Guinea-Bissau's president named a new prime minister late on Tuesday to fill a power vacuum left by the dissolution of parliament and govern the tiny country until parliamentary elections in November. President Joao Bernardo Vieira issued a decree naming Carlos Correia, a German-trained agricultural engineer who headed a short-lived administration in 1997, as prime minister.
Hours earlier, Vieira had dissolved parliament because a court had ruled the extension of its mandate to November was illegal, effectively signalling the end of a previous unity government already weakened by an opposition walkout over a week ago. A commission of lawmakers is tasked with managing parliamentary affairs until the elections, which are scheduled for November 16.
The impoverished country has been gripped by a series of attempted military coups and mutinies since independence from Portugal in 1974, accompanied by a succession of constitutional crises as rival blocs, often ethnically-aligned, vie for power.
The latest conflagration has taken on added significance amid warnings from United Nations officials and drugs experts that Latin American cocaine trafficking gangs threaten to transform the sleepy country into a "narco-state".
Last month the seizure of two planes at the main airport led to a stand-off between the ill-resourced judicial police service, which combats drug trafficking, and the army, which tried to prevent police from searching the craft. No drugs were seized, but three Venezuelan nationals were arrested, along with the two top officials in charge of air traffic control at the airport, fuelling suspicions among diplomats that senior officials are involved in smuggling.
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