Guinea's Conte, a Reforming Ex-Military Ruler
December 19, 1998 - 0:0
CONAKRY Guinea's President Lansana Conte, who won re-election on Thursday for a second and constitutionally final five-year term, is a former military ruler credited with opening up the once closed marxist state. Along with successive military rulers in Nigeria, Conte has been at the forefront of regional peacekeeping efforts in crisis-prone West Africa in the past decade. His country is wedged between war-ravaged Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau and he has sent Guinean troops on peacekeeping missions in all three states.
Refugees from the neighboring states now total more than 10 percent of Guinea's population of just over seven million. After seizing power in a 1984 coup shortly after the death of independence president Ahmed Sekou Toure, Conte went on to consolidate his rule through the ballot box in a turbulent presidential election in 1993. Opposition parties cried foul after the poll, before and during which scores of people died in clashes between rival factions.
The Supreme Court annulled results from opposition leader Alpha Conde's stronghold. Conte's Party of Unity and Progress went on to win 71 of parliament's 114 seats in a June 1995 general election. The mainly Muslim nation was largely calm until a February 1996 pay revolt by soldiers turned into a coup attempt. Guinea belongs to me and I belong to Guinea because I have nowhere else to run to if something goes wrong here, he said before the 1993 election.
He took over his mineral-rich but impoverished state on Sekou Toure's death in a U.S. hospital on March 26 1984. Sekou Toure had ruled from independence from France in 1958. A member of the minority Soussou tribe, Conte took on a nation suffering from the effects of 26 years of socialist- style economic central planning. He installed a semi-civilian government and began dismantling the most ruthless police state in West Africa and trying to improve relations with neighboring countries and potential creditors, particularly France. Conte has since reciprocated an official visit by President Henri Konan Bedie of neighboring Ivory Coast, for long at daggers drawn with Sekou Toure's Guinea. In July 1985, Colonel Diarra Traore, a co-leader of Conte's coup but whom Conte had removed from the post of prime minister, attempted to seize power while the president was attending a West African summit in Togo. Troops loyal to Conte swiftly regained control, close to 100 senior military and police officers of the Malinke tribe were summarily executed, and property belonging to Malinkes was looted or destroyed by Soussou hoodlums.
On his return from Lome, Conte pronounced the phrase wo fatara meaning well done in the Soussou language. Conte began following International Monetary Fund and World Bank-sponsored free-market reforms in 1985. He legalized political parties in 1992 in response to pressure from the opposition and unrest in the army and civil service. Parliamentary elections in June 1995, when Conte's party won a majority in the National Assembly, passed off more peacefully and the country remained relatively calm until a February 2 1995 army pay dispute turned into a coup attempt.
Conte was born in Moussayah, a small village in the prefecture of Dubreka near Conakry, in 1934. Conte narrowly escaped death when mutinous troops blasted his Chinese-built presidential palace with shellfire as he huddled in the basement. But unlike in most other African states, the trial of accused coup perpetrators was open and none was sentenced to death. Conte attended local primary and Qoranic schools, then at 16 he entered the military academy in Bingerville, Ivory Coast, followed by that of Saint Louis, Senegal, three years later.
In 1955 at the age of 21, he joined the French army and in 1957 was posted to Algeria during the war of independence. When Guinea opted for independence from France, Conte was among the first Guinean soldiers who chose to come home and serve. Conte's first wife Henriette, a Christian, did not bear him any children but he has five children with his second wife, a former Miss Guinea. (Reuter)
Refugees from the neighboring states now total more than 10 percent of Guinea's population of just over seven million. After seizing power in a 1984 coup shortly after the death of independence president Ahmed Sekou Toure, Conte went on to consolidate his rule through the ballot box in a turbulent presidential election in 1993. Opposition parties cried foul after the poll, before and during which scores of people died in clashes between rival factions.
The Supreme Court annulled results from opposition leader Alpha Conde's stronghold. Conte's Party of Unity and Progress went on to win 71 of parliament's 114 seats in a June 1995 general election. The mainly Muslim nation was largely calm until a February 1996 pay revolt by soldiers turned into a coup attempt. Guinea belongs to me and I belong to Guinea because I have nowhere else to run to if something goes wrong here, he said before the 1993 election.
He took over his mineral-rich but impoverished state on Sekou Toure's death in a U.S. hospital on March 26 1984. Sekou Toure had ruled from independence from France in 1958. A member of the minority Soussou tribe, Conte took on a nation suffering from the effects of 26 years of socialist- style economic central planning. He installed a semi-civilian government and began dismantling the most ruthless police state in West Africa and trying to improve relations with neighboring countries and potential creditors, particularly France. Conte has since reciprocated an official visit by President Henri Konan Bedie of neighboring Ivory Coast, for long at daggers drawn with Sekou Toure's Guinea. In July 1985, Colonel Diarra Traore, a co-leader of Conte's coup but whom Conte had removed from the post of prime minister, attempted to seize power while the president was attending a West African summit in Togo. Troops loyal to Conte swiftly regained control, close to 100 senior military and police officers of the Malinke tribe were summarily executed, and property belonging to Malinkes was looted or destroyed by Soussou hoodlums.
On his return from Lome, Conte pronounced the phrase wo fatara meaning well done in the Soussou language. Conte began following International Monetary Fund and World Bank-sponsored free-market reforms in 1985. He legalized political parties in 1992 in response to pressure from the opposition and unrest in the army and civil service. Parliamentary elections in June 1995, when Conte's party won a majority in the National Assembly, passed off more peacefully and the country remained relatively calm until a February 2 1995 army pay dispute turned into a coup attempt.
Conte was born in Moussayah, a small village in the prefecture of Dubreka near Conakry, in 1934. Conte narrowly escaped death when mutinous troops blasted his Chinese-built presidential palace with shellfire as he huddled in the basement. But unlike in most other African states, the trial of accused coup perpetrators was open and none was sentenced to death. Conte attended local primary and Qoranic schools, then at 16 he entered the military academy in Bingerville, Ivory Coast, followed by that of Saint Louis, Senegal, three years later.
In 1955 at the age of 21, he joined the French army and in 1957 was posted to Algeria during the war of independence. When Guinea opted for independence from France, Conte was among the first Guinean soldiers who chose to come home and serve. Conte's first wife Henriette, a Christian, did not bear him any children but he has five children with his second wife, a former Miss Guinea. (Reuter)