THE PRESIDENT of Guinea-Bissau, João Bernardo Vieira, was assassinated by the military yesterday in what was widely interpreted as a retaliatory attack for the killing of the army chief of the volatile and drug-corrupted west African state just hours earlier.
It is not immediately clear whether the murder of Mr Vieira, who was at the centre of his country’s politics for almost three decades, was linked to the growing cocaine trade out of west Africa. But the dead president and senior military officers have been accused of profiting from it.
The military put out conflicting statements over the death of Mr Vieira (69). The navy commander, José Zamora Induta, initially said that the president was shot after admitting that he gave the order for the killing of the army chief of staff, Gen Tagme Na Waie, who died in a bomb attack at the military headquarters on Sunday.
Cmdr Induta described the president as “one of the main people responsible for the death of Tagme”.
After the African Union called yesterday’s assassination a “criminal act” and military leaders met to discuss the crisis, announcing that they would respect the constitutional order, Cmdr Induta offered a different account. He said that “the death of our forces chief of staff has no connection with that of President João Bernardo Vieira” at the hands of “a group of people whom we do not know”.
However, tensions between the president and the military had been steadily rising in recent months in a country long afflicted by political upheaval. Soldiers attacked the president’s office shortly after parliamentary elections in November in what may have been a coup attempt, and there were reports of increasingly bitter hostility between Mr Vieira and Gen Tagme.
The International Crisis Group recently said that some in the military were opposed to “a reform that could force them into retirement and cut them off from lucrative drugs trafficking income”.
However, one of Mr Vieira’s main rivals, former president Mohamed Iala Embalo, has claimed that Mr Vieira was one of the country’s leading drug traffickers. Mr Vieira apparently did not respond to the charge.
West Africa has been an increasingly popular drug shipment route in recent years. The Nigerian military was heavily involved in shipping heroin via Liberia when it was the occupying force there during and after the civil war in the 1990s. Since then, Latin American cartels have discovered the region as an alternative route to Europe.
The United Nations, African Union, EU, Portugal and the United States have condemned the killings and urged the restoration of order. – (Guardian service)