What a great country Guinea is!
Guinean President Moussa Dadis Camara was shot in the head by his military aide and chief of the presidential guard, Aboubacar “Toumba” Diakite. Shooting an unarmed person is not usually a complicated affair, but he bungled the job because Diakite’s only previous experience was in mowing down peaceful demonstrators. That is, instead of killing the president, he only wounded him. This raises obvious questions about the man’s qualifications to lead the country’s security forces.
After the failed assassination attempt, Diakite fled the compound. How the president’s bodyguards failed to seize him is anybody’s guess. Machine gun-toting soldiers are patrolling the streets in search of the outlaw, but he has eluded capture. This raises even more concerns about the effectiveness of the country’s security forces.
Camara was flown to a hospital in Morocco for treatment. By leaving the country at this risky moment, he runs a very real risk of being overthrown. This clearly does not speak very well about the quality of Guinea’s medical care.
Russia is not Guinea, of course, but I have the feeling that it will be soon.
Judge for yourself. Sergei Magnitsky, a 37-year-old lawyer who was working on the Hermitage Capital Management case, died Nov. 16 in a Moscow prison. This is how he died: Browder accused senior Interior Ministry officials of stealing more than $230 million and ordered Magnitsky to blow the whistle on the crooks. Magnitsky subsequently was arrested on charges that he helped Browder’s investment fund evade more than $3.25 million in taxes. While being held in pretrial detention at Moscow’s notorious Butyrsky prison, Magnitsky died after he was denied medication for pancreas problems.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said in an Nov. 27 interview in France that he does not know what “the lawyer” (refusing to refer to Magnitsky by name) was imprisoned for. Putin did add, however, that since Magnitsky had been arrested, there had to have been a good reason for it.
Move over, Lieutenant Diakite — It looks like you’ve got company!
The prosecutor general is demanding that Britain extradite Yevgeny Chichvarkin, former head of Yevroset, who quarreled with the management of a division of the Interior Ministry known as “K.” Meanwhile, a video has come to light titled “Thugs from the K Bureau.” It records a certain Major Filippov — who was born in 1974 and who looks like a white version of Diakitt — being arrested as he takes a $200,000 bribe that he insists was meant for his boss, Groshev.
Fillipov, our fearless 35-year-old crime fighter, does not go into battle unequipped. He has a black Mercedes-Benz Gelandewagen, 30,000 euros ($44,500) in addition to the $200,000, three superelite Vertu cell phones, credit cards from a few different banks and his K employee identification papers. The only attribute that looks comically out of place is a hokey brass keychain with the Interior Ministry’s “MID” initials stamped on its face.
Now the London court is reviewing that video footage, and the Russian prosecutors must somehow convince the Brits that the K division did not try to extort money from Chichvarkin and that his refusal to pay was not the reason for all of his current troubles.
I wonder what Guinean President Camara tells his people when he gives a televised address? I think he tells them that Guinea needs to modernize and that the United States is their greatest national security threat.
Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.