[Shadow_Group] Ivory Coast's Violence Threatens Africa

[shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca]

Maybe Bush can work some of his mideast magic to save
Africa from itself? Maybe he won't because France is
involved. Interesting situation.
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Ivory Coast's Violence Threatens Africa
November 9, 2004, 4:13 PM EST
By ELLEN KNICKMEYER
Associated Press Writer

FROM:
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-ivory-coast-why-it-matters,0,168288.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines<http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-ivory-coast-why-it-matters,0,168288.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines>
DAKAR, Senegal -- On a continent that absorbs 75
percent of the world's U.N. peacekeeping forces and
budget, Ivory Coast's violent downward spiral
threatens hard-won gains against West Africa's
devastating civil wars of the 1990s. 

If Ivory Coast -- West Africa's economic powerhouse
and the world's top cocoa producer -- returns to war,
everyone from its neighbors to the world's chocolate
lovers will feel the pain. 
 
Many hold one man responsible: President Laurent
Gbagbo. His fate after the week's violence stands to
determine his country's fate as well. 

Tuesday saw South African President Thabo Mbeki arrive
in Ivory Coast on a peace mission, amid deadly
rampages that erupted when France destroyed the
country's tiny air force in response to an airstrike
that killed nine French peacekeepers and an American
aid worker. 

The world's chocolate lovers will probably feel the
effects of the chaos by Christmas. The violence has
shut down Ivory Coast's cocoa exports since Saturday,
closing ports that ship 40 percent of the world's raw
material for chocolate. The likely result will be
higher prices within a month, and then a shortage. 

Ivory Coast's neighbors felt the effect immediately --
5,000 refugees fled into neighboring Liberia and
Guinea massed troops at its border for fear of unrest.


As Ivory Coast plunges into war, its neighbors are
reveling in the quiet victories of peace. 

All but unnoticed by the world, the first 500 of
300,000 Liberians still living in camps for
war-displaced people waved goodbye and boarded buses
home this week after 14 years of vicious civil
conflicts in their country. 

"When I get back home, I will start to make gardens to
survive, and then make blocks to rebuild what once was
my small but decent house," said one grateful refugee,
62-year-old Momo Perry. 

It took an unprecedented commitment by the
international community, and the world's largest
deployments of peacekeepers, to get Perry and the
others home. 

In 2002, British, U.N. and West African armies crushed
a vicious Liberia-backed insurgency in Sierra Leone.
The next year, American, U.N. and West African forces
and Liberian rebels routed the chief promulgator of
West Africa's wars, Liberia's Charles Taylor. 

Taylor, a Cold War creation of Libyan leader Moammar
Gadhafi's guerrilla camps, had trafficked arms and
insurgencies across West Africa's borders since 1989. 

Today, 75 percent of the world's 62,000 U.N.
peacekeeping troops are trying to enforce peace deals
across Africa, and $2.9 billion of the world body's
$3.9 billion peacekeeping budgets are spent here. 

With up to 10 percent of the world's oil reserves in
West Africa, the United States and other nations
increasingly are saying they have a strategic interest
in Africa -- and a stake in keeping it peaceful. 

More than half the world's total peacekeepers --
32,402 -- are based in Taylor's old stomping grounds
-- Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast itself,
divided by civil war since 2002. 

With Taylor in exile in Nigeria, Gbagbo is looking
like the biggest current challenge to peace. 

The Ivory Coast president has commanded the loyalty of
his supporters by pitting them against anyone seen as
an outsider -- declaring it a matter of their survival
to fight the French, African immigrants and their own
northern countrymen. 

The airstrike on the French was part of three days of
government attacks that broke a more than year-old
cease-fire. 

Street protests put Gbagbo in power in 2000, during an
aborted vote count in elections meant to restore
civilian rule after a 1999 coup shattered the nation's
reputation for stability. 

Ivory Coast had been considered West Africa's most
prosperous country since independence, and its
commercial capital, Abidjan, was dubbed the "Paris of
Africa" for its nightlife and its boutiques. The Hotel
Ivoires even boasted an ice skating rink, one of only
two in sub-Saharan Africa. 

France kept the country peaceful by backing Felix
Houphouet-Boigny as the sole post-independence leader.
Africa "wasn't ready for democracy," Jacques Chirac,
now France's president, famously declared at the start
of the 1990s. 

Houphouet-Boigny died in 1993. With no tradition of
democracy and no clear successor, Ivory Coast slid
into chaos by 1999. 
_
EDITORS: Ellen Knickmeyer, the AP's West Africa bureau
chief, has covered Africa for four years. 
Copyright © 2004, The Associated Press






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