Hope is dying by the day that the two-month old crisis in Ivory Coast will be just a brief, if bloody, episode in one of Africa’s few success stories.
”This country has to dig itself out of a very deep hole and the odds are stacked high,” a member of President Laurent Gbagbo’s government remarked this week. Gbagbo, who came to power only two years ago, has lost control over half his country.
Since army mutineers simultaneously attacked the country’s two biggest cities, Abidjan and Bouake, on September 19, fighting has claimed at least 400 lives and the rebels have taken over more than 40% of the west African country.
The influential interior minister Emile Boga Doudou was killed on the first day of the unrest, as was former military leader Robert Guei, who came to power in a coup in 1999, and his family. The economy, which used to contribute 40% of the region’s gross domestic product, has gone into freefall and friendly relations with the former colonial power France have soured.
Founding president Felix Houphouet Boigny for three decades kept a tenuous harmony between more than 50 ethnic groups. But in recent years his country has become riven with divisions — between the loyalist south and the rebel-held north, between Muslims and Christians, and between factions jostling for political power.
In Abidjan, where the population lives under a strict
early-evening curfew, Gbagbo’s main political rival, former prime minister Alassane Ouattara, has been holed up in the residence of the French ambassador for 60 days.
Like him, former president Henri Konan Bedie, who was deposed by Guei on Christmas Day 1999, is living in fear and is monitoring developments.
Nobody knows how the crisis will end. There is a bitter debate between those favouring negotiations and those who want the two sides to fight it out.
Ivorians had been proud of their country’s stability and prosperity and it is with some disbelief that they await the arrival of soldiers from neighbouring African states to replace French soldiers monitoring a fragile ceasefire.
Ivory Coast has become increasingly troubled since the death of Houphouet Boigny in December 1993 and neither the rebels nor the problems that pushed them to take up arms will easily be dealt with.
The mutineers have gained political and popular support and have become better organised. In Bouake, their stronghold, they have assumed some administrative responsibilities.
Many sources say they also have a foothold in Abidjan.
There has been no proof of this, but the city has been plagued by a spate of disappearances and deaths which each side blames on the other, and which the government has used to justify keeping the city under curfew.
In government ranks some swear that the only way out of the crisis is to crush the rebels militarily. Two months ago the army lacked the experience, the fire power and perhaps the motivation to gain the upper hand over the rebels, but it has since received shipments of heavy weaponry and combat helicopters estimated as having cost some 150-million euros.
But many here say that more bloodshed between Ivorians must be avoided, even if the army stood a chance of winning, because this could lead to bitter reprisals later.
After a half-hearted start, Gbagbo appears to have decided to stay the course in the peace talks with the rebels that got underway in the Togolese capital Lome on October 30.
But his side is still not prepared to discuss any demands that dispute the president’s hold on power over all of Ivory Coast until the next elections in 2005.
The rebels for their part are highly unlikely to comply with Gbagbo’s demands and lay down their arms.
While the impasse drags on, millions of tons of cotton and the cocoa pods that form the mainstay of the economy are trapped in the north of the country as routes to the southern port cities remain
blocked.
Hate attacks on workers from neighbouring countries suspected of supporting the rebels continue to push thousands of refugees across the borders.
As Ivorians celebrated national peace day on November 15, some may have remembered Houphouet Boigny’s fondness to remark that may ”one does not know your blessings until they are gone”. – Sapa-AFP