Cote d’Ivoire and Ouattarra

The man Ivorian Presidents love to hate

By Daniel Balint-Kurti

Ivory Coast, the one-time poster boy of West Africa, has seen its long-drawn-out crisis deepen since the end of last year. When the incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo, was defeated in November presidential elections, his supporters had the results overturned. Now two men claim the presidency: Gbagbo and his rival Alassane Ouattara, a former Ivorian prime minister and economic czar whose electoral victory was recognised by the UN, the EU and the African Union.

A host of sanctions have been slapped on the country and thousands of UN and French peacekeepers guard Ouattara’s parallel government, which is holed up in a luxury hotel in the main city, Abidjan. Violence, however, has flared both upcountry and in Abidjan’s sprawling neighbourhood of Abobo.

The blame for this latest fiasco must lie squarely with Gbagbo. He has refused to accept elections that were meant to be the last step towards reuniting a country divided between rebel-held north and loyalist south for nearly ten years. But while it may be simple to apportion blame, working out how the Ivorian crisis could be resolved is far more problematic. As international bodies try to grapple with the messy situation, they should bear in mind that they are not just dealing with rival leaders, but with a population divided by years of toxic politics and propaganda.

The trouble in Ivory Coast now is to a large extent the result of xenophobic and ethnic hatred that was stirred up by Ivorian politicians in the mid-1990s. That hatred became largely focused on one person, Ouattara. Fearing Ouattara’s popularity, successive southern presidents labelled him as a closet foreigner who would sell the country to outside interests. Ouattara’s detractors also claimed that his ethnic northern credentials were bogus. The anti-Ouattara propaganda sharpened divisions between mainly Christian ethnic groups from the south and the mainly Muslim groups from the north.

The anti-Ouattara ball was set rolling after the death in 1993 of Ivorian president and founding father Felix Houphouët-Boigny. Ouattara, then Prime Minister, squared off against parliamentary Speaker Henri Konan Bédié for the succession. Bédié, a southerner from Houphouët-Boigny’s Baoulé ethnic group, won out – thanks partly to backing from former colonial master France – but he was determined that Ouattara should never pose a threat to his position again.

To this end, Bédié nurtured a philosophy called ivoirité or “Ivorianness” – the slippery idea of what it means to be Ivorian. Bédié used this murky notion to harness support for a change in the electoral code he had pushed through parliament a few months earlier, with the aim of making Ouattara ineligible for the presidency.  A new clause stated that no one with a parent who was not “of Ivorian origin” could stand for president.  Bédié and his supporters advanced an array of arguments to prove that Ouattara’s parents were both foreign, and that Ouattara himself was from Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast’s poorer northern neighbour.  Ivoirité became central to the anti-Ouattara propaganda campaign.  Bédié built nationalist fervour around the concept, loudly stating that people should be proud to be Ivorian and should not allow foreigners to rule over them.

But this supposed patriotism was accompanied by tribal prejudice, with Bédié claiming that among Ivorians, his Baoulé tribe was best suited to rule because of its political traditions which, he claimed, had their origins in ancient Egypt.  Northerners, who mostly supported Ouattara, found themselves singled out as being not quite Ivorian enough, or as having usurped Ivorian nationality.

Soon after I arrived in Ivory Coast as a journalist in mid-1999, Abidjan had become the scene of increasingly violent riots by Ouattara supporters, most of them ethnic northerners angry at being stopped by security forces at roadblocks and accused of having faked their identity papers. By the end of the year Bédié was ousted in a military coup, sparked by a pay dispute with junior army officers but helped along by the rising political tensions.

After first flirting with Ouattara, the new military ruler, General Robert Guéï tweaked ivoirité to suit his purposes, labelling Ouattara as a man “of doubtful nationality”. Amid accusations of coup plots against Ouattara supporters, the crisis deepened. After one series of arrests over an alleged coup plot, I remember the ominous warning issued by the junta’s spokesman on television: “If they want this country to burn, we shall burn it together and afterwards we’ll look at the ashes.” Ivory Coast’s rulers knew they were destroying their nation but kept pouring oil on the flames.

By the end of 2000, it was General Guéï’s turn to be overthrown, after he refused to recognise his electoral defeat by Gbagbo (Ouattara was barred from standing). Gbagbo’s supporters joined forces with the gendarmerie to force the military dictator out of power. But no sooner had Gbagbo – the veteran leader of Ivory Coast’s “democratic” opposition – declared himself president, than Ouattara supporters rioted in turn. Gbagbo responded with a bloody crackdown. The discovery of a mass grave in Abidjan, containing the bodies of over 50 ethnic northerners murdered by gendarmes, gave the Ouattara camp their martyrs and deepened the country’s divisions.

By this time, the army had turned on many of its key northern junior officers, forcing them to flee to Burkina Faso, where they formed a rebel movement. In September 2002, the rebels attacked, failing to take Abidjan but rapidly seizing the entire northern half of the country.

The elections last December were supposed to restore Ivorian unity but the enduring rhetoric of hatred had made that virtually impossible. For what needs to be understood is how ordinary Ivorians swallowed the propaganda against Ouattara and how he had come to personify, in many southerners’ eyes, their fears of immigrants and ethnic northerners in general.

These fears ran perhaps deepest in the southwestern cocoa belt – home to Gbagbo’s Bété ethnic group. During Houphouet’s 33-year rule, settlers were encouraged to move to the southwest to farm cocoa. The wave of immigration into the southwest made Ivory Coast the world’s dominant cocoa producer, allowing the country to become a regional economic powerhouse. However, as land became less available, the Bétés and other indigenous groups grew increasingly resentful of the incomers. Indigenous groups linked their fears of take-over of land by foreigners at the local level with a fear of a political take-over at the national level by the “foreigner” Ouattara. It should be noted that in Ivorian villages, the term foreigner or etranger, refers to anyone from outside the area – whether from another country or simply another area of Ivory Coast. By this token, those from central or northern Ivory Coast were as distrusted as those from Burkina Faso, a source of millions of immigrants in the country.

In southern Ivorian cities, the distrust was focused more on foreigners competing for jobs and political power. Ethnic northerners – who make up the majority in some southern cities – found themselves accused of being foreigners who had faked their Ivorian identity papers to gain access to jobs. Again, this mirrored the accusation against Ouattara – a supposedly fake Ivorian who wanted to usurp the presidency.

These tensions exploded into violence more and more frequently from the late 1990s, eventually leading to civil war in 2002. Even more disturbing than the extreme brutality of the security forces was the internecine conflict between civilians: rapes, the burnings of mosques and churches, machete attacks, people being doused with petrol and burnt alive. As the political crisis deepened, the nature of the violence grew progressively more horrific.

While a host of politicians and armed groups have been involved in Ivory Coast’s unrest, Ouattara is still blamed by many Ivorians for having been the instigator of the country’s troubles. Last year he won the election and he should be allowed to assume office. His opponents, however, could make a Ouattara-run Ivory Coast as ungovernable as it is proving to be under Gbagbo.

Daniel Balint-Kurti worked as a journalist in Ivory Coast, among other countries, from 1999 to 2007, reporting for publications and news agencies including Dow Jones, Reuters and The Associated Press. In September 2007 he published a paper on Ivory Coast’s rebel Forces Nouvelles for Chatham House (http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/files/9735_ivorycoast0907.pdf). Mr Balint-Kurti now heads the Democratic Republic of Congo campaign at British NGO Global Witness.

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