Guinée overview for RSR12 Engaging Marginalized Groups in the Design of Identification Systems in Africa (ID: P164513) Mike McGovern University of Michigan The situation in Guinée is significantly different from that in many other West African countries regarding the risks associated with new identification schemes. While Guinée shares the experience of other postcolonial nations in which ethno regional or religious identities have been instrumentalized in the context of multiparty democracy, this logic competes for space in the public debate with a different one. The ideology and practices of the socialist state that ruled Guinée for 26 years (1958-1984) instilled ideals of national identity and unity that have outlasted the regime that gave them birth. Like the ideal of pan-Africanism promulgated by socialist leader Sékou Touré, these concepts and practices attached to them counterbalance the all-or-nothing politics of the capture of the state by ethnic parties. The strong socialist state fully exercised its prerogatives to impose national law on anyone living within the frontiers of the country. The donor-mandated introduction of multiparty democracy in the early 1990s was accompanied by many of the attempts to undercut democracy that have been seen worldwide, including manipulation of electoral rolls, but Guinea has not experienced the same battles over citizenship and identity as linked to party politics as such countries as Côte d’Ivoire. The two groups that have experienced themselves as being most marginalized by the series of four post-colonial governments are the ethnic Fulbe and the group of small ethnic groups residing in the country’s southeastern rainforest, known collectively as “Forestiers.� The Forestiers are religious minorities (practicing Christianity and indigenous religions) as well as cultural outliers compared to the other c. 85% of the population. The Fulbe are culturally, religiously, and geographically central to the life of the region that became Guinee since long before colonization. Because of their traditional livelihood of cattle-keeping and their wide dispersal across most of West Africa, they have increasingly found themselves occasionally accused of being less “authentically� indigenous to Guinee than other groups who have traditionally worked primarily as smallholding farmers. Both of these forms of ethno-religious marginalization, however, are both relatively subtle and recent, and in some ways, the language of indigeneity and autochthony are recent introductions from neighboring countries such as Côte d’Ivoire. The concern for “indigenous groups� described in the concept note is welcome, but those implementing this policy in Guinée should be aware of the real danger that emphasizing these concepts has the potential to do more harm than good, especially in Guinee’s Forest Region, where inter-ethnic tensions are highest and where the language of indigenous/autochthonous precedence has fueled several large scale inter-ethnic massacres (killing as many as 500 individuals on two occasions). Cost In the past many Guineans have balked at the cost of photo IDs, even when they only cost about $1 equivalent. If digital national IDs are not free of cost, there will be a significant portion of the population that opts out of the program, especially if it is not clear what benefits they might derive from holding a new ID card. Only 41% of rural births are registered, according to UNICEF, despite the fact that a birth certificate is in principle required for children to attend school. Linking Identification to Other Sectors Two questions many Guineans are likely to have are 1. Whether the new identification regime is linked to voting rights and lists, and 2. Whether it will be linked to taxation regimes. As far as voters’ lists are concerned, there has been enough tampering that most Guineans have come to assume that the administration in power automatically manipulates the lists to their own advantage. Linking digital national ID and voting registration would thus undercut confidence and probably participation. Likewise, any inkling that a more comprehensive and technologically advanced ID system would facilitate taxation of citizens would be likely to cause many Guineans (both rich and poor) to evade the system. This researcher has known Guinean villagers to flee their villages and live in makeshift structures deep in the forest for two to three weeks in order to avoid paying a yearly head tax of about $2 equivalent. Gender West African women are often seen from other parts of the world as being disempowered, but that is not how many see themselves. Many Guinean women exercise considerable economic independence from their spouses, and in the precolonial period, women who were part of the Sande and Poro power associations exercised significant political power, including as chiefs. While the introduction of world religions and European colonization introduced new idioms of male domination, women maintained large degrees of financial, social and political independence throughout the colonial years. With Independence, the Socialist PDG government introduced programs of positive discrimination for women and girls in education, the armed forces, the civil service and the party-State. During the PDG’s 26-year rule, women became central to the operation of all sectors of Guinean society. The PDG government outlawed forced and child marriage, and enforced those laws partially. It was in fact the subsequent administration (which ruled from 1984 to 2008) that gradually attempted to usher women back out of the public sphere, reinstating what it saw as a more “traditional� gendered division of labor. The government obviously was able to exercise some influence in this regard, but many women, and some men, actively resisted such attempts to engineer a return of women to the domestic sphere. One dynamic that influenced Guinean society at about the same time (1990s onward) was the introduction of reformist strains of both Islam and Christianity, which both preached the necessity of patriarchal relations from a theological perspective. If there are any women who might be actively discouraged from taking digital national IDs in Guinea, they might be from these sectors. They are few in number, and may not be easy to interview, but Guinean members of “main line� Christian and Sufi Muslim denominations might be able to fill in this picture to a considerable extent. Refugees Through the 1990s, Guinea was host to a population of some 200,000 to 600,000 refugees from Liberia and Sierra Leone. After Côte d’Ivoire’s civil conflict began in 2002, several thousand refugees arrived from that country as well. After a series of cross-border attacks from Liberia and Sierra Leone in late 2000 and early 2001, there was a series of anti-refugee attacks that convinced many refugees to return to Sierra Leone. After the war officially ended in Sierra Leone (2002) and Liberia (2003) Guinea offered refugees a grace period after which those remaining in Guinea would be treated as foreign nationals resident in Guinea, and no longer afforded the protections or entitlements of refugee status. Guinea’s policy was in part the result of the ambiguous status of many of those who remained in Guinea. While most Sierra Leoneans were eager to return (partly because they had borne the brunt of the anti-refugee violence in 2000), some had made lives in Guinea, marrying Guineans, starting businesses, and beginning to educate their children in the Guinean French-language system. Among those who had come to Guinea from Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire, the situation was even more complex. Most of those remaining in Guinea had family on both sides of the border and self-settled in Guinean villages and towns. Ethnic Mandingos/Malinke had left Guinea in large numbers during the 1958-1984 socialist period, when the trade in which many Malinke families were involved was actively suppressed in Guinea. Upon returning to Guinea as refugees, many strove to diversify their options, registering as refugees and also seeking Guinean identity cards, and also registering members of their Guinean families who had never left as refugees in order to maximize their access to food distributions and other goods. This situation was rendered still more complex for the Liberian Mandingoes because in many parts of Lofa, Nimba and Bong Counties where they had lived, there were active attempts to ethnically cleanse villages of their Mandingo residents. This was partly a cause and a result of the fact that one of the major combatant groups in both the first (1989-1997) and second (1999-2003) Liberian wars, the ULIMO-K/LURD militia, kept its rear bases in Guinea, including in such refugee camps as the one in Kuankan, in Macenta Préfecture. While Mandingos had fractious and sometimes violent relations with ethnic Loma, Kpelle and Mano populations in Liberia, similar tensions arose in Guinea, too, leading to numerous small clashes and killings, as well as the two large massacres of roughly 500 people mentioned above, which took place in 1991 and 2013. In case this seems overly detailed and irrelevant to a national-level identification program, let me give a concrete example of why definite identification could be seen as a liability: During the 1991 massacre in N’Zerekore, over 500 people were killed in about 36 hours. The targets were the Malinke-Mandingo people with links on both sides of the Guinean-Liberian border. Many of them were also the products of mixed marriages of Mandingo fathers with Kpelle or Loma mothers, and spoke both languages. As busloads of people coming to N’Zerekore for the weekly Wednesday regional market were stopped by militias at roadblocks around the town, everyone was told to exit the vehicles, at which time Kpelle militia members began speaking to everyone in Kpellewo. Those judged to be Malinke/Mandingo were killed on the spot, but in the case where someone spoke good Kpellewo yet still seemed suspect to the militia members, they stripped off their clothing. Kpelle men and women receive elaborate raised scarification as part of their initiation into the men’s Poro and women’s Sande associations that mark the entry into social adulthood. In a very real sense, the existence of such cicatrizations is an indelible mark of identification each individual carries with them for life. In the case of the violence of that day in June, 1991, it also determined life or death decisions about dozens or even hundreds of people. The absence of identifying initiation marks meant death even for those who spoke good Kpellewo and claimed membership in that group. In such a context, people are intimately familiar with the urge to identify people in a definitive way as either belonging or not belonging to a socio-political group, even if the definitions of the group and its scale have shifted over time. Longstanding strategies for hedging national identity and holding multiple forms of documentation mean that people offered digital national IDs will probably worry about whether choosing to participate in such a program in one country will exclude them from doing so in another. Given the high premium people have placed on mobility as a strategy of survival going all the way back to the precolonial period, it is likely that many people will prefer no digital national ID to the possibility of being excluded from multiple and flexibly negotiated identities. In this, West Africans are rational actors, even if the basis for their rationality is not immediately apparent to those coming into the region from outside. Even within these local rationalities, short-term and medium-term incentives may clash. In the medium term, maximum flexibility may be the primary priority, but if there are material benefits to holding one form of identification (as in the case of food distributions in refugee camps), people may go out of their way to seek fixed identification. Whether Guinea is in a position to convince residents that it has enough entitlements to make it worthwhile for people to identify themselves in such a durable manner is an open question, and ought to be the topic of some of the project’s research. Disabilities There are few practical accommodations available to people with physical disabilities. There are no laws mandating access to public buildings or transportation, nor protections from discrimination in education. The 2015 labor code did prohibit discrimination against disabled persons in the workplace. Consequently, regardless of the situation in principle, there should be considerable thought given to how identification outreach teams will make specific efforts to reach disabled Guineans. Especially in rural areas, poor infrastructure is likely to ensure that disabled people will neither meet nor be met by ID teams, unless they make explicit and systematic outreach efforts. Mentally handicapped people face an extra hurdle in that intellectual disabilities are poorly understood in Guinea, and many Guineans make little or no distinction between those who are intellectually disabled and those who are mentally ill. In most cases, intellectual handicaps are also a source of shame to the family, and parents may worry that the presence of an intellectually disabled person in a household will hurt the marriage chances of the other siblings. For this reason, such disabled persons are frequently hidden within households and may not be presented during general calls for registration/identification. It would be good for field researchers to ask various focus groups how best to deal with this challenge. LGBTQ LGBTQ rights are poorly defined or non-existent in Guinea. Same-sex relationships are technically illegal, though these laws are rarely enforced. Most Guineans are aware that they have compatriots whose gender and sexual presentations or preferences fall under the LGBTQ umbrella, but tend to treat such sexual practices like other non-approved forms of sexuality (premarital and extramarital relations with any gender), enveloped by a veil of secrecy. One group that could theoretically face difficulties in the context of a biometric identification process would be transgender and intersex people. There is little information about such topics in Guinea, and thus there would likely be an insistence by authorities to assign a person’s biological gender at birth on any identification documents. U.S. State Department Human Rights Reports document a small number of arrests of trans women in nightclubs on public nuisance charges. A digital National ID program could create situations of concern if transgender people present themselves differently from the gender assigned on their identification documents. Further Research The scenarios above should give some idea of some of the probable challenges facing the digital national ID initiative proposed for Guinea. This researcher would suggest consultations with members of all of the groups listed above (women, refugees, disabled and their caregivers, and LGBTQ people) as a matter of course, and in a non-directive way in order to see what issues they raise as potential areas of concern. As mentioned in the section on gender, there should be an attempt to talk with female members of reformist/fundamentalist Christian and Muslim groups. As mentioned in the section on those with different abilities, there should be a particular effort made to talk with those who are mentally disabled and those who represent and care for them, and as mentioned in the LGBTQ section, there should be a particular attempt made to talk with transgender people. Aside from that, there are a number of situations in which some of the dynamics described in this memo would become easier to grasp empirically. First, it is essential to talk to people from the political opposition, particularly the UFDG, most of whose supporters are ethnic Fulbe/Peuhl/Fulani, and feel themselves to have been actively excluded from the spoils of the political “game.� They will have something to say about how digital national ID could act to exclude as well as include members of politically marginalized groups. Researchers should also seek out Sidya Touré, the leader of the UFR opposition party, who has been both inside and outside of government over the years, and as a member of a truly tiny ethnic minority group (less than 1% of Guinea’s population), has a somewhat different take on the intersection of minority status and the techniques used to predetermine electoral outcomes. A second site of research should be Guinea’s forest region, where the biggest incidents of intercommunal violence have taken place, and where the greatest risks of future violence present themselves. The proximity to Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d’Ivoire and the free circulation of ex-combatants and weapons from all three countries contribute to the existing local tensions around land and indigenous rights. The techniques of hedging and diversifying multiple forms of identity/identification prevalent in this region as well as in other parts of the country will form one of the greatest practical challenges to any digital national ID program, and need to be understood as much as possible. Also in the forest region, there are fairly large residual populations of people who once held refugee status. It will be important to talk with them. There are also a fair number of these people in Conakry, though most of them are Sierra Leoneans, while in a town like Guekedou or N’Zerekore in the forest region, it is possible to talk with people of Ivoirian, Liberian, and Sierra Leonean origins. Markets are another place where people from multiple countries meet, often transactionally and ephemerally, with communities of migrants remaining durably in towns, even as individuals cross back and forth. N’Zerekore and Guekedou, mentioned above, are the biggest trading towns in the forest region, but the town of Sinko, near Beyla, is even more fascinating in that traders come from Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia and Sierra Leone to this town that is not even served by a paved road, yet holds a massive weekly market with a history several hundred years old. Other important trading towns near borders include Koundara and Mali in the Fouta Jallon near the Senegal border, and Siguiri, an important gold mining and fuel contraband trading town near the Malian border.