Global Policy Forum

Between 1960-80, Cí´te d'Ivoire became the world's largest producer of cocoa. The 'cocoa boom' was fuelled by mass migrations into the cocoa- producing forests of the south initially by Ivorians from other areas, followed by millions of foreign migrants from Burkina Fasso and Mali.

The state policy of Houphouet-Boigny and the then ruling PDCI was to encourage a 'land rush' mentality, declaring that ‘the land belongs to those who cultivate it'. The result was an increasing sense of grievance on the part of the indigenous landholders of the cocoa areas towards incoming migrants, and opposition to the ruling PDCI. These relations became even worse in the 1990s with the decline in cocoa and emerging land shortages. But all of this hostility presented little threat to the regime until the political 'liberalisation' of the 1990s.

In the 1990 elections, the only challenge to the PDCI was Laurent Gbagbo's Front populaire ivorien (FPI), representing mainly the indigenous peoples of the cocoa areas. By the 1995 elections, the position of the opposition had been transformed by the addition of a new party, the PDCI 'reformist' splinter group, Rassemblement des républicains (RDR) led by ex-Prime Minister Allassan Ouattara.

Konan Bédié, who had taken power in 1993 on the death of the Houphouet- Boigny, was now faced with a much more formidable opposition grouping and responded by launching a personal campaign against Ouattara, preventing him from standing in the elections on the grounds that he was not an Ivorian. In addition, Bédié and the PDCI launched an anti-foreigner campaign behind the slogan of 'ivoirité that played to anti-foreign sentiments stirred by the severe economic crisis, particularly in the cocoa areas, and stigmatised the RDR as a 'northern' and 'foreigners' party.

After another PDCI victory, the FPI/ RDR alliance broke up as Gbagbo was unwilling to forgo the chance of competing in the next election. In any case, the anti-foreign tendencies of the FPI and its followers made them more in tune with their old enemy, the PDCI.

Cote d'Ivoire's first military coup led by Army commander General Gueí¯ erupted in 1999, just before the 2000 general elections. Gueí¯ continued the exclusion of Ouattara and tried to prevent Gbagbo from taking power after he had apparently won the largest share of the votes. Gbagbo eventually came to office in a wave of popular protest and violence against both Gueí¯ and RDR supporters whilst enthusiastically adopting the 'national identity' politics first initiated by Bédié.

It is not therefore surprising that when the 2002 coup was launched by a group of pro-Gueí¯ soldiers who had been purged from the Army by the new government, Gbagbo openly blamed 'foreign' elements and then by extension, the RDR and Ouattara.

Whether the RDR was involved in the coup or not, hostility from the south has only been reinforced by way in which the 'rebel demands' at the Paris conference seemed to echo the RDR's agenda. In the short term, the RDR look like the main gainers - but only if one ignores the power which the rebel leaders and their movement have carved out for themselves, independently of the RDR.

Many of the intellectual elite in the south are suspicious of the Paris agreement, accusing the French of having an 'interest' in overthrowing Gbagbo, and of therefore supporting the coup as a way of installing Ouattara in power. It is difficult, however, to see how even French business interests would have anything to gain by destroying the stability and prosperity of their prime African venture through bloody civil war.

The most unfortunate consequence of the rebellion and of the peace agreement itself is that the country is now deeply and dangerously polarised along regional lines. This sad development is partly a consequence of tensions created by forty years of rapid economic growth based on land and migration policies. Policies so extreme and so careless of local sensitivities that some political reaction was almost inevitable once the boom ended.

Political and military leaders in the 1990s gratuitously destroyed the delicate balance created by the PDCI, manipulating these dangerous issues of land and foreign migration, and excluding important groups from participating in the ruling elite coalition.