Africa is a continent accustomed to sad stories but few are as tragic as Ivory Coast’s.
Until the death of President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, who ruled the country from independence in 1960 until his death in 1993, Ivory Coast was a beacon of stability in a rough neighbourhood. Even as nearby Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea-
Bissau and, to a lesser extent, Guinea seemed perennially at war with themselves and with each other, Houphouet-Boigny’s country was prosperous and stable, seemingly inured to the region’s problems, a poster-boy for a different way of doing things.
Houphouet-Boigny was hardly a democrat, at least not until his later years, and he was certainly an egoist. His $US300 million Basilique de Notre Dame in Yamoussoukro was modelled on St Peter’s cathedral in Rome (only a personal request by the Pope meant that the dome is slightly lower than Rome’s) and has 7,000 individually air-conditioned pews.
Yet Houphouet-Boigny’s reign was characterised by an acknowledgment that outside expertise—from unskilled migrant workers to French businessmen and engineers—was necessary in building a thriving economy. Ivory Coast became a model for prosperity, friendship with former colonial overlords and coexistence with one’s neighbours.
The president’s model for a new African success story outlived him, but only just. A succession of presidents and edicts in the aftermath of Houphouet-Boigny’s death divided the country between the predominantly Christian south and the Muslim north, between ‘true’ Ivoireans and ‘immigrants’ from neighbouring countries. It culminated in the country’s first coup d’état in December 1999 which ushered in a period of intermittent violence, further coups and disputed elections in which opposition candidates were barred from standing.
By May 2003, after a brief but debilitating civil war, France had brokered a fragile peace which temporarily quietened the guns but left the country divided in two. Ivory Coast disappeared from the international headlines.
The world’s attention moved elsewhere, and while Ivory Coast was no longer at war, nor was it at peace. Incendiary rhetoric from the government-held south was answered in kind by the rebel north. The rebels joined a coalition government provided for under the terms of the ceasefire, but former government ministers scarcely spoke to their rebel counterparts. It became a national unity government in name only and fell apart more times than it met.
Rebel forces—of which there are many—refused to lay down their arms until electoral and other laws which discriminated against immigrants (all immigrants, whether recent or third-generation, had