A SHOOT-OUT IN GUINEA-BISSAU

One should not speak ill of the dead, but it's hard to resist the
suspicion that the murder of the army chief of staff on March 1 and of
the president on March 2 in the small West African country of
Guinea-Bissau were linked to the drug trade in Africa's first
"narco-state."

On March 1, a powerful bomb blew up the military headquarters in
Bissau, the capital, killing Gen. Batista Tagme Na Waie, chief of
Guinea-Bissau's military, and severely wounding five other senior officers.

Less than 24 hours later, gunfire and rocket explosions were heard
near the presidential palace, and shortly afterwards it was reported
that President Joao Bernardo "Nino" Vieira had also been killed. The
army didn't even deny responsibility.

"President Vieira was killed by the army as he tried to flee his house
which was being attacked by a group of soldiers close to the chief of
staff Tagme Na Waie, early this morning," said spokesman Zamora
Induta. "The country will start up now. This man had blocked any
momentum in this small country."

But it is unlikely that the quarrel was really about how best to run
the country.

The shoot-out had been coming for some time. Last November President
Vieira narrowly survived a machine-gun and rocket-propelled grenade
attack on his residence by "renegade" soldiers.

The 400-strong militia he then created to protect himself from the
army was accused of shooting at General Tagme Na Waie in January, and
he army forced Vieira to disband it.

After that, Vieira knew that he was a dead man walking, and the bomb
that killed Tagme Na Waie was probably an attempt to get his
retaliation in first.

But this was not simply another in the long line of coups and
counter-coups that has characterized Guinea-Bissau's history since it
got its independence from Portugal in 1974.

Guinea-Bissau's politics were rough even when the stakes were very
small: Control of a poverty-stricken country of one and a half million
people whose principal export was cashew nuts.

Vieira himself first came to power in a coup in 1980, lost it in a
military mutiny in 1999, and subsequently went into exile as the
country was ravaged by civil war.

Then he regained power in an election in 2005 after the previous
president was overthrown by the army.

The stakes have got a lot bigger now, because the country has become
the main transit point for Colombian cartels smuggling cocaine into
Europe. More than half of Guinea-Bissau's territory is a maze of
offshore islands, and the tiny navy lacks the strength to patrol them.

There is not even a prison in the country, nor do the police own a
computer.

The money that the Colombians can splash around is irresistible to
many in the government and the army, and an internal struggle to
monopolize that money was the inevitable result.

Mostly the struggle has been invisible, but occasionally it came out
into plain sight, as when an aircraft suspected of carrying cocaine
was prevented from taking off last July by the judicial police, which
are under the president's control.

For five days army troops prevented the police from boarding the
plane.

When they finally let them on, there was no cocaine there any more,
but sniffer dogs went crazy when they were brought aboard. Justice
Minister Carmelita Pires subsequently received a number of death threats.

In another incident, in April, two soldiers were arrested in a vehicle
carrying 635kg of cocaine - but they were soon released from
detention, and have yet to stand trial.

Maybe the late President Vieira died because he was waging a gallant
campaign against the drug-lords who are taking over the country, but
it is at least as likely that he was just involved in a struggle with
the army over the proceeds.

In any case, the army has won, and the country's status as Africa's
premier narco-state is assured.

Six months ago, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on
the Security Council to impose sanctions against those involved in
Guinea-Bissau's drug trade, but nothing has been done - nor would
sanctions deter officials in a desperately poor country who have been
dazzled by the prospect of great wealth.

If even the Mexican state, a hundred times as big and a thousand times
as rich, faces defeat at the hands of the drug gangs, what hope is
there for Guinea-Bissau?

So what is to be done? What should have been done decades ago: End the
stupid "war on drugs," which destroys not only thousands of lives but
the integrity of entire countries.

Legalize the drugs, sell them under government licence to those who
want to buy them, and deprive the illegal drug industry of the
cash-flow that makes it so powerful.

The war is lost anyway: Nobody who wants the drugs in any Western
country has any difficulty in getting them, and the supply is so large
and reliable that the prices have actually dropped over the years.

Moreover, the whole war against narcotics (and other "recreational"
drugs like marijuana, amphetamines and psychotropic drugs) is utterly
hypocritical.

Other drugs that cause far more devastation, like alcohol and tobacco,
remain legal simply because they are used by far more people in the
West.

Alternatively, we could make them illegal too, and lose some even
bigger wars.