Friday evening, Kerfalla Camara, the chief of staff of the Guinean army, announced in a radio broadcast that he has ordered the end of the general strike and the resumption of work on Monday, by requisitioning all the workers in the administration, in commercial establishments and in private enterprises!

However, in the course of the day, the deputies – pro-government in their crushing majority, the opposition having boycotted the last elections because of frauds – had unanimously decided not to prolong the state of siege which gave full powers to the army, as demanded by president Lansana Conté. According to the Guinean Constitution, the soldiers no longer have any legal authority to give orders to the workers and to the population.

But the army has force on its side, not a constitutional scrap of paper or bourgeois legality, but the force of weapons. Last pillar of the criminal regime of Conté; seriously ill and experiencing only 2 hours of lucidity per day; and who is only a marionette, the army believes itself all powerful. However it is impossible to put a soldier behind each proletarian to oblige them to work! To try to break the strike, the soldiers will need recourse to increased terror, to devote themselves to new massacres to intimidate the workers, meanwhile bestial repression has already killed more than a hundred since the beginning of the year and hundreds of people have been arrested over the last week.

The military will easily be able to continue their crimes, because the Guinean regime has the support of the States of the area (who send their emissaries to act in concert with Conté) and of the imperialist powers, starting with France which has already dispatched a warship to the gulf of Guinea and has announced that it was ready to intervene with its soldiers based in Gabon (under the pretext of guaranteeing the safety of French citizens in the country): all these States want to defend the "stability" of Guinea because this stability is necessary for the exploitation by the multinationals of the mining riches of the country and for the stability of the capitalist order in all the area.

Without this support (including military in the case of the Liberian combatants), the regime would probably have already collapsed. The days to come will be decisive: where the dictatorship will succeed in breaking the fight of exploited, or the strike will crush the criminal regime. Whatever the immediate outcome, the disinherited proletarians and Guinean masses have as their only allies the workers of the other countries. They need the class solidarity of the proletarians of the large capitalist countries; they need the struggle of the proletarians here against French imperialism, the real gendarme of Africa.

International Communist Party, February 24, 2007

Correspondence: Ed. Programme, 3 rue Basse Combalot 69007 Lyon (France)