While the worlds attention is on Iraq, there is a civil war materialising in the Ivory Coast which threatens the whole West African region.
Ivory Coast mutiny sounds alarm bells for region
LONDON (AlertNet) - The September 19 army mutiny in Ivory Coast was remarkably successful, at least from the mutineers’ point of view.
Apparently well armed and well organised, they control the country’s second city Bouaké and the main northern city of Korhogo, from where they are fanning out across the north, with the support of many local people tired of being blamed by the government for the country’s ills.
Hundreds of people have been killed, including Interior Minister Emile Boga Doudou and former military leader Robert Guei. No one believes the official account that Guei was killed while heading for the television station to proclaim a coup. His family says gendarmes loyal to President Laurent Gbagbo came to his home and executed him.
Gbagbo has declined offers of military intervention by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), but with every day the rebellion continues, a quick and lasting solution looks less and less likely.
There is now a serious risk that Ivory Coast will fracture along ethnic lines, leaving the government in control of little more than the economic capital Abidjan and the area around it.
The mutineers are a group of soldiers recruited by Guei, who have been resisting Gbagbo’s efforts to remove them from the army. They appear to have joined forces with a group of dissident soldiers who took refuge in Burkina Faso after falling out with Guei. The government repeatedly accuses a “neighbouring rogue state” of supporting and arming them, and Notre Voie, the newspaper of Gbagbo’s Front Patriotique Ivoirien, has accused Burkina Faso, calling President Blaise Compaore “the sole and unique destabiliser of Ivory Coast”.
It is not entirely clear what happened, or even who the rebels’ leaders are, but it is clear that Ivory Coast has again lost the credibility with donors that it was just starting to win back. Gbagbo is confronted with the inevitable result of the anti-northerner and anti-Moslem rhetoric directed by successive governments at opposition leader Alassane Ouattara, who took refuge in the French ambassador’s residence after saying the government had tried to kill him as well as Guei. He owes his presidency to a Faustian pact with Guei in 2000 that excluded all other credible presidential candidates. **“This has been preparing for years and no one has taken any notice,” said one diplomat. **
DIPLOMATIC FLURRY
The gravity of the situation was underlined by the diplomatic flurry that followed the mutiny. Gabon’s President Omar Bongo and Morocco’s King Mohammed were the first to try to organise a regional summit, then ECOWAS was judged the best body to do so. South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki’s attendance was unprecedented and the current ECOWAS president, Senegal’s Abdoulaye Wade, who already has a strong track record as an international mediator, was keen to send troops.
The collapse of Ivory Coast has enormous implications for the whole region. Ivory Coast is the biggest economy in the West African Economic and Monetary Union, an alliance of six countries sharing the CFA franc as their common currency.
Its agriculture and services are a major employer of migrant labour and goods heading to and from its landlocked Sahelian neighbours pass through Abidjan port. The economy was just starting to show signs of revival after three years of recession, helped by a recovery in the cocoa price, which has now soared to 16-year highs.
There were already forecasts of supply problems this coming season and these are likely to be worse now. Ivory Coast produces 40 per cent of the world’s cocoa. Indonesia overtook Ghana last season as the world’s second biggest producer, but Ghana’s exports are likely to recover sharply in response to the instability in its neighbour. The main cocoa growing areas of western Ivory Coast had already seen clashes between indigenous Bete people and incomers from central Ivory Coast and from Burkina Faso.
With the death of Guei, a Yacouba from the far west, these tensions are sure to increase, and there is potential for spillover from chronically unstable neighbouring Liberia, whose Gio people are closely related to Guei’s Yacouba.
CROSS-BORDER ATTACKS
Sierra Leone ended its decade-long civil war last year, with massive international support. Liberia’s older conflict has flared again and cross-border attacks into Guinea have resumed. Few regional governments want to see that conflict spread further.
France, which already keeps 600 troops in Ivory Coast, sent 200 reinforcements. They evacuated foreigners from Bouake and Korhogo but disappointed the government by declining to activate their defence pact with Ivory Coast, on the grounds that the country is not suffering “external aggression”.
They are, however, giving logistical help to the ill-equipped Ivorian army, and on October 1 were reinforcing positions south of Bouake, which will deter the rebels from pushing south.“France has made a clear decision to support the legitimate regime,” said Defence Minister Moise Lida Kouassi.
An ECOWAS mediation team has been appointed, but deployment of peacekeepers risks formalising the division of the country. “It all depends on the response we get from the rebels, if they choose the path of dialogue that has been offered to them,” ECOWAS Executive Secretary Mohamed Ibn Chambas said. “Otherwise it means they would have torn up the Ivorian constitution. In which case they will be taking on the whole of the sub-region and indeed Africa.”
African military interventions are seldom without their problems. Efforts are under way to increase African nations’ capacity to supply more troops for the continent’s peacekeeping operations, but capacity-building will take years and big-ticket peace operations such as the Democratic Republic of Congo will need tens of thousands of ideally well trained troops.
Senegal has a battalion that was headed for Sierra Leone, but may now go to Congo. The United States has been training Nigerian forces, which are now doing a much better job in Sierra Leone. Mali has troops available for peacekeeping operations, but Sahelian Moslems would not be suitable for Ivory Coast. Policymakers working with the architects of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) would like to see the deployment of more mediators to resolve conflict, rather than more troops.
“The U.N. needs to get involved in mediation and put pressure on Gbagbo to negotiate,” said one policymaker. “They need to be able to sit down and acknowledge that neither side is perfect and work out what to do from here.”