Tired of war

摘要

The headlights of the bus pick out the wet figure of a soldier with a gun over his shoulder standing among droopy bushes at the first checkpoint after the border. He hurries out of the rain into the warm bus and almost as an afterthought announces he will escort it on the short journey through his country. "We will make a stop," he says, "but nobody can get off." A few days earlier a group of military officers had seized power in Guinea-Bissau. This was nothing unusual: the tiny country of 1.5m has seen five coups in the past decade. No president has served a full term since independence from Portugal in 1974. But this rarely poses a problem for buses from Senegal to Guinea, the country's bigger neighbours, and then on to Sierra Leone and Liberia. The only change to the schedule today is that at the regular stop in the capital, Bissau, passengers may get on but not off.