webGuinée
Diplomatie. Guinée — Etats-Unis d'Amérique

John H. Morrow
First American Ambassador to Guinea.

New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. 1968. 291 p.

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X
Soviet Shortsightedness

Often as I walked beside the ocean in the evening during 1961, 1 could not help but wonder about the speed with which Russia and its satellites had moved into Guinea in 1958. Walt Rostow had pointed out in 1960 that there had been a distinct shift in Communist policy toward Asia, the Middle East, and Africa at the close of the Korean War. Rostow had maintained that the new Communist policy was based upon the concept that the Soviet Union could make use of the aspirations of the peoples and the governments of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa without resorting to force. Here I was in Guinea seeing this very thing come to pass and observing the validity of Rostow's idea that the Communist policy in developing countries since 1953 had been based upon the exacerbation of any possible points of friction between the developing countries and Western powers. The Soviet Union as well as the other Communist bloc countries had entered Guinea through the open door of economic aid and technical assistance, and by so doing had built up an image of willingness to aid an emerging nation, in contrast to Western reluctance to lift a hand.
I was reminded of the unsuccessful attempt on the part of the Soviet Ambassador in December of 1959 to mar the obviously good effects of the Touré visit to the United States by publishing a report that the United States had endangered the life of the President of Guinea by refusing to grant permission to land the IL-18, on which Touré was being brought from Eastern Europe to North Africa, on the last leg of his series of state visits. Supposedly the IL-18 had developed some kind of difficulty and had requested permission to land at the U.S. military air base in Libya. I was confronted with this report at a reception at the Présidence by an obviously agitated official from the Guinean Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I listened carefully to his statement and reassured him that I would report to him as soon as I had all the facts in hand. I told the Guinean official that I felt positive that no American would do anything that might endanger the life of President Touré. I sensed that here was the hand of Soviet Ambassador Solod, attempting to create sufficient friction between the United States and Guinea to nullify the warmth generated by the successful Touré trip to the United States. I did not give my Soviet counterpart the satisfaction of seeing me leave the Présidence right after my conversation with the Guinean official. Instead of going to the residence in Donka after the reception, I went to the chancery to prepare a query concerning the Libyan matter.
I received a reply two days later. I decided not to dignify this ploy of Ambassador Solod's by going to the Guinean Foreign Ministry with my reply. I decided instead to wait until that evening and deliver my reply at the reception at the Présidence in honor of the safe return of President Touré from his montli-and-a-lialf visit to foreign capitals. At the Présidence I waited until I was standing in a group that included Minister N'Famara Keita, Minister Fodéba Keita) Acting Foreign Minister Louis-Lansana Béavogui, and a Foreign Ministry official. After exchanging greetings and a few bantering remarks, I announced that I wanted to give my answer to the report which I had received two days ago concerning the alleged American involvement in endangering President Touré's life. I said that in the first place the report was an unmitigated falsehood, put out by somebody who wished to disturb the cordial Guinea-U.S. relations, or else by somebody who would be much better off incarcerated in a Siberian work camp. The Guinean Ministers grinned at this observation.
I then asked the Foreign Ministry official whether the person who had told him the story had told him also that there were two airfields in Libya and that the IL-18, if it really wanted to land, had only to notify the airfield where passenger planes entering Libya always landed. The official admitted that he had not been told anything about the existence of an airfield for passenger planes in Libya and seemed somewhat confused. I asked him if it didn't strike him as somewhat odd that the pilot of the IL-18 had approached a military airfield under the pretext that he needed to land and had made no effort whatsoever to communicate with or to land in the airfield regularly used by planes such as the IL-18. I then turned and pointed to President Touré, who was circling among the guests in the crowded reception room, and said that he certainly looked hale and hearty to me, and to the best of my knowledge the plane had carried him to his destination in Morocco, and from thence to Guinea, without mishap. I concluded that this whole matter of endangering President Touré's life must have been the figment of the imagination of someone suffering from African sunstroke. Everybody in the group, including the Foreign Ministry official, laughed heartily. I shook hands with each one and then left the group to engage President Touré in conversation concerning his recent trip.
President Touré made no allusion to any incident over Libya, and I, of course, made no mention of the nature of my conversation with his officials. The President thanked me very warmly for the reception which had been given him in the United States and expressed his appreciation for the sincere manner in which Americans had made the Guinean delegation and himself welcome.
As I assessed the situation after the reception, I decided that my Soviet counterpart had received no mileage from his sabotage effort. just before leaving the Présidence that evening, I had gone up to the Soviet Ambassador and said that I hoped the pilots and the plane that had brought President Touré to Conakry had made a safe return trip. I was smiling as I spoke to Solod, and he returned the smile and said the return trip had been without a mishap.
Speaking of Ambassador Solod reminds me of another incident during the visit to Guinea made by Patrice Lumumba in August 1960, when President Touré decided to take Lumumba for a ride in his open Cadillac throtigh the streets of Guinea and indicated that the members of the diplomatic corps as well as the Guinean Ministers should come along.
Rather than attempt to have each ambassador ride in his own car in the procession, it was decided that the Guinean Ministers and members of the diplomatic corps would follow the President's car in a bus.
Under ordinary circumstances, this would have been a sensible way to take care of a last-minute decision to transport members of the diplomatic corps. The only problem was that the bus to be used had been made in Czechoslovakia. To ride on such a bus in Czechoslovakia would probably be a delightful pleasure, but it was something of an ordeal in a tropical climate. The windows on this particular bus could open only a slight bit at the top, and since the bus was not air-conditioned, it was literally hot as Hades when filled with passengers. Nevertheless, when the Protocol Chief gave the word, I entered the bus by the side door and sat next to the Minister of justice, Damatang Camara. Other Ministers and several members of the diplomatic corps were distributed throughout the bus, but I noticed that Ambassador Solod was not aboard.
At that moment I looked out the window of the bus, which was parked in the huge yard of the Présidence near the automobiles of the various diplomats, and I saw Ambassador Solod and his chauffeur trying to make their way unobtrusively to the Ambassador's car.
What I did next cannot be found in any protocol book for diplomats; but then protocol was something that was sometimes honored in the breach in Guinea, where the political as well as the physical climate of the country was always hot. Obviously, Ambassador Solod had decided that he was not Several days after the publication of this article, however, and after its discussion in diplomatic circles, Ambassador Solod appeared on the little beach at Donka accompanied by three very attractive women. I did not know whether his guests were members of his Embassy staff or whether they were the wives of his staff members. I had gone into the water shortly after noon, and was coming out for lunch before returning to the chancery. I met Solod as I was entering the residence gate. Looking at him and at his three guests, I asked him quietly if these were his new submarine tenders. Solod looked at me quizzically, laughed, and then ran down to dive into the ocean. Neither he nor I ever made another allusion to the subject of submarines. I should add, however, that the Russians were not building a submarine base off the Los Islands between 1959 and 1961. Of this I am certain.
I noticed toward the end of January that Ambassador Solod was becoming increasingly preoccupied and less jovial than he usually attempted to appear. I concluded that he was getting on edge as the time drew near for the visit of Presidium President Brezhnev. On the night that President Touré held a reception at the Présidence in honor of Brezhnev and the other members of the Russian delegation, I called aside my colleague Hugh Jones, the British chargé d'affaires and told him that I intended to play a little joke on Solod. I didn't tell Hugh Jones what I intended to do, but merely asked him to stand by. In a few moments Solod approached with President Brezhnev and introduced us. Solod gave our names, titles, and the countries we represented. I could not help but notice that there was a world of difference in appearance, manner, and dress between Nikita Khruslichev and Leonid Brezhnev. Brezhnev was solidly built, but not fat. He would have made a good wrestler or fullback. He looked like a businessman and was dressed very smartly in a dark blue suit, black shoes, white shirt, and blue tie, with his white handkerchief showing at the proper length. Brezhnev spoke no French, but he had an excellent French-speaking interpreter.
We talked in generalities for a moment, and then I told Ambassador Solod that I had a question to ask his visitor. I turned to President Brezhnev and with a perfectly straight face told him that his representative, Ambassador Solod, was doing such an excellent job in Guinea that I wondered whether or not there was any chance that he might ever be sent to the United States or to the United Nations. I said that I thought it would be a wonderful experience for him, and it would be a pity if he did not get the opportunity to see my country. As soon as Solod realized what I was saying, he began to get very red in the face and looked somewhat anxiously in the direction of his visiting dignitary to see how he was reacting. Was Solod wondering whether Brezhnev would think that he had prompted me to do this to help him get out of Guinea, the heat and humidity of which bothered him greatly? Was he hoping that Brezhnev was going to realize that I was talking with my tongue in my cheek, and that he would not take the suggestion seriously? At any rate, that sheepish grin, which I had seen once before during the Lumumba visit, appeared on Solod's face as he awaited Brezhnev's answer. The latter merely said that he had no jurisdiction over the placing of diplomats, as this was handled in another bureau. He asked me how I liked my tour of duty in Guinea, and after my reply excused himself to continue on to meet other members of the corps.
Neither Solod nor I ever referred to my suggestion to Brezhnev, even though he returned to the beach at Donka after Brezhnev's departure, accompanied by his wife, who had come to Guinea on the same plane that brought the Brezhnev delegation. Solod's wife found the Guinean climate very difficult, and she only visited the post periodically. A pleasant, middleaged woman, she spoke neither French nor English, and depended on her husband to interpret for her.
I used to ask myself why it was that despite the Soviet $35 million line of credit and the friendly side of Solod's personality revealed to the Guineans, the Russians were making such slow progress in Guinea. There were times when the Czechoslovakians appeared to be the fair-haired boys because they had rushed in the “small arms” in the early days of Guinean independence. I used to wonder also why it was, if the odds in Guinea were so great against the West, and the West was doing so little to overcome these odds, that the Communist bloc countries did not succeed in taking over Guinea during this transition period.
It was true that although Sékou Touré was a Marxist in orientation, he was not a Communist and he had no desire to see his country taken over by the Russians or the Chinese. For that matter, he didn't want to see Guinea taken over by the Americans, French, British, or Germans. Despite Touré's wishes, however, Guinea's flirtation with the Communist bloc countries, made possible by the treatment received by this republic after it had legally achieved its independence, carried Guinea almost to the brink. That Guinea did not become a satellite may be attributed partly to luck, partly to Touré's maneuvers, and partly to mistakes made by representatives of the bloc countries. There were certainly no specific actions taken by the Western powers in the crucial days of Guinean independence that may be pointed to as having prevented Guinea from becoming a Communist satellite. Neither can it be said that the West deliberately did not act because it wanted Guinea to have a bitter experience with the bloc countries. Let it not be forgotten that the Russians have not lost out as yet in India, and they seem to have worked out a mariage de convenance with Nasser's United Arab Republic.
Today it is my considered judgment that if the Russians had not had such confidence in the Master Plan for Africa, and such disdain for Guinean intelligence and Guinean administrative ability, they might have succeeded in scoring an overwhelming success and securing Guinea as a bridgehead for further African conquests. The Russians made the mistake of looking down their noses at the Guinean people, and began trying too hard to drive a bargain too quickly. They were not alone in this, for other bloc representatives erred similarly. But the Russians became impatient and imperious, and they exposed their hand in Guinea just as they did in the Congo during the early days of the crisis there.
The Russians, as did representatives from other bloc countries, came to Guinea, a country with widespread unemployment, and did not hire a single Guinean to work in their chancery or in their residences. The Guineans, a friendly people by nature, could not understand this and interpreted it as distrust. Furthermore, Russians and other bloc technicians, as for example Czechoslovakians, became involved in advising Guineans in the various Ministries and in aid projects. These technicians were not always tactful, and they did not seem to sense the importance of African dignity. They became too dogmatic, too exacting, and too unsympathetic. At the same time the supplies and equipment sent to Guinea by the Communist countries were not coming up to Guinean expectations. The stories of inferior consumer goods foisted on the people were only too true. The real strain in Soviet-Guinean relations became apparent with the hasty departure of Ambassador Solod in December 1961, after the Government decided that his Embassy was involved in aiding Russian-trained or Russian-motivated Guineans to take over the Youth Organizations and infiltrate the Guinean Democratic Party and the Government.
There is, of course, more to it than what I have outlined above. It appears to me that the Eastern European Communist countries forgot to include Communist China in their Master Plan for Africa. When Khrushchev was praising the Communist Chinese in a speech given in 1955 for “throwing off the yoke of foreign oppression,” he little dreamed that these same Communist friends were going to become in 1960 and 1961 his chief competitors in Guinea, as well as other parts of Africa. Incidentally, the Communist Chinese had operated in Guinea at a disadvantage. They made the mistake of sending as their first Ambassador a man who could not speak French, and he was accompanied by a woman interpreter in a predominantly Muslim country. With the arrival of French-speaking staff members, and the later offer of a $25 million interest-free loan, the Communist Chinese were in business. Instead of leasin- villas for their personnel, the Communist Chinese bought up a number of desirable ones along the ocean front in Donka. They were the first to set up a trade fair in Conakry, and this fair drew great throngs from all over Guinea. (The United States would not even consider setting up a trade fair in Guinea.)
I learned that from time to time Chinese technicians would arrive in Guinea by plane, spend a day or so at the Hôtel de France in Conakry, and then disappear into the interior to begin the work of teaching Guinean farmers how to increase rice production. Some of the farmers looked upon these newcomers as possible threats to their livelihood, and the Guinean Government had to see to it that the Chinese Communists did not arrive in too great numbers.
Daily I passed a small store, not far from the center of Conakry, which the Embassy of the People's Republic of China kept well stocked with literature-in French-that praised the “operation boot-strap” which had brought victory to the Chinese. The Guineans were assured in this literature that a similar victory could be won by the Guinean people if they were willing to sacrifice and to follow closely the example of their nonwhite friends, the Chinese. The Chinese were not reluctant to let the Guineans know that their experience offered more authentic hope for the Republic of Guinea than the experience of white people anywhere in the world.
The efforts of the Chinese Communists in Guinea were aided and abetted by the arrival of Nguyen Thong, a French-educated scholar, who was sent as Ambassador by North Vietnam. The few staff members of the Embassy of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam were very aggressive. Their versatile information officer obligingly kept Radio Guinea well supplied with anti-American propaganda, the use of which sent me charging into the office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs with a stiff oral protest.
Observers on the scene in Guinea long before there was open discussion in international circles about a Sino-Soviet dispute could see that the Russians and the Chinese Communists were in competition and set on going their separate ways. Some highly placed admirers of the Chinese Communists among the Guinean Ministers did not hesitate to point out to me the significant parallel between the Guinean and the Chinese experiences. Numerous were the trips made by Guinean delegations not only to Moscow, but also to Peiping.
The longer I stayed in Guinea the more I became convinced that we should think in terms of a Chinese Communist-Russian Communist confrontation rather than in terms of an East-West confrontation. There were, of course, the daily confrontations of Western and Eastern diplomats in the local struggle for the minds and the attention of Guinean officials. There were similar confrontations in the efforts to gain insight into the objectives of the Touré Government. But rather than a confrontation, the basic policy of Western powers in Guinea at this period seemingly consisted of uncoordinated, half-hearted “foot-in-the-door” operations. On the other hand, the Chinese and the Russians went all out in Guinea with the realization that success in this new republic might open doors elsewhere in Africa.
What puzzled me somewhat was that some Guineans who spoke admiringly of the Communist Chinese did not seem to be bothered by the ruthless suppression of the individual and the shocking cost in human beings which had marked the ascendancy of communism in China. The same observation could be made of those who felt that certain phases of the Soviet experience might prove helpful in Guinea. These Guineans were more interested in the much-talked-about material accomplishments of the Chinese, in an amazingly short time, which had elicited praise even from Khrushchev. After all, the highly organized Guinean Democratic Party was geared to keep the people on their toes, and it wanted quick results. If it were a calculated risk that investissement humain might turn out to be something other than voluntary labor, the risk still had to be taken for the sake of rapid progress.
It is my belief that the Russians made a serious reappraisal of their economic and technical assistance programs in Guinea. This was particularly in order with the placing of Ambassador Solod over the bureau dealing with the Levant and sub-Saharan Africa. This question of reappraisal was true for the other Communist bloc countries still operating in Guinea. They realized that their efforts had not been marked with overwhelming success, despite their sponsorship of scholarship and aid programs, their sending and receiving of delegations, their attempts to move into Guinea on all fronts -diplomatic, nondiplomatic, economic, social, and cultural. They were forced, as were the Western powers, to reconsider Guinean foreign policy, which had as its cornerstone “positive neutrality.” For a long time the West considered this policy to be a façade that covered up distinct leanings toward the East. The East also considered it to be a façade that concealed an affinity for the East. Guinea's overt disenchantment with the Soviet Union merely strengthened the belief that more effective techniques and approaches had to be found to cope with the Guinean situation as well as with situations in other emerging African nations.
Numerous African students, including some Guineans attending institutions in Communist bloc countries, have attempted to return home or have requested permission to change to Western educational institutions because they encountered racial discrimination in the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries. Students from Ghana and Nigeria involved in racial incidents which resulted in injury to some students, as well as the death of one, have been particularly vigorous in protesting specifically against racial discrimination in the Soviet Union. Some African students with whom I have discussed this problem have appeared to be thoroughly disillusioned as a result of their experiences in Eastern Europe.
The Republic of Guinea has served as a laboratory as well as a meeting place for the West and the East. This republic, born much as an infant that has had its umbilical cord so rudely and unskillfully severed that healing from ordinary medication has been unsuccessful, has shown the world how difficult it is for a developing country, even within the United Nations, to maintain its sovereignty. It has shown the bitter experiences which threaten a nation beset with economic, political, cultural, and social problems. Although nominal independence was achieved in 1958, there is no question that the struggle is still going on in Guinea to make this independence a reality.

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