are de facto abolitionist (i.e. countries that have not carried out any executions for at least 10 years or countries that have binding obligations not to use the death penalty). On the other hand, there are 44 retentionist countries.

There were 19 countries that carried out executions in 2011, compared to 27 countries in 2006.

In 2011 there were at least 5,000 executions, compared to at least 5,946 in 2010, at least 5,741 in 2009, at least 5,735 in 2008 and at least 5,851 in 2007. A major turnabout came after the introduction in China of a legal reform on Jan. 1, 2007, which requires every capital sentence handed down to be reviewed by the Supreme Court. According to the U.S.-based Dui Hua Foundation’s estimates, executions in China have dropped 50 percent since 2007 (to around 4,000 per year).

However, the most significant facts concerning abolition came from Africa, home to the largest number of de facto abolitionist countries and where abolition had the same rhythm as the U.S. Since 2007, Connecticut, Illinois, New Mexico and New Jersey abolished the death penalty, while the governor of Oregon declared a moratorium on all executions last year.

In Africa, Rwanda, Burundi, Gabon, Togo and Benin completely eliminated the death penalty. In the first two countries in particular – being lands where the endless cycle of vengeance and the eternal drama of Cain and Abel has been played out most truly and tragically – abolition took on an extraordinary symbolic, as well as legal and political, value.

Africa remains the primary target-continent of the lobbying for additional support to the new Resolution on a moratorium on executions at the U.N. General Assembly 2012 because we continue to register the most significant political and legislative steps towards abolition.

During the last mission carried out by Hands Off Cain in the Central African Republic from Oct. 24-27, our arrival was greeted with news of the approval, by the Council of Ministers, of a bill for the abolition of the death penalty from the penal code. When minister of Justice Jacques M’Bosso met the delegation, he expressed the will of his country to become one of the protagonists of the abolitionist process.

Prime Minister Faustin-Archange Touadera himself assured us that the Central African Republic would vote in favor of the resolution on the Universal Moratorium that will be presented next month at the U.N. He expressed the political will to implement all legal means available to remove the death penalty, which has not been applied in the country for over 30 years, thus confirming the commitments undertaken by his government before the U.N. Human Rights Council for the ratification of the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

These openings must, however, correspond to a commitment by the international community to improve prison conditions. While in the capital Bangui, the delegation visited the female prison of Bangui-Bimbo and the male prison of Ngaragba.

The former was a small institution that housed 31 women and three girls in three separate dormitories. Two-thirds of these women are awaiting trial and many have been accused of witchcraft.

The male prison houses 328 men, two-thirds of whom are awaiting trial. The structure is divided into blocks depending on the prisoner’s security risk and type of crime. Each block has a different name: the White Room, reserved for political prisoners today, is a maximum security facility; Couloir is reserved for those caught practicing sorcery; Iraq for violent crimes; Golo-Waka for theft and consumption of cannabis, and DDP’for crimes against the public administration.

The institute is in very poor condition: the vast majority of detainees sleep directly on the floor in conditions that barely meet the minimum hygiene standards and where the food is prepared and distributed in unsanitary conditions. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Elisabetta Zamparutti is deputy in Italian parliament and treasurer of Hands Off Cain.