Cote D’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) has been caught up in an increasingly violent conflict after the West African nation’s November 28 elections ended with the incumbent Laurent Gbagbo and his main opponent Alassane Ouattara both claiming victory.
Ivory Coast is wracked by an armed conflict between the Ivory Coast army and rebel forces allied to Ouattara. Both sides have been accused of human rights abuses.
Former colonial ruler France, other Western governments and the United Nations recognised Ouattara as the legitimate ruler. France, under a UN banner, has militarily intervened into its former colonial possession on the side of the rebels in a bid to force Gbagbo out of power.
The article below, by journalist and author Asid Ismi, provides background to the conflict. It is abridged from the February Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Monitor.
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Ivory Coast, the world’s leading exporter of cocoa, has been politically paralysed since a November 2010 election ended in both main contenders declaring themselves winners.
Incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo (backed by the Ivorian army) and his rival Alassane Ouattara, a former minister, both claim to have won the election.
The country's election commission declared Ouattara president. But the constitutional council, which is supposed to announce the winner, said Gbagbo won.
Gbagbo claims there were electoral irregularities in the north of the country, which is under the control of Ouattara-allied rebel forces called Forces Nouvelles (FN).
The country has been politically and militarily divided between north and south since a northern-based rebellion in 2002 — a schism the election was supposed to end through reunification.
Ouattara has been recognised as the winner by the United States, France, the European Union, the United Nations, the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
By February, 200 people had been killed in post-election violence and about 25,000 had fled as refugees to neighbouring Sierra Leone.
The Western mainstream media have blamed Gbagbo for the violence, called for him to step down and portrayed Western governments as backing a fair democratic process in Ivory Coast.
But is this really the case? The governments of France and the US, which have exercised imperialist domination over the Ivory Coast since it became “independent” in 1960, do not suddenly care about democracy.
The FN is responsible for a level of human rights violations comparable to those Gbagbo is accused of. It has massacred more than 100 people in the northern part of the country under its control.
There is no evidence that Ouattara won the election fairly or that fraud did not take place in the northern area. It is likely that both Gbagbo and Ouattara committed some electoral fraud.
Both men are part of the corrupt French and US-backed Ivorian elite that has monopolised the country’s wealth along with Western multinationals. Most of the population are consigned to poverty.
Rather than any concern for democracy, the real reasons for the Western preference for Ouattara have to do with his greater pliability as a Western puppet. Gbagbo’s usefulness in this regard has ended due to his attempt to expand his international support base beyond the West.
Gbagbo came to power in another suspect election in 2000. Despite ruling the country as a corrupt, repressive dictator, he has been backed by France until recently.
In fact, France has supported every Ivorian government leader since 1960. All ruled the country in a dictatorial fashion preventing the development of democratic institutions.
This was fine with France as long as the leaders allowed the plundering of Ivorian resources by French and other Western multinational corporations.
The Ivory Coast is the world’s leading exporter of cocoa, producing 40% of it. It is also the third largest producer of coffee and significant offshore oil deposits have been discovered recently.
It is Gbagbo’s handing over of this oil to Russia rather than the West that has most likely stimulated France and the US to get rid of him. Russia is in the process of signing an off-shore oil agreement with Gbagbo.
Ivory Coast’s oil production is currently 60,000 barrels a day and is projected to reach 200,000 barrels a day by 2020. Big Chinese telecom and construction companies have also arrived in Ivory Coast.
Ouattara is a former deputy managing director of the US-dominated International Monetary Fund. Ivory Coast has been functioning under a World Bank-IMF structural adjustment program (SAP) since 1989.
Along with falling commodity prices, this has led to the country’s economic destabilisation and the consequent divisions between north and south.
After two decades of economic growth starting in 1960, Ivory Coast experienced economic decline in the 1980s due to falling world prices for cocoa and coffee.
Under the SAP, the country was required to cut government spending by 30%, capital expenditures by 15%, privatise state enterprises, deregulate the labour market and eliminate price controls and public subsidies.
State firms in the telecommunications, transport, electricity and water supply sectors were all privatised.
The social impact of these drastic measures on Ivory Coast was severe: the poverty rate doubled and GDP was cut by 15%.
In 2009, more than half the population lived on about a dollar a day. Close to 60% of the rural population is considered poor.
A horrendous consequence has been the encouragement of widespread child slavery.
The owners of the countries’ large cocoa plantations use children to clear land for the planting of cocoa trees, and for weeding and harvesting crops.
The boys and girls who are as young as seven years are unpaid or paid very little.
A documentary produced by Britain’s Channel Four said 90% of the cocoa farms in Ivory Coast use child slave labour that harvests most of the country’s cocoa imported into England.
Working conditions for the children include 20-hour work days (seven days a week), malnutrition, torture, the threat of physical, psychological and sexual violence, and chemical poisoning.
With the economy destabilised, the Ivorian elite turned to exploiting ethnic and religious divisions in competition for declining revenues.
This strategy led to civil war between the north, where Muslims predominate, and the mainly Christian-populated south. The country was divided in 2002 when France sent troops to separate the two sides.
The country is occupied by 10,000 UN troops and 900 French ones. France has repeatedly militarily intervened in Ivory Coast and West Africa to guard its imperial interests.
It went so far as to destroy the entire Ivorian air force in 2004 to assert its domination.
Ivory Coast’s ethnic and religious conflicts are a legacy of French colonialism. France colonised the country in 1893 and separated it from the larger colony of French West Africa.
Ivory Coast was created by France as a mainly Christian country with a thriving cocoa industry. The people from poorer neighbouring Muslim countries had little choice but to move for work to Ivory Coast where they suffered discrimination.
Under French colonialism, tens of thousands of people from the north of Ivory Coast and from neighbouring Burkina Faso were also deliberately displaced to the south of Ivory Coast and made to work as forced labour.
The population in the north of Ivory Coast today is made up of immigrants from Muslim countries, including Ouattara.
Gbagbo, who is Christian and from the south, has said that Muslims in the north are not Ivorian.
Gbagbo’s main backer in the current stand-off is the Ivorian army, but he is also getting considerable support from foreign multinationals prominent in Ivory Coast’s cocoa sector. The cocoa trade also supports Gbagbo’s northern opponents.
A 2007 report by the NGO Global Witness, titled Hot Chocolate: How Cocoa Fuelled the Conflict in Ivory Coast, said: “The profits each side [in the Ivorian conflict] derives from this [cocoa] trade are fundamental to understanding why the main protagonists have not shown greater commitment to solving the political crisis over the past four and a half years.
“On the government side, the national cocoa institutions ... have directly contributed at least [US]$20.3 million to the war effort.
“The big cocoa and coffee exporters [organisation], the Groupement Professionel de Exportateurs de Cafe-Cacao (GEPEX) … was represented on the board of the Bourse du Cafe et Cacao (BCC), one of the national cocoa institutions that decided to make this contribution to the war effort.”
Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), the notoriously corrupt US multinational, has also been part of GEPEX.
Global Witness quoted an “inside source” as saying that a $20.3 million payment to the government by ADM was “a joint decision by the boards of all the cocoa institutions and that exporting companies represented on the boards thought it was a good idea”.
The source called the payment “a political decision”.
The report adds that the payments from the BCC to the government, “coincided with a period when some of the worst human rights violations by government forces took place”.
Global Witness estimated the FN gets about $30 million a year in cocoa revenue, because companies exporting cocoa from the north have to pay an export tax to the group.
FN leaders enrich themselves through an extortion racket centred on the cocoa trade.
One such leader is Martin Fofie Kouakou, in charge of the Korhogo zone near the Mali border. The report said: “Some of the worst human rights abuses in Ivory Coast since the conflict began took place under Kouakou.”
The Western multinationals that export cocoa from Ivory Coast sell this to chocolate manufacturers such as Cadbury-Schweppes, Nestle and Unilever.
Given the significant role of cocoa and Western multinationals in sustaining and financing the Ivorian civil war, Global Witness called on the chocolate industry “to ensure that the products it sells are conflict-free”.
The NGO recommended that companies “press for all cocoa institutions accounts to be audited and published as a way of ensuring that levies paid by exporters are not contributing to financing the conflict”.
Also, it said cocoa-exporting companies should operate transparently and publish the payments they make to the Ivorian government and cocoa institutions.
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