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IVORY COAST CRISIS – A BACKGROUNDER
Dr. Gary K. Busch
America’s Second Front – In Africa
Nov. 11 - France has attacked the Ivory Coast once more and, again, is
seeking UN blessing for its
aggression and barbarism. Under the rubric of ‘peacekeeping’ the French
have been supporting the
rebels, known as the “New Forces”. These rebels take defensive positions
which abut French
peacekeeper’s lines and fire over their heads at the FANCI (Ivory Coast
Army) soldiers. The French
continue to protect these rebels, arm them, feed them, transport them and
offer them tactical
communication facilities. The notion of ‘peacekeeping’ is a total farce and
a travesty.
The French are determined to oust the democratically-elected President of
the Ivory Coast, Laurent
Gbagbo. After years of struggle against a country ruled by ‘Black
Frenchmen’ with a French advisor in
every civil service post, the FPI (Gbagbo’s party) managed a democratic
victory at the polls. Since
then, the French have been trying to oust Gbagbo and put in another Black
Frenchmen whom they
shelter in Paris awaiting the great day.
The current debacle has its roots in the post-election period in September
2002, when Gbagbo was
on a state visit to Rome. The military dictator Guei was recently defeated
in the ballot box and the new
Ivoirien government was busy untying the stranglehold of French
corporations over the nation’s
economy. The team of the President and his two Ministers represented a
powerful force for change in
the Ivory Coast and had substantial support from the Ivory Coast
population. Change and reform in
the Ivory Coast meant a struggle to relax the control by the French over
banking, insurance, transport,
cocoa trading and energy policies. The Gbagbo government had demonstrated,
during its short term
in power, a spirit of nationalism which had mobilised the population. It
was also threatening the
French hold over the Ivory Coast economy by inviting in companies from
other countries to tender for
Government projects.
On the Wednesday, in September 2002, when the rebellion began, there were
about 650 rebels
holed up in Bouake. These were Guei appointees who had been purged from the
Army. They had
little equipment and ammunition, as they had expected a conflict of no more
than five days. President
Gbagbo was in Rome, meeting the Pope and the rebels felt sure that the coup
could take place
quickly with the President out of the country.
As the coup began in the second largest town, Bouake, the loyalist troops
(FANCI) under Lida
Kouassi responded. They were able to surround the rebels, trapping them in
the city, and killing
about 320 of them. They were positioned for a final onslaught on the
remaining 300 rebels but were
suddenly stopped by the French commander of the body of French troops
stationed in the Ivory Coast.
He demanded a delay of 48 hours to evacuate the French nationals and some
US personnel in the
town. The FANCI demanded to be allowed to attack Bouake to put down the
rebels but the French
insisted on the delay. As soon as there was a delay, the French dropped
parachutists into Bouake
who took up positions alongside the rebels. This made it impossible for the
FANCI to attack without
killing a lot of Frenchmen at the same time. U.S. Special Forces from Ghana
went in and out in twelve
hours rescuing some American students trapped there.
During those 48 hours the French military command chartered three
Antonov-12 aircraft which were
picked up in Franceville in Gabon. These Ukrainian-registered aircraft were
filled with military
supplies stocked by the French in Central Africa. Two of the planes started
their journey in Durban
where Ukrainian equipment and military personnel were loaded on board. The
chartered planes flew
to Nimba County, Liberia (on the Ivory Coast border) and then on to the
rebel areas in Ivory Coast
(Bouake and Korhogo) where they were handed to the rebels. Bus loads of
troops were transported
from Burkina Faso to Korhogo dressed in civilian clothes where they were
equipped with the military
supplies brought in by the French from Central Africa and the Ukraine.
All of a sudden there were 2,500 fully armed soldiers on the rebel side as
mercenaries from Liberia
and Sierra Leone were also brought in by the same planes as well. They were
equipped with
Kalashnikovs and other bloc equipment which was never part of the Ivory
Coast arsenal. France
supplied sophisticated communications equipment as well. Once the rebels
were rearmed and
equipped, the French gradually withdrew, leaving operational control to the
Eastern European
mercenaries who directed the rebels in co-ordination with the French
headquarters at
Yamoussoukro. The French continued to subvert the loyalist army at every
turn and attempted to
purge the army of its key officers.
One of the reasons for the French unhappiness with Gbagbo was that he
refused to carry on with the
traditional French corruption of the Ivory Coast. At the time of the coup,
the country was virtually out of
fuel. The director of the S.I.R (Société Ivoirienne de Raffinage) had
emptied the reserves of the country’
s energy coffers. He fled to France with the money where he was offered
sanctuary and immunity for
his theft from the French. There was no fuel and no money to buy fuel. The
representative of Total-Elf
visited Gbagbo's office with the French ambassador and said that they had
two ships standing by off
the Ivory Coast ports which they could offer to Gbagbo. All they wanted in
return was the country’s only
oil refinery which they would purchase for one symbolic franc. The French
would operate the refinery
as it wished, using the high-priced oil Total would supply. They brought a
bag full of money for
Gbagbo. He ordered them out of his office and told them not to forget the
bag of money they had left. A
similar exchange took place with the cocoa entrepreneurs.
The same was true for the Companie Eléctricité Ivoirienne , the national
power company. The contract
with the CIE was due for renewal in early 2004 and the French (SAUR)
demanded the right to
continue to operate the national electricity grid in the way in which they
had been operating previously.
The Ivory Coast government consumed about 170 billion CFA francs (about 260
€ million) a year. The
French would supply overpriced gas to the to the ABB Azito gas power plant
as their rent on the power
station and grid but would charge everyone else fees for power. These fees
were not to be taxed as
revenue to the operators but remitted directly to them. There was no value
added to the national
economy, no amortisation of the debt incurred in building the stations and
the grid and with no control
over the prices. Gbagbo and his ministers said that this was unreasonable
and promised that when
the current contract ran out it would be open for international tender. The
French were fuming.
The French (Bouygues) had agreed with President Bedie in 1999 to build a
new bridge in Abidjan.
The price agreed was 120 billion CFA francs (183€ million) or 200 billion
if it were to be a bridge with
an upper and lower level. When Gbagbo took office he was appalled at this
gross overspend and
cancelled the contract. When Gbagbo was in China the Chinese said they
could do it for 60 billion (for
an upper and lower bridge) and they were given the contract in May 2002.
The French were furious but
could only continue to plot against Gbagbo. There were many such conflicts.
The French knew their
game was up and decided to do something about it. The decided that,
whatever the cost, they would
remove Gbagbo from office or make the country ungovernable (except with
French help).
France has had decades of experience in undermining African governments and
ushering in the
massacre of thousands of Africans. During and after the genocide unleashed
in Rwanda during April
1994, France was shown to have played a similar role in this horrendous
crime, which caused the
deaths of at least 800,000 people. Belgium, France and the United Nations
knew in advance that
preparations were being made to exterminate the Tutsi minority in Rwanda,
and did nothing to
prevent it. The French government, which kept the Hutu-led government in
power, protected the killers
and supplied them with weapons while the massacres were in progress.
"Operation Amaryllis," the
French code name for the evacuation of European civilians in Rwanda in
1994, also organized the
removal to France of Hutu "extremists" centrally involved in the genocide.
At the same time the French
military refused to evacuate Tutsi employees of the French embassy in
Kigali, who faced
extermination. A second evacuation, "Operation Turquoise," was mounted
later, as the RPF offensive
was on the brink of taking power, to bring Rwandan government and military
leaders to safety in
France while French officers managed the managed the "transition" to RPF
rule. The French armed
the Hutu militias for a period of ten days after the genocide began and
intervened to protect the Hutu
military when it was endangered.
France’s allies in the Ivory Coast were among the most bloodthirsty of
Africa’s irregular
soldiers/killers. Most of these rebels were not Ivorian at all. They were
the wandering mercenaries of
the Liberian and Sierra Leone wars who had attached themselves to the
military coup leader, Robert
Guei whom Gbagbo defeated in a free election. There were three rebel groups
which appeared in the
Ivory Coast: The Ivory Coast Patriotic Movement (MPCI) - which was the
first to take up arms against
the government; The Movement for Justice and Peace (MJP); and The Ivorian
Popular Movement of
the Great West (MPIGO). Of these the MPCI had a political base within the
Ivory Coast formed from
Guei supporters and the large immigrant communities of Burkinabes, Malians
and Guineans who
had come to Ivory Coast as economic migrants (they were better known by
their initials Mouvement
Pour Les Cons Ivres – because they showed up in battles drunk and
drugged).. The other two groups
were ad hoc groups of Liberians, defeated Sierra Leonean rebels and Guinean
dissidents offered
shelter and support by Charles Taylor of Liberia. The familiar faces from
the Liberian civil war were
seen in the television clips of the rebels. Moskito Bockarie from Sierra
Leone was familiar face
among the rebels. Ukrainian pilots and mercenaries from these wars and the
wars in the Congos
and Angola appear regularly. A substantial proportion of the rebels spoke
English with each other
rather than French.
After a period of sustained fighting a temporary cease-fire was agreed. In
this the rebels were in
control of a large portion of the West and North of the country. This
didn’t mean peace for the poor
Ivorians living in rebel-controlled areas. On the 15th of February 2003 the
UN Humanitarian Envoy for
the crisis in Cote d'Ivoire, Carolyn McAskie reported that “Western Cote
d'Ivoire, extending roughly
from the coastal town of Tabou to the mountain towns of Man, Danane and
Touba, remains highly
insecure because of continued fighting between armed elements and the
national army. The
presence of Liberian militias running rampant and drugged kids committing
every kind of atrocity
possible has rendered the area a ‘no-go’ zone. She went on, including the
North, "The complete
interruption of all administrative functions, including banking, in
rebel-held areas since September
2002 is causing a crippling lack of cash flow, especially in the north, and
the continued paralysis of
health services.” There are almost one million internal refugees inside the
Ivory Coast.
In that climate of civil disorder, the French invited all the warring
parties, to a peace-making session
in France, from 15 to 23 January 2003 at Linas-Marcoussis, in France.
Attending the meeting were
representatives of the legitimate Ivory Coast Government as well as the
rebel factions and the other
major Ivory Coast political parties who were not in the government. At that
meeting the political
opponents of the Gbagbo Government and the rebel military forces agreed to
create a government of
reconciliation which would include them. The term of the current elected
government does not end
until 2005 and the French and the rebels decided that during the period
until the end of the
presidential term, the opposition would play a crucial part in the running
of the government. They
demanded the posts of Minister of Defence and Minister of the Interior.
This was never to be.
However, a ‘neutral’ Prime Minister Seydou Diallo, was put in to supervise
the harmony.
After a long period of delay, the ministers from the New Forces took their
place in the Cabinet. Their
ranks were diminished by the fallout of the end to the war in Liberia where
Charles Taylor was driven
from office. Many of the Liberians fight in the Ivory Coast went home and
left a power vacuum among
the rebels. These started fighting among themselves and several leaders
were murdered. There
was, as is, a minor civil war going on among the rebels and each blames the
French for not
protecting them. These rebels are being attacked by other rebels; not the
FANCI. In February 2004,
Chief Adams Coulibaly was killed by his own side and Chief Adams was killed
the day later.
In May 2004, the UN found mass graves in the northern town of Korhogo.
Later there were gun battles
between rival rebel factions which left 22 people dead Korhogo and the
central town of Bouake.
These fire fights began with a late-night attack on June 20 by
"heavily-armed elements" on a convoy
travelling from Burkina Faso to Korhogo carrying rebel leader Guillaume
Soro. The violence in June
followed what forces loyal to rebel leader Guillaume Soro described as an
assassination attempt, for
which they blamed his Paris-based rival Ibrahim Coulibaly, known as IB.
Internecine warfare spread
across the rebel-held areas.
On 29 February 2004 the UN Security Council agreed to send a peacekeeping
force of more than
6,000 troops to Cote d'Ivoire to supervise the disarmament of rebel forces
and to prepare for the
presidential elections due in October 2005. The council voted unanimously
in favour of creating the
new peacekeeping force after the United States dropped its earlier
opposition to the proposal. The
UN Operation in Cote d’Ivoire (UNOCI) formally came into existence on April
4 for an initial period of
12 months. It replaced the existing UN mission in Cote d’Ivoire, known by
its French acronym MINUCI,
which included a handful of military liaison officers.
France made clear that its 4,000 troops in Cote d’Ivoire would not become
part of the UN
peacekeeping force, numbering itself 6,000 UN troops. The French soldiers
kept the peace and
everything else they could find. Twelve French soldiers on peacekeeping
duties in Ivory Coast were
arrested in connection with a bank theft there in September 2004. The
troops had been assigned to
protect a branch of the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO) and
were charged with stealing
$120,000 (100,000 euros). This is not a unique case of the French stealing
Throughout 2004 the rebels refused to carry out their agreed disarmament.
They were engaged in an
internal struggle and a continuous struggle against the FANCI. They
continued to refuse to allow
normalcy (schools, hospitals, public services) to be restored across the
country. On November 4,
2004, the Ivory Coast government launched air strikes against rebel
positions in the northern part of
the country, around the self-proclaimed rebel capital town of Bouake. The
air strikes forced the UN to
suspend its humanitarian operations, and marked the first hostilities since
the signing of a ceasefire
in May 2003.
On November 6, 2004, aircraft from the Ivoirian Government struck a French
military base where the
rebels had been given shelter, resulting in the deaths of nine French
troops and the wounding of an
additional 31. In retaliation, the French military destroyed two Sukhoi-25
aircraft, in addition to five
helicopters and an Ivorian army weapons cache, effectively destroying the
Ivory Coast Air Force. The
order to retaliate was reported to have come directly from French President
Jacques Chirac. The U.N.
Security Council, meanwhile, held an emergency session to discuss the
situation in the country and
called for an end to all military operations by Ivory Coast forces.
In the meantime, pro-Gbagbo militants began setting fire to a number of
French schools in the
capital, Abidjan, and looting French property. In response to escalating
tensions, the French military
dispatched three Mirage jet aircraft to another French military base in
Libreville in nearby Gabon, to be
put on standby. The French Ministry of Defence, on the following day,
announced that it was
dispatching as well an additional 600 troops as reinforcements; 300 of
which were dispatched from
Libreville, while the remaining 300, along with a squadron of gendarmes,
were sent from France.
The destruction of the Ivoirian Air Force was a serious blow, as this was
the Government’s main
advantage over the rebels; the control of the skies. The French have
destroyed this. This will allow the
rebels to continue and allow the French to continue to manipulate the Ivory
Coast at its pleasure.
However, there are thousands of French nationals in the Ivory Coast and it
is likely that there will be
retaliation by the irate Ivoirians against them.
This came up for debate in the United Nations. An emergency UN Security
Council meeting in New
York condemned the bombing raid as a violation of the May 2003 cease-fire
and gave the 10,000-
strong peacekeeping force permission to use "all necessary means" to stop
the fighting. It didn’t
recognise that the troops who should be suppressed are the French troops.
As the Ivory Coast
spokesman, Desire Tagro, “The Security Council ought to be taking action
against France; we are
going to inform the entire world ... that France has come to attack us."
It is crucial that the friends of the Ivory Coast stand up to support the
elected Gbagbo government and
reject the French moves to take over the effective control of the country.
Particularly, it is not in the
interests of the U.S. to allow French-induced anarchy to return the Ivory
Coast to French power. The
French have been working with Gabon to destabilise Equatorial Guinea on the
Corisco Island
business; France has been aiding Blaise Campaore in Burkina over his
efforts to keep U.S. forces
from opening a base there against the terrorists; France has been
supporting the Government of the
Sudan in resisting international pressure over Darfur. Along with Spain the
French are seeking an
activist European Union role in the Bight of Benin which is inimical to
U.S. interests, in Equatorial
Guinea, Sao Tome, Gabon and Cameroon.
It is not in U.S. long-term or short-term interests to allow the French to
get away with this coup-de-
theatre putsch in Abidjan. The African friends of elected democracy will
suffer from such an example.
The U.S. must stand by the Ivory Coast at its time of need and allow
democracy and enlightened self-
interest to prevail.
Dr. Gary K. Busch
Dr. Gary K. Busch: An American; Professor Webster University in London,
formerly Professor
University of Hawai, Chairman of Transport Logistics, Editor of Ocnus.Net.
Contributor to the Wall
Street Journal, Spectator and to Russian press. Consultant to governments
and international
corporations. Advisor to Russian transport and industry (1992-95).
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