Ivory Coast: Massacre in the West, Siege in the East

Posted By Elizabeth Dickinson Monday, April 4, 2011 - 10:25 AM Share

War has returned to the Ivory Coast in the shape of massacres, mercenaries, a besieged capital, and a humanitarian nightmare. Over the last week, a political deadlock that was by all accounts frozen has become a heated contest on the battlefield. Make no mistake: This was the worst-case scenario mapped out for the Ivory Coast back in November when this crisis began.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the city of  Duékoué, a key town in the West of the country close to the Liberian border. Forces loyal to the president elect, Alassane Ouattara, took the city last week. But over the weekend it became clear that the fighting took an incredible toll. The International Committee of the Red Cross announced last Friday that an estimated 800 had died; then Caritas put the number at 1,000. Reporting from Duékoué, the BBC's Andrew Harding-- the only English-speaking reporter there as far as I can tell -- writes that he counted 20 corpses in just one city block, children among them. Ouattara's forces, who put the figure much lower, claim that the killings were the result of community militias fighting one another in the wake of power changing hands. The administration blamed the U.N. peacekeepers for being absent and allowing the mess to unfold.  

Meanwhile in the capital, the Republic Guard elite forces loyal to the outgoing president Laurent Gbagbo are fiercely deterring an attempt by Ouattara's forces to storm the presidential palace, where it's thought that Gbagbo is holed up. Shots were heard throughout the weekend, though the exact situation is quite unclear. Reports are filtering out through social media that Gbagbo has been using human shields to block bridges around the palace. In one alarming development this morning, a leading Gbagbo general who had previously sought refuge in the South African embassy as a defector has now returned to the battlefield to fight on behalf of the outgoing president.

And in an ominous move reminiscent of Rwanda, and more recently, Libya, French citizens are being gathered for evacuation, as the French army has taken over the aiport. There's clearly a calculation being made that things are going to get worse. 

Even if the fighting doesn't continue to escalate, Abidjan under siege is edging toward a humanitarian crisis. Residents of Abidjan today warned that they were running out of phone credit. Water has been cut off to parts of the city, so young women and children are often visible on the streets, scurrying with buckets to fill.

How did we end up here? After months of warnings that this country was on the brink of civil war, it has now been allowed to fall from the precipice. And it looks as if the world is fresh out of ideas about what to do. Economic sanctions failed to squeeze Gbagbo into retirement; so did enticements and final offers for amnesty. Everyone -- Washington, Brussels, Paris, the U.N. -- is calling for the protection of civilians. Clearly that's not enough. Paul Collier had an interesting idea a while back to force defections within the army around Gbagbo, but that seems a bit late now. 

So here's what's probably going to happen: Ouattara's forces, which are arguably the legitimate army in this country, will likely be allowed to fight on until Gbagbo is eventually ousted. Everyone will yell and scream that civilians should be protected in the meantime. But everyone knows that this crisis doesn't end until Gbagbo goes, and again, we're fresh out of other options.

I'm not convinced that it even ends then -- after Gbagbo is forced out one way or another. Remember, this election was contested on a relatively close vote, and Gbagbo does retain support from a fair slice of the population. As much as Ouattara has talked about being the president for all Ivorians, the story on the ground is looking more complicated. This is about more than two men's egos at this point. It's about a country, back in civil war. And if we'd like to prevent a protracted armed conflict, maybe it's time to start plotting out options if it comes to that. 

ISSOUF SANOGO/AFP/Getty Images

 

JEAN KAPENDA

12:40 PM ET

April 4, 2011

Helping Africans Purge Their Own Mad Men

With very rare exceptions, Africa is led by madmen. They use several tactics to stay on power. Some recruit soldiers to forcibly send them as peacekeepers in Darfur or Somalia and to be butchered in those hot zones where no decent democracy would ever send troops. This is what has maintained dictatorships in Rwanda and Uganda, which blackmail even the United Nations as the UN has to think it twice to issue a report condemning those two regimes for violating human rights in neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, specifically in Eastern Congo! Others, including those of the first group, tailor and manipulate their countries' constitutions and the election process to remain on power eternally. They accomplish this goal by prostituting democracy, via prostituted parliaments and prostituted judiciary branch of government. Despite the high mortality of the plague, there are still some constipated individuals in the international community who call "legal" those constitutional manipulations by African dictators. Those short-sighted policy-makers fail to understand that what is legal is not necessarily moral and can even be billions of light years away from decency. They also fail to understand that dictators WILL NEVER be democrats. Political wisdom teaches that they can only become dictocrats (I've coined this word) when they intend to fraudulently play democrat. There's another group, those who are not necessarily dictators, but share something in common with dictators and dictocrats: they are thieves! If the international community assists in disclosing and freezing right away the assets those thieves have deposited in banks all over the world, I am optimistic instant Tahrir Squares will spring overnight all over the continent for a complete purge of their own madmen who've ruled Africa so long!

 

EUCHARISTED

1:45 PM ET

April 4, 2011

My two cents

Prayer, virtue and faith are the remedies. Prayer brings down God's Mercy, including consolation for the good and conversion for the bad. Virtue brings example and charity, so that men may learn to do good and those in need may receive alms. Faith brings prayer and virtue and propagates a culture of goodness, even in the face of tyranny and unspeakable abuse. May the Mother of the Word, who appeared at Kibeho, bring the Word which she bore in her womb to the people of Ivory Coast, to both the good and the bad, for their salvation and to the greater glory of God.

But I pray that tyrannicide is not done, for it is murder and murder may not be done under any circumstances. "Murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or wilful self-destruction...mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself...subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies...They poison human society...they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury...they are supreme dishonor to the Creator." (Gauium et Spes 27 §3)

Yet self-defense is not murder. "Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for one who is responsible for the lives of others. The defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to cause harm. For this reason, those who legitimately hold authority also have the right to use arms to repel aggressors against the civil community entrusted to their responsibility." (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2265)

Nor does the death penalty, by its very nature, constitute tyrannicide. "Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor. If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person. Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically nonexistent." (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2267)

 

TINAK

11:13 AM ET

April 25, 2011

wrong information

Its very frustrating to read something in the news and know that it's false information.....
Ouattara is not the elected president. He is a false president placed there by the French in order to control the natural resources of the country. According to the Constitution of the Ivory Coast, he is not eligible to be president of the country. Gbagbo is the rightful president. But no one knows this. The news won't report this because those in power are feeding false information. It's very upsetting!! Ouattara supporters bypassed the election process, handed Ouattara a piece of paper with the election results that they falsified and had him declare in front of cameras that he was president. They had votes come from towns where the number of actual votes was higher than the number of people in those towns! Obviously they are falsified. But these results and this information is not reported. None of this is.
They also don't say that there is now ethnic cleansing happening in Ivory Coast. That of the 2 tribes, the one that supports Ouattara is trying to wipe out the other. And in the process, they also wish to wipe out all the Christians! There have been reports of killings, and ritualistic murders, where people are beheaded and the murders drink their blood. But this isn't reported either. Why? Well it sounds so horrible, no one wants to acknowledge it. How could anyone possibly do something like that? Regardless of how anyone could do that, it's still being done.

Fact is... no one wants to dig deeper and find out what's REALLY going on there... They will just take whatever information is given them and report it. The media can not be trusted. It's very sad, but no one reports the truth anymore....

 

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