Nearly one month after Guinea-Bissau's military seized power in a coup, there is still no solution to the country's political instability. After Monday's United Nations Security Council meeting in New York, attended by the ousted ruling party's foreign minister and the Guinea-Bissau U.N. special envoy, Bissau-Guineans have been debating the best solutions to resolve the crisis. Many people are calling for justice for the leaders of the coup.
Since Guinea-Bissau's military seized power in a coup on April 12, the country's whitewashed Ministry of Justice in the capital, Bissau, has stood empty.
The country's justice system was limited even before the coup, but now it has stopped operating completely. The minister of justice fled, staff went home and legal cases have been placed on hold.
As the international community discusses Guinea-Bissau's future and the possibility of an international peacekeeping force in the country, many Bissau-Guineans believe that an inadequate justice system is one of the reasons behind the latest coup.
The European Union has imposed sanctions on six military figures, including Antonio Indjai, the head of the armed forces.
But Bissau-Guineans say the coup leaders are corrupt and operate outside of the country's skeletal justice system. They suspect the coup leaders will continue to access funds through drug trafficking, despite the economic sanctions.
The United States government has previously accused some senior military figures of involvement in cocaine trafficking, which the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says is a major source of instability in Guinea-Bissau.
Maimouna Bacar Sande is a third year law student. She says that Guinea-Bissau's top military and political figures are rarely held accountable for their actions.
Sande says Guinea-Bissau's crisis runs deep. She says the country has suffered several coups since the end of the civil war and that one solution would be to strengthen the justice system.
She says the political situation is like a bad weed growing in a beautiful country. Sande says it needs to be pulled out by the root.
Brother Michael Daniels, an American Catholic priest at Bissau's main cathedral, agrees.
In addition to his work for the church, Brother Daniels leads a peace, justice and human rights initiative.
He says that there is no justice for military and political players implicated in international drug trafficking or human rights abuses.
Instead, Guinea-Bissau's prisons are overloaded with people arrested for theft and other small crimes and the Ministry of Justice is not able to look after them.
"The Ministry of Justice closed down," said Brother Daniels. "The state institutions are not working, and when the prisoners are detained they are forgotten by their families."
In the aftermath of the coup, military leaders considered releasing prisoners from the country's two main jails, simply because they did not have enough food for them.
Since then, Brother Daniels has been personally delivering food to the prisoners. "I go buy it myself, I wait for a lady to finish cooking it and go bring it to 30, 40 prisoners," he said.
Outside the Ministry of Justice, law student Justino Nhaga sits on a wall waiting to meet a friend.
Nhaga says the country's ongoing political crisis will only be solved when a reliable justice system is established and the coup leaders are held accountable.
Talks on Guinea-Bissau are to continue in the coming days at the U.N. Security Council among heads of state from ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West African States.
But Nhaga says the situation should be solved by Bissau-Guineans, not by the international community. He likens international intervention to a donated jacket that will only improve the situation for a short while.
Underneath, he says, Guinea-Bissau's deep political problems will persist.
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