The Crisis in Cote d'Ivoire

The catastrophe unfolding in the Ivory Coast is due to the fact that the committed backers of both candidates are unwilling to accept anything other than complete vindication and victory by their man.  A substantial portion of the ordinary population would just like a resolution of the issue and peace, but because this is all tied to questions of land ownership, government support to different regions, and competing elite claims tied into increasingly strong ethnic and regional identities, a substantial portion also feel that it would be a disaster if their man were not president.  It is pretty obvious that Mr. Ouattara won, and that Mr. Gbagbo has been devious, even dishonest, for a long time. But simply giving the presidency to Mr. Ouattara would hardly solve the country's problem.  There has to be power sharing with various regions getting a cut of government programs, and a good bit of local autonomy if any kind of peace is to be achieved. 

Even if Gbagbo goes, some of those around him have to have a share of power.  The same is true for those who back Ouattara.  I think that personally Ouattara is a better man, but many of those around him are no better than those around Gbagbo.  There are local warlords in various parts of the north, for example, who are just as frightening as the "young patriots" who do the killing for Gbagbo in Abidjan.  To understand the difficulties facing this country requires some background to explain what happened when civil war broke out in 2002, and a discussion of why just making either Mr. Gbagbo or Mr. Ouattara president is not an ideal solution. 

An electoral victory by Mr. Ouattara was bound to produce a backlash by those who will not accept a northern Muslim president and who are afraid to lose everything if Mr.  Gbagbo goes.  Standing on legalisms and claiming that either side is cl!  early right gets us nowhere.  None of the contending political forces in this country have clean hands, including Mr. Bedie, the former president who threw his support to Mr. Ouattara in the second round of the election after coming in third in the first round. 

In some ways, even though it takes very specific local knowledge to understand what is happening, the tragedy in this country resembles the situation in quite a few other African cases as well.  Decades of poor governance and corruption have exacerbated ethnic and religious tensions, and too few of the leading politicians are willing to act for the greater good rather than for their own and their supporters' narrow interests.

Daniel Chirot, Job and Gertrud Tamaki Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington, has authored books about social change, ethnic conflict, Eastern Europe, and tyranny.  His most recent works are the co-authored Why Not Kill Them All?  about political mass murder (Princeton University Press, 2nd edition, 2010), and a short text on ethnic conflicts, Contentious Identities (Routledge, 2011).   He has edited or co-edited books on Leninism's decline, on entrepreneurial ethnic minorities, on ethnopolitical warfare, and on the economic history of Eastern Europe.  He founded the journal East European Politics and Societies and has received help in his research and writing from the US State Department, the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations.  He has done some work for, among others, the US Government, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the Ford Foundation.  In 2003, 2004, and 2006 he did some consulting for CARE in Cote d'Ivoire.  He has also worked in Niger and elsewhere in West Africa.  In 2004/05 he was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace working on the study of African conflicts.  He has a BA from Harvard and a PhD in Sociology from Columbia.

Co-sponsored by The Center on African Studies