GUINEA: Coffins & Broken Backs

A year and a half ago, France abruptly stalked out of Guinea, and left it to fend for itself, the first nation to declare its independence from the new French Community. A small, impoverished country the size of Oregon, on Africa's western bulge, Guinea had no administrators to replace those the French took with them, and President Sékou Toué a handsome and tough political organizer, had more experience in rabble-rousing than in governing. Last week, there were alarming signs that out of a combination of ineptness and ignorance, Guinea was rapidly becoming a police state under the cold direction of imported Communist instructors.

Lost Teeth. In sweltering Conakry, once a cheerful little city where the Africans ate out of doors by lamplight and danced into the night under the mango trees, the streets were deserted by 10 p.m. and the houses dark and locked. By day, the Capitol's 80,000 people went about their business nervously. The secret police, guided by Communist instructors imported from Czechoslovakia, were equipped with concealed Czech-made wire recorders, listening for the chance remark that would betray a "Gaullist enemy of the state."

Last month hundreds of hapless Guineans were arrested on suspicion of plotting the overthrow of the government on behalf of "French colonialism and its black lackeys." They were an unlikely bunch of plotters: petty crooks caught black-marketing, government officials charged with smuggling trunkloads of the new currency over the border, and young intellectuals led by brilliant, French-educated Ibrahim Diallo, a former civil servant who had asked Touré's permission to form an opposition party.

A few details of the arrests and their aftermath have leaked past Touré's rigorous censorship. According to foreigners recently in Conakry, five prisoners were beaten and tortured to death at the interrogation in Alpha Yaya military camp. Their remains were sent home in sealed coffins, and police waited until the coffins were underground before they left. An employee at Alpha Yaya said police knocked Diallo's teeth out and ripped out his fingernails. The relatives of another prisoner were told to come and get him. They found him crawling on his hands and knees, his back broken. He died three hours later.

There were no defense lawyers present when 40 of the suspects were hauled before a secret "People's Court" three weeks ago. For Diallo, as well as the Moslem imam of Conakry's Coronthie district (who had called Touré's regime "irreligious") and 17 others, the sentence was death: the others, including three Frenchmen and a Swiss youth, drew long jail terms. Last week, the government disclosed that one of the Frenchmen had already died. "Heart attack," said the brief announcement.

New Captives. The 1,000-odd Frenchmen who are still living in Guinea are harassed at every turn. Some have been jailed for failing to stand up in theaters when Guinea's national anthem was played; one drew three months ("willful deterioration of Guinea's national heritage") for practicing with a revolver against the trunk of a mango tree. Airline officials have laid on 25 extra flights in the next few weeks to take care of Frenchmen and their families headed for home.