/ 2 June 2006

Elephants to unite war-divided Côte d’Ivoire

Down a dusty ally, past noisy chicken coops and roving bands of small children, about 50 Ivorian football supporters gaze intently at a tiny TV screen suspended from the rafters of the green canvas awning at the X-Five bar.

Côte d’Ivoire has qualified for the World Cup finals for the first time this year.

And fans have been packing into curbside watering holes across the country to tip back giant beers, know affectionately as Drogba’s after the Côte d’Ivoire and Chelsea star, and to scrutinise the performance of the Elephants during the team’s series of warm-up matches.

At the X-Five, the Elephants are taking on Chile, and a foul on Arsenal’s Emmanuel Eboue sparks the kind of conversation that has, in recent years, become commonplace in the war-divided country.

”Eboue: are you sure he’s Ivorian?” asks one of the gathered faithful. ”His dad isn’t Cameroonian or something? There are Eboues over there too.”

”No, Eboue’s Ivorian, like me, Yeboue,” replies a heavily muscled man decked out in an orange bandana, and green and white T-shirt, the colours of the Ivorian flag.

”We’re the sons of Ghana,” he adds, referring to the Baoule ethnic group, which in pre-colonial times migrated to Côte d’Ivoire from territory in what is now the country’s eastern neighbour.

Côte d’Ivoire has been divided in two since a failed coup against President Laurent Gbagbo deteriorated into a civil war that left half of the country under the control of rebel fighters.

In the 1990s, the long-established open-door immigration policy begun under Côte d’Ivoire’s independence President Felix Houphouet-Boigny began to come under fire. The country’s economy, long the envy of West Africa, was faltering.

And upon Houphouet-Boigny’s death, an extreme form of nationalism, known as ”ivoirite” took root and was used by one president after another to exclude political rivals amidst charges of dubious citizenship.

Questions over who should be considered Ivorian permeated public debate, complicated further by the fact that an estimated three million of Côte d’Ivoire’s 17-million residents have no civil documentation whatsoever.

And many blame the resulting inequities and discrimination, particularly against those with ethnic origins in the north, for setting the stage for war, in what had long been a bastion of stability in the troubled region.

Today, the New Forces rebels say they are fighting to secure equal rights for northerners.

But despite three years of blocked peace negotiations and increasing scepticism among international mediators that any progress would be made soon, many Ivorians are now putting their faith in the unifying powers of football.

”When there’s a match, we set the political parties aside, we reunite, and we follow the match,” says 34-year-old Didier Kouassi, the manager of the Blue Diamond bar in the heart of the commercial capital Abidjan’s Yopougon neighbourhood, a stronghold of the notorious pro-Gbagbo street militia known as the Young Patriots.

”Everyone has the same idea, to win the cup. I’m proud of all the Ivorian players,” Kouassi said.

Côte d’Ivoire’s selection for Germany 2006 fields players with origins from both sides of the United Nations-patrolled buffer zone that has now separated the rebels in the north from government troops in the south for more than three years.

When the Elephants make their World Cup debut against Argentina June 10, their attack is due to be led by Didier Drogba, a world class striker who is Bete, the ethnicity of the president, while the defence is to be anchored by Arsenal’s star defender, Kolo Toure, who is an ethnic northerner, born in the rebels’ de facto capital of Bouake.

On match days, Bouake’s usually bustling central market is empty. Twenty-eight-year-old Mamadou Kone sells shoes there, and though he was born just a few hundred metres away in the city’s hospital, he is still referred to teasingly as the Guinean, the nationality of his immigrant father.

”The leaders of this country have created this xenophobia.

They’ve divided the population,” says Kone, who like most Ivorians, expects the Elephants to defy the odds and advance past the tournament’s group phase.

”The president is Bete. They came from Liberia. The Baoules are from Ghana. The Dioulas in the north came from Mali. We all just ended up here. But look at us on match day,” he says, then utters with a smile what has become Côte d’Ivoire’s unofficial World Cup motto, now emblazoned upon thousands of tee-shirts. ”We are

together.” – Sapa-DPA