IVORYCOAST'S GRIM PAST

Ivory Coast’s grim past

With allies like this....

WEARING green-and-blue pyjama bottoms, Amadé Ouérémi casually bantered with government soldiers and posed for mobile-phone pictures as he entertained them recently at his encampment in the Mount Peko national park, in the west-central part of Ivory Coast. Mr Ouérémi’s personal militia, believed to number at least 100, had occupied the protected forest for more than a decade. A few hours later, government soldiers arrested him, dragging him kicking and screaming into a blue van. “Why am I the only one accused of crimes?” he said. “They want to eat without me.”

Ever since Ivory Coast’s short but murderous crisis after a disputed election in 2010, Mr Ouérémi enjoyed close relations with the rebels who have now become the national army. Alongside bands of traditional hunters, called dozos, he helped to wrest the country’s west from forces loyal to the incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo, on behalf of Alassane Ouattara, who was internationally recognised to have won the election. In the process, they allegedly slaughtered hundreds in Duékoué, a town near Mount Peko.

Despite allegations that Mr Ouérémi was involved in the

massacre, he looks likely to be tried only for occupying the forest. This will invite yet more accusations of “victors’ justice”. To date, no supporter of Mr Ouattara has been prosecuted in connection with the post-election violence, whereas more than 150 of Mr Gbagbo’s partisans are facing trial.

A government-appointed commission last year concluded that both sides had committed atrocities. Still, the architect of the western offensive, whose forces have also been implicated in the Duékoué massacre, is now one of the army’s chief commanders. Another well-known pro-Ouattara commander who has been accused of overseeing soldiers implicated in extrajudicial killings now heads a department in the south-west. The list goes on.

It reflects the peculiar nature of Mr Ouattara’s ascent to power. Although he was freely and fairly elected in the eyes of the outside world, he entered office on the back of a rebellion led by warlords who ran the country’s north until the election. Most owe their first loyalty to Guillaume Soro, a former chief rebel commander who is now the national assembly’s Speaker. Mr Ouattara has eagerly courted their allegiance. As well as getting plum jobs in the security apparatus, they have held on to the vast smuggling networks and parallel taxation systems they established as rebel leaders. A recent UN report found that smuggling costs the state hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Mr Ouattara has emerged as a forceful president. The legislature granted him the power to enact economic policy by decree after he announced GDP growth of nearly 10% in 2012. Yet he often seems in thrall to armed men. After Mr Ouérémi’s arrest, some expressed cautious optimism that the president was at last prepared to remove some of the more unsavoury characters around him. The government did win convictions in May against two ordinary soldiers in the president’s camp for murders committed after the crisis. The big fish, however, have remained untouched.

DEATH SQUADS

Ivorian opposition fears going home

QUIETLY, two vice-presidents of Ivory Coast’s former ruling party went to Ghana last month to ask Ivorian refugees in the country what it would take to get them to come home. Former President Laurent Gbagbo’s Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) was weakened after his refusal to step down despite losing the 2010 presidential election. Many high-ranking officials of the party fled to neighbouring Ghana in the ensuing crisis that saw President Alassane Ouattara take office by force the following year. The party has since boycotted parliamentary and local elections, and works out of a mansion headquarters in the commercial capital Abidjan that was stripped bare of windows and lights fixtures by occupying rebels. But the FPI still commands some support among Ivorians, particularly those from the country’s south, and President Alassane Ouattara is up for re-election next year. The visit by the two vice-presidents may be the start of a comeback attempt by Mr Gbagbo’s followers, though not the former president himself.

Approximately 8,900 Ivorian refugees live in Ghana, according to United Nations High Commission of Refugees statistics from last August. Many occupy camps in the countryside, but others live in or near the capital, Accra. Damana Adia Pickass, an FPI representative on Ivory Coast’s electoral commission during the crisis who famously tore up election results in front of journalists, was seen in Accra last July, and Justin Kone Katinan, Mr Gbagbo’s former spokesman, calls the capital home. Though Ghana is generally safe and welcoming to the former officials, many keep a low profile, and not without good reason. Last January, youth leader Charles Blé Goudé was arrested by Ghanaian and Ivorian police and spirited to Abidjan on a warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC). The United Nations in a report released last year revealed that the Ghanaian government had intercepted two hit squads sent from Ivory Coast, and that at least one pro-Gbagbo Ivorian who had returned home from Ghana had disappeared.

Gbagbo supporters in Ghana are aware of all this, and made it clear that if the FPI wants them home, they’re going to need to protect them. A member of a refugee group, the Coalition of Ivorian Patriots, told Baobab that the only way the group’s members would come back is if they received a written agreement from Mr Ouattara that they would be safe from retribution in Ivory Coast and if Mr Gbagbo was released from jail in The Hague, where he is awaiting trial at the ICC. While seen as a savvy economic manager, Mr Ouattara has been criticized for failing to bring the country together again. Perhaps that’s because he doesn’t have complete control of the myriad militias and rebel groups that backed his rise to power. Even a written agreement may not be able to protect former Gbagbo officials who return home. 

FRANCAFRIQUE

Françafrique

Houphouet-Boigny used the word in a positive sense, but it didn't remain that way. In the current French media, the word evokes a shadowy network of personal friendships and money transfers that influence policy on both sides of the Atlantic. "I give you your budget; I can do what I want," former President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing apparently told Jean-Bédel Bokassa. D'Estaing had helped finance Bokassa's grandiose wedding ceremony—worth one-fourth of the annual budget of the country—before growing exasperated with his protegé's wasteful spending and flirtation with Muammar Gaddafi—and throwing French military support behind a 1979 student uprising that brought down the Bokassa regime. In France, political campaigns were financed by oil and even aid money that African leaders—particularly longtime Gabonese President Omar Bongo—skim off and send back to Paris, therefore manipulating French policy in their own way.
Since François Mitterand in 1990, French presidents have tried to distance themselves from the "old boys' club" of "occult networks" of Françafrique. However, it was on Mitterrand's watch that the biggest disaster of Françafrique occurred: a bungled military intervention in Rwanda—a former Belgian colony whose president had worked closely with France— that allowed some perpetrators of the 1994 genocide to escape across the Congolese border.

Pyromaniac

Sarkozy "is a pyromaniac," says Chaibou Boubacar, editor-in-chief of Alternative Espaces Citoyens magazine. "Based on a survey I did yesterday in the capital [Niamey, Niger], we're glad to be rid of him." The fires to which Boubacar alludes are the French interventions in Cote d'Ivoire and Libya.

"Our president [Mahamadou Issoufou] has traveled to Paris 14 times in a little more than a year," adds a resident of Niamey interviewed by Jeune Afrique. "What does he need to go there so often for? France needs to give us our independence back."

After a close, disputed election in Cote d'Ivoire in fall 2010, socialist incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo was widely believed to have won therefore refused to give up power. After several months of slow-burning civil conflict, a French military intervention resulted in Gbagbo's arrest and installed his opponent, Alassane Ouattara, as president. Ouattara, a former IMF economist, is a friend and ideological ally of Sarkozy. His party, Rassemblement des Republicains, even signed a collaboration accord with Sarkozy's Unis pour un Mouvement Populaire shortly before the election.

"It's true that Hollande is a socialist, like Gbagbo, but people here are just happy to see Ouattara's puppet-master gone," says Goué.

France's support of NATO intervention in Libya also left a bad taste in the mouths of many Africans. Former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had invested millions in schools, mosques and infrastructure across Africa, in the name of Islam and his dream of a "United States of Africa."

France ruled, really essentially by pitting one ethnicity against the other.  So there is a legacy of colonial powers extracting resources and really making sure that those resources go for the interests of the external actors, particularly multinational corporations that are active in mining, have been active in mining in Africa for decades, and really rendering the people on the land invisible.