Lansana Conté
Lansana Conté was president of Guinea for twenty-four years, from the coup of April 1984, a week after Sékou Touré's death, to his own in December 2008, a colonel from the coastal Susu people who opened the camps and the country Touré had closed, brought back the French and the IMF and the bauxite companies, was elected under a multi-party constitution in 1993, 1998 and 2003 in votes his opponents did not accept, and spent his last years diabetic, invisible and ruling through a circle whose corruption brought the general strike of January 2007 and the shooting of a hundred and thirty demonstrators. The army took over the day after he died. He was born about 1934 near Dubreka, served in the French army in Algeria, came home at independence, and rose to command the Guinean forces on the Guinea-Bissau front in the 1970s. He was deputy chief of staff when Touré died in a Cleveland hospital on 26 March 1984, and on 3 April the army took the radio, dissolved the party and freed the prisoners of Camp Boiro. The first years undid Touré. The state farms and shops sold, the currency replaced, the exiles invited home, the French advisers and the World Bank in, and the economy, with a third of the world's bauxite under it, still one of the poorest in the world. He survived a coup by his prime minister Diarra Traoré in 1985, whom he had shot, and a mutiny of the army in 1996 that burned the palace around him, which he ended by promising the soldiers a rise. The constitution of 1990 and the election of 1993, which he won with fifty-one per cent after the constitutional court annulled the opposition's strongholds, and the removal of the term limit by referendum in 2001, were the politics. The wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone next door, whose refugees Guinea took by the hundred thousand and whose rebels raided across the border in 2000, were the geography. By 2006 he was flown to Switzerland for treatment and governed by fax, and the unions' strike of January 2007, demanding that he go, was broken by the presidential guard with a hundred and thirty dead before he conceded a consensus prime minister he then removed. He died on 22 December 2008 and a captain's junta announced itself six hours later.
- Lived: 1934 CE – 2008 CE
- Nationality: Guinean
- Roles: president, general
