ANALYSIS:Questions for the UN will grow more awkward if it emerges that Alassane Ouattara's forces carried out a massacre, writes RUADHÁN Mac CORMAIC
LATE LAST November, when voting was taking place in the second round of Ivory Coast’s election, I was in southern Mali, travelling between remote villages in the countrys cotton belt.
The Ivorian border was just a few kilometres to the south, and the radio news bulletins offered crackly, non-stop coverage of the long-awaited contest between Alassane Ouattara and Laurent Gbagbo. It gave rise to a strong sense of hope and anticipation; this, after all, was the moment Ivory Coast would symbolically turn its back on the civil war that raged from 2002 to 2004. In a place where every family seemed to have someone living across the border, the election was the first topic of conversation everywhere I went.
The fascination with events in Ivory Coast was not confined to its doorstep. Far away in Dakar, Senegal’s capital, the interest was as intense, the judgments every bit as informed. Part of the explanation is that for decades Ivory Coast has been the economic powerhouse of francophone west Africa, its transition to independence having made it the world’s largest cocoa producer, a magnet for foreign firms and a popular destination for migrants drawn to its stability and jobs in a region where both have been in short supply.
Four months after the election, Ivory Coast is once again in turmoil. Despite having lost, Gbagbo resisted international pressure to step down. A tense stand-off ensued, Gbagbo holed up in the presidential palace in Abidjan, Ouattara chairing a parallel government a short distance away in the Hotel du Golf, where he was under UN protection. International sanctions and attempts by the African Union to negotiate a powersharing deal and exit for Gbagbo came to nothing.
While isolated skirmishes have been taking place for months, the conflict turned dramatically last week when northern-based forces loyal to Ouattara sprang a sudden, spectacular offensive. Sweeping across Ivory Coast from at least three points in the north and west, they swiftly took control of most of the country. Until they reached Abidjan last Thursday – just four days after the offensive began – Ouattara’s forces appear to have met little resistance. But on Saturday the International Committee for the Red Cross reported that about 800 people had been killed in a massacre in the town of Duékoué.
Abidjan, the commercial capital and the heart of Gbagbo’s power base, has been a war zone since Friday, its civilians confined to their homes and the streets taken over by militias and looters. Aid agencies have warned of a humanitarian crisis not only in Abidjan but as far away as Liberia and Mali, where hundreds of thousands of fleeing Ivorians have sought sanctuary from the violence.
The UN’s decision on Monday night to mount helicopter attacks against Gbagbo’s heavy weapons, coinciding with a new push for control of Abidjan by Ouattara’s forces, made his departure appear inevitable.
Yesterday he was in a bunker in Abidjan, isolated and encircled by Ouattara’s troops. But the end of Gbagbo’s decade in power will leave many questions unanswered and present his successor with a country riven by the trauma of recent months.
The divisions between the largely Muslim north and the Christian south, having stoked poisonous debates over the notion of Ivoirité (Ivorian-ness) and fed into the brutal civil war, will have been sharpened in the past week. Ouattara may have won the election, but his victory was no landslide. Some 46 per cent of Ivorians voted for Gbagbo, and forging a sense of national unity will be a daunting task.
For outside powers, the crisis poses searching questions. By intervening against Gbagbo’s forces on Monday night, just as Ouattara’s troops were mounting a new offensive, has the UN inadvertently undermined the president-elect by strengthening Gbagbo’s argument that his rival has been installed by foreigners as one of their own? Conversely, did the UN remain passive for too long, failing to intervene to protect civilians until the last minute despite having legal authorisation to do so?
The questions will grow more awkward if it emerges that forces loyal to Ouattara were responsible for the Duékoué killings. Did his forces receive weapons and training from foreign allies? What if more mass graves are found over the coming weeks?
Throughout the crisis, France has found itself in the most delicate position. Its political, economic and personal connections to Ivory Coast run deep, with 12,000 of its citizens living there and its companies dominating the local economy. Gbagbo and Ouattara have links to France, the former being a one-time Marxist who studied at the Sorbonne, the latter an economist with a French wife and ties to the Paris elite.
Sensitive to Gbagbo’s claims of neo-colonial meddling and mindful of violence against French interests by Gbagbo’s forces in 2004, president Nicolas Sarkozy has been at pains in recent months to appear above the fray in Ivory Coast, even sending his chief of staff to Abidjan last year to assert that Paris was “neutral” in the election. Ever since Paris recognised Ouattara as president, however, Gbagbo has ramped up the anti-French rhetoric, and this week state television warned that France was preparing a genocide like Rwanda’s in 1994. When Gbagbo forces took the fight to France by kidnapping two French citizens in Abidjan on Monday, the response was swift. Two hours later, the Élysée Palace said it had acceded to a UN request and had begun firing at Gbagbo’s military camps.
That may well prove to have been the moment when Gbagbo lost his grip on power. To his successor he hands over a divided country, a scarred people and a brittle peace.
Ruadhán MacCormaic is Paris Correspondent