OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — Gunfire erupted close to the presidential palace. Army vehicles raced by the streets as civilians fled. The nation’s president vanished from view.
The small West African nation of Guinea-Bissau gave the impression to be hurtling towards a army coup on Tuesday — the most recent in a spate of army takeovers throughout a swath of Africa up to now yr that has signaled a worrisome democratic backslide. However hours later, the nation’s chief all of a sudden reappeared to declare he had thwarted his armed foes.
Addressing the native information media, President Umaro Sissoco Embaló mentioned that “many” members of his personal safety forces had been killed in what he termed a “failed assault towards democracy” with attainable hyperlinks to drug trafficking. Others had been arrested, he mentioned, however he couldn’t say what number of.
“It wasn’t only a coup,” he mentioned. “It was an try and kill the president, the prime minister and all the cupboard.”
The dramatic turnabout, after hours of heavy gunfire that drew nervous statements from the United Nations and regional organizations, was a uncommon excellent news story for Guinea-Bissau — a coastal nation bordering Senegal and Guinea.
Guinea-Bissau has weathered at the least 4 profitable coups — the final in 2012 — and maybe a dozen tried ones because it gained independence from Portugal 48 years in the past.
However the loud wave of worldwide alarm that the tried coup generated was a mark of rising jitters within the West Africa area, the place, after years of halting democratic progress, a rash of army takeovers has stoked rising fears of “coup contagion.”
Final week, within the landlocked nation of Burkina Faso, troopers seized energy and introduced a suspension of the Structure. Within the final yr and a half alone, there have been army takeovers in Mali, Guinea and Chad. Additional east, in Sudan, the army additionally seized management three months in the past.
As Guinea-Bissau plunged into uncertainty for a lot of Tuesday, United Nations Secretary Normal António Guterres mentioned it pointed to a worrisome pattern.
“We’re seeing a horrible multiplication of coups, and our sturdy attraction is for troopers to return to the barracks, and for the constitutional order to be absolutely in place,” he mentioned.
President Embaló of Guinea-Bissau, a former military normal who got here to energy in 2020 following a disputed election the earlier yr, had completed a cupboard assembly on the presidency on Tuesday when gunfire erupted outdoors, he mentioned.
Armed attackers tried to enter the constructing however have been repelled, he mentioned with out elaboration. They have been “nicely ready and arranged” and “could possibly be associated to folks concerned in drug trafficking,” he added.
Whereas most of the most up-to-date army takeovers have been fueled by common anger on the failure of elected governments to stem rising violence by Islamist and different armed teams within the Sahel, the huge area south of the Sahara, the prospect of a coup in Guinea-Bissau was much less shocking.
Political instability has been a relentless in Guinea-Bissau, a rustic of about 1.4 million folks.
After the nation’s 11-year battle for independence resulted in 1974, its new leaders have been confronted with making an attempt to unify an especially numerous inhabitants, a lot of whom have been unfold out over an archipelago of 88 islands. Since then, there have been so many coups and tried coups that the counts range. A lot of the turmoil has been fueled by the nation’s standing as a significant transit hub for drug smuggling.
Within the 2000s, the United Nations labeled Guinea-Bissau Africa’s first “narco state” for the big quantities of South American cocaine that have been touchdown there earlier than being smuggled into Europe. The drug financial system has fueled corruption in authorities and the army, destabilizing the nation’s fragile politics, mentioned Jonathan Powell, an affiliate professor on the College of Central Florida, who research coups in Africa.
“The drug commerce is vital in Guinea-Bissau as a result of it’s been really easy for that business to hijack the loyalty of many people within the higher echelons of the armed forces,” he mentioned.
There have been 214 tried coups in Africa since 1950, as much as the current one in Burkina Faso, Mr. Powell mentioned his analysis had proven. Precisely half of them — 107 — have succeeded, he added.
Guinea-Bissau has seen a number of high-profile assassinations up to now twenty years, together with the killing of President João Bernardo Vieira in 2009, and a mutiny during which the military chief of workers was killed in 2003.
However the nation has loved a interval of relative political stability for the reason that final profitable coup in 2012, partially because of what the United Nations termed a “peacebuilding mission.” However the mission was wound down in December 2020.
When President José Mário Vaz accomplished his time period in workplace in 2019, it was the primary time a democratically elected chief had finished so within the nation’s post-independence historical past. Even so, the prospect of one other coup appeared to not part residents as experiences of one other violent confrontation on the presidency started to flow into on Tuesday.
Reached by cellphone, a number of folks described a rising unease in Bissau in regards to the gunfire, but mentioned they have been persevering with with their regular actions.
Mamadu Jao, a senior official with ECOWAS, mentioned he was at a market round noon when information of the gunfire unfold by phrase of mouth. “For the second all the things is calm right here and individuals are going about their enterprise,” he mentioned.
Ruth Maclean contributed reporting from Yaoundé, Cameroon, Rick Gladstone from New York and Mady Camara from Dakar, Senegal.
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