Cellou Dalein Diallo: “I am determined”

This Sunday, Cellou Dalein Diallo summoned the press outside his home in the Dixinn district, where he has been locked up since Tuesday, October 20. A security device made up of pick-ups as well as trucks from the gendarmerie and the CMIS (Mobile Intervention and Security Company), a police unit, blocked each of the road accesses. But the initiative came to nothing: local and foreign journalists were unable to approach the grounds of his villa.

While the Orange network has been cut since Thursday, limiting the use of social networks, Le Point Afrique was able to reach him for a few minutes by phone.

Le Point Afrique: How do you cope with this arbitrary house arrest?

Cellou Dalein Diallo: I see it as an injustice, an abuse of power. I am illegally deprived of my freedom of movement. There is absolutely nothing that justifies such an ordeal. Mr. Alpha Condé does what he wants, he uses the powers linked to his function as President of the Republic to hamper his opponents, to try to neutralize them and to destroy their morale. But my morale is not broken, I am determined. What hurts me is to see children, young people under 30, being killed. They are innocent, and even assuming they have committed an offense, how can you use a gun to shoot them? And they will never have the right to justice. Two hundred and thirty people have been killed during opposition demonstrations since 2010. No police or gendarme has been sanctioned. When I say this, I fear that I will be taken for an opponent of bad faith, but it is, alas, the Guinean reality.

This is the third time that you face Alpha Condé at the polls, you expected such a repression?

I knew that if Alpha Condé lost the election, he would risk hurting. That he would try to hang on to his third term, by violence, by electoral fraud, and that is what is actually happening. So, I had considered this hypothesis. But I did not expect this blind and bloody repression, so many killings, the requisition of the army. And then I didn’t think that I would be kidnapped, that my offices and party premises would be barricaded.

During the proclamation of the provisional overall results of the presidential election, this Saturday, you spoke of an “electoral hold-up”. Do you continue to claim your victory?

I have invested a lot in securing votes. I recruited, trained and equipped nearly 30,000 young people, most of them unemployed graduates. I deployed them in the 15,000 polling stations, so as to have a delegate and an alternate in each office, equipped with a telephone to capture the image of the report drawn up at the end of the count, and to transfer it to us. electronically. From Monday morning, the day after the election, the results were thus available.

But we have seen the maneuvers of Alpha Condé to have other reports drawn up before the centralization of the results and the totalization by the Independent National Electoral Commission. It is for this reason that we have decided to make our results available to the press, and we are convinced that we have won this election. We can prove it because we collected 85% of the copies of the polling station minutes.

We know that Alpha Condé falsified the results by eliminating the minutes from the constituencies where we were in the majority, and by boosting participation in other constituencies. Look at Siguiri or Faranah, in Upper Guinea, which record turnout rates of 99% and 101% respectively, while we know that the turnout was more in the order of 43% in Siguiri, according to the minutes. ballot boxes… This is an area, Upper Guinea, which is today very disappointed by the Alpha Condé governance, and where many movements in support of my candidacy have been formed. This is also the reason why he prevented me from going to campaign in this region which he considers his stronghold.

What remedies are you now considering?

There is the street, of course, since we are convinced that the Constitutional Court like the Ceni are subservient institutions. We will still send our exhibits to the Constitutional Court. We are convinced that if independent experts analyze these elements, they will come to the same conclusion as us.

A diplomatic delegation of emissaries from the UN, the African Union and Ecowas has just arrived in Conakry. Are you going to meet them?

They asked to meet me, and I wish I could do that too. But how ? I am kidnapped at my home. No one has the right to enter or leave.