Issue No. 607
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10 - 16 October 2002 Issue No. 607 International |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Battling over Bouake
Ivory Coast's neighbours put together a tentative peace plan but the Ivorian government turns it down, writes Gamal Nkrumah
Ivory Coast is fast plunging into civil war and chaos. The Ivorian government twice declined to sign a cease-fire deal brokered by the 16-nation Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) of which Ivory Coast is a member. The Ivorian government and mutineers were supposed to sign the ECOWAS cease-fire deal last Sunday in Tiebissou half way between the Ivorian capital Yamoussoukro which is still in the hands of government forces, and Bouake 100 kms northwest of the capital, and a rebel stronghold. The Ivorian government had different plans. It promptly ordered its loyal troops to march on Bouake. A major battle has been raging in and around the city since. If the city falls, the Ivorian government would have dealt a severe psychological blow to the mutineers. If the rebels get to keep Bouake, the consequences for the Ivorian government would be too horrible to contemplate.
Two Ivorian youths protesting the presence of foreigners (Photo:Reuters)
The Ivorian government hurriedly bought weapons worth $10 billion from Yugoslavia, and is determined to thwart the army mutiny which has effectively divided the country in two, with the mutineers controlling the northern and central parts of the country and government forces holding on to the southern coastal strip, including the largest city and main port Abidjan. But the battle for control of the country now centres on Ivory Coast's second largest city, Bouake, in the central heart of the country and which has been in the hands of the mutineers since 19 September. The latest reports give conflicting accounts of the battle for Bouake. The Ivorian government claims that it has triumphantly entered the city, but the rebels say that they have warded off the loyalist forces' attacks. The 1,000 French troops, who are in the country much to the Ivorian government's chagrin, are not taking sides, preferring instead to play an impartial peacekeeping role in conjunction with ECOWAS and the African Union.
The worst scenario is that a military and political stalemate will consolidate the division of the country into a predominantly Muslim north pitted against a wrathful Christian south with vulnerable pockets of Muslim minorities in southern cities.
At this critical historical juncture, Ivorians, Muslim and Christian, northern and southern, must join hands to construct a more humane and more tolerant Ivory Coast, and by extension a more humane Africa. Ivorians must show more magnanimity towards each other and demonstrate that they can bridge their own ethnic and religious chasms. Those Ivorians pushing for the mass expulsion of immigrants, and the descendants of immigrants who in many instances have been residing in Ivory Coast for several generations, can only be described as irresponsible chauvinists. As Africa moves towards a more effective union, calls must be seen as an anachronistic aberration.
Muslim northerners are as much a composite feature of the contemporary Ivorian make-up as the Christian southerners who have dominated the political establishment of Ivory Coast since it gained independence from France in 1960.
Ironically, it has been the former colonial power which has emerged as a voice of reason and tolerance in the ongoing Ivorian crisis. "We believe that there can be no military solution to the difficulties which Ivory Coast is currently experiencing," said French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin. "We have to emerge from this crisis by means of dialogue, by means of reconciliation," he added.
Sadly, the failure to secure a cease-fire has highlighted the weaknesses of regional and international institutions in dealing with armed mutiny.
The Ivorian government insists that the mutineers should disarm first, before any deal can be concluded. ECOWAS officials accuse the Ivorian authorities of "stalling" and adopting "delaying tactics" so as to regroup their armed forces and storm the rebels' strongholds, especially the large provincial towns of the rich agricultural farmland in central parts of the country -- a region that produces the bulk of the Ivory Coast's agricultural export crops.
The Ivorian mutineers demand fresh elections in which all political parties participate on an equal footing. The precise identity and number of the mutineers remains a carefully guarded secret. However, they do appear to politically favour the chief opposition leader Alassane Ouattara, a Muslim northerner.
Ouattara is a close associate of the first Ivorian President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, and he sought safety in the French Embassy in the aftermath of the 19 September mutiny. Ouattara had been barred from running for the presidency on the grounds that he was not Ivorian, even though he held senior positions in the past including the premiership. In June, the avowedly secularist Ouattara was finally granted nationality papers, but even though his wife is a devout Roman Catholic, he has been unable to win over the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-northern Christian establishment. His political constituency remains largely northern and Muslim.
Ouattara's political problems pale in comparison to those of his correligionists trapped in impoverished ghettoes of the southern coastal regions of the country. The slums surrounding the Ivorian commercial capital Abidjan, are peopled mainly by immigrants from the predominantly Muslim countries to the immediate north of Ivory Coast and were set ablaze in a frenzy of religious hatred and xenophobia. The "key to victory" was to expel the two million Burkina Faso nationals residing in the country, proclaimed the national television broadcasts.
With immigrant and Muslim neighbourhoods torched, the immediate prospects for peace appear slim. Some of the more zealous members of Ivorian President Gbagbo's ruling Ivorian Popular Front Party (PFP) are fanning the fires of an Inquisition-like armed conflict. The more militant segments of Ouattara's opposition Rally of the Republicans (RDR) might be tempted to support a sustained insurrection.
The tragic events in Ivory Coast come at a time when peace efforts in other civil wars in Africa appear to be bearing fruit. The situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is especially encouraging. Some 20,000 Rwandan troops have pulled out of the country. Uganda has withdrawn all but 1,000 troops, who are still stationed in the northeastern town of Bumia where continued ethnic fighting necessitates their presence. And 12,000 Zimbabwean troops were recently in a formal departure ceremony in the Congolese capital Kinshasa.
Ethnic and regional rivalry triggered off by the fabulous mineral wealth of the DRC resulted in four years of civil war which dragged no less than nine neighbouring countries into the crisis. Rwanda agreed to withdraw in exchange for a pledge by the Congolese authorities to disarm, demobilise and repatriate ethnic Hutu militiamen held responsible for the 1994 genocide which claimed the lives of more than 500,000 mainly ethnic Tutsi people in Rwanda.
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