BISSAU, Nov 28 (AFP) - A special envoy from a west African regional group
has arrived in Guinea-Bissau to try to help resolve the country's political
crisis, diplomatic sources reported here Tuesday.
   General Idrissa Sire Traore of Mali arrived in the capital late Monday to
help defuse tension after a purported coup bid by General Ansumane Mane
against President Kumba Yala last week went sour.
   Traore met with Yala and passed a message on to him from the current
chairman of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Mali's
head of state Alpha Oumar Konare, and was also due to meet other leading
political figures on Tuesday.
   Guinea-Bissau authorities said Monday they had arrested almost 200 army
officers and politicians, along with separatist fighters from neighboring
Senegal, whom they accuse of working with the now fugitive general.
   Mane fell out with the president last week over a series of military
appointments, but fled following clashes in and around the capital Bissau.
   Mane, a former military ruler, proclaimed himself army chief and "supreme
commander" of a revived junta, but fled after loyalist forces overcame his
men
in fighting on Wednesday and Thursday that fighting 10 dead.
   Traore also met with the United Nations special representative in
Guinea-Bissau, Samuel Nanan Sinkam and the country's Archbishop Jose
Camnato.
   Both are members of a mediation team which also includes the Guinean and
Gambian ambassadors which is seeking to resolve the political crisis without
bloodshed.
   ECOWAS, an economic and security grouping of 16 nations, was already
militarily involved in the first Guinea Bissau crisis in 1998 and 1999.
   Between June 1998 and May 1999, Mane led the military in an insurrection
against then President Joao Bernardo Vieira, when each accused the other of
trafficking in arms to Casamance separatists.
   Hundreds of people were killed and Vieira was eventually ousted.
   hts/tm/nb

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