CONAKRY, Guinea.

From outside, the large, square building looks abandoned. But inside, the embassy of North Korea is still staffed, as are the impressive compounds of other formerly communist countries—Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria.

Around Guinea's crowded, decaying capital, many of the statues of national heroes have a distinctly Asian look, the 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. As with many of the leftover monuments built by fraternal communist parties, it is the ruin--of the economy and of a state--that remains.

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 communism with his own reign 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 7 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. He has also edged the country toward more of a free-market economy and out of its international isolation.

"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, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal, said he believes a firm hand is still needed.

In the past two months, fighters in Guinea and Liberia have attacked across the border, leaving 600 dead in Guinea and bringing the two countries close to war.

Senior officials said Conte governs almost entirely on his own and rarely consults with those in his cabinet. The officials declined to be quoted, saying they were unsure how he would react to their statements. Several said they agreed with Conte's description of himself as having the heart of a peasant farmer and the head of a military man.

"He is not a man of dialogue," said a Guinean professional who knows Conte well. "He believes God gave him the duty to guide the country. He thinks democracy is a useful thing to do, but as the security situation gets worse and worse, he takes more and more control because he is afraid Guinea will fall [according to] the domino theory, after Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal."

While insisting that he has broken with Sekou Toure's regime, Conte has retained some of his predecessor's aides in key posts.

Other vestiges of the past remain. Conte is the army's commanding general as well as president. His chief political opponent, Alpha Conde, languishes in prison. In senior government officials' waiting rooms, recent issues of North Korea's official Pyongyang Times extol the virtues of the former Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, and his son and successor, Kim Jong Il.

And Camp Boiro, the military barracks and prison where Sekou Toure's opponents were tortured and killed, remains guarded by armed troops who prohibit photographs and refuse to say what function the place now serves.

Despite the Conte government's continued repression, its ties with the United States are improving, diplomats said, because Washington recently has begun to see Guinea's stability as crucial to keeping this coastal stretch of West Africa from collapsing into a wider war.

The State Department has long denounced Conte's autocratic style and human rights record. Its 1999 human rights report said the police and paramilitary gendarmes "play an oppressive role in the daily lives of citizens," and that "members of the elite presidential guard are accountable to almost no one except the president." The report cited "extrajudicial killings; disappearances; use of torture by police and military personnel; police abuse of prisoners and detainees; inhuman prison conditions and frequent deaths due to these conditions. . . . Members of the security forces committed abuses with impunity."

Still, U.S. officials describe relations as good. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright visited Conakry in October 1999 in a show of concern for the region's stability. Conte has "made progress in a number of areas," said a U.S. official, who nonetheless acknowledged that "clearly this is not a democracy."

Mohamed Diane, a leader of the opposition Rally of the Guinean People, said it was virtually impossible for his party to hold public meetings because they must be approved by the government. The party's top leader, Alpha Conde, was arrested in 1998, the day after presidential elections in which he opposed Conte. He was held incommunicado for months and sentenced in September to five years of hard labor for sedition.

Conde's imprisonment and the government's refusal to appoint an independent electoral commission have led a coalition of opposition parties to boycott municipal elections scheduled for this month. "The government has been forced to open up the process a little," Diane said, but Guinea's limited steps toward democracy are "for outside consumption."

"There is no sign things are really changing. Conte was a member of Toure's Central Committee. He has maintained the same structure with a better face."

© 2000 The Washington Post Company