Nation votes for democracy on Sunday

Few dispute the fact that the main issues now in Guinea-Bissau include lasting peace and stability, observers say, but there is less consensus on the identity of the person the 500,000 voters will choose on Sunday to steer their nation on a peaceful, stable course.

Representatives of political parties said they had registered no significant incidents of violence during the election campaign and that they hoped things would remain that way after the polls. “Whichever party wins,” the leader of the Frente da Liberacao da Guine (FLING), Catengul Mendy, told IRIN, “stability is a point on which there should be a consensus.”

Guinea-Bissau and its 1.2 million people have had to live with instability for much of its recent past. A liberation war started in 1963 ended in independence in 1974. Six years later, in 1980, President Luis Cabral was overthrown by Joao Bernardo Vieira, who survived two alleged coup attempts before the bulk of the armed forces, grouped under the self-styled Military Junta, rose up against him on 7 June 1998.