Ivory coast

In an interview, Alassane Ouattara, president of the Ivory Coast and chairman of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), urges Germany’s leaders to engage more in the fight against Islamists in northern Mali. In addition to logistical aid, Berlin should also send troops, he argues.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Germany has promised two transport planes for the international mission against Islamists in Mali. Is that enough?

Interview conducted by Jan Puhl – spiegel.de

Ivory Coast ex-rebel forces say demobilisation completed

Ivory Coast's former rebel New Forces (FN) marked the completed disarmament of thousands of Read more

Who will be Côte d’Ivoire’s new Moses

Despite the long-awaited announcement of an election date for 31 October, key issues remain unresolved. And while a younger generation Read more

Russian oil company LUKoil to invest $780m in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire

The second largest oil company in Russia, LUKoil says it will invest an amount of Read more

Drogba told Tiote to join Newcastle

Newcastle new boy Cheik Tiote has revealed that Didier Drogba persuaded him to try his Read more

Imprimer cet article

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:

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.

Ivory Coast ex-rebel forces say demobilisation completed

Ivory Coast's former rebel New Forces (FN) marked the completed disarmament of thousands of Read more

Who will be Côte d’Ivoire’s new Moses

Despite the long-awaited announcement of an election date for 31 October, key issues remain unresolved. And while a younger generation Read more

Russian oil company LUKoil to invest $780m in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire

The second largest oil company in Russia, LUKoil says it will invest an amount of Read more

Drogba told Tiote to join Newcastle

Newcastle new boy Cheik Tiote has revealed that Didier Drogba persuaded him to try his Read more

Imprimer cet article

For western eyes, Sudan has most often appeared as a site of famine or war, be it in the south or Darfur. Said to be “one of the hollow-bellied places of the world” or a landscape “seared by war,” the continent’s largest country has often been rendered via stereotypical images.

The politics of the situation facing Sudan is inevitably complex (the International Crisis Group has excellent analyses of the situation here and Alex de Waal has his usual profound insights here). So how can it be visualized? How can politics be represented in pictures?

This week we have seen two conventional strategies in response to that challenge. The first is to invoke images from the past…

The second is to record the appearance of the visible traces of politics, namely leaders engaged in ceremonies where the trappings of sovereignty are evident. Peter Martell’spictures of President Omar al-Bashir’s visit to the south earlier this week are an example of this, showing Bashir’s welcome by the south’s leader Salva Kiir, with the requisite red carpet, military officials and marching band.

It is a lot to ask of a single photograph that it represent the complexities of politics, no matter how talented the photographer. No doubt in the week ahead we will see pictures of polling stations, queues of voters, and people raising inky fingers to signify the completion of their electoral act (hopefully images of conflict will be absent). Who, though, will produce something a little different?

This is what David Campell has to say about the visual representations of the referendum in Sudan. The last paragraph is especially poignant and I think it’s important to try and imagine what a photograph that captured these complexities would look like. A group of South Sudanese in heated debate, perhaps with political posters on a wall behind them framing their engaged expressions? A voter leaving a polling station with a look of dismay, confusion, or trepidation on his or her face, rather than the stock happy voter images we’re seeing over and over?  I’m not that either of these theoretical images, or any image for that matter, might do the trick. Perhaps this isn’t the kind of complexity that can be captured through spot news photography.

In Ivory Coast, an equally complicated political situation is being widely photographed. In yesterday’s New York Times, a story about civilians paying the price for political tumult is accompanied by two photographs by different photographers of dead bodies.

The question is what each photograph tells us about the politics of the situation, and the answer, I fear, is very little.

I strongly believe this has far more to do with the demands of newspaper photography and news imagery than any shortcoming on the part of the photographers. Both snappers are well established image makers who have worked in West Africa for many years and undoubtedly know far more about the politics involved than either of these images lets on.

In an interview, Stephen Mayes, managing director of VII, says:

Rather than looking at oneself, and at one’s own experience, what photojournalism has become is the process of looking at others in a way that is intrinsically remote and idealized. Representations of war, for instance, fall into standardized forms. There are certain [visual] codes that recur. What I tend to find is that so much journalism we see is about affirming what we already know, instead of challenging us to broaden our horizons.

The photographs coming out of Sudan and Ivory Coast at the moment mainly reflect instances of these known visual codes. This is partially because they are all news photographs, which are constrained by factors like time, budget, and logistics, and partially it’s because this is what newspapers think that readers want. They are documents of the situation, verification of what’s happening and when, rather than explanations or commentary.

The numbers of comments on Chris Blattman or Jina Moore’s blog that delve into the details and nuances of just what is going on in Ivory Coast clearly point to the fact that not all readers want simple narratives, and I would argue this could extend to a desire for photographs that are more than known visual codes as well.

Readers, what do you think? Do these types of photos do the trick when it comes to illustrating what’s going on? Or do you want to see something else? Also, can anyone point to examples of images that illustrate politics, in Africa or elsewhere, more effectively than these do?

Here’s one of my favorite images by Ami Vitale of a rally in Kashmir that manages to be both political and metaphorical, and through its use of metaphor demands that I as a viewer challenge my assumptions and seek to learn more about what’s happening.

Ivory Coast ex-rebel forces say demobilisation completed

Ivory Coast's former rebel New Forces (FN) marked the completed disarmament of thousands of Read more

Who will be Côte d’Ivoire’s new Moses

Despite the long-awaited announcement of an election date for 31 October, key issues remain unresolved. And while a younger generation Read more

Russian oil company LUKoil to invest $780m in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire

The second largest oil company in Russia, LUKoil says it will invest an amount of Read more

Drogba told Tiote to join Newcastle

Newcastle new boy Cheik Tiote has revealed that Didier Drogba persuaded him to try his Read more

Imprimer cet article