History of Guinea-Bissau

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History of Guinea-Bissau deals with the former Portuguese Guinea , today's Republic of Guinea-Bissau .

Before the colonial era

The Arab- Islamic culture influenced the Berber ethnic group in northern Africa in the 7th century . The empire of Ghana , founded in the 8th century, lay in the southern border area between today's Mauritania and Mali . Due to raids by Arabian, North African Berber tribes on the empire of Ghana, the African population sought refuge in what is now Guinea-Bissau. In 1240 Ghana became part of the Kingdom of Mali , which until the discovery of the country by the Portuguese also included the area of ​​what is now the Republic of Guinea-Bissau.

Portuguese Guinea

Coat of arms of Portuguese Guinea from 1935

In their search for mineral resources, the hunt for slaves and the search for a way to bypass the customs systems north of the Sahara in trade with the African hinterland, the Portuguese sent King Alfonso V from the house of Avis and on behalf of the time of the reign Henry the Navigator ships to the coastal region of West Africa even before America's discovery .

In 1446 Nuno Tristão reached the coast of what would later become "Portuguese Guinea". In order to supply the market in Lagos in the Algarve with slaves from West Africa, Portugal gradually built bases in the region. In 1614 the colony of Cacheu was founded, which was administered from Cape Verde . In 1753 the Bissau colony was founded. Bissau was founded here in 1765 as a center for the slave trade. The area became less important when Portugal banned the slave trade in 1836 and slavery per se in 1858. In 1879 the country officially became a colony of Portuguese Guinea and was separated from Cape Verde. Parts of the territory claimed by Portugal were incorporated into its colonial empire by France . After the Berlin Congo Conference, the two colonial powers France and Portugal established the exact boundary between their property in a treaty dated May 15, 1886. Portuguese control over the hinterland remained very limited, until 1915 Portugal was able to subdue the previously independent tribes on the mainland; in the Bissagos archipelago only in 1936. In the 1940s, Bissau, the capital since 1941, had a certain importance as an alternate airport for the Panamerican clipper .

In 1951, like the other possessions, it became a Portuguese overseas province , i.e. part of the mother country with limited self-government. At that time Portuguese Guinea had about 510,000 inhabitants, around 1960 the population was estimated at 600,000, of which about 2,600 were Europeans. In theory, the Assimilado rule allowed black Africans to become citizens of Portugal with equal rights. In Portuguese Guinea, only 1,478 Africans had achieved this status by 1960. Portuguese Guinea was considered the poor house of the Portuguese empire like the mother country itself in comparison to the other western-oriented states of Europe.

In practice, the equal rights for Portugal was of little importance, as in the era of Salazar were equally authoritarian rule motherland and overseas territories and political activities by the Portuguese police organization Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (PIDE) was largely avoided.

Amílcar Cabral on a GDR postage stamp

In 1955 Portuguese Guinea was given its own constitution and financial and administrative autonomy. But this limited autonomy could not prevent the formation of an independence movement Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC) in 1956. Under the leadership of Amílcar Cabral, it formed to oppose Portuguese rule. After soldiers fired at striking dock workers in the port of Pidjiguti in 1959, killing around 50, the PAIGC received a large number of visitors.

With the independence of the neighboring states of Guinea in 1958 and Senegal in 1960, the PAIGC was able to rely on the support of the local governments, especially Ahmed Sékou Touré . The headquarters of the PAIGC was in Conakry . In addition, there was close cooperation with the independence movements in the other Portuguese territories, especially with those of Angola and Mozambique . In addition, the PAIGC received material support from the states of the Eastern Bloc , and many of its leading personalities were trained there.

Locals were excluded from voting until 1961. In 1961 Portugal repealed the so-called Native Statute of 1954. The population became Portuguese citizens and was able to vote in local elections.

War of Independence

Situation in Portuguese Guinea in 1970
In 1974, PAIGC soldiers hoist the flag of the independent Guinea-Bissau

A guerrilla war had taken place since 1963, but because of the country's isolation, it received less international attention than the one in Angola, for example. The PAIGC acted as a joint independence movement for Portuguese Guinea and Cape Verde. The strength of the Portuguese troops is said to have been around 35,000 at the end of the 1960s. In the course of time, the PAIGC was able to bring most of the country under its control and established its own administration. There was a women's suffrage in the areas that were controlled by the PAIGC liberation movement. Women took an active part in the liberation struggles.

On September 24, 1973, Guinea-Bissau unilaterally declared its independence from Portugal; the year before, a government-in-exile had been formed in Conakry . The provisional capital was Madina do Boé . This step was supported by the UN General Assembly with 93 votes to 7. Portuguese governor and commander in chief was António de Spínola from 1968 to 1972 . His book Portugal eo Futuro ("Portugal and the Future"), in which he dealt with the colonial wars, among other things, set the movement in motion that culminated in the Carnation Revolution on April 25, 1974 . As commander in chief, he was able to record some successes by relying on the use of napalm and Agent Orange like the USA in the simultaneous Vietnam War . There were also successful attacks against the rear bases of the PAIGC in Guinea. Amílcar Cabral was shot dead on January 20, 1973 in Conakry during a conflict within his own ranks. Another version is that Portuguese agents had Cabral killed.

After the Carnation Revolution, both sides quickly agreed to end the war and Portugal recognized Guinea-Bissau's independence on September 10, 1974. During the Eleven Years' War, Portuguese soldiers fell in 1875 and around 6,000 of a total of 10,000 PAIGC fighters.

After independence

One-party state

Luis Cabral

Amilcar Cabral's half-brother Luís Cabral became the first president of the now independent country after he had already taken over the leadership of the PAIGC. In the period that followed, Guinea-Bissau leaned closely towards the Soviet Union and maintained good relations with the People's Republic of China and Portugal. In 1977 the general active and passive right to vote for women was introduced.

On September 28, 1978 João Bernardo Vieira became the new head of government. He succeeded Constantino Teixeira as Prime Minister. The PAIGC was the country’s unity party . Cabral was overthrown in a military coup and on November 14, 1980, the initiator of the coup, the PAIGC veteran and previous Prime Minister Vieira, became president. The background to the overthrow were tensions over a recently passed constitution that would have restricted the prime minister's power. All members of the newly formed Revolutionary Council came from Guinea-Bissau, the previously strongly represented Cape Verdeans were ousted. The overthrown Cabral and other Cape Verdeans were initially charged with the deaths of 500 political prisoners during his tenure and were charged with mass murder. The coup meant that the unification of the two states that had been sought so far did not materialize. Relations were initially broken off, on January 19, 1981, at the instigation of President Aristides Pereira, the Partido Africano da Independhência de Cabo Verde (PAICV) was founded on Cape Verde to replace the previously common unity party PAIGC. In June 1982 the two countries resumed diplomatic relations.

After thirteen months in prison, the fallen Cabral was exiled to Cuba . In 1984 a new constitution was passed. Guinea-Bissau was confirmed as the presidential republic and Vieira as chairman of the newly formed State Council as president and head of government in one person. In the parliamentary elections in April 1984, the unity party PAIGC received 96% of the vote.

Transition to democracy

With the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc at the end of the 1980s, Guinea-Bissau gradually broke away from its hitherto socialist economic policy and one-party rule. Since 1991, an amendment to the constitution in Guinea-Bissau allowed other political parties except the PAIGC. In the same year Carlos Correia was appointed head of government. The death penalty was abolished in 1993 after the last official death sentence was carried out in 1986 . As a result of an attempted coup in 1993, leading opposition politicians were arrested and the planned parliamentary elections were postponed. In 1994 there were elections with several candidates, which Vieira won. In the first ballot on July 3, 1994, Vieira had received 46.2% of the vote against seven opposing candidates. In the simultaneous parliamentary elections, in which eight parties took part, the PAIGC was able to assert itself as the strongest force with 62 of the 100 seats. In the runoff election on August 7, 1994, Vieira prevailed with 52.02% against Kumba Ialá, who was excluded from the PAIGC in 1989, from the Partido para a Renovação Social (PRS) founded by Ialá in 1992 . Since May 2, 1997, Guinea-Bissau has been part of the West African Economic and Monetary Union and replaced the previous currency, Guinea Peso, with the CFA franc . In the same year, Manuel Saturnino da Costa was relieved of his post as Prime Minister, succeeded again by Carlos Correia.

Civil war

After the dismissal of the Chief of Staff Ansumané Mané for alleged arms deliveries to separatists in the Senegalese region of Casamance , the army under the leadership of Mané rebelled against Vieira on June 7, 1998. The president only had 400 soldiers in the presidential guard, but he received support from troops from neighboring Senegal and Guinea. Around 3,000 foreigners were evacuated and 150,000 residents of the capital Bissau fled to the surrounding area. Neither the rebels nor the foreign troops could achieve a clear victory. On August 26th a peace agreement was reached, which should be monitored by ECOMOG peacekeepers. On December 3, 1998, a transitional government independent of Vieira was formed with Francisco Fadul , an employee of Mané, as prime minister.

A series of negotiations and ceasefire agreements failed to resolve the conflict until Vieira was overthrown in May 1999. He fled to Portugal and received asylum. From May 7, 1999, Mané initially acted as provisional head of state for seven days, until Parliamentary President Malam Bacai Sanhá , also from the PAIGC, was installed as interim president. In the presidential elections on November 28, 1999, Sanhá took first place, in the run-off elections on January 16, 2000, Kumba Ialá then won with around 72% of the vote. Caetano N'Tchama becomes Prime Minister .

In November 2000 there was another civil war, this time brief. A dispute over promotions and posts for Ansumane Mané and his supporters escalated when Mané appointed himself commander in chief on November 20. From November 23, there was heavy fighting between the troops of President Ialá and those of Mané. On November 30th, Mané was caught by government troops and shot either during the battle or only after his capture.

After the civil war

In November 2002, Kumba Ialá had parliament dissolved. He acted increasingly authoritarian and was confronted with allegations of corruption and government crises. In terms of foreign policy, there were tensions with the Gambia , which he accused of supporting his opponents and which he threatened to “crush”. A transitional government under Mário Pires followed . On September 14, 2003, Ialá was overthrown by Veríssimo Correia Seabra , a longtime PAIGC member. Ialá and his ministers were arrested. Seabra appointed a transitional government under the civilian Henrique Pereira Rosa . During his term of office, parliamentary elections took place on March 28, 2004, in which the PAIGC was the strongest party with 45 seats, but missed an absolute majority. Carlos Gomes Júnior became Prime Minister. Former Prime Minister Correia was killed during a military uprising.

João Bernardo Vieira

In the first ballot for the presidential election on June 19, 2005 , the former heads of state Ialá, Sanhá and Vieira ran. Sanhá emerged victorious, but in the second ballot on July 24, 2005, Sanhá was defeated by Vieira. After some dispute about the correctness of the result, Rosa was handed over to Vieira on October 1, 2005. A few weeks after taking office, Vieira announced the dismissal of the government of Carlos Gomes Júnior from the PAIGC and on November 2, 2005 appointed the former vice-president of this party, Aristides Gomes , as the new head of government.

Since several MPs left the PAIGC in protest after Vieira was elected President, the ruling party was dependent on coalition partners. In spring 2007 an alliance was formed with the PRS and the social democratic PUSD, and Martinho Ndafa Kabi became the new prime minister . The coalition broke up after just 16 months. In the parliamentary elections on November 16, 2008, the PAIGC won a two-thirds majority of the seats, and Carlos Gomes Júnior was again head of government.

A week after the parliamentary elections, President Vieira's residence was attacked by rebel soldiers. The coup attempt failed, but led to a worsening of the conflict between Vieira and the military leadership. On March 1, 2009, the army chief of Guinea-Bissau, General Batista Tagme Na Wai, was killed in an attack on the military headquarters . Military circles gave Vieira the responsibility for the attack. A day later, President João Bernardo Vieira himself was murdered by supporters of Na Wai. A military spokesman said the Vieiras assassination was not an attempted coup; the government of Carlos Gomes Júnior remained in office and announced an investigation into the attacks. Observers suspected an involvement of Colombian drug traffickers who used Guinea-Bissau as a hub for the cocaine trade .

In 2009 presidential elections were held, from which the former independence fighter Malam Bacai Sanhá emerged as the winner. At Christmas 2011, Sanha survived a coup attempt when he was in Paris for medical treatment. However, on January 9, 2012, he died there in hospital.

On the evening of April 12, 2012 at around 8.30 p.m., a military coup in the capital Bissau was carried out by units led by Mamadu Turé Kuruma . They captured President Raimundo Pereira and Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Júnior and took control of the city. However, they assured that they did not want to seize power permanently. They justified the coup with the fact that the Mission of the Angolan Armed Forces to Help Reform the Guinea-Bissau Armed Forces (MISANG) had planned to forcibly disempower the Guinea-Bissau military. The withdrawal of this mission was announced three days before the coup and finally carried out at the end of May. However, since the coup took place between the first round of the presidential election won by former Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Júnior and his PAIGC party and the runoff election between him and the second strongest candidate Kumba Ialá , scheduled for April 29, many assume that the The actual motivation for the coup was to prevent the election of Carlos Gomes Júnior as president.

An agreement was reached between the coup plotters and some opposition parties, in particular the PRS of the former President Kumba Ialá, but to the exclusion of the PAIGC, to suspend the constitution in parts for a transitional period of one to two years and not to hold new elections (parliament, president) to let. As part of this agreement, the previous President of Parliament, Manuel Serifo Nhamadjo, was appointed transitional president. In the previous first round of the presidential election he was the third strongest candidate with 16% of the vote after Carlos Gomes Júnior and Kumba Ialá. He appointed Rui Duarte Barros as temporary prime minister. Gomes Júnior's PAIGC does not recognize this transitional government, nor does the EU, which also imposed travel sanctions on members of the military command that led the coup. Carlos Gomes Júnior and Raimundo Perreira were released and were able to travel to the Ivory Coast . On April 12, 2012, Carlos Domingos Gomes Junior, the favorite in the upcoming presidential election on April 29, was arrested by soldiers at his home. The military took control.

In the presidential election of May 18, 2014, the former Finance Minister José Mário Vaz (PAIGC) won 61% of the vote. He was the country's first president to rule for a full term. In the 2019 presidential election , the former General and Prime Minister Umaro Sissoco Embaló from the PAIGC spin-off Madem G15 won . He swore himself in, although the PAIGC had pending a lawsuit against the election result in the Supreme Court.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Guinea . In: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon . 4th edition. Volume 7, Verlag des Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig / Vienna 1885–1892, p. 916.
  2. ^ History of Bolama, the first capital of Portuguese Guinea (1879-1941), as reflected in the Guinean National Historical Archives. British Library, Endangered Archives Program, September 6, 2017, accessed June 30, 2020 .
  3. ^ A b c June Hannam, Mitzi Auchterlonie, Katherine Holden: International Encyclopedia of Women's Suffrage. ABC-Clio, Santa Barbara, Denver, Oxford 2000, ISBN 1-57607-064-6 , p. 10.
  4. ↑ Estatuto dos Indígenas Portugueses das Províncias da Guiné, Angola e Moçambique, Decreto-Lei nº 39.666, 20 de Maio de 1954.
  5. ↑ - New Parline: the IPU's Open Data Platform (beta). In: data.ipu.org. Retrieved October 2, 2018 .
  6. ^ Mart Martin: The Almanac of Women and Minorities in World Politics. Westview Press Boulder, Colorado, 2000, p. 161.
  7. ↑ Christine Pintat: Women's Representation in Parliaments and Political Parties in Europe and North America In: Christine Fauré (Ed.): Political and Historical Encyclopedia of Women: Routledge New York, London, 2003, pp. 481-502, p. 488.
  8. ↑ International Herald Tribune : 6 Guinea-Bissau troops arrested in attempted coup from November 24, 2008 (English; accessed March 2, 2009).
  9. ↑ Tagesschau : Putschists kill presidents of Guinea-Bissau ( memento from August 1, 2010 on WebCite ) from March 2, 2009 (accessed on March 2, 2009).
  10. ^ Deutsche Welle : Guinea-Bissau: Chaos in the failed miniature state of March 2, 2009 (accessed on March 3, 2009).
  11. ↑ Berliner Umschau: Politics: Drug Problems in West Africa from February 20, 2009 (accessed on March 3, 2009).
  12. ↑ Dominic Johnson : West Africa's Drug Paradise Without a Guide . In: taz of January 10, 2012
  13. ^ Military coup and shots in Guinea-Bissau
  14. ↑ Público (Lisbon), April 14, 2012 and April 15, 2012
  15. ↑ Kanal-A, April 10, 2012 ( Memento of February 8, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  16. ↑ Radio Cultura Angolana ( Memento of the original from February 8, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.radioculturaangolana.com
  17. ^ "According to the will of the coup regime, there should be no elections in the next two years" . Spiegel online April 19, 2012 , accessed April 19, 2012.
  18. ↑ Público (Lisbon), April 19, 2012
  19. ↑ Manuel Serifo Nhamadjo allafrica.com, accessed February 29, 2016
  20. ^ A b Council reinforces sanctions against military junta in Guinea-Bissau European Council of Ministers of May 31, 2012
  21. ↑ Der Standard Kompakt, May 21, 2014, p. 5

literature

  • Franz Ansprenger: Africa. A political geography (on politics and contemporary history; Vol. 8/9). Colloqium-Verlag, Berlin 1962.
  • John Gunther : Inside Africa . Hamilton Books, London 1955.
    • German: Africa from within. A dark continent . Humanitas Verlag, Konstanz 1957.
  • Walter Hawthorne: Planting rice and harvesting slaves. Tranformations along the Guinea-Bissau coast . Heinemann, Portsmouth 2003, ISBN 0-325-07050-4 .
  • Eric Morier-Genoud: Sure road? Nationalisms in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique . Brill, Leiden 2012, ISBN 978-90-04-22601-2 .
  • Ronald Segal: African profiles . Penguin, Harmondsworth 1962.
    • German: African profiles. Prestel, Munich 1963.

Web links

Commons : History of Guinea-Bissau  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files