Issue No. 610
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31 Oct. - 6 Nov. 2002 Issue No. 610 International |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Dialogue of the deaf
Hopes for peace were rekindled when West African leaders convened in Lome yesterday to broker an Ivorian peace deal, but the warring parties were still poles apart, writes Gamal Nkrumah
A great trial for peace in the Ivory Coast has just begun. It is a trial in which the West African country's neighbours play judge and jury. Ivorians need to find the equation for political stability somewhere between meshing the interests of the warring protagonists and the prospect of a lingering conflict that has already raged for the past four weeks.
The 16-nation Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), of which Ivory Coast is a member, held an emergency summit in the Togolese capital Lome. Togolese President Gnassingbe Eyadema, a former military ruler and one of Africa's longest serving heads of state, now officially heads a team of West African mediators in the Ivorian conflict. Diplomatic pressure is being applied by the West African states on the Ivorian government to demonstrate its seriousness in negotiating with the rebels. The Ivorian government contends that the rebels must first lay down their arms.
In the south, anti-Muslim prejudice is on the rise and Muslim immigrants are seen as the wreckers and traducers of Ivory Coast's indigenous heritage. Unfortunately, many southerners echo much of the same rhetoric exhorted by the New Christian Right in the West. They paint a wildly idealised and homogenous picture of indigenous Ivorian culture, deliberately omitting that the country is a cosmopolitan pot-pourri with an important Islamic component that dates back at least four centuries.
Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo called on his compatriots to desist targeting foreign nationals especially those suspected of hailing from Ivory Coast's poorer northern and predominantly Muslim neighbouring countries. But, his pleas have gone unheeded. Violence has dramatically escalated. The death toll since 19 September when the civil war started has exceeded 1,000. In Lome, the rebel Patriotic Movement of Cote d'Ivoire spokesman Guillaume Soro warned that "None of this helps, nor does it show a spirit of reconciliation".
The rebels complain that they were treated as slaves by the government. Conversely, the Ivorian government's refusal to endorse a West African peace proposal is rooted in the widespread fear of foreign nationals from poorer neighbouring West African countries.
The armed opposition group demand Gbagbo's resignation, claiming that he rigged last year's presidential elections. Ivory Coast was an oasis of political stability and economic prosperity until quite recently. On Christmas Day, 1999, General Robert Guei overthrew the democratically-elected government of former Ivorian President Konan Bedie. Ever since the country has been embroiled in political power struggles, teetering on the verge of civil war. Crucially, neither the former colonial power, France, nor Ivory Coast's West African neighbours are willing to force the rebels to disarm. Indeed, the 1,000 French troops now stationed in the Ivory Coast, acting as a buffer between the warring Ivorian protagonists, are soon to be replaced by at least 2,000 West African troops. ECOMOG, the armed wing of ECOWAS, has been called upon to play a more decisive peacekeeping role.
However, peace is not that simple. The clouds on the horizons are those of civil war. The Ivorian government's desperate bid to forcibly quell the armed rebellion by preventive military action has failed. The uprising prompted a spate of ethnic and religious rioting in a country that, like Lebanon of the 1970s, teetered on the delicate balance of a confessional divide. Muslims, who at independence from France in 1960 constituted just over a third of the population, now make up more than 50 per cent of the Ivorians. That, the Ivorian Christians insist is mainly because of an influx of foreigner nationals from poorer and predominantly Muslim countries to the north of Ivory Coast such as Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea and Senegal. Meanwhile, Muslims -- both local and foreign-born -- make up the majority of the country's labour force, and especially on the cocoa and coffee plantations in the rich agricultural farmland in the central part of the country which has sadly now been turned into a front-line.
The Ivory Coast is for all intents and purposes split into two warring zones: a rebel-controlled Muslim north pitted against a government-held mainly Christian south. To make matters worse for the Ivorian government, hundreds of ostensibly loyal government troops have fled the country to seek sanctuary in neighbouring Mali and refuse to return and fight the rebels as ordered by the Ivorian authorities.
People in neighbouring West African countries cannot determine how it is that a country which enjoyed prosperity and political stability for decades under its first president, the now deceased Felix Houphouet Boigny, has fallen into utter chaos. Chief Ivorian opposition leader Alassane Ouattara, a Muslim northerner, a former prime minister, World Bank official and one of Boigny's closest associates, was accused of being a Burkinabe -- foreign-born. He could, therefore, not qualify for participation in presidential elections. His angry supporters took to the streets and fought fierce battles with government forces. They are incensed -- what they regard as an illegitimate government is hurtling towards war against their correligionists in the north of the country.
If West African nations take a common stance, the beleaguered Ivorian government would have to sit down and seriously iron out differences with the somewhat shady group of 750 rebel soldiers who mutinied against the Ivorian government on 19 September. Others joined the rebellion and the mutineers captured the country's second largest city Bouake in the heart of the prosperous central coffee and cocoa country. Korhogo, an important northern city also fell to the rebels. But, the mutineers failed to storm the country's largest city, commercial capital and chief port, Abidjan. Ominously, a large number of Muslim and foreign nationals were trapped in Abidjan unable to escape the city for safe havens in rebel-held areas.
It is against this grim backdrop that West African leaders try to mediate between the Ivorian factions. Earlier in the month, they managed to get the two sides to sign a cease-fire. And, the one hopeful piece of news from this process is that the ECOWAS-brokered cease-fire has miraculously held for two weeks. But Amnesty International and other human rights groups have sounded the alarm bells, warning that atrocities and gross human rights violations have been committed on both sides of the Ivorian divide.
Hundreds of civilians bearing Muslim names have been killed and maimed in government-held areas and in the north, and the corpses of at least 20 Malian nationals have been identified. Meanwhile, southerners are subject to torture and death in the northern rebel-held parts of the country.
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