Muslims excluded from power in Ivory Coast
Muslims constitute 60% pf the population of this West African state, but lack political clout, reports Omer Bin Abdullah
December 6, 2000
This past November 22nd was a milestone day in Ivory Coast, or Cote d'Ivoire as this Francophonic country is officially called, as major opposition leader Alhassane Dramane Ouattara was cleared to contest the December 10th Parliamentary elections, after having been barred from running for president, in a vote to restore civilian rule.
Ouattara was one of 999 candidates approved by the National Electoral Commission, which evaluated 1,008 applications for the 225 Parliamentary seats.
Ouattara, a Muslim, was barred from running for president in October by the Supreme Court, which said there were questions over whether both his parents were of Ivorian origin as required by a constitution approved by the ousted military junta. Ouattara's Rally of the Republicans welcomed the electoral commission's ruling, lauding its independence.
Ivory Coast, once seen as an island of ‘stability’ within Africa, is now in turmoil as Muslim blood is flowing. In October, groups of Ouattara’s supporters were rounded up, beaten at police stations, and executed. In one such incident, the bodies of at least 50 young men were found in a nature reserve in Abidjan, presumably shot by security forces.
The country, slightly larger than New Mexico, has a 60% Muslim population; however, power has rotated among the Christian Baoule people of central and eastern Ivory Coast, who account for about 22% of the 16 million citizens, since France relinquished its control of the country in August 1960. The religious and ethnic nature of the latest violence exposes an old fault-line, in most West African states, between a mainly Christian coast and a hinterland dominated by Muslims.
Ivory Coast's founding father, President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, ruled with an iron fist from 1960 until his death in 1993. In 1990, he allowed the first multiparty elections in which he was reelected. His handpicked successor, Henri Konan Bedie, another Baoule but far less adept than Houphouet-Boigny, became president in the October 1995 elections after receiving 95.25% of the votes – an election that the opposition, including then soft-spoken Prime Minister Ouattara, boycotted.
Ouattara resigned as prime minister, becoming deputy-managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, D.C. However, he said he would return to Ivory Coast and run for the presidency. He left the IMF in early 2000 to stand as a presidential candidate.
Bedie’s government, invoking the idea of “Ivorités” and Ivorianness, argued that his foreign parentage prevented Ouattara from being a suitable candidate for the presidency. Ouattara was then barred by a Supreme Court ruling from running for the presidency on the grounds that he is a foreigner, an assertion that he denies.
“Ado,” as he is affectionately called, is an economist and has spent much of his career at the IMF and the West African Central Bank, with a brief tenure as prime minister between 1990 and 1993 under Houphouet-Boigny.
However, as a northerner Ouattara has been an outsider from the mainstream of Ivorian politics and the target of extraordinary attempts concentrated on his nationality and the origin of his parents to exclude him from power. Ironically, his citizenship saga stems from his former boss, Houphouet-Boigny, who had encouraged large numbers of immigrants from neighboring countries – often of the same ethnic groups found inside Ivory Coast – to come and work on the extensive cocoa and coffee plantations to which the country owed its early economic prosperity.
Houphouet-Boigny advocated a very broad concept of dual nationality that allowed foreign residents the right to vote. He was also a consummate politician, managing to keep ethnic tensions to a minimum while ensuring the concentration of political and economic power within his own ethnic Baoule, mainly Christian, group.
Today, some 40% of Ivory Coast's 16 million inhabitants – the immigrants and their descendants – fall into this category of “circumstantial Ivorians” differentiated from “pure Ivorians,” the so-called original natives.
Bedie’s much-hated policy of “Ivorités” had the effect of marginalizing an estimated 60% of the population, mainly Muslims from the north, who were considered a threat to his bid to be returned to power. It also disqualified Ouattara, his main political rival from running for the presidency, on the grounds of his nationality.
On December 25, 1999, General Robert Guei overthrew Bedie and promised to clean up Ivorian politics. He forgot his pledge and tried to steal the October elections by pursuing the same policy, for the same ends, and targeting the same man – Ouattara. In less than a day, he was forced to flee as thousands of protesters swept onto the streets and placed opposition leader, Laurent Gbagbo, in power.
The change of presidents, however, has not changed the country’s power structure, which continues to exclude Muslims. Gbagbo’s head of the army, General Mathias Doue, is a former member of the Guei junta. Gbagbo's accession triggered a new wave of violence as supporters of Ouattara demanded new elections in which their candidate could stand. The marches turned into ethnic violence and sectarian attacks in which Muslim homes and businesses were targeted.
Gbagbo is an opposition leader of many years' standing. However, in the past year, Alhassane Ouattara has eclipsed him as Ivory Coast's most visible opposition figure. Although nominally a socialist with a background in trade unionism under the government of Houphouet-Boigny, Gbagbo, for years seen as little more than a rabble-rouser off the street, has recently embraced the idea of Ivorité – no less enthusiastically than Bédié and Guei before him. After all, it was the sidelining of Ouattara that enabled Gbagbo to stage a political comeback, and it would not suit him to see Ouattara reestablish himself.
Ouattara insists his ancestry is fully Ivorian, and his lawyers say genetic tests have shown that he is the son of an Ivorian woman – contradicting his opponents who say that Ouattara's mother was from Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta). While prime minister, he was an effective economic manager and succeeded in pruning government spending. This earned him praise from international economic bodies but annoyed senior figures in the then ruling party and many civil servants. Some have commented that if competence were the main election issue, Ouattara would romp home.
Political analysts are concerned that after almost 40 years of peace and stability, the former French colony is now in danger of sinking into the religious and ethnic turmoil that has gripped many of its West African neighbors. The country has now had two coups in under a year, and election violence has cost hundreds of lives, mainly that of Muslims.
They point out that Ivory Coast’s GDP per capita was estimated at $1,680 in 1998 along with a healthy 6% growth rate when, by contrast, the corresponding figures for oil-rich Nigeria were only $960 and 1.6%.
This tradition of stability, obtained at the cost of the Muslim majority, caused Ivory Coast to be regarded by Western powers – particularly by France and the United States – as an important regional ally in a notoriously unstable region. Another attraction for the West besides Cote d'Ivoire’s coffee, cocoa beans, and palm oil is its offshore oil and gas discoveries.
The concern for maintaining the status quo among Western powers has been so intense that even France, which had supported Bedie, continued to work with Guei after expressing its disapproval of his violent seizure of power, and there was no sign of a challenge to the general's authority in Washington either.
After the ignominious and hurried departure of General Guei, the ascension of Gbagbo as president of Ivory Coast was trumpeted as a victory for democracy – despite the fact that the October election was not inclusive. And there has been little talk about democracy as the youth who defied bullets to oust Guei now hunt down supporters of Gbagbo's rival, Ouattara.
Regrets being offered by Western observers over Ivory Coast's shattered image as a relatively prosperous and peaceful country do not note that its stability was built on a flawed premise enacted by the country’s former colonial master. The Islam-phobic French empowered the mainly Christian Baoule at the cost of the Muslim majority. Today, the country’s Muslims are determined to reclaim their due.
http://www.islamfortoday.com/ivorycoast.htm
All I see when Muslims take over is hatred for everyone not willing to kowtow to them, beheading of Christians and women, and other brutalities.
Islamaphobia is a survival trait !