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PAUL BIYA ENDS 24 HOUR VISIT TO COTE D’IVOIRE

25 mai 2011 by Le Magazine de la Diaspora Ivoirienne et des Ami(e)s de la Côte d’Ivoire

CAMEROON’S CHIEF EXECUTIVE, PAUL BIYA HAS BEEN GIVEN A GRACEFUL RECEPTION AS HE VISITS COTE D’IVOIRE FOR THE SECOND TIME SINCE THE DEATH OF THE COUNTRY’S FIRST POST INDEPENDENCE PRESIDENT, FELIX HOUGHOUET BOIGNY.

The first couple was received at the foot of the plane at the Yamousoukro airport by the Prime Minister, Minister of Defence of Cote d’Ivoire, Guillueme Soro amidst a teaming crowd of Cameroonians.

The warm embrace and echange of civilities at the foot of the plane is reminiscent of the attaint cordial between the two friendly and brotherly nations.

After the airport rituals, highlighted by the chanting of the national anthems of both countries, President Paul Biya and Madame communed with representatives of the over five thousand Cameroonian populations living the Cote d’Ivoire, who had crowded the airport.

The Cameroonians who were not spared by the post electoral violence in Cote d’Ivoire took advantage of the presidential visit to present their difficulties to the Head of State.

They hope that the participation of President Paul Biya in the investiture of Alassane Dramane Ouattara would certainly ease post electoral relations between Cameroonians and Ivorians. It is worth noting that the country went into a political turmoil after presidential elections were organised some six months ago.

Cameroon that maintains the policy of non interference has through the event rekindled diplomatic and bilateral relations which were established since independence.

President Paul Biya’s participation at the investiture of the Ouattara administration is expected to boost cooperation ties and once again strengthen and consolidate leadership role Cameroon and Cote d’Ivoire in the Central African and West African sub regions respectively.

Photo credits : http://www.jamiiforums.com/international-forum/137962-ouattara-aapishwa-uraisi-ivory-coast.html

Elvis Teke

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Supporters of Ivory Coast president Alassane Ouattara ‘killing enemies’

25 mai 2011 by Le Magazine de la Diaspora Ivoirienne et des Ami(e)s de la Côte d’Ivoire

Atrocities being committed against real or perceived supporters of former leader Laurent Gbagbo, says Amnesty International.

Reprisal attacks are still being committed by forces loyal to the president of Ivory Coast, six weeks after he came to power vowing peace and reconciliation, Amnesty International warns today.

Alassane Ouattara, championed by the west during a deadly post-election conflict, has failed to condemn atrocities against real or perceived supporters of ousted president Laurent Gbagbo, the human rights group said.

Amnesty also criticised the UN mission in Ivory Coast for ignoring pleas for help and failing to prevent a massacre in the western town of Duekoue.

Its report argues that forces allied to both Gbagbo and Ouattara committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during six months of violence following November’s disputed vote.

Gbagbo, who refused to accept defeat, was finally winkled out of his presidential bunker on 11 April by pro-Ouattara rebels with French military backing. Ouattara – whose inauguration last weekend was attended by 20 other national leaders and UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon – has pledged to heal the bitter divisions.

But Amnesty reports that a manhunt was launched against Gbagbo loyalists in Abidjan and several senior officials close to him were beaten in the hours after his arrest.

In the west of the country, thousands of people fled their homes and many are still living in the forest, too frightened to return.

Gaetan Mootoo, Amnesty’s west Africa researcher, said: « Human rights violations are still being committed against real or perceived supporters of Laurent Gbagbo. Alassane Ouattara’s failure to condemn these acts could be seen as a green light by many of his security forces, and other armed elements fighting with them, to continue.

« Ouattara must publicly state that all violence against the civilian population must stop immediately. »

Attacks against villages inhabited by people belonging to ethnic groups considered supporters of Gbagbo continued in the first weeks of May, Amnesty said.

Between 6 and 8 May several villages were burned and dozens killed. Ouattara’s republican forces justified these acts by saying they were looking for arms and Liberian mercenaries.

An Amnesty delegation spent two months in Ivory Coast, gathering more than 100 witness statements from people who survived the massacre in Duekoue and neighbouring villages on 29 March.

All the statements indicated a systematic and targeted series of killings committed by uniformed republican forces, who executed hundreds of men on political and ethnic grounds.

Before killing them, they asked their victims to give their names or show identity cards, Amnesty said. Some of these cards were found beside the bodies.

A woman who lived in Duekoue told researchers: « They came into the yards and chased the women. Then they told the men to line up and asked them to state their first and second names and show their identity cards. Then they executed them. I was present while they sorted out the men. Three young men, one of whom was about 15, were shot dead in front of me. »

Amnesty’s report also accuses the UN mission, which has a base less than a mile from Duekoue, of fatal inertia.

Victims claimed they had repeatedly requested help from Unoci (the UN Operation in Côte d’Ivoire) but received no response from its 200 soldiers.

Mootoo said: « Unoci has a mandate to protect the civilian population yet in some cases it clearly failed to do this.

« Unoci officials told us that it is the duty of the state to protect civilians. However, as the national forces firstly under Gbagbo and then under Ouattara themselves committed horrific crimes, how can we expect them to protect the civilian population? »

In response yesterday, Hamadoun Touré – a Unoci spokesman – said: « We will issue our own report on the Duekoue events within the coming days. »

Since December 2010, Amnesty found, forces and militias loyal to Gbagbo also committed war crimes including extrajudicial executions, torture and rape.

At least 3,000 people died and more than a million were displaced in the Ivorian crisis, in which cocoa exports ceased, banks closed and shops were ransacked.

S: guardian.co.uk

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France Must Now Leave Côte d’Ivoire

6 mai 2011 by Le Magazine de la Diaspora Ivoirienne et des Ami(e)s de la Côte d’Ivoire

In scenes redolent of the kidnapping of Patrice Lumumba and storming of Salvador Allende’s presidential palace, France’s recent activities in Côte d’Ivoire have been purely about establishing self-interested ‘regime change’, argues Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe.

‘Without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st century.’ French President François Mitterand, March 1998

‘A little country, with a small amount of strength, we can move a planet because [of our] … relations with 15 or 20 African countries.’

Jacques Godfrain, former head, French foreign ministry, March 1998

For whoever wished to know, it was evident, right from the outset, that the French mission in Côte d’Ivoire since November 2010 had little to do with the locally disputed presidential elections. If France’s ambitions were to help resolve a fractious presidential poll, it indeed was confronted with a pressing opportunity during the period within its own European homeland – in Belarus, just a thousand miles away. Perhaps for a ‘nobler’ transcontinental effect, if it felt so compelled, it could have sought to resolve that mother of all presidential disputes that has dragged on for 21 years in Myanmar between Aung San Suu Kyi and the country’s aging military junta.

No, France had no and has no such lofty aspirations. In Côte d’Ivoire, to employ that late 20th century/early 21st century awful euphemism for the flagrant invasion and occupation of a country and the overthrow of its government by an aggressor state, the French objective here has been nothing but ‘regime change’. It achieved this so ferociously and viciously recently by unleashing a raging cascade of violence in Abidjan that was at once aimed at recreating, on the African scene, the bestial kidnapping of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in 1960 (centrally organised, we mustn’t fail to recall, by France’s Belgian francophonie cousin) and the 1973 attack and virtual destruction of Salvador Allende’s presidential palace in Santiago, Chile, by Augusto Pinochet’s putschist military. Hundreds of Ivoirians and others were murdered during this brigandage, with one report placing the final casualty tally at 2,300. On the morrow of its Abidjan rampage on 6 April 2011, the brute seized President Gbagbo, along with his wife and family and aides, dismissed him from office and turned him over to his very implacable electoral foes for incarceration or worse. Finally, the brute imposed Alassane Ouattara, its francophonie acolyte and barely competent ex-IMF (International Monetary Fund) official, on the peoples of Côte d’Ivoire as le président de la république!

But why Côte d’Ivoire, a sovereign African country 3,000 miles away from France? Why indeed Africa? France has long been wracked by chronic anxieties about its ‘status’ and ‘prestige’ in the world since its military was dealt a humiliating defeat during a 12-year old uprising by enslaved African military forces led by Toussaint L’Ouverture in French-occupied San Domingo (Haiti) – the ‘greatest individual market’ of the 18th century European enslavement of the African humanity, which accounted for two-thirds of French foreign trade at the time. The Africans of San Domingo, ‘The Black Jacobins’, as C.L.R. James, the illustrious African-Caribbean scholar would describe them in such searing irony and sardonicism in his 1938-published classic of the same title on the subject, ‘defeated in turn the local whites and the soldiers of the French monarchy, a Spanish invasion, a British expedition of some 60,000 men, and a French expedition of similar size under [Napoleon] Bonaparte’s brother-in-law’. Following the latter’s victory in 1803, the Africans proclaimed and established their republic of Haiti.

France has yet to recover from the catastrophic damage to its psyche, elicited by its losses in San Domingo. The transformation of enslaved Africans, as James notes perceptively in his study, ‘trembling in hundreds before a single white man … into a people able to organise themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day … is one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievement’. Consequently, in its relationship with Africans, wherever this occurs on earth, France feels that it is still fighting Toussaint L’Ouverture and his formidable forces all over again and again… Furthermore, San Domingo is gravely etched indelibly in French consciousness as the precursor to the catalogue of crushing French military defeats in the subsequent 150 years of its history, aptly illustrated by the following: the 1871 Franco-Prussian War, the 1914-18 First World War, the 1939-45 Second World War and the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu, resulting in the débâcle of its elite French Far East Expeditionary Corps’ occupation garrison in Vietnam, inflicted by the resolute Viet Minh commanded by General GiÃƒÂ¡p. It would require another commentary to sketch, more fully, how the French angst over San Domingo must be working through the mindset of the current occupant of the Élysée Palace, whose regime thrives in its serial fantasy as the neo-Napoleonic imperium of these early decades of the 21st century.

Interestingly, to mention the Second World War French experience is to invoke a fascinating, albeit uncanny irony which French history shares currently with that of the peoples of Côte d’Ivoire in the wake of Paris’s unprovoked and unpardonable aggression. Despite the iron-fist texture of the German blitzkrieg that overran France in July 1940, resulting in the French surrender and the establishment of the Vichy regime to oversee the Nazi occupation for four debilitating years, the majority of French people had to work very had to believe, correctly, that the success of this invasion was essentially a Pyrrhic victory; eventual termination of the occupation and consequently the restoration of French sovereignty was therefore possible and had to be assiduously pursued with those French men and women who identified uncompromisingly with the free French.

STATES OF DEATH

Thankfully, the Ivoirians haven’t had long to wait to draw their own conclusions on the character and intent of the overwhelming brutish terror visited upon them in April 2011 by the military from that same country that was so virulently subjected to a similar experience, almost 71 years to the day. Despite the savagery of its violence, despite its subterfuge, despite its obfuscations and despite its hackneyed rationalisations for these dreadful deeds, France must know that the African peoples of Côte d’Ivoire and Africans elsewhere in the world regard the presumed successes of its 6 April 2011 bombardment of Abidjan as, at best, a Pyrrhic victory. Just as France ultimately found out in its own experience in 1945, a free Côte d’Ivoire, free of France, will surely occur. Additionally, its reincarnated, entrenched overseer-Marshal Pétain, now dubbed with an altered second name that begins with ‘O’, pointedly the next alphabet up from ‘P’, will end up agonising how to precisely answer the overriding question of an enraged epoch: ‘Why have I allowed myself to be so fouled-up by the course of history where I exist and operate miserably, pathetically and disgustingly as the mere pawn of an active agency?’

In the meantime, a group of southern World countries headed by South Africa and including Botswana, Cape Verde, India, Jamaica and Bolivia should visit Côte d’Ivoire and support the process of organising a referendum to determine the competing sovereignties in the country, occasioned by the murderous collapse of the Ivoirian state. Côte d’Ivoire, as so presently constituted, can no longer provide security to all its incorporated African nations or peoples. Instead, it murders them most horribly.

Tragically, Côte d’Ivoire has now joined that dreadful league of states of Africa inaugurated in May 1966 by Nigeria, the obligatory haematophagous monster in the region, whose raison d’être is to murder Africans most routinely and ritualistically. Enough! Every African life in Côte d’Ivoire is worth much more than the state of Côte d’Ivoire, in addition to all of Africa’s states of death. The peoples, including the hundreds of thousands who have been displaced by the emergency to neighbouring countries in West Africa and elsewhere, must determine freely and democratically which post-Côte d’Ivoire successor states they wish to belong to.

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is an independent scholar whose new book, ‘Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature’, will be published later in 2011.

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Ivory Coast: A UN failure

28 avril 2011 by Le Magazine de la Diaspora Ivoirienne et des Ami(e)s de la Côte d’Ivoire

United Nations have failed in Ivory Coast

The United Nations had a plan for Ivory Coast: to oversee elections and install a ‘winner-takes-all’ state president. Having failed to secure a political solution, the UN joined with French forces and one side in the civil war in Ivory Coast to forcibly overthrow the government that had lost the election but refused to quit. The discovery of mass graves of civilian victims of gruesome violence suggests that the UN may have reignited the North-South civil war instead of healing it.

The alternative to a ‘winner-takes-all’ strategy would have been a transitional power-sharing arrangement that would have embraced both sides in the civil war as a way of finding a way beyond the civil war. But the UN wanted a national election, which it enforced in October 2010.

I first read about the debate in an article by an independent Ghanaian analyst who had earlier helped broker peace settlements between fighting groups in Sierra Leone and Liberia. He wrote before about the UN decision to break the post-election political deadlock with a military intervention:

The three protagonists, Henri Konan Bedie, Alassane Ouattara and Laurent Gbagbo could have been prevented from contesting for state power through a transitional arrangement that embraced all three egos but with a caveat preventing each one of them from participating in future elections as they laid down the foundations to reorder the Ivorian society. […] The combined experience of the three is a national asset that must not be left polarized to the disadvantage of the country. This is what the UN has denied the people of Cote d’Ivoire.

Determined that the military intervention be both surgical and successful, the UN joined hands with France. The resulting French invasion of Ivory Coast has compounded the UN failure.

The north-south difference

The oversized egos of protagonists is at the heart of the power struggle in the Ivory Coast – former Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara, the Speaker of the Assembly Henry Konan Bedie and President Laurent Gbagbo – cannot fully explain the origins of the north-south civil war. That civil war was fuelled by a debate on citizenship.

The citizenship debate has plagued the Ivory Coast since the rise of a successful movement against the dictator, Houphet-Boigny, who had ruled the country for a good four decades since independence in 1960. The citizenship question, known as Ivorite [Ivorianness], is about political rights: who is an Ivorian with a right to participate in the political sphere?

The origins of Ivorite speaks to the shortcomings of the democratic movement against Houphet-Boigny. What would today be called a ‘pro-democracy’, movement began in the south of the country. The democratic movement faced one big challenge as it sought to become a national movement. In essence, it was the joining of two different regions, each with a different history and a different social makeup, into a single political movement.

The historical origins of the north-south split lie in the political economy of colonial Ivory Coast. France treated its West African possessions as a single administrative entity. In French Occidental Africa, a single economic policy was implemented: as a rule, plantations were situated near communication lines at the coast and labour to work the plantations was extracted from inland territories.

Hundreds of thousands of plantations workers were brought in from inland Sahelian countries like Burkina Faso and Mali to work cocoa, coffee and banana plantations in the north of Ivory Coast. In the heyday of colonial rule, two trains a day made the run to fetch migrant labour from Burkina Faso to the Ivory Coast.

The north-south division reflected deeper social differences by the end of the colonial period: in contrast to the increasingly Muslim and immigrant north, the predominantly Christian south increasingly came to define itself as the indigenous group.

Politicising the north-south division

The north-south issue turned political when the pro-democracy movement wrested a concession from President Houphet-Boigny, the holding of national elections in 1990. The candidate of the pro-democracy movement in that election was Laurent Gbagbo.

The big question in the 1990 election was: who is qualified to vote? Taking a short-term view of the question, the pro-democracy movement pressed for an answer that would turn voting into an effective monopoly of its organised base in the south.

The movement said only ‘indigenous’ Ivorians should be able to vote. Ironically, Houphet-Boigny, a former trade unionist who had successfully organised plantation workers in the north during the colonial period, championed the political right of migrants and their descendents to vote.

The political blind spot of Ivorian pro-democracy recalls a similar decision by the Congolese Sovereign National Conference, when it met in Kisangani in 1991-92 to demand democratic reforms from the Mobutu regime. It too, decided to limit political rights only to ‘indigenous’ Congolese, thereby disenfranchising long-term migrants from Rwanda. Like Mobutu in Congo, Houphet-Boigny in the Ivory Coast also championed citizenship rights for migrants.

The historical responsibility of pro-democracy movements in Ivory Coast and in Congo is that each politicised a regional difference for short term gain, and in the process laid the ground for a future civil war.

Ivorite turned out to be a poisoned chalice. Northerners were blocked from voting in 1995, and were increasingly subject to attacks, particularly in the south. Part of this story is the repeated blocking of former prime minister Alassane Ouattara from running for president because his parents were said to have been born in Burkina Faso.

Disenfranchised, the North resorted to armed rebellion, initiated in 2002 by a group called the New Forces. The short civil war led to a peace plan negotiated under the chairmanship of former President Thabo Mbeki in South Africa in 2005. Part of the peace plan was that Ouattara could run for the highest office in the state.

That election, demanded by the UN, was held on October 31, 2010. Gbagbo (roughly 35 per cent) won the first round, against Outarra (32 per cent) and Bedie (25 per cent), but failed to muster a majority of the vote. The runoff in November pitted Gbagbo against Ouattara. Gbagbo told voters that there was only one « real » Ivorian in the race, warning that they should never trust the leadership of their country to a foreigner.

Not surprisingly, both the casting and count of votes reflected the division of Ivory Coast between contending armed groups in the two regions – the official army and New Forces. The Electoral Commission said Ouattara had won with 54.1 per cent of votes against 45.9 per cent for Gbagbo. The Constitutional Court vetted the result on account of voting irregularities, particularly in the North; its count reversed the verdict: 51.45 per cent for Gbagbo and 48.55 per cent for Ouattara.

Ouattara’s response was to call for a national strike of workers on 26 December 2010, to continue until Gbagbo hands over power. But most workers in the capital, Abidjan, and the main ports, Abidjan and San Pedro, all in the south, ignored the call. Only some shop-keepers in Bouake, the capital of the rebel-held north, heeded it.

Political order in divided societies

Ivory Coast is a divided society. The outsized egos of its presidential candidates were fed by a real social crisis that divided the country into a regional civil war. No one familiar with the country’s unfolding crisis should have been surprised by the ruling party’s refusal to accept the verdict in a ‘winner-takes-all’ election. Africa had already witnessed similar refusals in other countries, notable Zimbabwe and Kenya.

The notable thing is the refusal by those who pressed the solution in the Ivorian case to heed the lessons of a similar crisis in Africa. When it came to Zimbabwe and Kenya, power-sharing arrangements were put in place, with a helping hand from SADC in Zimbabwe and the UN in Kenya. The objective in both cases was to avert a full-blown crisis.

In the Ivory Coast, however, the UN insisted on an election, and a regime change in line with its results. When the election led to a political stalemate, the UN, a body set up to strengthen peace-keeping, came in with guns blazing to force a military implementation of its preferred solution.

In the words of Akyaaba Addai-Sebo, the Ghanian analyst I quoted earlier, Cote d’Ivoire was « an avoidable disaster. » The price of that disaster will surely be paid by the people of Ivory Coast in the years to come.

Mahmood Mamdani is professor and director of Makerere Institute of Social Research at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda, and Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University, New York. He is the author, most recently of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War and the Roots of Terror, and Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

Source: Al Jazeera

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Gambia refuses to recognize Ouattara as Ivory Coast president

17 avril 2011 by Le Magazine de la Diaspora Ivoirienne et des Ami(e)s de la Côte d’Ivoire

The Gambian government said Saturday it would not recognise Alassane Ouattara as president of Ivory Coast following the ousting of his rival Laurent Gbagbo with the help of UN and French forces.

« The Gambia government would not recognise any president, including president Ouattara, or government in Africa that has been imposed by forces outside the African continent for whatever reason, » a statement said.

« We know what those governments and presidents stand for in Africa as they loot African resources on behalf of the powers that brought them to power », the statement from the office of President Yahya Jammeh added.

The statement, which was also carried by state broadcaster GRTS, called for « an impartial and comprehensive investigation into all the atrocities carried out in Ivory Coast by a team of honest and decent Allah-fearing people. »

« Alassane Ouattara and his forces cannot go scot-free and blame everything on President Laurent Gbagbo, who according to the Ivorian constitution is the legitimate president of Ivory Coast », it said.

Forces loyal to both sides have been accused of massacres in recent weeks as Ouattara, recognised as president by the United Nations and the African Union following a disputed vote in November, fought to take power.

« As far as we are concerned, the only solution to avert a long drawn-out civil war with all its attendance consequences in Ivory Coast is to reorganise presidential elections in the shortest possible time, » the Gambian government said.

« In the meantime, an interim government of national unity should be formed without Alassane Ouattara as he also has a lot to answer for, » it said.

« One thing that is very clear to all Africans today is that the plot to re-colonise Africa is very real and we most stand up to it. »

Banjul called on the UN to ensure the safety, protection, and well being of Gbagbo, « the constitutionally legal president of Ivory Coast », and set him free.

« He cannot be tried while Alassane Ouattara, the internationally selected president of Ivory Coast, goes scot free after massacring thousands of civilians just to be president », the statement said.

Events in Ivory Coast « have vindicated us in our earlier assertion that Western neocolonialist-sponsored agents in Africa that owe allegiance only to themselves and their Western masters are ready to walk on thousands of dead bodies for the Presidency, » it charged.

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Deluge fire tonight on Abidjan

10 avril 2011 by Le Magazine de la Diaspora Ivoirienne et des Ami(e)s de la Côte d’Ivoire

France benefits, loosely, a context of increasing belligerence into terrorist groups Alassane Ouattara to launch missiles at the residence of the President of the Republic in Cocody and the Presidential Palace on the Plateau. Fighting with heavy weapons now oppose elements of IB and Chérif Ousmane. While the defense forces and security in Côte d’Ivoire (FDS-CI) are involved, this Sunday, April 10, 2011, in any fight. In fact, France has decided to simply cast a pall over the Ivorians and destroy Cote d’Ivoire.
In addition to several serious injuries, one of the buildings of the residence of the President of the Republic is on fire and Choi on i just recognize that these are TV joint strike force Licorne and UNOCI. But worse, the South Korean reached by telephone by the drafting of i TV, talks about the final assault.

The codename for the final assault which speaks Choi is « dead or alive. » That is to say that UNOCI and Licorne want President Gbagbo dead or alive. It vera good because God is Great.

Joseph Wiki