Events in Côte d’Ivoire last week illustrated the fragility of the three-month peace in that country.
Drunken Ivoirean rebels killed two French peacekeepers in an exchange of fire 300km north of Abidjan last Tuesday.
The French soldiers, part of a 4 000-strong force posted in the country, were patrolling Lake Kossou in the buffer zone between the government-controlled south and the rebel-held north of the country.
After an argument, the rebels in a truck fired on the French army boat, inflicting the first fatalities since France sent in troops last September to keep the warring parties apart.
One rebel was killed in the exchange.
Three days earlier, at a Paris airport, police arrested 11 people allegedly planning to destabilise Côte d’Ivoire with the help of mercenaries.
These included Master Sergeant Ibrahim Coulibaly, who was a key figure in the 1999 coup d’état that brought Colonel Robert Guei’s military government to power.
Coulibaly went into exile in Burkino Faso when Guei made way for President Laurent Ggabgbo’s elected government in 2000.
This might be small potatoes compared with the country’s rambunctious neighbour Liberia and nearby Sierra Leone. But Côte d’Ivoire’s history as an island of stability in the region is what returned peace to the centre relatively quickly after the civil war a year ago led to rebel forces seizing control of the north.
Anything that enhances the climate of violence damages this fabric.
The number of roadblocks in the capital has increased and military helicopters clatter overhead, underlining the sense of instability.
“Ivoireans never really expected that some day their country would be immersed in the kind of conflict that has taken place during the past two years. It was kind of a rude awakening for a lot of Ivoireans,” Washington-based Africa specialist Christopher Fomunvoh said on his return from a seminar near Abidjan this month.
Cameroon-born Fomunvoh was guardedly optimistic about the peace and reconciliation efforts under way in the country.
Instability also hurts the tending and harvesting of the cocoa harvest. The country’s position as the world’s largest exporter of this commodity contributed largely to it becoming the economic success story of West Africa.
In his report on Côte d’Ivoire earlier this month, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan noted that fighting had stopped since the latest ceasefire was signed in May.
A government of national unity established in March was to organise fresh elections in two years.
Confidence-building steps had been implemented between the government, the armed forces and the rebels. The National Assembly had passed an amnesty law earlier this month allowing rebel soldiers to return to their original units.
Annan warned, however, that the security situation was threatened by the activities of unofficial armed groups on both sides of the divide.
He highlighted the activities of “uncontrolled” elements of the rebel army that maintained check points on main roads in the north and “freelance Liberian elements which still maintain a presence in the western region”.
There are disturbing signs that both sides in the now-dormant conflict are rearming, Annan reported.