Vol. 75/No. 3      January 24, 2011

UN troops are protecting Ouattara, who set up a competing government in Abidjan, the capital city, in a luxury hotel being blockaded by government soldiers. UN helicopters ferry foreign diplomats and provisions to the hotel every day.

The European Union and U.S. government have imposed visa bans on Gbagbo and more than 50 of his allies, and frozen their assets. African officials said in late December that they were granting check-signing privileges only to representatives of Ouatarra for government funds held by the BCEAO regional bank.

Gbagbo has been president of the Ivory Coast, a former French colony, since 2000, when a popular uprising ousted Gen. Robert Guei following what was widely criticized as a rigged election. Guei had prohibited Ouattara from participating in the ballot because his parents were born in neighboring Burkina Faso. At the time, Gbagbo’s assumption to the presidency was strongly backed by the French Socialist Party.

In 2002 Gbagbo gave four ministerial posts to Ouattara’s party. Later that year a civil war broke out after the Ivory Coast Patriotic Movement took control of the northern part of the country. A thousand French troops and some U.S. soldiers were deployed under the guise of evacuating U.S. and French citizens. The French troops remained, at first helping to defend the Gbagbo regime from the rebel forces.

In 2003 a cease-fire was signed under pressure from Paris and a new government formed that included nine members from the rebel forces. But tensions between the contending sides continued and the country was effectively divided between north and south.  
 
UN troops intervene in 2004
UN troops were first sent to the Ivory Coast in April 2004, ostensibly to enforce the cease-fire. Today there are some 10,000 UN troops, including 900 from France. In another blatant trampling of Ivory Coast sovereignty, the UN mission has set up its own radio station, which broadcasts to most of the country.

During the election Gbagbo blamed Ouattara for the 2002 civil war and questioned his nationality. Ouattara in turn charged that Gbagbo was corrupt and that Ouattara, a former International Monetary Fund official and economics graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, was better qualified to turn around the country’s economic crisis. Ouattara has more support in the north, where there are large numbers of immigrants from neighboring countries. Gbagbo’s strength is in the south.

Although the Ivory Coast was granted independence from France in 1960, its reliance on French imperialism continued. At least until the 1980s French citizens dominated private businesses and held key advisory posts in the government.  
 
World’s largest cocoa exporter
Under colonial rule, French authorities forced Ivory Coast farmers to cultivate cocoa. After independence cocoa production took off, more than doubling from 1973 to 1983. Today the Ivory Coast is the world’s largest producer and exporter of cocoa beans.

A railroad linking Abidjan with Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) was built during French colonial rule. After independence light industry was developed and the international airport became a hub for West Africa. The economic and agricultural advances made the Ivory Coast a magnet for workers across West Africa. About 25 percent of the country’s 21 million people are immigrants from West Africa, especially Burkina Faso and Nigeria.

Time magazine in 1966 and 1968 featured the Ivory Coast as an “Oasis in a Desert” and an “economic miracle” that proved that imperialist domination and promotion of unbridled capitalist development was superior to the road taken by other African nations breaking free from their former colonial masters.  
 
French companies still dominate
Battered by unstable cocoa prices and wracked at times by violent clashes between competing capitalist factions, the Ivory Coast is no longer looked to as Black Africa’s most flourishing country. But French corporations still play a dominant role: Bolloré manages Abidjan’s harbor, the most modern port in West Africa; Bouygues runs the country’s telecommunications; and Total is a major player in oil exploration.

French capitalists face increasing competition from Canadian, British, U.S., Chinese, and Indian companies for shares of the petroleum reserves, estimated at 250 million barrels. U.S. capitalists in particular are looking to increase their take of the wealth and to push Paris aside, as Washington seeks to extend its influence in Africa.

“Cote d’Ivoire’s civil war in the early 2000s did not register a single dent on the country’s rising oil production trend,” notes an April 2010 special report on the Ivory Coast oil industry by U.S.-based IAS Group. The report adds that the oil fields are offshore, limiting “exposure to political volatility both in the country and along transportation routes.”

In the face of Gbagbo’s refusal to step down, the head of the UN forces in Ivory Coast has requested 1,000 to 2,000 more blue-helmeted troops. Ouattara has called on the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to send forces to remove Gbagbo.

But neither the Nigerian government, with the largest army in ECOWAS, or Ghana, with the second largest army, have shown enthusiasm for getting deeper into the conflict. Ghana’s armed forces leadership issued a statement calling it a “needless war.”

With ECOWAS so far not willing to unleash a strike to remove Gbagbo and Gbagbo digging in, Ouattara hedged his bets. In a BBC interview released January 10, Ouattara’s ambassador to the UN said that a coalition government was a possibility.  
 
 
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