Courtesy : Joseph Petit. West Africa has seen a series of successful coups in recent years. In Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, they took place in countries weakened by jihadist movements. Military officers took power, alleging their frustration with the performance of civilian regimes and international partners. They quickly broke with France and, more broadly, with Western countries.
Guinea offers a very different context: jihadism is still only a potential threat, and the junta is rather close to France. The approach of the scheduled end of the transition end is raising tensions. The process of returning to constitutional order has made very little headway, the socio-economic situation is poor, tensions in the army persist, protests are mounting and repression is increasingly brutal. They were arrested in the middle of the night, outside any legal proceedings.
The government claims they were abducted by unknown assailants, and it is not known whether they are still alive. How did it come to this? He had won the ensuing election, organized under highly questionable conditions. Huge demonstrations organized by the FNDC and the UFDG had not been enough to make him back down, and repression had resulted in around a hundred deaths over the years.
Doumbouya promised to organise elections, not stand in them, and return power to a civilian government. An agreement seemed possible. The FNDC, which demanded the presidency of the National Transitional Council CNT , the transitional legislative assembly, in order to influence the course of events, was offered only the Ministry of Youth, which it declined. In the end, the CNRD appointed as head of the CNT a civil society figure with a reputation for opportunism, and allocated only very few seats to political parties, in an obvious attempt to marginalise them.
It succeeded in winning back a few individuals, often of little importance or dissident within these groups. As for the civilian government the junta appointed, it serves at its pleasure β the junta has already gone through three Prime Ministers. The government enjoys limited room for manoeuvre and is under the close control of the CNRD, which directly oversees the most sensitive issues, such as the controversial iron-ore mining project in Mount Simandou, worth billions of dollars and still not operational a decade after initial deals were struck.
