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Guinea-Bissau President Kumba Yala rejected on Thursday a proposal by his Senegalese counterpart to place UN military observers between their borders to monitor the movement of guerrillas fighting for a separate state in the south of Senegal, AFP reported.
“It is senseless for us to accept such a proposal since we do not constitute a threat to Senegal,” Yala told AFP. He said Senegal was free, as a sovereign state, to place observers on its side of the border.
Yala was reacting to a proposal the previous day by President Abdoulaye Wade for UN observers to monitor the borders for the possible infiltration of Mouvement des forces democratique de Casamance (MFDC) guerrillas from Guinea-Bissau to Senegal. Bissau rejects the Senegalese belief that guerrillas are using its territory to attack Senegal’s Casamance area.
The MFDC has been fighting the government in Dakar for 18 years for the independence of the Casamance, saying the area was administered by the French colonial power as a territory separate from the rest of Senegal.
As Wade announced his proposal on Tuesday, the BBC reported that armed “rebels” attacked another military outpost in the southern town of Niassia in which “two rebels and two government soldiers were said to have been killed”.
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