By
Saliou Samb
CONAKRY (Reuters) – Guinea security forces used guns, teargas and truncheons on
Thursday to scatter protesters angered by the government’s handling of upcoming parliamentary
elections, witnesses said.
The government said later in the day that 17 members of the
security forces had been injured and, amid rumours of further protests planned for Friday, banned all
demonstrations.
Tensions have been rising in the West African country between the administration
of President Alpha Conde and the opposition, which has accused him of attempting to consolidate power
by pre-rigging the polls in his favour.
Wrangling over how to organise the vote has caused the
date of the poll, initially meant to come on the heels of Conde’s election in late 2010, to backslide
repeatedly.
“The CENI (independent national electoral commission) is corrupt,” Kerfalla Sylla,
one of the protesters in the capital Conakry, said.
Witnesses said more than two thousand people
had joined the protest – the first of several planned by the opposition – before police charged it, and
that at least two people were injured with live rounds.
“I was running and I saw an old man
struggling with a soldier who was holding a weapon to him. I wanted to fight the soldier and he shot
me, the bullet hit me in the foot,” protester Mamadou Aliou Diallo told Reuters.
Another
protester said he saw a man shot in the back during the clashes, in which some demonstrators lobbed
chunks of concrete at the police.
A government spokesman said that the demonstration had been
authorised, but that police were forced to intervene after the protesters became unruly. He gave no
details on injuries.
Speaking on state television on Thursday evening, Alhassane Conde, minister
of territorial administration, cited the injuries and other violence as a reason to ban further
protests.
“I call on the security forces to ready themselves. Anyone who decides to protest
without authorisation will bear the full force of the law and the state,” he said.
Conde last
month scrapped a July 8 election date to give officials more time to fix problems in the voter
registration system, a move welcomed by opposition parties.
But opposition figures also have
demanded that electoral body officials resign and be replaced over concerns that they are biased in
Conde’s favour.
The standoff has heightened tensions in the coup-plagued nation and rekindled
divisions between the country’s two most populous ethnicities, the Malinke and the Peul.
Conde,
a Malinke, narrowly defeated Peul candidate Cellou Dalein Diallo in the 2010 polls.
The European
Union, which cut off aid programmes in Guinea after a 2008 coup, has said it will only resume full
cooperation in the country after the parliamentary polls.
Guinea is the world’s top supplier of
the aluminum ore bauxite and its iron ore riches have drawn billions of dollars in planned new
investments from companies like Rio Tinto and Vale.
