Rival armies set up disarmament committee

Rival forces in Guinea Bissau have set up a committee to oversee the disarmament of all armed units in the country, AFP said today (Tuesday) citing military sources in the capital, Bissau. Representatives of the West African peacekeeping force, ECOMOG, will also be on the committee which was formed yesterday. The committee will take an inventory of weapons in the country and register the number of men under arms. “It would be desirable to have the heavy weapons under control,” the Togolese commander of the ECOMOG force said. “Once this is completed we will avoid any risk of war.” According to AFP, a military spokesman for the loyalist troops said over state radio that the weapons collection would be a difficult and lengthy affair, as it was in the Central African Republic and Liberia. The protagonists in the Guinea Bissau conflict are President Joao Bernardo Vieira and the leader of the self-styled Military Junta, cashiered armed forces chief of staff General Ansumane Mane. Some 3,000 Guinean and Senegalese back Vieira’s loyalist forces while at least 90 percent of the Guinea Bissau army support Mane, whom Vieira fired over accusations of arms smuggling to Senegalese separatists. Mane said Viera was guilty of that charge. Under a fragile peace accord signed in November 1998, supposedly to end a five-month civil war, Guinean and Senegalese troops are to leave as ECOMOG troops arrive in the country. On Friday, Mane give Senegalese troops 48 hours to leave the country, with the arrival of ECOMOG troops. The last of the ECOMOG troops were to have disembarked in Bissau late yesterday. Meanwhile, Mane has said his movement has no proof of French military involvement in the Guinea Bissau conflict, other than the transport of ECOMOG troops to the theatre of operations. He was responding to accusations by pro-junta Prime Minister-designate Francisco Fadul and by a Roman Catholic priest that a French warship had shelled anti-government positions in last week’s fighting in the capital. French President Jacques Chirac denied the charge.