AFRICA / ISOLATED CONFLICT : Separatist Region Tests Senegal on Rights Issue

Increasing ethnic violence has taken scores of lives and shattered the calm of Senegal, long admired as one of Africa’s most tranquil and homogeneous countries. The violence is centered in a region known as the Casamance, which is geographically and culturally isolated from the rest of the country and has nurtured separatist sentiment for decades.

Since April, at least 76 people--civilians, guerrillas and government soldiers--have been killed and hundreds injured in the Casamance. The most recent incident came Sept. 21, when, according to Amnesty International and diplomatic sources, Senegalese military forces entered a town on the Gambian border in search of reputed separatist militants, rounded up five townspeople and shot them to death.

BACKGROUND: The Casamance, named after the 150-mile-long river that waters its valley and flows to the Atlantic, is cut off from the rest of Senegal by Gambia, the long, narrow, English-speaking country that juts like a finger into French-speaking Senegal.

The region’s sense of isolation has other roots, largely cultural. The Diola tribe, its most important, is one of the few ethnic groups in Senegal that does not speak Wolof, the country’s main traditional language. The Diola, generally labeled animists, are also one of the few groups that does not practice Islam, the religion of most Senegalese. Christians are also well represented among the region’s people, who are known as Casamancais.

The region also differs from the rest of the country in its agricultural self-sufficiency. Its land is rich and well-watered, compared to the semi-arid Sahelian climate of northern Senegal. Some economists believe that its rice paddies could feed much of the nation.

ISSUES: Since the early 1980s the Senegalese government has tried to increase the productivity of under-used Casamance land by seizing it from recalcitrant subsistence farmers and transferring it to market-oriented “northerners.”

Although the Casamancais are not excluded from Senegalese public life--they are well-represented in the government and the army--the agricultural policy exacerbates their resentment at being overrun by outsiders and deprived of their fair share of the country’s admittedly meager development since independence. Violent skirmishes have become more frequent, and the government recently assigned a military governor to take things in hand.

An over-violent response to the separatists jeopardizes Senegal’s world standing as a paragon of human rights. President Abdou Diouf is an international diplomat, this year’s chairman of the World Islamic Summit and a former chairman of the Organization of African Unity. But mishandling of domestic problems is ruining his reputation.

IMPACT: Militant separatists are believed to number no more than 300, but they have the capacity to cause great trouble, particularly now that Senegal’s tourist season has begun. A Club Med resort and other hotels help attract 200,000 French and other Europeans annually.

Social services have also begun to collapse, notably in education, where there are reports that secondary school teachers from the north, fearing violence, have refused to return to Ziguinchor, the main town in the region, for the beginning of the school year.

OUTLOOK: Senegal has taken major steps to defuse Casamancais resentment. The land transfers have stopped. The military governor has offered full amnesty to armed separatists who turn in their guns. Most notably, the government, which will host the Africa Cup soccer tournament in 1992, has made Ziguinchor the No. 2 venue for the matches, after Dakar, the national capital, a step that will bring in considerable money.