_ SCI will work hard to identify funding opportunities for US Africa sister city programs, especially in the areas of health care, education and economic development.

 _ SCI will partner with other organizations, including the United Nations, to insure that sister city programs are recognized as one of the most important avenues for addressing the critical needs facing the people of Africa.

Sister Cities International is committed to working together with US Africa Sister Cities to promote, enhance and sustain outstanding sister city programs throughout Africa. We are committed to providing the best possible services and support to the US Africa sister city network.

In closing, I want to personally salute the hundreds and hundreds of individuals who are working through their sister city programs in support of their African sister cities. These contacts, relationships and programs are so important. Your personal commitment and dedication are what makes the sister city movement so successful. Thank you.

Leader Keeps Tight Grip on Guinea West African Nation Battles Spread of Nearby Civil Wars. Conakry, Guinea, By Douglas Farah, Washington, Post 11/9/00 In the capital there are embassies of North Korea, and other former communist countries- Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria. Around the capital, many of the statues of national heroes have a distinctly Asian look, and handiwork of North Korean and Chinese artists. The embassies and statuary are inherited from Guinea's long Cold War role as the West African showcase of Marxism. But Guinea's quarter century as a Marxist,

single-party state was a ruinous experiment headed by one of the continent's most prominent "big men," Ahmed Sekou Toure. In 1958, when French President Charles de Gaulle offered limited autonomy to its restive African colonies, Sekou Toure declared that Guinea preferred "poverty in freedom to prosperity in slavery." Guinea became the only colony to reject France's proposal in favor of full independence. The snubbed French colonialists stripped Guinea of its civil service and government equipment - even telephones and toilets - and returned home. What they couldn't get onto a ship, they destroyed. Inheriting an economic shambles, Sekou Toure and a handful of educated Guineans anxiously sought help - and in the depths of the Cold War, quickly found advisers, technicians and political advice from the Soviet Union, China and North Korea. Sekou Toure combined their forms of terror, in which his police and troops killed or jailed tens of thousands of real or perceived opponents and drove nearly a quarter of the country's seven million people into exile. Sekou Toure applied a mix of Chinese-style cultural revolution and North Korean " back to the land" collectivization. Guinea's communist allies took interest in Guinea's bauxite deposits - the world's largest - and its diamonds, gold, and iron ore. But Guineans' poverty deepened. Sekou Toure died in 1984, and Gen. Lansana Conte took power following a military coup. Conte has shown some tolerance for tightly circumscribed opposition, allowing multiparty elections that independent Guineans and foreign monitors have found less than free. "After 26 years of tropical Stalinism we have had 16 years of transition" said a long-serving foreign diplomat here. "Conte has done a good job of keeping the country from complete collapse, but he doesn't communicate well with the outside world. The president doesn't find it necessary to have a dialogue with the opposition. I don't think he has spoken to anyone from the opposition in years." Conte's supporters said the president is determined to keep this ethnically fractious nation united - and with recent or current civil wars in neighboring Liberia, Sierra Leone,