Willing to Take Dollars

The black leaders of Africa's emerging new nations endlessly complain that the outside world too often judges whose side they are on in the East-West struggle by whose aid they accept. Guinea's Red-leaning President Sekou Toure loudly proclaims that he is on no side, stubbornly insists he signed up for aid from Russia ($35 million) and Red China ($25 million) and brought in scores of Communist technicians, simply because he needed the money and expert advice.

Certainly Toure needed help from somewhere; for when Guinea voted itself out of the French community, France in a fit of pique cut off all aid. But when the U.S. proffered assistance more than a year ago, Toure was not much interested. Washington's standard aid contract violated Guinea's sovereignty, he said. He objected to clauses that would guarantee U.S. aid officials who worked in Guinea immunity from taxes and that require Guinea to state its other sources of aid. He balked at U.S. insistence on scrutinizing Guinea's proposed aid projects to make sure they were feasible. The Communists, sniffed Marxist Toure, parceled out their cash grants with no strings attached.

Month after month in Washington, Toure's negotiators bickered and quibbled over each paragraph in the proposed agreement, demanding in effect that the U.S. just hand over the cash and be done with it. Although aware that Toure was under pressure from the Communists to cut off his Western dealings altogether, the U.S. negotiators, partially hemmed in by U.S. laws, insisted that Guinea follow the rules if it wanted the aid. Finally, a few weeks ago, the Guineans quietly signed on the dotted line--so quietly, in fact, that no announcement was made at all in Conakry newspapers until the U.S. embassy protested and then the news was buried in a one-paragraph item in the back pages.

It will be more months before the first small U.S. aid team in Conakry gets agreement for specific projects and settles on an estimate of costs. But Western officials happily noted that Guinea has also just concluded a credit agreement with Britain and a trade pact with West Germany. And a fortnight after the U.S. agreement was signed, Guinea's President Toure rose in the U.N. Assembly to criticize Khrushchev's bullying, shoe-thumping tactics. Added up, it all revived the hopes of many that the Red tint in Sekou Toure's cloak of "neutralism" was not necessarily permanent.

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