Unpaid railway workers stage rare protest demonstration

Several hundred former employees of a now liquidated Guinean state railway company have staged a rare protest demonstration in the capital Conakry to protest that their long-delayed pay cheques bounced when they were presented for payment at the central bank. Over 400 former railway employees blocked main roads with old train parts on Thursday night to protest that the cheques they had just been issued to cover pay arrears had been rejected because there was insufficient money in the account concerned. Police intervened and eyewitnesses said five people were arrested. The protestors were former employees of the state-run railway which once ran from Conakry on the coast to Kankan in the central highlands of Guinea. Trains stopped running on the line in 1987 and the railway company itself was wound up three years later. The protestors told IRIN that they represented 257 former employees of the railway company who had been made redundant, but were still owed money 14 years later, and 187 pensioners. Some of them had recently received cheques ranging in value up to five million Guinean francs (the equivalent of US$1,800 at the current rate of exchange on Guinea's volatile parallel market), but they had all bounced. The demonstrators said the World Bank had provided the government with money to settle these arrears, which they now wanted paid in cash. Opposition demonstrations in Conakry are rare and seldom tolerated by the government of President Lansana Conte, who has ruled this West African country with an iron hand for the past 22 years. A demonstration of about 200 people called by a small opposition party in Conakry last Friday to protest at rising food prices and the continued detention without trial of several people arrested last year in connection with a suspected coup plot, was swiftly broken up by the police. The march was called by the Union of Democratic Forces in Guinea, an opposition party led by veteran politician Ba Mamadou.