The Government Palace, where the President and the Prime Minister were supposed to be for an extraordinary council of ministers, was encircled by heavily armed men, according to the correspondents of AFP.
Le Monde with AFP
While fed shots continued in the government’s palace sector, in the capital of Guinea-Bissau, according to several correspondents of the France-Press agency (AFP) on the spot, the Secretary-General of the UN , Antonio Guterres, claimed Tuesday 1 February, in a statement, “the immediate judgment” of the fighting in Bissau and “full respect for the democratic institutions of the country”.
The Economic Community of West African States (Cédéao) also sentenced on Tuesday, in a statement published on social networks, what it considers as a “coup attempt” in progress and asked the military to “return to their barracks”.
The Government Palace, where the President, Umaro Sissoco Embalo, and the Prime Minister Nuno Gomes Nabiam, were supposed to be for an extraordinary council of ministers, was encircled by heavily armed men, found the correspondents of the AFP. No information was available at first on the exact cause of the shots.
The soldiers around the palace of the government, on the outskirts of the city not far from the airport, held the people at a distance. The surroundings were prey to movements of inhabitants fleeing places. The markets have emptied and banks have closed their doors. Many military vehicles charged with soldiers crisscrossed the streets.
Kyrielle of coup attempts
Guinea-Bissau, a small country of about 2 million frontier inhabitants of Senegal and Guinea, is subscribed to political strokes. Since its independence of Portugal in 1974, after a long war of liberation, it has known four putschs (the last, in 2012), a kyrielle of coup attempts and a waltz of governments.
Since 2014, it has committed itself to a return to constitutional order, which has not preserved repeated turbulence, but without violence. The country suffers from endemic corruption. It also passes for a hub of cocaine trafficking between Latin America and Europe. The armed forces play a pre-eminent role.
Since the beginning of 2020, Umaro Sissoco Embalo, a former general, is the head of state, following a presidential election in early assets by the African Party for the independence of Guinea and Cape Town -VERT, dominant training since independence. Mr. Embalo, 49, had forced his destiny in February 2020 by putting the presidential scarf and on the presidential palace, despite the persistence of the protest. No news has been publicly given by Mr. Embalo Tuesday afternoon.
The events of Tuesday, to the always unknown cause, inevitably evoke the standard putschs that agitate West Africa since 2020: in Mali in August that year and again in May 2021, in Guinea In September 2021 and Burkina Faso, at the end of January 2022. The situation in these different countries had to be discussed this week at a summit of the West African States, Cedao.