Guinea and Liberia

As I’m sure you’ve all read, there may have been a coup in Guinea yesterday. What does this mean for Liberia?

First, a brief overview of the Guinea-Liberia relationship since 2000. From 2000 to 2003 Guinea, under recently-deceased President Lansana Conte, supported Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rebels. These rebels attacked former Liberian President Charles Taylor’s government from the northwest of the country, and ultimately helped force Taylor to take refuge in Nigeria in 2003. Conte wanted revenge for Taylor’s support of rebel incursions into Guinea. In 2000 Taylor had used Revolutionary United Front (RUF) fighters, Liberians, and disgruntled Guineans to attempt to overthrow Conte. In 2001 Conte forced back the fighters with support from LURD forces. During this time, the US provided substantial support to Guinea’s military, which allowed the military to step up support for LURD. Up until recently, Guinea hosted thousands of refugees who fled Liberia’s civil war. There is an excellent 2002 International Crisis Group report that talks about most of this, available here.

So how could political instability in Guinea affect Liberia? I see two ways. First, the Guinean-Liberian border is porous. There have been rumors over the past few years that Guineans have recruited Liberian ex-fighters to cross the border and fight in Guinea. If more fighting breaks out in Guinea, this likely would start happening on a much larger scale. Second, the Kissi, Mandingo, Belle, Kpelle, and Mano ethnic groups in Liberia all have kinship ties to groups in Guinea. If a power struggle in Guinea took on ethnic dimensions–which is very likely–it could easily spread to Liberia.I’m not usually a fan of maps that show distribution of ethnic groups. Ethnic groups cohabitate with each other far more than these maps would make you thing. But I think it’s worth showing these maps, from 1973, because it demonstrates how ethnic groups are spread across Guinea (above) and Liberia (below), and how easy it would be for ethnic fighting to cross borders. Maps from here.