Togo president says country not headed for civil war

Masked gunmen torched a German cultural centre in Togo today, leaving the main library building gutted and a van in ashes in the latest violence gripping the country since disputed presidential elections.

The officially named winner of the weekend balloting, Faure Gnassingbe, denounced attacks on African immigrants in Togo during two days of rioting and said the country wasn’t headed for civil war.

“I have confidence in the forces of order and security and, most of all, in the political maturity and good sense of the Togolese,” Gnassingbe said in remarks published today.

“I do not think Togo will tip into civil war,” he told French daily Le Monde. “Not, at least, as long as I am at the head of this country.”

Gnassingbe’s main opponent in the Sunday elections, Bob Akitani, dismissed the voting as rigged, and insisted he was the true winner. The Tuesday announcement of Gnassingbe’s win sparked clashes between security forces and opposition-party supporters that left at least 22 dead nationwide.

Calm largely returned to the capital, Lome, on Thursday during daylight hours, but violence spiked anew under cover of darkness.

A group of heavily-armed men stormed into the Goethe Institute in the Togolese capital, Lome, before dawn today and held the guards at gunpoint while the attackers shot up the main library and set it ablaze, institute director Herwig Kempf said. No one was injured.

The once-tidy concrete building stood gutted, and a nearby tool shed and van also burned. Damage was estimated at several hundred thousand pounds.

Through films, book-lending and language lessons, the Goethe Institute promoted cultural exchange between Togo and Germany – Togo’s colonial master until the years after Germany’s defeat in the First World War.

Kempf said the interior minister who was fired last week after saying Togo should delay elections has taken refuge in the German Embassy.

The ex-minister, Francois Boko, lost his job after warning of possible bloodshed surrounding Sunday’s elections.

The rioting began on Tuesday after officials said that Gnassingbe, son of former dictator Gnassingbe Eyadama, had won Sunday’s elections by a wide margin. Fighting broke out between demonstrators and troops, and by Thursday at least 22 people had been killed.

Among the dead were eight west African migrant workers, killed in Lome.

Gnassingbe today denounced the killings of guest workers, and told Le Monde the attacks had been organised by opposition-party cadres.

“People who engage in these types of almost barbarous acts were trained, manipulated by the opposition,” Gnassingbe was quoted as saying.

Akitani, the main opposition candidate, declared himself president on Wednesday, alleging massive ruling-party fraud and claiming the opposition’s own ballot counting had put him ahead of Gnassingbe. He urged his followers to continue to fight the government.

UN officials said thousands of Togolese have fled to neighbouring Benin and Ghana since strife broke out. Refugees are staying in relief camps, church grounds and with host families, Ron Redmond, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, told reporters in Geneva.

The agency “is urging Togolese politicians to find a peaceful resolution to the current crisis, and to avoid triggering a humanitarian emergency,” said Redmond. “We are closely monitoring the situation.”

By Thursday, the mobs of machete-wielding demonstrators had disappeared from Lome’s opposition neighbourhood of Be, scene of the heaviest clashes, while Lome’s downtown streets slowly came back to life.

Reports of violence in the countryside began emerging in the capital on Thursday.

Gerard Besson of the International Committee of the Red Cross said eight people died in political violence at the town of Atakpame, 105 miles north of Lome. Further details weren’t available, and it wasn’t clear when the violence occurred.

Still, government officials reopened Togo’s land borders, which had been closed two days before Sunday’s election.

Besson said three people had been reported killed in violence in Lome, though officials in the city morgue said 14 bodies had been brought there since Tuesday’s fighting, most of them victims of gunshots.

Togo’s interior minister, Foli Bazi Katari, said three soldiers had been killed this week. He didn’t elaborate.

Togo tipped into crisis on February 5, when Eyadema’s death of a heart attack ended his 38-year reign – Africa’s longest and second worldwide only to Fidel Castro’s leadership in Cuba. Loyalists in the military named the deceased leader’s son as new president, but Gnassingbe agreed to step down and run in elections under heavy pressure from African and other international leaders.