Global Policy Forum

By Daniel Balint-Kurti

Stepping from his silver Mercedes sport utility vehicle, rebel leader Guillaume Soro greets fighters laden with magic charms and lays out his latest idea: seceding from Ivory Coast and creating Africa's newest nation. Since security forces killed dozens of protesters in the government-controlled south a month ago, Soro has been touring northern regions that his fighters still control despite signing a peace accord early last year. "Everyone should know that faced with the threat of a return to civil war, which could lead to the massacre of millions, we prefer secession," the 31-year-old leader told a crowd of hundreds this week during a stop in Korhogo, a rebel stronghold.

Stopping at villages to talk with civilians and his fighters, who wear amulets to ward off bullets, he said he had not decided whether to launch a breakaway republic. But he said a decision could come as early as Monday. Soro argues secession would forestall future killing. But others fear fighting would resume, despite thousands of French and U.N. peacekeepers patrolling a cease-fire line. Renewed civil war would be a bitter blow to Ivory Coast, which before the political unrest of recent years was West Africa's business center and a haven of stability in a troubled region. The war killed 3,000 and displaced 1 million.

Soro's critics say the secession talk is little more than a bid to pressure President Laurent Gbagbo to adhere to the French-brokered power-sharing deal signed in January 2003. The accord ended a civil war that began in September 2002 after a failed coup against Gbagbo. Rebel representatives and major opposition parties have boycotted Ivory Coast's unity government since security forces shot into crowds of demonstrators March 25 and then conducted nighttime executions in poor neighborhoods.

The International Crisis Group, a peace advocacy organization based in Brussels, Belgium, estimated 200 people died in the violence. Estimates from opposition party and government officials ranged widely on either side of that figure. "After March 25, there is no question of us sitting down with someone who ordered the army to shoot at our supporters,'' said Soro, who is still nominally the country's communications minister. Thousands of demonstrators remembering the dead danced and sang at a rally Saturday in Abidjan, the country's commercial center. U.N. peacekeepers, in their first deployment in Abidjan, provided security. "When you meet people in the street, ask them and they will tell you they are for secession,'' Soro said.

If the arid north were to secede successfully, it would cut itself off from the rich fields of the south that have made Ivory Coast the world's largest cocoa exporter. It's also unclear that other nations would recognize a separate northern republic, although Gbagbo's government has accused neighboring Burkina Faso of backing the rebels.

Much of the country's troubles stems from hatred for foreigners. Particularly in the north, many people have felt politically disenfranchised because their parentage was questioned and they were denied full citizenship. For decades, the government had encouraged foreigners to move in to be laborers in the cocoa fields and take unskilled jobs in Abidjan. But an economic downturn in the 1990s ended their welcome. "There were Ivorians who considered themselves foreigners on their own soil and that could not continue,'' Soro said.