webGuinée Camp Boiro
Memorial

To all the victims of this African Goulag,
this Guinean Auschwitz, this Political Killing Field and its extensions throughout Guinea.

This site publishes documents and facts on the Camp Boiro (or the Death Camp) and its ramifications, found elsewhere in Conakry and throughout Guinea from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. Camp Boiro and its likes materialized the penitentiary network and the detention centers that made this West African country feared and shunned, and where thousands of Guineans, Africans and foreigners alike met tortures, humilitations and, for most, their fate. Turned into a political prison in 1964, Camp Boiro became a symbol and a reality of the regime of Sekou Toure and his hegemonic party-state, paradoxically called 'democratic and popular'. Camp Boiro epitomized the ruthlessness of one of Africa's most repressive ruling groups.

The webGuinea Camp Boiro Memorial honors the victims of human and political rights abuses carried out in Guinea for more than two decades on behalf of an egocentric socialist revolution. These web pages shed light on a tragic aspect of Guinea's recent history. On one hand, they emphasize Sekou Toure's blind and murderous tyranny. On the other hand, they remind citizens and politicians of current and upcoming generations of the bloody price and heavy toll paid by Guineans for peace, and (yet to be fulfilled) tolerance and democracy.

A brainchild of Sekou Toure's paranoia and thirst for absolute power, Camp Boiro abolished friendship. It spurned companionship. It ignored the respect for life and innocence. Suspects were accused and guilty until proven innocent; which often came too late to spare their life. Sekou Toure, his henchmen, and his ruling party, the PDG, filled the camp's jail cells and kept the torture chamber (la Cabine technique) busy. Men, women, adolescents, professionals and students, civilians and military, civil servants and peasants, relatives, elements from just about every segment of society, suffered or died on the altar of a destructive and bloody revolution. At Camp Boiro and extensions Sekou Toure sacrificed:

• his own comrades, buddies, and colleagues of the 1940s and 50s, who were arrested, detained and executed in secret as traitors, imperialist agents and mercenaries;
• his past adversaries, rivals and competitors, who had joined his 'national' government in good faith;
• his 'damned souls', such as Fodeba Keita (of the Ballets Africains fame), an early Camp Boiro inquisitor who became a subsequent victim in the so-called 1969 « Kaman-Fodeba plot » Emile Cissé, also a writer and drama director.

Camp Boiro became the terminal point in the odyssee of most individuals targeted in the cyclical purges that paced the rhythm of the revolution. Such purges were nicknamed the Permanent Plot, or the 'Fifth Column', a World War II Nazi metaphor. Ultimately, at his death, in 1984, Sekou Touré left behind an exhausted regime, an impoverished people and a divided country.

As the saying puts it, those who do not study and understand history are bound to repeat it. In 1984, in the aftermath of the military takeover and the collapse of the PDG, a commission headed by then Commandant Facinet Toure and No. 3 in the military regime, promised to research and publish a White Book on Camp Boiro. Fifteen years have gone by since. Nothing has happened. Led by President Lansana Conté, the second and third republics have now settled silent about the repressive era of Sekou Toure. In fact, they have swept the dirt beneath the carpet. Instead of a permanent ban and indictement of the self-proclaimed heirs to Sekou Toure's legacy, the PDG has been allowed to rear its ugly head again. Meanwhile, incompetence, corruption, divisiveness, and parochialism have become rampant. The State is paralyzed by frequent scandals or bloody and tragic crises. In Conte's Guinea two of many conflicts stand out:

• the power struggle between Colonel Lansane Conté and Colonel Diarra Traore, which resulted in the July 1985 arrest of mostly Maninka officers. To make matters worse, unwarranted attacks were waged against Maninka civilians and their property. The subsequent execution of Diarra, his accused accomplices, and of officials of the PDG detained at Camp Keme Bourema (Kindia) topped this milestone crisis. Today, its implications linger on and pervert significantly the current political process;
• the February 1996 soldiers mutiny in Conakry.

It is in that context that the National Assembly voted, in 1997, a law exonerating past and sitting presidents of the republic from legal proceedings, responsibility and liabily for wrong deeds and events occurred under their term. Based on that law, Sekou Toure could not be held accountable for Camp Boiro!...
In bringing into the Web's limelights the political crimes perpetrated at Camp Boiro and its extensions, our goal is nothing short of a public service. Following Sekou Toure's cruel rule Guinea should never fall again under the terror and the horrors of a dictatorship. No more personality cult, arbitrary arrests, secret trials and executions, freedom deprivation, forced exile, stunted or broken careers, and destoyed families!

The Camp Boiro Memorial will gradually include the following components :

1. In-depth history of the institution
2. A roster and detailed information on the perpetrators (commanders and executioners) of Camp Boiro ignominious record
3. A roster and detailed information on the victims, dead or still alive
4. Bibliographic references and a digital library containing exhibits: text documents (speeches, letters, articles, books) statistical data, pictures, audio-video material (detainees' recordings, testimonies)
5. A Virtual Reality simulation of the Torture Chamber (Cabine technique), the Tête de Mort, the execution sites by firing squads or hanging, the burial grounds, where victims where dumped at night, etc..

Suggestions, contributions and ideas are welcome. Thank you for your time and interest.