The current fighting in Guinea is not a stand-alone war - it is part of the
messy and complicated regional conflict which started in Liberia more than
10 years ago.

Although the violence has only recently moved to Guinean soil, the country
has been affected by, and involved in, the conflict from the very start.

When Charles Taylor - now Liberian president, but then an obscure rebel
leader - launched his rebellion at Christmas 1989, he did so very close to
the Guinean border, in the mineral-rich area where Liberia, Guinea, Sierra
Leone and the Ivory Coast all meet.

One of the first things that happened was that local people ran away, across
the border into Guinea. They were the first of an eventual 500,000 refugees.



Refugee camps in Guinea are full of Sierra Leoneans

When the other countries of West Africa first formed an intervention force
to try to restore order in Liberia - and stop Charles Taylor - Guinea was a
founder member.

It allowed some of the politically active Liberian refugees to organise and
recruit, and became the rear base for one of the armed movements known as
Ulimo-K.

So Charles Taylor and Guinean President Lansansa Conte have always been on
opposite sides.

Spreading conflict

Fighting began to spread to Guinea itself last year, already having engulfed
its other neighbour, Sierra Leone.



Refugees were harrassed by police and soldiers, and attacked by local youths

There was trouble on the Sierra Leone border around Forecariah and Kindia,
not far from the capital, and also hundreds of kilometres to the east, where
Guinea borders Liberia.

At first these were hit-and-run raids, with the attackers coming across,
killing civilians and burning villages, and then retreating back across the
border, taking with them whatever they could loot. They showed no sign of
taking and holding ground.

But the attacks did have one major effect - they turned the local Guinean
population against the refugees living among them.

Refugees were harrassed by police and soldiers, and attacked by local
youths. The authorities accused them of collaborating with the attackers,
and confined them to their camps, which were often dangerously close to the
fighting.

Alliance

President Conte's first reaction was to blame his old adversary, Charles
Taylor. The Guinean Government declared that it was the victim of a Liberian
invasion, by people greedy to get their hands on Guinea's wealth.



UK forces are helping the government tackle rebels in Sierra Leone

Meanwhile a group calling itself the "Rassemblement des Forces Democratiques
de Guinee" had been phoning international radio stations, and a hitherto
unknown spokesman, Mohamed Lamine Fofana, had been claiming the attacks were
the work of the Guinean opposition.

In fact both things seem to be going on at the same time.

In the attacks near the Sierra Leone border, the ones closest to Conakry,
some Guineans do seem to have been involved.

There have been persistant reports of a Guinean rebel group training inside
Liberia, with, at its core, Gbago Zoumanigui and the army mutineers who fled
after narrowly failing to overthrow the government in 1996.

After training, the rebels are reported to have moved across the border to
Sierra Leone, and linked up with the Liberian-backed rebel movement there,
the RUF.

This alliance of Guineans and Sierra Leoneans, with a few Liberians thrown
in, seems to be responsible for the attacks near Kinda and Forecariah.

Most of the initial Guinean military effort was in this area, perhaps
because it is relatively close to the capital, and this group has now been
pushed well back across the border, with most of the fighting now taking
place around Kambia, an RUF-held area inside Sierra Leone.



The UN want to move the refugees to safer areas

But in the forest region, along the border with Liberia, the initial attacks
were an all-Liberian affair, the result of President Taylor's forces
mounting cross-border raids against Liberian rebel bases around Macenta.

The presence of these Liberians - still known as Ulimo-K - is an open secret
in Guinea. As soon as the attacks started, they were out in Macenta for all
to see, manning road blacks and taking an active part in the defence of the
city.

The battles in this area are now becoming very serious, with aircraft and
helicopter gunships, as well as heavy artillery being used in the border
area.

The attackers are no longer just raiding villages, they have attacked the
two main towns in the region, Macenta and Gueckedou, occupying parts of them
for a time, driving out the population and leaving buildings in ruins.

The Guinean army is clearly struggling, and this may be in part because the
Liberian dissidents, whom they had armed and relied on to help them, have
proved unreliable allies. Some at least are reported to have changed sides,
and joined the attacking Liberians.

Regional alarm

The spread of the war to Guinea has caused ripples of alarm around the
region. Neighbouring countries first of all concentrated on trying to get
President Taylor and President Conte to resolve their differences and to
stop harbouring and encouraging each other's dissidents. This had little
success.



Guinea has never been very high on the international agenda, but the spread
of the conflict has rung a lot of alarm bells around the world

But since both Guinea and Liberia were claiming to be the innocent parties,
both said they would be very happy if the border between them could be
sealed, to prevent attacks from the other side.

So the West African Economic Community, Ecowas, has begun work on a border
monitoring force, to secure the border. Both sides agreed to this, even
President Taylor, despite the fact that similar Ecowas forces have always
been against him in the past.

Preliminary reconaissance was done and a force commander - a Nigerian -
appointed, but the deployment of the monitoring force has been delayed by an
upsurge in fighting.

There seems no chance of its going ahead as long as pitched battles are
raging around the border.

International fears

Guinea has never been very high on the international agenda, but the spread
of the conflict has rung a lot of alarm bells, in West Africa and around the
world.



Many refugees want to return to their homes

The conspiracy theorists are talking once again in terms of a West African
domino theory, of a master plan fronted by Charles Taylor, but involving
Burkina Faso and the Ivory Coast, backed by Libya and approved by France.

This aims - they say - to reduce American influence, and break the power of
the too-dominant English speaking countries in the region.

The Liberian and Gambian dominos have already fallen, Sierra Leone, Guinea
and Guinea-Bissau are teetering, and after that Senegal and ultimately
Nigeria are threatened.

But you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see a more immediate
threat.

The international community has invested heavily in supporting the elected
government in Sierra Leone - there is a regional force there, and also a big
United Nations peacekeeping operation. Britain has sent troops as well.

But despite this, President Kabbah's government is still fragile. Sierra
Leone already has a hostile border with Liberia to the east, across which
the rebels move freely.

If Guinea falls into the hands of President Taylor and his friends - perhaps
as the result of a coup d'etat precipitated by the fighting - it would be a
disaster for President Kabbah and all his backers.

   Search BBC News Online




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