wealth of Côte d'Ivoire. In a more accurate formulation, the Sahel labourers were invited to help expand agribusiness by entering a labour bond known as a 'tutorat' with the original inhabitants of the tropical West. At independence, traditional forms of land ownership were largely intact despite fifty years of colonial rule. Only a small number of individuals or communities held any form of legal deed, as remains the case today. Instead, Western land was – and to a large extent, still is – governed by tutorat relationships: a perpetual debt system binding migrant laborers to the autochthone communities on whose traditional lands the newer residents live and work (Chauveau, 2000). There are positive stories of friendly co-inhabitation under the tutorat, however there are also many accounts of the customary tenant system being manipulated by both debtors and lenders, depending on the details of the given case.

Tutorat relationships are part of a cultural obligation within Krou subgroups to share wealth, food and land with any foreigner who comes to stay in their territory. According to this tradition, parcels of land were allocated to the migrant labourers who arrived under colonial and Houphouët era migrant labour policies. The price of the land was usually symbolic: often a small sum of cash or a bottle of gin.<fnref n="47" /> Although the land thereafter belonged to the 'stranger' and could be passed on to the next generation, the continuance of that 'gift' depended on meeting ongoing and undefined obligations to the host, and could be revoked if the relationship faltered. 'Strangers' are expected to contribute financially or in kind to family events and in times of need for the duration of their stay in the Krou community, with funerals and marriages being the most common occasion to call on a tutorat debtor. Two generations later, descendants of the original

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Gin (and other alcoholic drinks) has symbolic meaning in Krou culture and is given for its ceremonial use. For instance, it is often involved in welcoming guests to the community. This tradition has fed negative stereotypes about Krou as 'lazy' or 'drunks', as we will see later in this chapter.</footnote>
migrants find themselves the beneficiaries of free or very cheap fertile farmland acquired by their forefathers. Yet, on the other hand, they are still indebted to ‘tutor’ hosts in a relationship governed by ill-defined and potentially unending obligations.

Historians often describe the *tutorat* as the original source of the social exclusion experienced by ‘northerners’ in Ivorian society.<fnref n="48" /> In this interpretation of the customary law, the *tutorat* locks migrant families into a permanent status as indentured tenants of traditional land owners. In this understanding, foreigners are generously welcomed but they will never be full members of their adopted community nor will they ever truly own the land they farm, no matter how many generations pass. In the West of Côte d’Ivoire today, a traveler will hear many accounts of Krou hosts who took advantage of the migrant labourers living on their lands, sometimes over many decades. That said, the resentment expressed by some Krou farmers towards Dioulas neighbours who benefited from the cultural obligation to gift land is also understandable. Significant areas of farmland were acquired at little or no cost, usually with agreements for minimal or merely symbolic rent. The value of land has risen dramatically since these tenancy bonds were made by the grandparents of the current occupants. In the time since, the modern world has wiped away many customary obligations and social realities that once made those agreements beneficial to all sides. Furthermore, the Krou are amongst the country’s poorest residents. Now that farmland has become scarce and highly prized, that relative poverty further deepens resentment felt towards Dioula families farming on *tutorat* acquired land.

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ For example, see Fofana (2009) and Soro (2004).</footnote>
Arbitrating these cases is nearly impossible due to the contradictory laws governing land ownership in Côte d'Ivoire. Firstly, Ivorian property law establishes that land can never be permanently transferred from its customary owners and, in particular, can never be owned by foreigners. However, it is equally the case that the law forbids traditional landowners from forcing rent upon the descendants of migrant workers, unless such payments were originally included in a legal contract. This second clause is effectively irrelevant, as legal contracts almost never exist. *Tutorat* arrangements were made by the grandparents of current residents, most of whom were illiterate and who would have depended on customary justice to resolve any issues arising from the exchange. Finally, Ivorian law further prohibits customary landowners from expelling so-called strangers from traditional land. This principle was recently clarified in the legal code to officially forbid land evictions of migrant farmers (Mitchell 2014).

When the contradicting pieces of Ivorian land laws are considered together, the contemporary legal standing of *tutorat* amounts to the following; even with a contract, traditional lands cannot permanently change ownership. Migrant workers thus have no claim to land ownership regardless of what terms were negotiated for the use of the land, what payments were made, and the number of generations that have passed. It is equally the case that *autochthones* have no right to expel foreign workers or force payments from those occupying land on their traditional territory. Again, this holds regardless of what terms were originally negotiated for land use, how much time has passed, and whether the migrant community has significantly grown in the interim years. The legal deadlock is unfair to both sides and inevitably leads to conflict. That said – and this is a point we will return to shortly – the legal deadlock also has clear beneficiaries. Large agribusinesses profit from cheap labour working on vast stretches of rent-free land that are effectively, though not officially, co-opted from the traditional owners by
labourers who can occupy it, but cannot own it, and thus can only put it to temporary use: namely, for farming cocoa.<fnref n="49" />

It is no surprise that land rights became a permanent source of tension between indigenous and migrant groups in Côte d'Ivoire. Although these tensions intensified with the 1990 economic crash, violent outbreaks over land began during the colonial era. That said, given the incomprehensibility of the legal code, the unfairness of the *tutorat* and the high-stakes of land ownership, much more remarkable than infrequent clashes is the fact that most Western communities co-existed in relative peace during pre-war period. For decades, western villages lived under a land and labour system that was deeply unfair to both migrants and to the original residents. Despite this, until civil war broke out in 2002, peaceful settlement was the most common outcome of land conflict (Chauveau and Bobo 2003). In most instances land disputes were settled on a case-by-case basis by customary authorities from both groups.<fnref n="50" /> While imperfect, this local solution was relatively successful for three-quarters of a century. Thus, rather than accepting the common claim that ethnic hatred has long festered in the West and finally spilled over into a civil war, the impression we ought to gain from this account is that these communities managed an incredibly difficult social history with restraint and mutual accommodation.

During the war years this picture of accommodation was replaced in popular culture and newsreels with accounts of ethnic hatred and bloodlust, first springing up from the West and then infecting the country at large. Indeed, the best-known account of the *tutorat* system is an entirely

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ Account of the Grand Beriby Abron Chiefs in interview with author, San Pedro, Côte d'Ivoire August 2015.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ ibid.</footnote>
fictional one. Written for an urban intellectual audience during the long years of stalemate
between the civil war's dramatic origins and end, *Les Catapilas* is a novel by Venance Konan,
the editor-in-chief of Côte d'Ivoire's largest news agency and publishing house, Fraternité Matin
(Konan 2009). Despite being fictional, the novel has shaped contemporary understandings of
Ivorian land conflict more than any real-life account.<fnref n="51" /> The story is written from the perspective
of Frank, a foolish and lazy Bêté man. He is a drunk and forever scheming how he will afford to
attend some out-of-town festival or lure a young woman into bed behind his wife's back. The
term 'Catapilas' is a Bêté patois referencing to the American-made Caterpillar excavators used in
European plantations to clear land in the West. The Bêté protagonists in the novel dub 'their
strangers' Catapilas as a good-natured mockery of the tireless work ethic of the Dioulas as they
clear vast swaths of land for cultivation. Frank cannot think long term and is known for his
aversion to work. Throughout the story we see him selling parcel after parcel of his family's
traditional land for next to nothing to the quiet, good-natured and ever-obliging head of the
Catapilas clan. Within a few years, the Catapilas have transformed the Bêté village from a
backwater into a bustling trade center. They also control local industry and finances. When Frank
finally awakens to the new status quo, he becomes obsessed with his hatred for the Catapilas.

Thanks to the help of a radicalised, unemployed nephew from the city and a corrupt party
official, the town's Bêté men band together on a xenophobic mission to destroy the Catapilas and
take back their traditional land: a particularly cunning plan given the land is now cleared,
cultivated and productive, and their once lost little village is a lively trade hub.

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ “Forget anything else; everything you need to know about the war you can read in Catapilas!” This was stated in an interview with a French business owner whose family had lived in the Western region as planation and hotel owners for three generations (Grand Bériby, Côte d’Ivoire, June 2014). The comment is one of many mentions over my time in Côte d’Ivoire pointing to the novel as an important source of information about the war.</footnote>
As seen in the preceding pages, the historical record shows a quite different picture than the one recounted in Konan’s novel. Land conflict grew overtime because of an unfair land and labour system built on the double exploitation of both labourers and traditional landowners. Migrant labourers were promised land and a share in Côte d’Ivoire’s riches if they migrated South, yet the state never regulated labour rights nor compensated the traditional landowners in areas where migrants were sent to work. For their part, Krou communities had little choice but to hand over territory to foreign workers before their ‘unused’ land was expropriated by the state and reallocated to agribusiness. The Houphouëtist elites left it to local customary authorities to muddle through the fallout and, in the meantime, became exceedingly rich off the cocoa industry, booming thanks to an abundance of cheap labour *and* free land.

Yet these architects and primary beneficiaries of land conflict are omitted in *Catapilas*. Instead the book presents a decontextualized account, portraying violence in the West as a matter of petty personal failings and nasty ethnic stereotypes. *Catapilas* is certainly an important historical record, but not for the story itself. The book taught its wide readership a simplistic and divisive conflict narrative, and it did so at the height of the national partisan. The story revitalizes colonial era stereotypes of industrious Dioulas and backwards Krous, replacing a complicated historical record with simple clichés. (R. Marshall-Fratani 2003). In doing so, the novel hides both the exploitative policies at the root of conflict and the primary beneficiaries of that exploitation. As an influential account of the early phases of the civil war, the book helped transfer blame for the discord caused by an untenable and exploitative land system away from the governing elites and onto the *autochthone* farmers and migrant labourers who suffered most from it.
Catapilas was not intended to capture the complexity of land conflict in the Western region. Rather, the book contributed to a conversation happening amongst urban intellectuals in Abidjan more than a decade after the events depicted in the book. The clichéd account of Bêté farmers analogized then-President Gbagbo (a Bêté) and his urban youth supporters as a means of debunking their anti-foreigner rhetoric and glorifying the rebellion against them. As such, Konan's is one of numerous sources that collapse rural land disputes and urban political unrest into a single timeline (M. McGovern 2011; Notin 2013; Soro 2005). These accounts describe the war as an eruption of long festering conflict between northerner migrants and xenophobic Ivorian youth. This, however, is a misleading narrative on three accounts: first, the timing of events leading to the conflict; second, the key instigators of that violence; and, third, the geography of where those events played out. In fact, the first decade of civil unrest in Côte d'Ivoire was concentrated in the urban centre and happened for reasons unrelated to rural land disputes. It took a deliberate effort from warring political elites, eager to capture the power vacuum left by Houphouët-Boigny's death, to connect rural dynamics in any meaningful way to the political violence that was already happening in the urban centre.

### 3.3. The Pro-Democracy Movement

Despite accounts often seen on social media or in international newsreels, ethnic tensions rising from the rural land crisis did not spark the civil war in Côte d'Ivoire. At its origin, unrest in Côte d'Ivoire began with a bi-partisan, pro-democracy movement that was vocally committed to ethnic and religious unity, actively cultivating an image of Ivorians standing together against Houphouët's one-party rule. The movement began in urban centres and, quite explicitly, was not mobilized along ethnic lines. Eventually that movement divided into camps and leaders on both sides exploited ethnic allegiances to justify their calls for escalated violence. This happened only
gradually, however, and it did not manifest in violent clashes along ethnic lines until years after
political violence along party lines was a well-established fixture of urban life.

In the early 1990s, a formidable pro-democracy movement grew from Houphouët-Boigny's
impressive record of developing higher education in post-colonial Côte d'Ivoire (Woods 1996).<fnref n="52" />

The independence-era President discovered that his remarkably successful education policy had
produced a new generation of educated citizens, unwilling to accept centralised and often
arbitrary one-party rule. The President now faced a generation of leftist-oriented students and
professors, schooled in the language and principles of French enlightenment, and espousing a
new vision of nationalism divorced from the colonial mimicry they identified with Houphouët-
era elitism. The movement mobilized around a shared contempt for the small ruling elite and the
enduring influence of their allies in the French administration. FHB, one-time hero of
independence, now faced a united movement of youth activists, crosscutting ethnic groups and
led by Ivorian-born, Paris-educated socialist intellectuals.

During this same period, Côte d'Ivoire sank into a severe economic crisis. IMF reforms imposed
on the country in exchange for debt relief stripped Houphouët-Boigny of the financial means to
continue his former strategy of co-opting the growing intellectual class into government posts.
IMF mandated austerity measures hit the education sector especially hard, cutting the generous
housing and salary benefits that teachers and students had once enjoyed. Many in the teachers'
syndicate felt they were being targeted as punishment for their open resistance to the regime

<footnote n="52">⁵² In 1950, there were only 1,268 students in secondary schools. Thirty years later, the figure had grown nearly twenty-fold. Furthermore, the number of students at the university of Abidjan exceeded the 6,000 places available three-fold at the end of the 1980s (Woods, 1996).</footnote>
(Daddieh 1988).<fnref n="53" /> Notable amongst the more militant teachers was a history professor from Abidjan University named Dr. Laurent Gbagbo. In defiance of the regime, a group of student activists invited Professor Gbagbo to give a public lecture entitled ‘Youth in Politics’. In a country where political science was banned as a topic of study, this action was deemed flagrant insubordination and met a heavy-handed state response. The meeting was banned, prompting a student march on the University administration. The government sent troops to ‘protect the Rector’, resulting in the arrest and beating of several hundred students.<fnref n="54" /> The repression only helped grow more protests, which, again, met an even harsher state response.<fnref n="55" /> Rather than dissuading the opposition, state violence sparked further civil actions and soon spread to a general strike. Once the police and gendarmes began switching sides to join the striking teachers and students, Houphouët-Boigny understood that his coercive tactics had reached their limit. He agreed to negotiate with the professors and student activists in a ‘national consultation process’,

<footnote n="53">⁵³ Though he tried on various occasions, Houphouët-Boigny was unable to co-opt the teacher's syndicate into the ranks of the PDCI. In the one-party state, this explicit non-affiliation with the regime was considered a grave provocation (Daddieh 1988).</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ The student marchers were jailed in the Akouedo military barracks where many reported being tortured. The incident was used as a pretext for the government to close the university's independent research centers, an action interpreted by the students and teachers as an attempt by Houphouët to stamp out a growing pro-democracy movement among intellectuals (Woods 1996).</footnote>

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ This action pushed then Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara to pass ‘anti-breaking’ laws [*lois anti-casseurs*] against the opponents of the regime, essentially criminalizing all civil action (Pigeaud 2015). Readers familiar with Ivorian history will see the irony that Prime Minister Ouattara’s own law meant to crush opposition, would later be used to deny him and his supporters the same right to protest a decade later. In September 1991, acting under the new ‘anti-breaking law’, the paramilitary commando was sent to the student’s residence, known as the ‘Cité’ in Youpougon. The operation was led by another future president, General Robert Guéï. The paramilitaries were accused of committing numerous acts of forced disappearances, beatings and rapes. Outrage at the unprecedented violence secured an independent investigative commission into the incident. The report, issued January 29, 1992, clearly linked the General Robert Guéï and his soldiers to rapes and other crimes committed at Cité Yopougon and recommended criminal action. Houphouët-Boigny was known for the dubious governance principle coined in the slogan that he ‘prefered injustice to unrest, as injustice can be fixed’. True to his words, Houphouët rejected the commission finding, citing his reluctance to fracture army loyalty. The following month more protests followed resulting in mass riots and the arrest of the entire opposition class, amongst them Gbagbo and his wife as well the leaders of the PIT (the worker’s party) and Lidho (Côte d’Ivoire’s first human rights’ NGO) (Woods 1996).</footnote>
resulting in the decriminalization of opposition parties and the first competitive elections. On
May 31, 1990, Côte d'Ivoire became a democracy. Marking the occasion, Gbagbo's *Front
Populaire Ivoirien* (FPI) became the first legal opposition party.<fnref n="56" />

3.3.1. Dividing the Youth

The ‘*Fédération des Étudiants et Scolaires de Côte d’Ivoire*” (FESCI) was founded in the St.
Families Church of Riveria on May 31, 1990: the very day Houphouët conceded to multi-party
democracy. That said, the student organization had long existed underground at the heart of the
youth-led pro-democracy movement. Going back to the colonial era, labour syndicates form the
main terrain of Ivorian politics, and FESCI was no exception. Officially FESCI was a syndicate
for the defense of student rights, but for its members “FESCI was a school; it was a school of
politics”.<fnref n="57" /> This student movement formed a new generation of political actors. With few
exceptions, the men and the few women who today comprise the younger generation of Côte
d’Ivoire ruling class entered politics through FESCI. In the words of a former FESCI
communications officer: “We were all formed in FESCI together, it was only later that people
chose their camps.”<fnref n="58" /> Though it is hard to believe today, during the first years of the multi-party

<footnote n="56">56 The RDR opposition party was founded a year later under the leadership of Djeni Kobena. As a close friend of Kobena, Laurent Gbagbo helped draft the founding statute of the RDR. In the first years of democracy, the two opposition parties worked together to weaken the PDCI.</footnote>

<footnote n="57">57 FESCIsts, as they call themselves, will explain that being accepted into the ranks required unfaltering discipline and respect for the hierarchy. To enter FESCI, members spent a period in probation where they were expected to learn deference to authority and commitment to the movement. Fittingly, FESCI's constitution commits all members to defend democracy and the head of state with military discipline (Former FESCI leaders now in hiding, in a group interview with author, Abobo, Côte d'Ivoire, August 2014).</footnote>

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ Former FESCI Communications Director, interview with author, Abidjan, August 2014.</footnote>
democracy, future *Jeune Patriot* leader Blé Goudé and future Rebel Commander Soro Guillaume were college roommates. After the war, the former was put on trial at The Hague while the latter served as President of the National Assembly, but the two men started their political careers together, as close friends and colleagues in the FESCI national office.

The political ambitions that split FESCI in two explain Côte d'Ivoire's youth factions better than the common narrative of ethnic hatred, and yet the details of that divide are known only to the few surviving FESCI members who witnessed it. These events were recounted to me by a former National Office member who held a leadership post at FESCI when Soro and Goudé fell out and divided the youth movement as a byproduct of their dispute. Blé Goudé served as National Coordinator at the same time that Guillaume Soro was the General Secretary of FESCI. The post of General Secretary was the most senior in FESCI's hierarchical organogram, with the GS serving a one-year term, after which national elections are organized. Though democratic in principle, in practice the national office would present a single candidate and that person invariably won. During its 5th general elections in 1998, this precedent was broken, sparking the power struggle that divided the youth movement into warring factions.

As the end of his tenure neared, Soro negotiated with other members of the National Office that a friend would replace him as General Secretary. It was not lost on the others that Soro's candidate was shy and had no talent for words. Soro clearly saw his timid friend as a way to maintain control despite the official end of his term. In the lead up to the elections, Goudé left Abidjan on a national tour to mobilize FESCI's followers on campuses outside the city. As a man with an impressive – now infamous – talent for oration, he used the tour to build a mass following in the regional offices. Less than a month before elections, Goudé announced his candidacy for General Secretary, prompting Soro to accuse his one-time friend and ally of an
unforgivable betrayal. On the day of the election, Blé Goudé talked circles around his inarticulate opponent and easily secured a victory. The Soro clan stormed out in protest. Victory celebrations were short lived, however, as Soro and his supporters returned within the hour, armed with machetes. Although the Soro camp were better armed, their opponents were more numerous, and the battle ended with three deaths and numerous injuries. Soro disappeared into exile, his supporters left the organisation, and the remaining FESCIsts returned to daily operations under their new Secretary General, Blé Goudé.

The event permanently divided FESCI into factions. Those factions grew into the youth leagues of the opposing political parties that constituted the two sides of the decade long civil war, with the very same Soro Guillaume and Blé Goudé leading their respective camps. Blé Goudé and his followers remained allied with their long-time mentor, Laurent Gbagbo and his party the FPI. Soro Guillaume disappeared underground for two years, only to resurface on September 19, 2001 under the pseudonym Dr. Koumba. On the night the rebels first attacked Côte d'Ivoire, this mysterious Doctor appeared on the radio and announced the start of a virtuous rebellion opposing the tyranny and xenophobia of President Gbagbo. Only his former friends from the National FESCI Office recognised the voice of Soro Guillaume.

In his 2005 autobiography, Soro wrote that he took to the microphone that night in order to end the slaughter of the Dioula people at the hands of Laurent Gbagbo and his *Jeune Patriot* supporters. He justified the rebellion as a fight to end an allegedly ongoing massacre, claiming these horrors had already begun in Côte d'Ivoire and risked reaching the scale of the Rwandan genocide (Soro 2005). It is significant that Soro wrote this version of events four years later, after the country was partitioned in two and his rebellion had transformed into civil war. By that later point, the rebellion's origin story claimed 'Rwandan-scale' ethnic cleansing was underway
and the rebellion was necessary to stop the slaughter and restore democracy. That story does not, however, align with events on the ground during that first year of Gbagbo's decade long presidency and the period leading up to it.

In the two years between Soro's exile and his return as a rebel leader, Côte d'Ivoire was certainly in tumult, but ethnic hatred was not driving that unrest. During this period, the kingpins of the Ivorian political elite clashed over the power vacuum left by Houphouët-Boigny's death. To feed their political ambitions, these men sent their youth supporters to brawl and die in the streets. An unknown number of people were forcibly disappeared or killed in the ensuing violence. As the faction that ultimately came out on top in that struggle, Gbagbo and his youth supporters bear responsibility for many of those crimes. Even still, the violence that Soro described in his autobiographical call to arms – the slaughter of civilians for no reason beyond ethnic hatred – only began at a much later period: after Gbagbo took power, after Soro's rebellion attacked, and after the ensuing battle consolidated into a civil war. By 2011, a decade into the conflict, killing ethnic 'others' was indeed perpetrated by both sides with terrible frequency. This was not, however, the case during the first year of Gbagbo's presidency in 2001. Even Soro Alphonse, the current President of the RDR Youth League and a veteran of the rebel forces, conceded that targeted killings of Dioula began after Soro's return. That is, after he launched a rebellion with an army raised in the North and funded by Burkina Faso President, Blaise Compaoré.<fnref n="59" />

In Côte d'Ivoire, both national and foreign policy-makers deployed the language of ethnic hatred as a means of transferring responsibility for terrible violence off the kleptocratic ruling elites and

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ Soro Alphonse, RDR Youth League President, interview with author, Abidjan, May 2015.</footnote>
onto the masses, with youth movements serving as the primary targets of that scapegoating.
Perpetuating that dynamic, observers in the global North helped the political elite skirt
responsibility for the growing chaos by easily believing accounts claiming African youths were
butchering one another for no better reason than simply hating an ethnic 'other'. Seeing youth as
merely xenophobic belligerents meant that, throughout the decade of conflict, the international
community responded to the horrific violence committed against young people with cold
indifference, as though the kids were just getting what their delinquency deserved.<fnref n="60" /> Terrible
crimes were committed by young militants and these individuals share responsibility for the
suffering caused by the war. Ivorian youth did not, however, act as a homogenous mob and their
violence was not an irrational response to ethnic hatred. Ethnic hatred entered the conflict as a
tool deployed by political elites to shape the country's collapse to their interests and to overwrite
the much more complex reasons young Ivorians joined the fight.

The civil war did not originally form along ethnic lines, even if this discourse eventually took
over. As we saw, during the first decade of political unrest, Ivorian youth activists mobilized in
a united movement. After the democratic transition was achieved, that unity began to crack
under the ambitions of the movement's leaders and their allies in the political class. Yet, even
after the resulting groups transformed into violent factions, these groups represented opposing
political parties and not ethnic divisions. Those faction only fought one another along ethnic
lines later in the conflict timeline, and then because of a deliberate effort by their respective
political leaders to rewrite the conflict into an ethnic one (as we saw Soro do just above). The

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ For example, marking Gbagbo supporters as xenophobes and hooligans by the ADO regime secured international military assistance in the invasion of Abidjan and, allegedly, ‘hundreds of extrajudicial executions’ of teenagers affiliated with Gbagbo’s regime after his arrest (Varenne 2012; Pigeaud 2015; Onana 2011. Members of FESCI interviewed also allege these executions took place, August 2014).</footnote>
message of this chapter therefore is not that ethnicity was unimportant to the dynamics of the Ivorian civil war. Ethnicity indeed became central to Ivoirian politics. Ethnic allegiances were exploited in Gbagbo's many ploys to hold power. Likewise, stoking fear of ethnic violence at home and abroad was central to Ouattara's strategy for seizing power from him. The point is rather that the ethnic hatred – supposedly the driving force of the country's violent collapse – only manifested after the fact. By that I mean, ethnic hatred was not a deep grievance, growing from a dark history of hate and driving Ivoirians to take arms. The war was rooted in the political repression and exploitation of the ruling class: grievances shared across ethnic lines. As we will see in the coming pages, the motivations expressed by combatants on both sides reflect those more complex and deep-rooted struggles.

### 3.4. The Succession Crisis

Land disputes in the rural West and the fractured youth movement in Abidjan were two sites of social unrest that initially had little to do with one another. To understand how these separate struggles merged into a civil war, we need to look back at the power vacuum left by Houphouët-Boigny's death and the succession battle that ensued as rivals vied to fill it. During the presidential secession battle, candidates used citizenship debates to delegitimize the claims of their opponents and solidify their own claim to the presidency. These citizenship debates would become the linchpin that linked growing resentment in the west to youth fractions in the urban centre.
Houphouët died on December 5th, 1993. According to the Constitution, the President of the National Assembly would inherit the presidency until the end of term. This position was held by Henri Konan Bédié, the adopted son of Houphouët and President of the PDCI party from the time of FHB's death to the present day. Seventy-two hours after Houphouët died, Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara attempted to circumvent the constitution by establishing a 'presidential college' that would manage an immediate transfer of power into his own hands. Despite objections from the Prime Minister, Bédié assumed the presidency, with backing from French President Jacques Chirac.

To secure his position, President Bédié amended the constitutional requirements to run in presidential elections by adding the now infamous Article 35 to the constitution. All presidential candidates would henceforth be required have a father *and* mother born on Ivorian soil. This legislation originally targeted then-leader of the RDR, Djeny Kobena, whom opponents claimed was of Ghanaian heritage. Although not the original target of the law, Ouattara was also disqualified due to the allegation that his father was Burkina born.<fnref n="61" /> The 1993 Constitution also blocked anyone who had represented a foreign country in an official government post from the office of President. Again, this provision barred Ouattara, who served Burkina Faso as President of the West African Regional Bank before obtaining his Ivorian citizenship when he became Prime Minister of Côte d'Ivoire. Soon after Bédié's ascendancy, Ouattara resigned his post as Prime Minister and returned to Washington as one of three joint directors at the IMF.

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ Note this claim has no documented evidence such as a birth certificate or birth registry supporting it. More to the point, neither Côte d'Ivoire nor Burkina Faso existed as countries at the time of his father's birth.</footnote>
### 3.4.1. Ivorité

The concept of ‘Ivorité’ was invented during Henri Konan Bédié’s presidency. Definitions of Ivorité vary depending on where the speaker sits politically. In its official meaning, the term refers to a political platform created by President H.K. Bédié to promote Ivorian industry and culture, ostensibly as an act of resistance against continued European dominance in these sectors. For RDR supporters, however, Ivorité is a xenophobic principle used to legislate hatred and exclusion of northerners. CURDIPHE was a group of academics at the FHB University in Abidjan assigned the task of devising the concept and its practical applications. On the surface, there is nothing explicitly anti-northern about CURDIPHE and its Ivorité publications. Indeed, there are many Dioulas and Malinkes communities indigenous to Côte d’Ivoire and this is celebrated in CURDIHPE works. The authors go to lengths to explain that the purpose of Ivorité is to embrace the diversity of Côte d’Ivoire as the cornerstone of this nation-building project (CURDIPHE 1996).

In more subtle ways, however, Ivorité was indeed antagonistic to groups from the North. There is an underlying sentiment in CURDIHPE works that Ivorité is about ‘returning peoples to their correct place’ (R. Marshall-Fratani 2003). In this sense, Ivorité was a way to formalize and legitimize the claim that northerners and migrant labourers were taking up too much space, jobs and resources in the South. For instance, CURDIHPE research findings exaggerated immigration statistics, adding to the sense that the south was ‘flooded’ with migrants from the Sahel (Touré 2000). CURDIPHE leveraged a liberal discourse of ‘cultural rights’ and the perceived legitimacy of academic research to create a body of literature that helped politicians exclude migrants from full citizenship and deny their leaders a place in national governance. On its own, Ivorité was a pseudo-intellectual project undertaken by remnants of the Houphouët-era
elite: the musings of an aging ruling class, nostalgic for the good days when no one questioned their privileges. Once the concept was pulled into citizenship debates surrounding the succession crisis, Ivorité became a powerful and destructive force in Ivorian politics.

Prior to the invention of Ivorité, the main social cleavage in Ivorian society divided the wealthy and powerful Baoulé from the Krou and Dioula who, together, shared the experience of being politically and economically marginalized by French and Baoulé elites. As seen, the booming economy of Houphouët's golden era depended on a French-Baoulé compromise made at the expense of both Krou traditional landowners and Dioula labourers. It should thus come as no surprise that conflict was brewing for generations between the Baoulé elite and the western Krou subgroup (Chauveau 2000). From the 1960s through the early 1990s, East-West relations (i.e. Baoulé into Krou lands) rather than North-South relations (i.e. Dioula into Krou lands) were the primary source of social tensions in Côte d'Ivoire (ibid). At times those tensions erupted into violence between the Baoulé entrepreneurs and the Krou inhabitants of land expropriated by agri-industry chiefs from the central region. The presence of Baoulé industry elites in the West was always a tense arrangement, but it was tenable during the Houphouët years due to the first president's strategy of quelling dissent through a combination of economic rewards and targeted repression.

Possessing neither FHB's charisma nor cash reserves, President Bédié needed a different strategy if he hoped to preserve the tenuous status quo in the West. Bédié revealed his Ivorité inspired solution to his countrymen in his famous 1997 declaration, the 'Call of Fengolo'. In this speech, Bédié recounted a murderous conflict between the Wê (a Krou group) and the Baoulé, communicating his fear of this core cleavage in Ivorian society. He changed the story, however, to highlight the threat of encroaching outsiders and ended by announcing a ban on foreign land
ownership.<fnref n="62" /> The declaration changed nothing in the actual law; foreign land ownership was banned long before. The words, however, allowed the Baoulé president to redraw the map of political allegiances, binding together eastern industrialists with western indigenous communities against the perceived incursion of northern migrants. The speech became famous because it reimagined Krou and Baoulé identity as a common experience of ‘Ivorianness,’ and in contrast to Dioula ‘northernness’. Bédié, in other words, was actively shifting alliances away from actual lines of oppression and toward the newly invented ethnic category ‘Ivorité’.

The genius behind Ivorité was that it consolidated Bédié’s hold on the Presidency while preserving the colonial model of siphoning wealth out of the cocoa region at the expense of both migrant labourers and *autochtone* farmers. Bédié spent twelve years as Ivorian Minister of Finance at the height of Houphouëtism (1966-1977) and, consistent with this resume, his presidency guaranteed the continuation of French business interests in Côte d’Ivoire (Pigeaud 2015). Bédié used the notion of Ivorité to pander to westerner frustrations while simultaneously avoiding any reforms that might hurt the interests of his friends and political allies in the Baoulé and French cocoa elite. During Bédié’s presidency, like today, poverty crosscut ethnicity, with indigenous farmers and migrant workers suffering together in an exploitative agricultural sector. Ivorité counteracted an otherwise natural alliance between these poorer segments of Ivorian society. During this period Krous and Dioulas alike were largely excluded from politics (Chauveau 2002). Ivorité created the impression of common ground between Krou and Baoulé, at the expense of the northern migrant groups. Ivorité, in other words, was a way to maintain the

<footnote n="62">⁶² This was a reference to the ‘Guebié Genocide’ when, in October 1970, a young Bété called Kragbé Gnagbé led a farmer’s revolt. The claim that 4000 people were killed during the repression that followed is debated. Nevertheless, the account remains an important symbol of Bété resentment and sense of repression at the hands of Boualé leaders (See R. Marshall-Fratani 2003).</footnote>
lucrative status quo by starting a citizenship debate rather than reforming the antiquated colonial policies that continued to enrich Côte d'Ivoire's ruling class.

Once citizenship debates were folded into the land crisis, it was a short step to begin describing migrant labour as an unwelcome burden on the crumbling economy. At its origin, Ivorité was a conservative innovation from an old elite looking to preserve its privileged standing. The concept took on a different dimension once adopted into the anti-colonial leftist discourse of the Abidjan youth movement. Rapid globalization during the 1990s meant trade relations between Côte d'Ivoire and France continued to tilt in favour of the former colonizer. As Peter Geschiere and Francis Nyamnjoh contend, fear of globalization and the rise of autochthony were two sides of the same coin in pre-war Côte d'Ivoire (Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 2000). Opposition candidate Laurent Gbagbo reduced globalization and colonization to one and the same thing in his propaganda, explicitly drawing a connection between France's continued influence in Côte d'Ivoire and his constituency's growing resentment of so-called Northerners. The result was a sense that economic domination from outside and the abundance of foreign workers inside both manifested from the same dynamic (ibid, 443). Thus Gbagbo supporters began associating Dioula identity with the persistence of colonial policies. Suddenly the anti-colonial discourse of the youth movement was consistent with an emerging anti-immigrant rhetoric. The polarisation that resulted from this repositioning left no neutral space (R. Marshall-Fratani 2003). Ivorians found themselves caught between two political camps with no room between. One could either ascribe to Dioula nationalism and support the pro-Ouattara rebellion with its French backers, or one could stand for Ivorité and its anti-colonial but also increasingly xenophobic principles.
3.4.2. A Coincidence of Dioula Repression and Ouattara's Ambition

The popular appeal of Gbagbo's propaganda to young supporters was connected to the economic
collapse Côte d'Ivoire experienced at the end of Houphouëtisme. Houphouët's export-led,
cocoa-dependent economy kept both workers and residents in the planation region out of dire
poverty, but also offered few opportunities for advancement. The real profits of the Houphouët
era went to the *Caisse*, a central marketing board that served as a personal bank account for
Houphouët and his close associates at home and in France. By the time FHB's state-run
economic model fell apart, land was growing scarce and unemployment was on the rise. The
economic crisis that ensued certainly hurt Dioula communities, however – at least in the public
perception – it had a harder impact on *autochthone* farmers. IMF mandated austerity in the
1990s led to the devaluation of the CFA currency, which, in turn, caused commodity prices to
skyrocket. Dioula s traditionally run the small business sector in Côte d'Ivoire, meaning
increased prices translated to profits for these businesses. Dioula communities were thus able to
weather the 1990 reforms more easily than their Krou and Akan-Boaulé counterparts.<fnref n="63" /> This,
combined with general economic tumult and a sense of scarcity, meant longstanding land

<footnote n="63">63 As a different explanation, Dioula s are historically the least privileged groups in Ivorian society, living in the arid and unindustrialized North, or as migrant communities in the South. In that sense, the perception that Dioula weathered the crisis with relative ease could merely reflect the fact they had less standing and opportunities to lose in the first place. The Akan is the subgroup based in the centre and east of southern Côte d'Ivoire. The group includes the Baoulé nation and various smaller lagoon and eastern farming groups. Unlike the dispersed and locally self-governing Krou, the Akan are traditionally hierarchical and organized into a feudal system under a handful of influential kings. Akan - especially Baoulé - dominated industry and politics from before independence. Speaking in terms of the net drop quality of life, it was likely the Akan who lost most from the economic collapse and austerity, given the privileges they expected from life and the opportunities left for them after austerity. As we will see, the enemies Ouattara made within this group when he was the IMF's hand-picked PM would come back to haunt him later.</footnote>
disputes heightened into violent confrontations in the cocoa growing region. In some cases, Dioulas were violently expelled.<fnref n="64" />

When recounting their motivation for launching a civil war, the RDR leadership draw on accounts of Dioula expulsions in the West during the economic crash. This is captured in the words of Soro Alphonse, National President of the RDR Youth:

> “We’ve always been second class citizens, ‘strangers’. For years you couldn’t advance with a Dioula name. You couldn’t have a position in government. The systematic attacks started in 1994. Do you know the word genocide? That is what they had planned for us. Every day they would spray us with bullets like chickens. Living in these conditions, did we have any choice but to fight back? You ask why we started the rebellion? They were killing us everyday! Who really started the war?! It was not us…”<fnref n="65" />

Although this account aligns with most media representations of the period, Soro’s claim is anachronistic. It is true that organized violence entered politics in the mid-1990s but, as we have seen, those early episodes were explicitly *not* a confrontation between ethnic and religious groups. During the period he is discussing, there were episodes of violence in the West, but there were equally confrontations between Krou and Boualé. More importantly, given the difficult conditions of co-existence in the region, the remarkable thing about inter-ethnic relations in the West is that they were generally peaceful. It is true that systematic discrimination was a major problem in education and employment, but this affected anyone not connected to the small elite

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ The best-known incident of this was a mass forced exodus of Dioulas in the western border town of Tabou in 1998.</footnote>

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ Interview with RDR youth leader Soro Alphonse, Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire August 2015.</footnote>
who inherited political and industrial power from the colonial authorities. When Gbagbo took power there were approximately the same small number of Dioulas and Krous in government posts.<fnref n="66" /> The rebellion became the champion of the Dioula cause, but not for the reasons Soro described.

The front line of the civil war was drawn through the collapsed youth movement as the fractions formed alliances with the FPI and RDR political parties.<fnref n="67" /> The politicians leading those parties deployed the youth fractions for their own purposes and, ultimately, at the cost of thousands of Ivorian lives. As one former FESCI explained,

> “When FESCI was together, the students were too strongly united. No one [from the political class] could have ever succeeded without finding a way to divide the youth. [The war] was a strategy to divide and defeat us.”<fnref n="68" />

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ The statement that Dioulas had no prospects in state legislature is only part of the story. Full records of who sat in state ministerial posts are available on the Ivorian government website going back to the independence era. Analysing the last fifty years of governments, there is a clear over representation of Baoulé. Krou subgroups, Dioulas and other Akans groups are all comparatively underrepresented, and in approximately the same proportion. During Gbagbo’s regime, the number of Krou representatives increased more than other groups. That said, under Gbagbo, Dioulas and non-Boualé Akan representation also increased compared to HKB and Bédié’s governments (Portail officiel du gouvernement de Côte d’Ivoire 2006).</footnote>

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ The latent threat of a united youth resistance proved itself in an unlikely way. In the final days of the crisis, a conspiracy was uncovered between KKB, Soro and Blé Goudé. The three old friends from the FESCI planned together to co-opt the leadership of the three main political parties from their aging leaders. At a moment when these men are meant to be mortal enemies, there is something much more complex happening. Then again, if we accept the thesis of a generational conflict being an important factor in the Ivorian civil war, perhaps an alliance of the three is not so surprising.</footnote>

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ This was explained by a former FESCI national office secretary who was in jail at that time, without trial, in the maximum-security prison known as MACCA (interview with author, Abidjan Côte d’Ivoire, December 2014).</footnote>
As was the case with their young supporters, political ambition and not ethnic hatred caused the divide between Gbagbo and Ouattara.<fnref n="69" /> Prior to the succession crisis, they were allies, albeit uncomfortably so, working together to carve out new political terrain in the antiquated Houphouëtist regime. Their political alliance, important as it was to dismantling the one-party state, dissolved with Houphouët's death. Although Bédié immediately assumed power, he was resented by his peers in government and unpopular with voters outside his Boualé stronghold. Expecting HKB would not last long in power, his rivals vied for political influence. Amongst those rivals, neither Gbagbo or Ouattara were likely candidates to rise to prominence. Both men were disliked by the late President and that opinion remained influential, even from the grave. Moreover, at the time of Houphouët's death, neither man was a dominant player on the Ivorian political scene: Gbagbo was a university professor with little support base outside his student followers, and Ouattara was a wealthy technocrat who had lived nearly all his life abroad. Nevertheless, the two men soon dominated a political arena that had had no space for them just a few years before. They achieved this feat by mobilizing, then sacrificing, huge followings of militant young supporters.

Gbagbo and Ouattara found themselves in a political struggle where success depended on their ability to channel the momentum of a frustrated and mobilized youth population. Writing at the height of the tensions between the RDR and FPI, Yacouba Konaté explained the war “as the eruption into politics of rebellious youth, trained in the ranks of FESCI, and now no longer

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ While I am arguing that Gbagbo did not initiate the incursion of ethnic violence into politics, it is nonetheless true that Gbagbo benefited from the ethnic polarisation caused by the launch of the rebellion and he used that polarisation to his advantage. Polarizing the political arena created the pretext of crisis that presented the rebellion as an existential threat to Côte d'Ivoire. This refocused the energy and frustrations of his supporters off the many unfilled promises of his regime and corruption in its ranks.</footnote>
willing to sit in the shadows of their elders” (Konaté 2003, 50). When the alliance of the FPI and RDR broke down, Gbagbo was poised to take over the youth movement. As a professor and activist, Gbagbo was a spokesman for the youth during the democratization struggle and a vocal critic of Houphouët’s neo-colonial rule.<fnref n="70" /> Facing a charismatic and populist rival, Ouattara and his RDR leadership found themselves at a major disadvantage when it came to turning the powerful tides of youth mobilization in their favour. As a national symbol of austerity and foreign accommodation, Ouattara held little appeal to the FESCI youths. He needed a way to draw supporters from that politicized youth movement onto his side.

As RDR Youth President Soro Alphonse explained, the civil war ultimately resulted from “a coincidence of Alassane Ouattara’s ambition and the repression of the Dioula.”<fnref n="71" /> ADO and his associates saw Ivorité and rising tensions in rural western communities as a chance to garner their own mass following amongst urban Dioulas. In other words, the anti-northerner rhetoric coming out of the economic collapse was a useful coincidence at the time of Ouattara’s rise in the RDR leadership. Ouattara lived a privileged family life abroad, building his career as a high-ranking technocrat in international finance and development institutes. He had no connections to the struggles of the most marginalized members of Côte d’Ivoire’s labouring class, but his Malinke heritage and his exclusion from the Presidential elections under Bédié’s Article 35

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ It is worth pointing out that Gbagbo never succeeded in uniting the youth masses into a coherent and controlled organization. Under his auspices, the once coherent youth movement broke into a loose network of protesters, auto-defense groups and, later, militias of armed and semi-armed groups known together as the *galaxie patriotique* (Interview with former head of FESCI security, Abidjan, May 2015). This matter also came up at the ICC when the prosecution tried to build a case around the claim that the *galaxie patriotique* was a united movement, directly doing the binding of the upper leadership (Peniguet 2015). As a witness for the prosecution explained, there was too much competition and resentment between the factions of Gbagboist and each group acted with significant autonomy (Panaite 2016).</footnote>

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ Interview with Soro Alphonse, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire August 2015.</footnote>
constitutional amendment were enough to qualify ADO as a voice for the Dioula cause. The image was reinforced by a well-circulated myth that the spirits in his mother's ancestral home had foretold Ouattara's return to Côte d'Ivoire would restore the once great power of the Malinke empire. For his part, Gbagbo is a Bête from a farming family in the West. He equally saw the political potential of exploiting tensions in the region. Gbagbo began fueling his support base with talk of the noble Krou farmers, reduced to poverty by the incursion of cunning migrant workers (Dunn 2009; Mitchell 2012). Seeing an opportunity to gain politically from the collapse of a once united youth movement, both ADO and Gbagbo actively served as lightning rods for the anger of Côte d'Ivoire's youth at a time when the country was in economic shambles and descending into political chaos.

### 3.5. L'année terrible

The year 2000 is referred to simply as *l'année terrible* in Côte d'Ivoire, and an account of this period must begin by introducing the two figures who set the year's terrible events in motion. The first of these men was the former national army's top general, Robert Guéï. During the succession crisis, Guéï had refused President Bédié's orders to repress pro-Ouattara protestors, stating it is not the role of the army in a democratic state to engage in ideological fights on behalf of the regime. In response, Bédié sent the celebrated General into retirement (Kieffer 2004). The second of these men is Ibrahim Coulibaly or, as he is more commonly known, IB. Coulibaly was a veteran soldier and devoted Ouattara loyalist. He served ADO as his personal security guard and oversaw the Ouattara family's protection for many years.
On Christmas Eve 1999, IB led a successful coup d'état against the Bédié regime. Fighting alongside him were Guéï's former soldiers from the Ivorian peacekeeping mission to Central African Republic, men known as the Zinzins. As one former combatant close to IB explained,

> "We held the coup so Ouattara could be president. IB considered him like his father. For him, like for many people from the north, Ouattara represented hope that we would see an end to the humiliations we were enduring: we were convinced he was indeed Ivorian and that he would be the first northerner to hold this important post. We mobilized for Ouattara, we were certain he would win a transparent election" (Pigeaud 2015).

Not all the Zinzins shared IB's dedication to Ouattara, and in the end a compromise was needed.

This is why the Zinzins dragged General Guéï from retirement and placed him in charge of a caretaker government until new elections could be held (Kieffer 2004).

The longer Guéï stayed in power the more he enjoyed the luxuries of the President's office. The General who had reluctantly left his village to temporarily hold the presidency realised ‘*comment la pouvoir est douce*’.<fnref n="72" /> Believing Ouattara was his only real threat in a general election, Guéï organized a referendum on Article 35. In a vote of questionable validly, Guéï cemented the rule: presidential candidates must be born of an Ivorian father and mother, must never have renounced Ivorian citizenship, and must never have benefitted from possessing another nationality (Pigeaud 2015). The three clauses under referendum were written with the explicit purpose of

<footnote n="72">⁷² This is a common phrase in Côte d'Ivoire meaning 'power is sweet.' The quote is from a former FESCI national office member, interviewed by the author, Abidjan Côte d'Ivoire, August 2015.</footnote>
disqualifying Ouattara. For Ibrahim Coulibaly, the General had committed an unforgivable
betrayal of the soldiers who put him in power and would pay dearly for it.

The “White Horse Plot” was an attempted coup on Guéï named in reference to a white horse that
the superstitious General sacrificed on the advice of his marabouts in advance of the October
2000 presidential election.<fnref n="73" /> The General was already suspicious that his security chief, Ibrahim
Coulibaly (IB), had unseated Bédié on orders from his adoptive-father, Ouattara. The White
Horse Plot finally gave Guéï the excuse he needed to purge his army of Ouattaraists. The coup
leaders were imprisoned and tortured, amongst them was “le Grenade” (Souleymane Diomandé),
Cherif Ousame, “Zaga Zaga” (Oumar Diarrasouba), Zacharis Koné and “Watta” (Cherif Ouattara
Issuaka).<fnref n="74" /> Those who survived would, one year later, return leading a rebellion as the
*commandants du zones* or, as they are more commonly called, the ComZones.

With Ouattara excluded from running and his most dangerous military adversaries imprisoned or
dead, Guéï felt certain he would secure an uncontested victory and finally called an election. In
protest of Guéï’s deceit and manipulations, both the RDR and PDCI parties boycotted the
election, pitting the incumbent against FPI leader Laurent Gbagbo. As a history professor with
few connections in the halls of power, Gbagbo seemed no threat to the famous general. Indeed,

<footnote n="73">⁷³ Those who believe in traditional Ivorian religion claim the sacrifice granted Guéï the power to become invisible and teleport out of his home on the night that IB and his camp launched their first coup attempt.</footnote>

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ Zinzins are considered powerful spiritual warriors who are virtually immune to death by any ordinary means. In an effort to destroy their spiritual protections, the Zinzin where brutally tortured by Guéï. According to local legend, amongst all the imprisoned Zinzins, only The Grenade's gris-gris (protective amulets) failed, resulting in his death. Amongst the scars these men still carry, Zacharis Kone is rumored to have deep burns from hot iron rods administered across his back. During the civil war, the torture scars of the Zinzin were held up as proof to new recruits that gri-gri protections would keep them safe during battle. Ultimately, an estimated 100 thousands young recruits followed the Zinzins into a rebel war against Gbagbo's fully equipped and professional army (Interview with former rebel combatants, April 2014, Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire).</footnote>
were the other major parties able or willing to participate, Laurent Gbagbo would likely have disappeared into the background at this juncture in the story.

### 3.5.1. Gbagbo Elected

Alain Diabeté cannot hide his emotion when explaining the events of October 24, 2000.<fnref n="75" /> Diabeté is a Dioula from the northern border town of Odienne who, for many years, served as a Director in the Ministry of the Interior under his lifelong friend Laurent Gbagbo. He was with Gbagbo in the presidential palace on the day of the latter's arrest and Diabeté served three years in prison for his role in Gbagbo's government. On the night of the election, Diabeté was driving back to Abidjan from his hometown in the North when the polls closed. As he drove the corridor into the city through the sprawling neighbourhood of Youpougon, a huge commotion was forming around him. Fearing the worst, Diabaté was panicking and cornered in gridlocked traffic when the news came; the deafening noise was not an attack, it was the youth of Youpougon, Gbagbo's urban stronghold, celebrating the unexpected victory.

By the time he reached the city center an hour later, the situation had changed for the worse. Guéï declared himself president, overriding the National Electoral Commission. Thousands of Gbagbo supporters flooded the streets with the intention of taking back the presidency. Guéï's military fired indiscriminately on the crowds amassing in the central district of Cocody. The bridges that connect Abidjan's downtown to the rest of the city were blocked, trapping the protesters on a thin peninsula. The death toll rose as youth jumped from the high extension

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ Note the vote was October 22 and he was declared winner two days later.</footnote>
bridges trying to escape gunfire. Taking advantage of the chaos, IB and his group attacked the Akouedo military camp in Abidjan and liberated their imprisoned comrades. Alassane Ouattara also decided it was the moment to act, sending RDR youth supporters to join the fight in a bid to claim power for his own excluded party.<fnref n="76" /> In the resulting chaos, Guéi’s soldiers confronted crowds of youth from the two opposing political parties, while the youths also fought amongst themselves. In the end, Guéi abdicated and Gbagbo’s electoral win was confirmed. Officially reported death tolls range between 100 and 400 people from that single night, although people like Alain Diabété, who lived through the incident, insist the numbers were much higher (Pape and Vidal 2002).

### 3.5.2. "Le Charnier de Youpougon"

The night of Gbagbo's election is best remembered for events that take place two days later. In the aftermath of a bloody FPI victory, a cache of 57 bodies was discovered on the edge of Yopougon near the military base. The *charnier* was reported to the international news as a massacre of Dioulas by Gbagbo's security personnel. This mass grave became the focal point of a new narrative that linked Gbagbo and his supporters to an attempted ethnic cleansing of the northerners. This version of events first appears in the documentary 'Côte d'Ivoire: La poudrière identitaire' (The Identity Powerkeg), made with the help of a Belgian film studio.<fnref n="77" /> The RDR youth movement later had its own team producing short videos featuring horrific scenes of killings by machete and burning alive. These films were made readily available in the markets of Abidjan and other urban centers as evidence that Côte d'Ivoire was on the verge of a genocide.

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ Navigué Frank (Youth Leader FPI) interview with author, Abidjan Côte d'Ivoire April 2015.</footnote>

<footnote n="77">⁷⁷ The film, sponsored by a Belgium organization called the Foundation for the Prevention of Genocide, is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvyu1pJuHyk.</footnote>
Though the veracity of the footage is questionable, the videos served their purpose both inside the country and as a reference for the international media.<fnref n="78" />

According to one of two survivors of the *charnier* massacre, on the night of Gbagbo’s election, a gendarme entered an Abobo ‘court commune’ (a shared courtyard between makeshift housing) and started an altercation with a young Dioula, resulting in the death of the gendarme. In revenge for the officer’s death, the police allegedly went on a rampage in the neighbourhood, rounding up Dioula men and boys who were then tortured and killed at the Akeodo military base. This witness today serves as the President of the state sponsored victims association, a man we will meet again in the following chapter. His testimony, as reported by Human Rights Watch, states that during the night of October 24th, the military visited houses in Abobo, collected 59 men and tortured to death all but two of them. The survivors were forced to transport and bury the bodies in the mass grave.

In contradiction to that testimony, the bodies were found unburied the following morning in conspicuous pile. Having unseated Guéï during the riots of the night before, Gbagbo was president for less than a day when the *charnier* was discovered. He denied all allegations of his role in the murders and asked for an international investigation. The UN inquiry raised some questions about the authenticity of the *charnier*, though not the accusation that a massacre of Dioula men and boys took place in Youpougon on the night election results were declared (La commission d’enquete international pour la Côte d’Ivoire 2001). Likewise, an independent

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸ This project was explained to me by one of its producers and the current leader in the RDR youth wing. Although he stood by the authenticity of the footage, he confirmed there are some inconsistencies in the stated timeline of events shown in the videos. Executions by burnings and machetes only became a major feature of the civil war later on. The FPI opposition claim that much of the footage is cut from newsreels or online videos of the civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia.</footnote>
report by Fidh, one of Côte d'Ivoire's two oldest human rights NGOs, agreed with the UN findings regarding the *charnier* (FIDH 2000). These investigations discovered some evidence that the bodies in the *charnier* had not died of torture, finding signs of various causes of death including victims of drowning and bullet wounds. For Gbagboists, the *charnier* was a body pile left in a conspicuous place by Ouattara's supporters, who had collected victims of the previous night's chaos.

Given the evidence available, the following conclusions seem the most likely explanation of these events. First, all investigations confirm the claim that a gendarme was killed in Abobo and that the police exacted a terrible revenge on the community. Many human rights abuses happened under General Guéi's authority and his security forces were known to be uncontrolled. Gbagbo, on the other hand, had just assumed power, making it unlikely he commanded the security forces of his electoral rival within the first hours of his presidency, especially given his supporters were clashing with those very troops during the hours that the massacre took place.

Even Ouattara made a public statement saying he did not believe Gbagbo was responsible (FIDH 2000). Gbagbo's regime was responsible for many violent deaths during his tenure as President.

The *charnier de Yopougon*, however, seems to have been a cache of bodies, belonging to protestors who died during clashes the night before, and brought to this location to perpetuate the fear that Gbagbo was planning an ethnic war against Dioulas. Though doubts circulated immediately regarding the authenticity of the *charnier*, it still served its intended purpose. A year later, when the rebel forces attacked Côte d'Ivoire, their fight was justified by the claim that ethnic cleansing against Dioulas had begun the moment Gbagbo took power. That narrative attracted significant international attention and ensured that the international community put their support behind the rebel cause, first tacitly and later with active military backing.
3.6. So Began a Decade at War

"Once I arrived in Burkina Faso, I began calling all my old friends... We waited two and a half years in Ouagadougou. To prepare my men for the September 18 attack, we went into the bush and trained for six months. The Burkina Faso state gave us villas there to live in. We trained in three groups as we would need three simultaneous attacks: Abidjan, Bouaké and Korhogo...We entered in Côte d'Ivoire and these things didn't work out quite as planned, but we did manage to cut the country in two." IB, 7 April 2011<sup>79</sup>

These are the words of Ibrahim Couliblay as he described preparations for the rebellion. This is the same IB who started his career as the right-hand man and personal security chief of Alassane Ouattara. Thanks to Blaise Compaoré's patronage, IB and the Zinzins prepared the rebellion over two years in Burkina Faso. Ouattara has never admitted to assisting with these plans, however he began regular visits to Blaise Compoaré in 1998. In a momentary slip during a recorded statement in 2003, Zakaria Kone (a Zinzin and later ComZone) admitted that Ouattara, not IB, "took care of us" from his exile in Paris and that it was he who provided the weapons needed for the assault launched September 19th, 2002 (Pigeaud 2015). Under the military leadership of IB and the political command of Soro, the rebellion began as three simultaneous attacks across Côte d'Ivoire: one in the arid Northern capital, Korhogo; one in Bouaké, the trading hub that connects Sahel traders to the tropical industries in the south; and one in Abidjan, the lagoon bound

<footnote n="79"><sup>79</sup> IB gave the speech *Ma part de verité* to the media on April 7 2011 explaining his version of events in the first years of the partition. A video of this speech is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSJ0qtDsDhU</footnote>
Southern metropole once dubbed the Paris of Africa. By the morning of September 20th, former President Robert Guéï was dead, as was Gbagbo's Minister of the Interior. Bouaké and Korhogo were in the hands of the rebels and Abidjan was under siege.

### 3.6.1. A Virtuous Rebellion

Jean-Christophe Notin is a historian of French military intervention. In his book *Le scorpion et le crocodile*, Notin describes the original *force nouvelle* (later renamed *force républicains de Côte d'Ivoire*, or FRCI) as a brigade of seven pick-up trucks with a few automatic weapons mounted on the roofs (2013). His account paints the picture of a small band of freedom fighters facing impossible odds with bravery and grit. This picture of benign freedom fighters moved by a righteous cause is a popular narrative in the foreign media, however it is at odds with the reality of the well-equipped and at times sadistically violent forces that laid siege to Côte d'Ivoire in the fall of 2002.

‘Mon Afrique” is the sole luxury hotel in the crossroads trading town of Bouake. It is frequented by high society Abidjanais and expats when work or leisure sends them away from the comforts of the cosmopolitan capital. Despite being the only chic hotel in Bouake, ‘Mon Afrique’ was never pillaged by the rebels in the ten-years they occupied the city. The hotel owner was dubbed by the international media ‘Mama FRCI’ and famously gave French grammar lessons to the rebels. This anecdote is held up as evidence that Soro led a virtuous rebellion against Gbagbo’s cruel dictatorship. The rebels supposedly compensated businesses damaged by fighting and punished their own ranks when caught pillaging (ibid). In the spirit of branding the rebellion a fight for freedom, Che Guevara became an important symbol for the *force nouvelle*, with hand painted images of him appearing on trucks, buildings and t-shirts. Presumably those adopting the
communist's image did not understand Alassane Ouattara - the man they fought to put in power - was committed to dismantling Gbagbo's socialist schemes and establishing neoliberal capitalism in Côte d'Ivoire.<fnref n="80" />

Tales of restraint towards the business community of Bouake contrast with the treatment of the less affluent population. On October 6, 2002, hundreds of gendarmes were taken prisoner in Bouake by the rebel forces. Amongst them, at least 40 were executed and another 10 killed at the mass gravesite where the bodies were taken. At least 30 of their children and five other civilians were also executed with the officers (Amnesty International 2003). Amnesty reported: "the survivors were left for two days with the decomposing corpses, not receiving any food. Some of them were required to transport the dead and bury them in a mass grave." This episode was part of a larger manhunt for police, gendarmes, military and forest rangers by the *force nouvelle* as it consolidated its control in the northern region (Pigeaud 2015).<fnref n="81" /> Just two weeks after the massacre of state security officers in Bouake, the French newspaper *Libération* published an article stating, "in Bouaké and Korhogo, the insurgents are demonstrating professionalism and discipline without falter" (Ayad 2001).

### 3.6.2. 'Les escadrons de la mort'

Gbagbo's regime reacted to the attacks by launching a regime of terror in Abidjan. The response was cruel and heavy-handed, and does not reflect the image of anti-colonial liberators his

<footnote n="80">⁸⁰ Both sides claimed Che Guevara as their own, making the symbolism of the war confusing to outsiders.</footnote>

<footnote n="81">⁸¹ Note that in contrast to the North American image of a jovial park ranger, Ivorian rangers are some of the best-armed and trained fighters in the country. This is because protecting national reserves from poachers is one of the deadliest jobs in the security services.</footnote>
supporters continue to project. Most infamously, a campaign of forced disappearances shook the
city. During the first year of the rebellion, accusations circulated widely at home and abroad that
masked death squads ('escadrons de la mort', as they are locally known) roamed Abidjan after
curfew, killing off political opponents of the Gbagbo regime. Testimony to the CDVR confirms
that RDR members were indeed kidnapped and murdered during the first months after the
rebellion started.<fnref n="82" /> Even staunch Gbagbo supporters admit that the *escadrons* were indeed a
reality, disagreeing on the degree and nature of the kidnappings rather than the fact thereof. Pro-
Gbagboists give the low estimate that ‘a few dozen’ people disappeared into the hands of the
masked men. At the other extreme, the RDR leadership estimate the *escadrons* forcibly
disappeared approximately 400 people (Fofana 2009). Whichever the case may be, the killings
were concentrated in the middle-class neighborhood of Deux Plateaux where most of the NGO,
UN and foreign entrepreneurs lived, making the events highly visible to the international
community.<fnref n="83" />

While the existence of the *escadrons* is not in question, there is still debate about their primary
purpose and whether Gbagbo was directly responsible for these crimes. In their own accounts, IB
and Soro launched the rebellion as a pre-emptive attack against a pending threat of ethnic
cleansing. The *escadrons* are treated in this narrative as the primary instrument of that massacre.
Although there were indeed ambitions in some cadres of the Gbagbo regime to begin ridding the

<footnote n="82">⁸² The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights fact-finding rapport (2003) on the *escadrons* claimed that “elements close to the government, the presidential guard and militia groups of the president’s ethnicity” comprised the death squads (Fall and Seck 2003). Nonetheless, evidence linking Gbagbo to the murders was difficult to find. Just how difficult became apparent in April 2003 when Gbagbo won a defamation case in a French court against the newspaper Le Monde, claiming they systemically and without proof associated him with the death squads.</footnote>

<footnote n="83">⁸³ GIZ Expert interview with author Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire March 2015.</footnote>
South of Sahel migrants by creating a registry program, these policies were never implemented. Moreover, those close to his regime claim this was never a dominant perspective in Gbagbo's inner circle.<fnref n="84" /> Charlie 'Watta' oversaw security for FESCI at the height of the *escadron* crisis. He explained his understanding of these events as follows,

> "We in the [FESCI] central office still do not understand what was happening, but of course there's a lot of speculation. It wasn't orders from Gbagbo directly. I organized security for FESCI nationally, so all orders passed by me. What was really happening was the work of the *Jeune Patriots*. You have to remember that the *Jeune Patriots* were a mafia and they worked like it; they controlled Abidjan that way. A lot of them were nothing but delinquents, there because they knew they'd profit. As a mafia, they always had accounts to settle with someone. FESCI had divided violently and the country was facing a rebellion – we were in a civil war. There were always lot of debts to pay and also profits to be made ... I can tell you that these groups were not getting orders from Gbagbo; they were acting on their own accord. The guilt and complicity of Gbagbo was that he knew what was happening and turned a blind eye. There were no prosecutions, so the *Jeune Patriots* learned they could do whatever they wanted and still get away with it. Here, Gbagbo was guilty."<fnref n="85" />

<footnote n="84">⁸⁴ For example, the witness for the ICC prosecutor disagreed with the prosecutor's characterization, insisting that Gbagbo had a multi ethnic army (Dubruelh 2016). According to a US State Department briefing, Gbagbo had a 'mini Côte d'Ivoire' of religions and ethnicities advising him (State Department 2009). In discussions with former government associates of Gbabgo, interviewees characterise him in the same way (Interviews with NGO President and with former Director at the Ministry of the Interior, April 2014).</footnote>

<footnote n="85">⁸⁵ Former Head of Security at FESCI National Office, interview with author, Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, July 2015.</footnote>
Gbagbo created a regime of terror to crush the threat posed to his government by the rebellion and to punish anyone who dared side with them. For that he can indeed be characterised as ‘a political killer’, but he was not the ethnic killer portrayed in the international media and at his ICC trial.<fnref n="86" />

Charlie and his associates openly admit to committing violent crimes against their political rivals, but he and his fellow Gbagboist youth leaders take insult at the suggestion that ethnic or religious hatred motivated these actions. The same is true when speaking to former rebels willing to explain their role in violations committed in the name of protecting ‘northerners’. Ask a rebel fighters to explain his motivation for killing southerners and the response is always a matter defending his community from attacks that seemed imminent.<fnref n="87" /> In all interviews conducted with combatants from both sides, not one fighter expressed hatred for his rivals based on an ethnic or religious identity.<fnref n="88" /> All interviewees expressed frustration with their lot in life and felt that circumstances in Côte d’Ivoire were deeply unfair to themselves and their families. Even still, most former fighters interviewed actually showed sympathy for their supposed ethnic enemies, who they understood to be facing similar struggles to their own.<fnref n="89" /> All expressed regret for the political circumstances that drove neighbors, friends and football buddies into violent confrontation.

<footnote n="86">⁸⁶ Ruth Marshall in discussion with author, Toronto Canada, October 2015</footnote>

<footnote n="87">⁸⁷ Anonymous former *force nouvelle* youth combatant in interview with author, Abobo, Côte d’Ivoire July 2015.</footnote>

<footnote n="88">⁸⁸ I use the male pronoun here because I did not interview female combatants. Although some women were registered in DDR camps and women had various other roles in the fight, female fighters were comparatively rare in the conflict (Interview with GIZ consultant on DRR, June 2014)</footnote>

<footnote n="89">⁸⁹ I found evidence of this line of thinking in interviews with former combatants on both side. Former fighters tend to explain their actions with lines like ‘we only massacred the [foreign] mercenaries’, ‘we never spilled Ivorian blood if we could help it!’ and ‘we didn’t kill our brothers!’ Though the veracity of the claims is likely weak, they reflect the fact that, despite everything, the idea of a multi-ethnic Ivorian ‘brotherhood’ is still strong in their minds.</footnote>
3.7. A Topology of Youth Violence

In most accounts of the Ivorian civil war, the chief architects of ethnic violence were Blé Goudé's infamous *Jeune Patriots* (JPs). The *Jeune Patriots* were an unofficial counter-insurgency movement who ruled Abidjan's streets as an ad hoc national defense squad.<fnref n="90" /> Their stated purpose was to protect Gbagbo's regime from foreign military intervention by using street protests to control national politics.<fnref n="91" /> The Patriots saw themselves as inheriting the legacy of great African socialists such as Sankara, Kwame n'Krumah and Patrice Lumumba (Dembele 2003). Western media outlets actively discouraged these comparisons, instead painting the Jeune Patriots as murderer, thieves and would-be *genocidiers*. In turn, the Patriots considered the Western media one of their chief enemies in the struggle to preserve Gbagbo's regime (Konaté 2003).

The international news portrayed the Jeune Patriots as young fascists, serving Gbagbo as death squads and assassins (Notin 2013). It is unlikely, however, that Gbagbo relied on the Patriots for assassinations or other similarly sophisticated military operations. The President had trained mercenaries and private security personnel at his disposal who could undertake such tasks more

<footnote n="90">⁹⁰ Unclear boundaries always existed between *Jeune Patriots*, FESCIst, ‘barragists’, pillagers and the unaffiliated youth who simply took to the streets en masse when they saw protests forming, often profiting from the chaos to pillage. FESCI was not interchangeable for the *Jeune Patriots*, through there was clear crossover especially amongst the younger generation of FESCIsts. During the war years, the Secretary General of FESCI circulated the campus with a full escort of body guards. More disturbing still, the FESCI of the civil war years are accused of running prisons inside the university and of attacking anyone who challenged to their authority on campus (Konaté 2003). As Charlie Watta explained, “Once the war started, Blé {Goudé} filled the campus with delinquents, little nobodies, people who were not even students”. These new recruits, many of them not even university students, formed the central contingent of the *Jeune Patriots*.</footnote>

<footnote n="91">⁹¹ Interview with postwar president of *Jeune Patriots*, Yopougon, May 2014.</footnote>
reliably and discretely.<fnref n="92" /> Instead, the Patriots' role was to control the streets. They mounted
massive and bloody street demonstrations against French, UN and other international facilities.

Though controllable when Gbagbo chose to intervene, the image of a frenzied mob was an
explicit strategy the Jeune Patriots employed to attack international institutions.<fnref n="93" /> The
perception of chaos permitted Gbagbo's FDS forces to feign powerlessness in the face of unruly
youth while the Patriots sabotaged infrastructure belonging to the international coalition backing
the rebellion (Konaté 2003).<fnref n="94" />

Clashes between Jeune Patriots and the RDR youth became a fixture of urban life during the
country's long partition. At every election or significant political junction, the two groups met in
the streets for mass protests that inevitably descended into violent confrontation. As FESCI
Security Head, Charlie Watta, explained to me,

> "There were not usually open machetes, but they hid 'armes blancs' or they'd be in the streets protesting, and then suddenly it would turn into an attack on a neighborhood. Most of them were just kids from Abobo joining so they could do whatever they wanted; pillage, steal."

<footnote n="92">⁹² The killers of Canadian journalist Guy-André Kieffer, for instance, were mercenaries and police officers and not part of the youth movement (Kieffer 2004)</footnote>

<footnote n="93">⁹³ Former FESCI Head of Security in interview with author Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire August 2015.</footnote>

<footnote n="94">⁹⁴ *Jeune Patriots* protested the 'incursion of sovereignty' by the international coalition on January, 18 2006 in Abidjan as well as the Western towns of San Pedro, Daloa, Duékoué and Guiglo, creating barricades and attacking ONUCI personnel and goods. The confrontations resulted in ONUCI killing 5 protesters and electing to leave Guiglo and Duékoué. The attacks showed evidence that the police and *Jeune Patriots* were working together to assault western institutions, with both side feigning inability to control the chaos. The FDS was notably absent in stopping the protests, FDS General Mangou is quoted saying "I am a republican, I would never give the order to fire on protesters who are trying to defend the institutions you are trying to dissolve" (Djehoury 2007; also discussed in interview with former Gbabgoist Director at Ministry of the Interior, A. Diabete, Abidjan, August 2015).</footnote>
Here my informant is describing the acts of RDR militants, however he openly confirms that his side also hid weapons when marching out to meet the RDR youth.

Brawls in Abidjan and other urban centers between the Patriots and RDR youth paralleled a different kind of youth violence in rural areas. *'Les barrages'* refers to a roadblock network set up by pro-Gbagbo rural youth claiming to protect their community from rebels. In a sense, these barrages did serve that stated purpose. The rebels did attack towns and villages by entering the region separately on public transit, dressed as civilians and concealing their weapons, then regrouping in the bush nearby to launch an assault.<fnref n="95" /> The *'barragists'* were not, however, a formally coordinated military operation. They were ad hoc 'auto defense' groups, mimicking the Patriots they saw on TV (Chauveau and Bobo 2003). *Barragists* tended to be young men displaced by war rather than local villagers. Chauveau and Bobo found that these were often people whose homes were already under rebel control and who now lived as burdens on relatives in the government-controlled South. With no jobs or other source of income, racketeering and building barrages meant newfound freedom for village youth. The *barragists* won a sense of importance as self-proclaimed village security guards, and manning barrages provided these young men with unprecedented authority and wealth in their geriarchic and industry-barren communities.

More than anything else, the purpose of barrages was to extract small bribes from passing vehicles. The roadblocks suddenly created a rural war economy for a generation that grew up

<footnote n="95">⁹⁵ These tactics were explained to me by a group of young former rebels who entered the fight in 2002 in the Northwest, and stayed with Chief Ousmane's troops until the final days of the war in Abidjan. In explaining this tactic, the former rebels gave the example of taking the gbakas (public vans) into the western mountain town of Man from all directions dressed as civilians and hiding their weapons. They met at a rendez-vous point in the mountains late at night before attacking the town in the early morning. This is one of a number of testimonies recounted to me of rebels using public transport to enter towns prior to an attack.</footnote>
with no prospects (R. B. Marshall-Fratani 2003). Chauveau and Bobo found that the *barragists*
would take approximately 500 CFA from each person in the vehicles that passed, meaning each
individual was making up to 15,000 CFA (30 USD) a day – a rate vastly higher than any local
job, had jobs been available. The same study also discovered that the racketeers did not only
target Burkinabes and Dioulas. They also extorted Baoulés, Tagana and even members of their
own ethnic groups if the unfortunate traveler did not have identity papers. There is no reason to
doubt the claims that *barragists* were much rougher to Dioulas, but the Chauveau-Bobo
ethnography nonetheless adds weight to the argument that barrages were foremost erected to
gain profit and status, not because of ethnic hatred.

The rebel forces had their own roadblock system that paralleled that of the *barragists*. The following testimony given before the CDVR by a former *force nouvelle* fighter confirms that both sides used essentially the same tactics to profit from travelers and imprisonment or kill suspected enemy combatants:

FN: “When the war erupted, I was in PK 18 [a pro-ADO Abidjan neighborhood], I helped with ambushes. I killed them, just like they killed us. After that, I was sent to Issia [a rebel held town in the north]. When guarding the corridor, we made the passengers pay before they could pass through.”

CDVR President Banny: “And if they didn’t pay?”

FN: “We made them pay…we made arbitrary arrests, people were put in prison. Some we freed, others were transferred to Abidjan.... if we got our hands on an FDS, we’d kill them on sight and take their weapons.” (CDVR 2014)
It is important to recall that even the petty bribes taken by *barragists* amounted to vastly more money than these young men could touch in any available job, then or now. Moreover, these profits pale in comparison to the vast wealth accrued by high-ranking rebel commanders and politicians during this period. As we will see in Chapter 5, the war economy that formed during the rebellion still dominates Côte d'Ivoire's business sector today.<fnref n="96" />

Like in urban areas, patterns of rural violence also show that ethnic hatred was not a primary driver of conflict. Chauveau and Bobo observed that daily life in multiethnic villages actually continued with relative normality for most of the war. Even at the height of the conflict, they found traditional authorities from 'autochthone' and 'northerner' sides of the village were often able to negotiate peaceful solutions to tensions in their communities. Despite being dubbed a hotbed of ethnic hatred, their study discovered that rural villages in the West were relatively safe places for northerners, so long as they were known community members. The authors even recount a story of young Guère joining together to help rebuild the houses of Burkinabe neighbors destroyed during a land dispute (Chauveau and Bobo 2003). The gesture indicates that, at the village level, many Gbagboists still saw a clear difference between the rebel fighters and their Dioula neighbors.

This record emphasizes that the war was not a conflict fueled by ethnic hatred. Rather, it was the result of a power struggle amongst elites tapping into the sense of disenfranchisement and ruined

<footnote n="96">⁹⁶ For example, today Fofana runs a taxi empire and Wattao is the owner of a gold mine (Jeune Afrique 2013). The ComZones are also the core of the new security forces: Wattao (deceased January 2020) was head of Ouattara's security; Cherif Ousmane leads the 1rst battalion, an elite unit of commandos; Morou Outtara is head of the East battalion (the area he controlled during the partition); ‘Cobra’ Losseni Fofana is head of the West Battalion (also the territory he held during the rebellion); Martin Kouakou Fofié heads the Centre battalion and Zakaria Koné heads the Central command. Vetcho lead the 3rd battalion in Bouaké until recently joining the national administration school in order to return within the Ministry of Defense (Miew 2019).</footnote>
prospects felt amongst the country's large youth population, and then providing those youths
with the means to vent their anger while gaining profits and status. That said, my account does
not deny violence ultimately followed ethnic lines, nor do I wish to downplay the fear stoked by
the anti-northerner rhetoric Gbagbo's regime employed to counter the rebellion. Both Gbagbo
and the rebels fermented fear and resentment along ethnic lines in order to justify the violence
they deployed against their political opponents. My account does not disregard that reality, but
rather emphasizes the root causes of the conflict hidden underneath the commonly repeated
narrative. Before Côte d'Ivoire knew ethnic conflict, it had experienced a long history of
oppression by the ruling elite. Eventually that history saw the rise of a young, frustrated and
well-organized new citizenry that clashed with the ambitions of the country's self-serving
leadership. Once the original battle for democracy was won, elites from all political camps
sacrificed that mobilised generation in pursuit of personal ambitions. In time, the ensuing battle
consolidated into ethnic allegiances, but only after years of economic crisis and political
manipulations. We will see in the following chapter that political narratives fueling ethnic hatred
eventually transformed into self-fulfilling prophecies, however the key message in this chapter is
that that shift happened slowly and for much more complex reasons than the intolerance or
bloodlust of youth.

3.8. Rewriting Inequality as Ethnic Hatred

In her opening statements, ICC Chief Prosecutor Bensouda described the Côte d'Ivoire civil war
as a confrontation of Gbagbo's would-be *génocidiers* against ADO's dream of liberal
democracy.<fnref n="97" /> Seven years later, the ICC's acquittal decision called “the credibility and reliability” of the prosecutor's case “seriously questioned” (Peniguet, 2019). Presiding Judge Cuno Tarfusser accused Fatou Bensouda of “relying on shaky and doubtful bases, inspired by a Manichean and simplistic narrative of an Ivory Coast depicted as a ‘polarised’ society” (ibid). Although the judges' decision offered a long missing challenge to the dominant narrative, these words came only after seven years of dead-end litigation and nearly a decade after Gbagbo and Goudé were arrested. In the meantime, the agenda for peace, justice and reform in the new regime was designed and implemented according to the belief that the country went to war because Côte d'Ivoire was an ethnic ‘powder keg’.

Prior to the ICC court decision, transitional justice in Côte d'Ivoire taught Ivorians and international onlookers a single history, framed by graphic episodes of ethnic violence and youth radicalism. The transitional justice process shaped national discourse by emphasizing certain voices and excluding those with more nuanced stories to tell. This became apparent in conversation with a former FESCI leader held in MACCA, Abidjan's maximum-security prison:

> “There were 300 of us put in Macca together including a lot of Gbagbo's military, after they'd been denounced. ADO released the military personnel but kept the students inside... The students were tortured with water, burning and whipping. I haven't seen a lawyer three years later and wasn't even accused of a crime until 2014.”<fnref n="98" />

<footnote n="97">⁹⁷ The emphasis of my argument is on role of the ICC in simplifying and decontextualizing the violence committed. This account is not meant to deny efforts within the ranks of Gbagbo's regime to entrench and exploit growing ethnic tensions during this period. First Lady Simone Gbagbo and Mamadou Koulibaly propagated discourses fostering hatred and drew on anti-immigrant rhetoric to attract supporters (Losch 2000a). For more details on the role of Gbagbo's party leadership exploiting those existing tensions, particularly in the early years of Gbagbo's presidency, see R. Marshall-Fratani (2003), J. P. Dozon (1997 & 2000), and Chauveau (2000).</footnote>

<footnote n="98">⁹⁸ Anonymous FESCI National bureau officer in prison, in interview with author, Côte d'Ivoire, December 2014.</footnote>
As his account explains, those directly involved in battles were welcomed into the discourse of forgiveness and reconciliation promoted by the state sponsored transitional justice process.

Indeed, former armed combatants are key actors in the transitional justice process: they are recipients of demobilization packages, confessors before the truth commission and witnesses in special national courts and at the ICC. Those with more nuanced experiences from the pro-Gbagboist student movement disappeared into hiding or, for the less fortunate, into prison. In an irony of the Ivorian transitional justice process, direct perpetrators of human rights were given the privilege of being charged for their crimes and thus gained the opportunity to serve a fixed sentence or seek clemency. In contrast, people who played a nuanced role in the conflict and tell a complicated version of the past were left outside national truth and reconciliation. This came out in a focus group interview with former FESCI national office staff living in hiding.

Gbagbo's military force was led by the national army, with foreign mercenary units and *Jeune Patriots* backing the fight. Student organizers, in contrast, had non-combatant roles and primarily led street demonstrations against the international intervention. When I asked why they did not approach the truth commission as a way to tell their side of the story and perhaps seek a pardon, they laughed and explained that the CDVR was not meant to tell history as they understood it.

Rather than investigating the long and complicated path to civil war, the truth commission reinforced the narrative that conflict resulted from radicalized youth killing one another out of ethnic hatred. The first public hearing of the commission was a spectacle of reconciliation acted out between a Malinke youth involved in burning a Guéré village. The youth fell to the floor, crying at the feet of the village chief. He crawled across the stage muttering his remorse and explaining his actions, "I was part of your community, but we foreigners were pushed to this
violence!” The commission had hired a film director to coordinate the scene. That director sat behind me during the spectacle whispering to his colleagues that the first ‘episode’ had ‘played out exceptionally well’. It was a scene that rewrote a century of conflict over land and labour rights into an emotional drama in which a delinquent youth begged pardon from a wise old traditional leader. Kneeling and crying before the Commissioners’ platform, the youth was pardoned by CDVR Commission President Banny on behalf of the chief and the five surviving Guéré communities. That a commission president would claim for himself the authority to pardon a perpetrator on behalf of an entire ethnic group shows the hubris of the Ivorian elite as they shaped national discourse through the transitional justice process.

The first hearing was a decontextualizing and depoliticizing performance that set the stage at the so-called “*Théâtre de souffrance*.” The ‘Theatre of Suffering’ was a basement conference room at Abidjan’s chicest golf club where the public hearings were held. The venue was down the road from both the Golf Hotel and Presidential Palace where, just a few years before, the central drama of the Ivorian electoral crisis took place (these events are discussed in the next chapter).

The CDVR hearings sought out victims able to narrate a historic record worthy of the venue’s macabre name. In Commission President Banny’s own words, the CDVR told stories of “innocent victims, the weak, and amongst them some of our weakest, children and young women.” Conspicuously absent from the witness stand were the political leaders who divided the population over decades of poverty, exploitation and austerity. While the commission shaped history into an account of xenophobic masses targeting the nation’s most vulnerable, the elites orchestrating the process used the opportunity to represent themselves as benign leaders, committed to peace and stability.
3.8.1. Atoning Before the Elite

The truth commission was operated by handpicked elites. Charles Banny, President of the Commission, was the former Prime Minister of Côte d'Ivoire, a successful business man and, himself, a player in the Ivorian conflict. The commissioners and department heads were also all notable members of Abidjan's upper class, selected from across partisan lines and representing the business and political elite of the new Côte d'Ivoire. The staging of the CDVR further reinforced the spectacle of elite's holding court over the lesser segments of society, represented at the commission by victims and perpetrators alike. Members of the wealthiest and most influential families in Côte d'Ivoire presided like a panel of judges, with Commission President Banny using a gavel to officiate the initial hearings. Commissioners sat on a raised platform, looking down over those giving testimony before them. The format was designed for victims to answer the questions posed by the panel, with no opportunity to challenge the commissioners' opinions or interpretations. The display reinforced the legitimacy of the elite class by assigning them the role of compassionate rulers, devoted to the task of quelling the radicalised and unruly masses.

Printed on a wide banner and hung behind the commissioners' stand was the slogan, "Perfecting the Construction of the Ivorian Nation." Quite explicitly, the commission considered nation-building its core mission. The truth commission, with its many decontextualized accounts of ethnic violence, presented Ivorian 'imperfection' as the consequence of horizontal violence between radicalized youth. Speaking to a victim who witnessed her husband's murder before being brutally raped, Commissioner Offoumou explained to the room that "like all the others, this is a case of intolerance!" The commissioner went on to say that the woman must pardon
what was done to her and “encouraged her, and all Ivorians, to strive for communal life.” When the woman responded that it is impossible to forgive such a thing, the commissioner pushed back, saying: “It isn’t easy, but pardoning is what needs to be done here.” The commissioner concluded by asking the young woman to move beyond ethnic divides, as though being intolerant of ethnic ‘others’ and refusing to forgive the horrific abuse she endured were one and the same.

Conflating an unwillingness to forgive perpetrators with the pathology of ethnic hatred was a theme repeated throughout the commission. Not only did this framing transfer the responsibility for rebuilding the nation onto victims by requiring their forgiveness, it also holds victims partially responsible by implying their victimization is a sign of their own intolerance and hence their share in culpability. In case after case, the commission interpreted victim experiences with a discourse of ethnic intolerance, and then pressured the victims to forgive for the sake of a new Côte d'Ivoire. At the end of nearly every session the victims were asked, “Is your heart appeased?” Those who answered that they were not were gently reminded of their responsibility to do their part in “perfecting” the Ivorian nation.<fnref n="99" />

The truth commission allowed political elites to write the nation's history in a patronizing display where some of the richest and most powerful people in the country instructed some of the

<footnote n="99">⁹⁹ In another example, a victim – who happened to include in his testimony that he became an alcoholic after the war – said he cannot forgive his brother’s death. Commissioners focused in on man’s drinking as an illness that he is responsible for addressing in order to contribute to ‘perfecting’ the Ivorian nation, as though there was somehow a moral continuum between his alcoholism and the violations committed against his family. In a separate case, a woman said she cannot forgive her husband’s murder and subsequently being raped by the assassins. In response, she was told she must work on her faith to learn forgiveness. In an Ivorian context, it is a great failing to be considered disconnected from God. Again, the commission transferred blame onto the victim for her ‘weak faith’, as though her inability to forgive was a moral failing akin to being faithless. This was an especially painful accusation given she lives in a society where religion is the central moral and social glue, and a person’s worth is often measured against his or her commitment to faith (see transcript of CDVR public hearings, 2014)</footnote>
poorest and most vulnerable in lessons of tolerance and humility. In one of his many speeches
before the commission, Banny exclaimed, "This is not about forgetting, but about pardoning.
There is no pardon that does not pass through tolerance and humility. Pardon is before anything
being humble." Demanding that victims learn humility and tolerance carries an implicit message
that anyone involved in the violations, whether victim or perpetrator, shared the blame due to his
or her own self-centered intolerance. A victim leader who was severely tortured and left for dead
by police explained this dilemma; "they think if you're a victim, you're a *burro* [perpetrator]. I
don't even tell people anymore. I can't stand the way they look at me. We're so stigmatized as
victims in this society." This man is making an important observation; within the script of ethnic
war, everyone who experienced the horrors of the conflict first-hand, whether victim or
perpetrator, can be deemed guilty, at least in part, of participating in the intolerance that
destroyed the nation.

Transferring guilt for the agony of a ten-year civil war onto the victims would be absurd in a
more careful reading of the conflict, but the transfer of blame is consistent with the commission's
simplistic narrative of a war fueled by ethnic hatred. Rather than taking victim resentment and
anger seriously, these feelings were treated as a sign of xenophobia by the CDVR. It thus
followed that victims were instructed by the commissioners of their responsibility to move
beyond such thoughts and become productive contributors to a better future. This proved a
powerful message. When I questioned the groups lined up outside CDVR statement-taking
centers about their motivations to give testimony, the most common response I received was a
statement on the duty to participate in national pardoning and rebuilding. These words mirrored
the slogans communicated over the radio and on television by the CDVR leadership and from the
Ouattara administration. The truth commission, in this sense, was an opportunity for the
population to atone for the war before the ruling class.

### 3.8.2. Transferring Blame to Avoid Transforming Injustice

The discourse of ethnic war recharacterized legitimate grievances around social and economic injustice as the illiberal demands of an irrational crowd. This made the war narrative a useful platform for advancing neoliberal reforms in Côte d'Ivoire. By labeling the Ivorian conflict an ethnic war, the conflict-affected population lost the status of stakeholders and become illiberal masses needing to be taught 'tolerance and humility'. Good liberal democrats are not obliged to address the anger and frustration of a xenophobic population as they build a better regime.

Indeed, these policymakers are good liberals precisely because they are not corrupted by such base motivations. In an ethnic war narrative, the goals that motivate violence are abhorrent and should be cleansed from the new nation. Were oppression and inequality the cause of violence, victims would be right to expect a structural change as the price of their forgiveness. Under the specter of ethnic hatred, however, the population at large is to blame for the terrible past. Perhaps the state is expected to fund social cohesion and civic education programs but, in the wake of ethnic conflict, the responsibility to do justice for the past is not connected to structural reforms or wealth redistribution. Correcting the past is a burden shared by the entire community to atone of their intolerance and learn liberal values going forward.

Retelling the civil war as an eruption of ethnic hatred at the CDVR ensured that reforms envisioned by the transitional justice process would not touch long-standing structural injustice and thus posed no challenge to the economic or political status quo, nor the neoliberal reform agenda Ouattara implemented once in power. There are five hundred thousand registered
conflict victims in Côte d'Ivoire, most of them living in economic, emotional and physical circumstances that condemn them to ongoing and severe suffering. Until interventions addressing larger social justice concerns are put in place, this will continue to be the reality for half a million Ivorians, with consequences that may extend for generations. In contrast, within the CDVR narrative, ethnic hatred is the root of their suffering, therefore their salvation will only come from taking personal responsibility for rebuilding a more harmonious society and learning to forgive their neighbors.

## 3.9. Conclusion

As part of the larger neoliberal vision guiding post-conflict reconstruction in Côte d'Ivoire, the truth commission served as a form of nationwide moral intervention that shut down discussion of structural injustice and replaced it with a general instruction to the population to take responsibility for their role in destroying the country and do their part in rebuilding. The commission pathologized the population, presenting them as irrational people needing to learn 'tolerance and humility'. In the CDVR's account, the grievances that motivated violence were intolerance and, at moments, even genocidal ambition. To rebuild a good government, in a decent nation, this kind of intolerance needed to be suppressed and its advocates silenced.

Erased from the account was a nearly century long struggle over land disputes, labour rights, exploitation and poverty. The elite-led truth commission wrote a narrative blind to these aspects of the war and, in doing so, excluded them from consideration as core components of a just resolution to the conflict. This gave the ruling class the freedom to rebuild Côte d'Ivoire
according to their own interests while also winning moral legitimacy as devoted peacebuilders in
the face of xenophobic masses.

The CDVR's characterization of heroic elites and intolerant masses has ideological
underpinnings. It is no coincidence that the rise of global neoliberalism saw transitional justice
become a central part of the peacebuilding community's response to civil conflict. With its focus
on individual physical and political rights violations, transitional justice is poorly suited to
addressing longstanding structural injustice, but well-adapted to chronicling accounts of ethnic
hatred. Transitional justice, I claim, 'neoliberalises' a post-conflict context by establishing a new
moral order compatible with the interests of national and global elites. I further claim that
transitional justice builds that new 'moral order' by establishing a parameter between suffering
that is morally intolerable and thus requires justice, and other forms of suffering that are
unfortunate but effectively tolerated. The clearest way transitional justice builds that parameter is
by repeating and reinforcing ethnic conflict narratives. Keeping the irrational hatred of Ivorian
lower classes at the centre of the CDVR's story pushed the more complex accounts of grievance
and deprivation into the background. As we saw in this chapter, blaming ethnic hatred rather
than acknowledging structural injustice was a strategy of the Ivorian elite on both sides of the
political spectrum. Accusing Ivoirians of ethnic hatred allowed political elites to preserve an
exploitative land and labour system, justify the social and economic exclusion of younger
generations, and sacrifice their supporters in a self-serving battle of succession. By reinforcing
this ethnic narrative, transitional justice not only legitimized elite behaviour in the past, it also
advanced their claim to continued authority going forward. Ivorian transitional justice presented
violations stemming from ethnic hatred as abhorrent and meriting justice, while simultaneously
excluding suffering caused by oppression, exploitation and grave inequality from the justice and
reform agenda.
# 4. Permissible and Punishable War Crimes: Selecting the Heroes and the Villains of Neoliberal Peace

## 4.1. Introduction

Signatory states to the International Criminal Court grant the court jurisdiction over their nationals and within their borders to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Although the ICC mandate declares that the humanitarian norms it upholds are universal, in practice the court has applied different standards across cases. The international court is increasingly criticised for the seemingly politicised nature of decisions around whether to indict or overlook war criminals. Current Ivorian president, Alassane Ouattara, and the former president, Laurent Gbagbo, are both responsible for incidents potentially tantamount to war crimes during the civil war. Yet the ICC only opened proceedings against Laurent Gbagbo and his Minister of Youth, Blé Goudé. The difference between the two leaders is not a matter of their respective adherence to universal humanitarian laws and norms. As we saw in the previous chapter, the Ivorian civil war was not a simple story in which the heroes of democracy were victorious over the scourge of ethnic violence and dictatorship. Both men commanded units who committed grave atrocities, with the largest documented civilian massacres actually perpetrated
by Ouattara's rebel forces. Rather than their moral comportment, the difference between the two men is their respective visions for governing Côte d'Ivoire and, relatedly, the international community's support for ADO's vision and abhorrence for Gbagbo's.

The President of the Ivorian Coalition for the ICC (ICICC) defended the Court's one-sided process by insisting that, regardless of potential flaws, the international trial was crucial for Côte d'Ivoire's 'Emergence 2020'. This was a reference to Ouattara's much-cited plan to become a fully industrialized state in just eight years after taking power. By way of explanation, ICICC President spoke of the country's judicial sphere being fully integrated with and reinforcing of promised economic progress. Initially the speech seemed to muddle unrelated matters yet his understanding of the ICC prosecutions was remarkably consistent with the actual impact of those trials on post-conflict Côte d'Ivoire. The one-sided trial helped secure international commendation as a World Bank and IMF approved 'good government' while denouncing those who blocked this vision of progress. More than that, the ICC indictment ensured that Gbagbo was not merely expelled by military defeat; it expelled him and his vision for Côte d'Ivoire from the realm of moral admissibility. In this sense, the ICC was indeed fundamental to the economic 'emergence' planned in ADO's neoliberal restructuring program because it drew a clear parameter between the permissible and punishable visions of Côte d'Ivoire's future. The ICC trial proved that, on the international stage, the difference between Ouattara's permissible war crimes and Gbagbo's' punishable crimes was not the matter of those acts in and of themselves.

The difference was ideological: President Ouattara promised a neoliberal overhaul of governance in Côte d'Ivoire and Gbagbo's rule was an obstacle to that vision.

This is not, however, merely a story of the international community cynically accepting victor's justice for the sake of economic interests. The Ivorian case is interesting because of the huge
amount of work – intellectual, political, and technical – done by the foreign intervention and their partners in the Ouattara government. That heavy investment was not made just for the sake of letting Ouattara and his clan go free: a cynical guarantee of impunity for an uncontested victor with powerful foreign backers does not require so much fanfare. The ICC trial served a more important purpose by signaling on the international stage that neoliberal peace in Côte d'Ivoire was a moral project, undertaken in accordance with the highest standards of international humanitarian laws and norms. More important that distributing punishment or pardon to specific war criminals, that moral project defines the scope and limits of the moral obligation to right past wrongs. The ICC trial, in that sense, set the terms of a new moral order in Côte d'Ivoire according to which war criminals remained permissible state actors so long as they are ideologically aligned with the neoliberal reform project.

## 4.2. Neoliberal Peacebuilding

In contrast to many similar conflicts on the African continent, the Ivorian case attracted a major international response. The joint UN and French peacebuilding mission were central players at every stage of the ten-year protracted civil war.

"The Ivorian situation is unusual in that international actors took an interest in the situation, backing up their words with actions... this is not often the case... Indeed, if one calculates the ratio of the number of peacekeepers deployed to war casualties, concern about events in Côte d'Ivoire would appear to have far outstripped that in any African conflict in which the UN has mounted a peacekeeping operation" (M. McGovern 2010).
This quotation highlights the draw of the Ivorian civil war on the international community. The common explanation for this unprecedented attention is that the Ivorian war broke out soon after the catastrophic failure of the international community to act during the genocide in Rwanda.

Leaders from the global North, particularly in France, voiced their determination to never again abandon Africans to slaughter (Notin 2013). In practice, however, were a commitment to protect the lives and dignity of civilians the core motivation behind the foreign military intervention, the focus and priorities of those international actors would have been quite different. As we will see, during the ten-year military intervention and the peacebuilding mission that followed, restoring peace and good governance in Côte d'Ivoire did not primarily mean preventing or ending suffering amongst the civilian population.

Authors critical of contemporary peacebuilding refer to missions like the one deployed in Côte d'Ivoire as 'liberal peace' or 'western peace'.<fnref n="100" /> Roland Paris writes that liberal peacebuilding is characterized by the "belief that one model of domestic governance – liberal market democracy – is superior to all others" (Paris 1997). Peacebuilding proponents, Rawls also contends, present liberal governance as not merely the best available course towards state-building, but as the only viable option (Rawls 1999). Fanthorpe extends the argument, observing that liberal peace tends to regard non-western democratic visions of rebuilding as obstacles to peace rather than potential partner approaches. As he observes, if there is only one road to true peace, anyone seeking a different vision becomes, by definition, the enemy of peace (Fanthorpe 2005).

Once liberal democracy is established as the only viable vision of a peaceful and well-governed

<footnote n="100">¹⁰⁰ For examples see Fanthorpe 2005; MacGinty 2008; Laffey 1999; Paris 2002; Chandler 2004; D. Chandler, 2006; Duffield, 2001.</footnote>
society, it is a short step to accepting military intervention in the name of liberalism as a
necessary, if not benevolent, course of action. In liberal peacebuilding, a war of intervention is
therefore no longer a matter of weighing difficult and deadly options, but a technical project on
the one viable road to peace and good governance. Roger MacGinty and Pamina Firchow
consider liberal peacebuilding part of a general trend towards sanitizing war by redefining it as a
larger human security and development operation (MacGinty and Firchow 2016). As Whyte
writes, “today, when those who wage war themselves trade in the language of moral anti-politics,
this serves to depoliticize wars and neutralize dissent.” In this vision, conduct during war is a
technical problem, and war itself is an instrument leveraged in the moral pursuit of preventing
even more excessive abuses on the way to a better – and, specifically, a more liberal – future.
The trend towards humanizing military intervention implicitly legitimizes civilian causalities
(ibid). As David Chandler contends, the idea of a humanitarian military operation “would have
been an oxymoron before the 1990s, today it has become a tautology” (Chandler 2001).

Mamdani further captures this dynamic in his controversial book *Saviours and Survivors* (2009).
He recounts the Save Darfur campaign purchasing a full-page advertisement in the New York
Times, demanding a peacebuilding intervention with a mandate to shoot to kill. As Mamdani
exclaims, “these are humanitarian demands!” (Mamdani 2009).

The term neoliberal peacebuilding is used in critical literature to describe the disappearing divide
between war makers, humanitarians and a globally connected business community. Tadjbakhsh
describes neoliberal peacebuilding as a “marriage of Immanuel Kant and Adam Smith” in which
contemporary peacebuilders “transpose Western liberal values, political institutions and capitalist
markets” onto war-torn countries (Tadjbakhsh, 2010). Neoliberal peacebuilding efforts
undermine liberal values while simultaneously relying on the wide appeal of liberalism to justify
military operations. Neoliberalism invokes liberal ideals such as human rights and freedoms, however, its core characteristic is conflating those ideals with a governance project that ensures elite economic interests dominate over all other priorities in the public sphere. This project includes deregulating markets, empowering a ruling coalition of global and national elites, privatizing resources and industries, and the insolation of elites and their financial interests from public scrutiny or the threat of economic reforms.

A neoliberal peacebuilding mission, as per Tadjbaksh's definition, was deployed in Côte d'Ivoire within the first days of the conflict in September, 2002. An initial unilateral French military intervention entitled *Opération Licorne* was soon joined by ECOWAS forces. The United Nations MINUCI (*Mission des Nations unies en Côte d'Ivoire*) mission was established a few months later in May 2003 and succeeded the following year by the ONUCI mission (*Opérations des Nations unies en Côte d'Ivoire*). A coalition of Western military forces, led by the French and operated in tandem with the United Nations, monitored the civil war and ultimately secured regime change in Côte d'Ivoire. By the final stages of the war, the coalition forces made no distinction in their demands before the UN Security Council between humanitarian appeals and the necessity of regime change through military force. The deadly practical reality of deploying combat forces in a protracted civil war was forgotten in light of the belief that foreign troops were needed to restore peace and democracy. Unquestioning belief in the effectiveness of their peacebuilding model blinded decision-makers in the international community to the realities before them, with terrible consequences for the Ivorian population. As we will see, the ONUCI's uncritical adherence to the idea of humanitarian regime change ultimately facilitated an ethnic cleansing campaign perpetrated by their own 'liberal democratic' allies. Even as that slaughter was unfolding, the international community still failed to see the reality happening right before
their eyes.

### 4.2.1. The French Intervention

Contrary to popular narratives about the early stages of the war, the rebellion was not an insignificant group of home-ground freedom fighters who triumphed against the odds.<fnref n="101" /> Abidjan would have certainly fallen to the insurgents during the first week of fighting had the French forces not secretly intervened on the road from Bouaké to halt their advance.<fnref n="102" /> IB’s rebel forces were well-trained, well-armed and well-funded. The full details of the early funding remain unknown though sources allege the money came from Blaise Compaoré’s Burkina Faso, as well as from Quaddhafi’s Libya, the UAE and Lebanon (Pigeaud 2015, 32).<fnref n="103" /> Burkina Faso further assisted by providing weapons and training for the initial assault.

Decades before, at the time of independence, Côte d'Ivoire and France signed an accord of mutual protection that would ensure French military support to the Ivorians in the event of an external armed threat. In exchange, the accord secured French economic interests in the former colony. Knowing this, Blaise Compaoré required IB to stay in Burkina Faso and command the

<footnote n="101">¹⁰¹ On the rebels being well armed and numerous, see the testimony of Jerome Tarlue Junior before the ICC (Dubruelh 2016b)</footnote>

<footnote n="102">¹⁰² Interview with Ruth Marshall, October 2016. Western journalists like Jean-Christophe Notin (2013) helped the political heads of the rebellion build the image of home-ground freedom fighters whose primary aim was to prevent an ‘inevitable genocide’ of Northern Ivorians.</footnote>

<footnote n="103">¹⁰³ One possible scenario is a result of the ‘chocolate finger plot’ in which Ouattara’s son in law, African President of the cocoa company Armajoro, assisted the cocoa multinational in acquiring nearly a tenth of the world’s cocoa just weeks prior to the attack. The price of cocoa skyrocketed, earning the company a profit of 60 million euros on the purchase. This theory suggests that the money was then used to fund the early phase of the rebellion (Onana 2011).</footnote>
rebellion from across the border. His absence on the battlefield was intended to mask the role of
external forces driving the rebellion. Ergo, under the claim that the war was a domestic affair,
Chirac refused to honour the accords of mutual defense and crush the rebellion. Instead, the
French Licorne mission stepped in just long enough to push the FRCI forces back to the central
trading town of Bouaké. This became the partition line that divided Côte d'Ivoire for nearly a
decade into the rebel-held North and state-controlled South.<fnref n="104" />

As the crisis mounted, the French *Bimé* military base in Abidjan, found itself increasingly at odds with Gbagbo. Though technically their ally and host, the president built his legitimacy through populist and anti-colonial discourse. Every time the French responded to the mounting crisis with incoherent actions or disproportionate force, Gbagbo was emboldened. He and his supporters easily construed the disorganized French response as an imperialist plan to hold power in the former colony (Smith 2003). Thus, from the first days of the rebellion, France was characterised by the President's clan as a greedy Empire proxied on the ground by the rebel insurgency.

The most plausible explanation of France's strategic intentions with this limited intervention is that the former colonial power simply had no clear strategy for managing a pending Ivorian war.

At this point, the French executive was merely focused on getting their own expatriates out of danger as quickly as possible.<fnref n="105" /> *France Afrique* had ended a decade before, and France simply

<footnote n="104">104 In the international media, the French stepped in to push the ComZone back, thus saving Côte d'Ivoire from outright war and protecting the regime from a coup in light of French obligations to the Ivorian state (Notin 2013). For Gbagbo and his anti-colonial clan, the real intention of the *Licornes* was to assist the rebels in securing their position at the partisan line, exploiting their presence as an international force to inhibit Gbagbo from retaking the north (Onana 2011).</footnote>

<footnote n="105">105 Ruth Marshall in discussion with author, Toronto, Canada, October 2015.</footnote>
did not have the personnel or military resources needed to respond effectively to a mounting
crisis in Côte d'Ivoire (Smith 2003). Although the French administration continued to address
then-president Gbagbo with the language and paternalism of a colonial power, their actions no
longer matched the force of their words (Onana 2011). As Marshall explains, the French
response to the Ivorian crisis was "a series of knee jerk reactions by an Empire that had
disappeared and had not yet come to terms with that reality". Indeed, if the French were still the
formidable colonial force Gbagboists accused them of being, the Ivorian crisis would have ended
within days rather than drawing out over the next decade.

4.2.2. The Waga Accord

In 2006, following seven failed internationally brokered peace deals, Gbagbo asked for direct
dialogue with the *force nouvelle* rather than continuing to work through international
mediation.<fnref n="106" /> To achieve that end, he sent FPI Youth Leader Navigué Frank to Ouagadougou
(‘Waga’) to negotiate a peace agreement with his RDR counterparts. Navigué explained to me
that his mandate, direct from Gbagbo, was to come back with a peace agreement and nothing
less. “Everything was on the table,” recalls Navigué of his final instructions before leaving for
the negotiations.<fnref n="107" /> In March 2007, the Waga Accord was signed, dissolving the partition *zone de
confidence* and creating a new joint armed unit under a shared central command. The terms of
Waga also made Guillaume Soro the new Prime Minister by presidential decree. On Thabo

<footnote n="106">106 Direct discussions were initially entered with Compoaré, bringing Soro onboard later (Navigé, FPI National Youth President in interview with author, Côte d'Ivoire June, 2015)</footnote>

<footnote n="107">¹⁰⁷ It took four years to reach a final agreement, with Soro himself coming for difficult negotiations. As Navigé explains, “at first we were in separate rooms with negotiators going back and forth, but by the end we could talk in the same room and with respect.” (Navigé, FPI National Youth President in interview with author, Côte d’Ivoire June, 2015)</footnote>
Mbeki's advice, the agreement entrusted the organization of new presidential elections directly to Prime Minister Soro. As Navigué explained, “every time we tried to find a peace agreement or call elections, Soro and the rebels would find a problem, so Gbagbo just said, ‘Fine, put them in charge! Make them organize elections themselves.’”<fnref n="108" /> With the implementation of the Waga Accord, Côte d'Ivoire appeared to be taking the first significant steps towards peace since the rebels attacked five years before. In the transitional period that followed, Gbagbo praised Soro as the best prime minister he ever worked with.<fnref n="109" />

Waga was a homemade solution that came after seven failed internationally brokered peace agreements.<fnref n="110" /> With the success of the new accord, the UN began losing credibility and influence in Côte d'Ivoire, and Gbagbo leveraged that loss of standing. He unceremoniously downgraded the UN mission's mandate from orchestrating the peace process to the task of 'certifying' steps that his men and the rebels had negotiated directly amongst themselves.<fnref n="111" /> Even before Waga took effect in March 2007, Gbagbo fired the internationally appointed Prime Minister – and

<footnote n="108">¹⁰⁸ A. Diabete, a former Director at the Ministry of the Interior under Gbagbo, in interview with the author Abidjan Côte d'Ivoire April 2015</footnote>

<footnote n="109">¹⁰⁹ Polé Joele, Jeune Patriot political leader at the time of writing, in interview with author, Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire July 2015.</footnote>

<footnote n="110">¹¹⁰ Thabo Mbeki played a key role resolving the civil war. Before Waga, Thabo Mbeki organized the negotiations at Pretoria 1 (April 2005) and Pretoria 2 (June 2005). Unlike the French brokered Linas-Marcoussis Accord and Accra I, II and III Accords, these negotiations where exclusively open to Gbagbo, Soro, Bedié and ADO. Thabo Mbeki also made a public show of declaring that the continued presence of French soldiers on Ivorian territory was shocking and was increasing tensions on the ground rather than helping. He further aggravated the Sarkozy regime by sending a group of South African experts to investigate the protesters massacre by French forces at Hotel Ivoire in 2004. To add insult to injury, the report this group issued demanded an international arrest mandate against French General Poncet and Colonel Destremau, although no actions followed (Pigeaud 2015, 69). Despite provoking the French, Mbeki achieved the main breakthrough needed to move beyond the rebellion: he convinced Gbagbo to use an executive decree that would permit Ouattara to run in upcoming elections. He also convinced Gbagbo to make a presidential decree that banned all protests in the weeks after Ouattara's candidature was secured as a precautionary measure for keeping the *Jeune Patriots* out of the streets. These actions went forward without incident, setting the way for the Waga negotiations and inclusive elections.</footnote>

<footnote n="111">¹¹¹ For details on Gbagbo reducing the presence of the UN during this period, see the US Secretary of State in Côte d'Ivoire, 2007 released by wikileaks.</footnote>
future CDVR President – Charles Konan Banny.

## 4.3. Côte d'Ivoire Votes

Côte d'Ivoire's 2010 election received a special commendation from the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon as 'open, free and fair'. This high distinction was never before granted on the African continent (Choi 2010). Despite unprecedented praise from such a respected authority, the election dissolved into the bloodiest episode in Côte d'Ivoire's modern history. The remarkable thing about the 2010 presidential election is not the fact that an electoral process, so applauded by the international community, suddenly turned deadly. Rather, the striking thing is that the violence was clearly foreseeable given events leading up to it, and yet the United Nations continued on its singular path to elections, as though the process was preceding in an orderly fashion. As scholar Foluke Ipinoymi observed, the welfare of Ivorians was forgotten in favour of an abstract promise made in the name of democratization (Ipinyomi 2012, 73). The UN mission exhibited a kind of cognitive dissonance, imagining they were leading a successful and sequential liberal peacebuilding mission when, in truth, their actions triggered a rapid descent into total war.

### 4.3.1. “Free and Fair”

The electoral process was flawed long before the elections were called. Amongst the controversial demands made some years before in the French brokered Linas-Marcoussis Peace Accords (2003), the Independent Electoral Commission (CIE) became an institution with a
majority RDR leadership. Only four of 31 members were pro-Gbagboist and its president was a
vocal RDR supporter. At the time of the Linas-Marcoussis negotiations, handing the CIE to the
RDR may have seemed a necessary concession to keep peace talks moving. By the time elections
were finally taking shape in 2010, the mistake was obvious. The institution responsible for
organizing and overseeing elections was visibly partisan, thus ensuring Gbagbo supporters would
never accept any unfavorable results announced by the CIE as credible.<fnref n="112" />

At the beginning of October 2009, The Institute National de la Statistique (INS) and a private French company called Sagem Securité handed a new electoral list to the CIE. The provisional list had 6 384 816 names on it, 2 752 181 of which had never featured on any other previous voting register. On one hand, an increase in eligible voters was expected as the Waga Accord ensured a large number of descendants of migrants from the Sahel region would be included as first-time voters. That said, an increase of nearly fifty percent was impossible.<fnref n="113" /> In a 2009

<footnote n="112">¹¹² The CIE was charged with preparing Côte d'Ivoire's electoral list, a task they completed by outsourcing the technical work to the French company Sagem Securité. In 2007, without any public call for the contract, Sagem signed a contract for 66 billion CFA (approximately 135 million USD): 48 billion for their own use, and the rest for sub-contractors. The election ultimately cost 200 billion CFA (approximately 400 million USD) making it the world's most expensive internationally brokered national vote to date. Through French backing, the contract with Sagem Security was honoured in 2010 despite the discovery that Mohamaed Sisi Kagnassi represented the company in Côte d'Ivoire. This rich Malian businessman was a close friend and advisor to chief rebel commander Soro Guilluame (Pigeaud, 2015, 27). Moreover, the same Mr. Adama Bitogo who channelled cocoa wealth out of CDI into Burkina Faso was the founder of the Ivorian branch of Sagem. During the same period that his company was designing a questionable electoral list, Bitogo was also serving as Soro's diplomatic counsellor and the director of ADO's electoral campaign in the Agnéby region (Onana, 2012, 86; Varenne 2012, 69).</footnote>

<footnote n="113">¹¹³ The number of new voters is impossibly large given the demographics of Côte d'Ivoire. More than 50% of the population are of Akan, Gru or Krou descent, and would be little affected by new voter laws (CIA World Factbook 2007). Approximately 20% of the total population are from Mandes (so-called northerner) descent, many of whom became enfranchised under the Waga Accord. Not everyone from this ethnic background were previously excluded; Ouattara and the RDR had a significant voting base in prior elections. An increase in voter numbers was thus expected, but unless the demographics recorded in the national census are hugely inaccurate, it would be impossible to nearly double the total number of voters by including those previously excluded. Gbagbo's supporters claimed that the new names were both invented voters and were the names of people living in Burkina, Mali and Guinea who would cross the border to vote. Additionally, there are five million non-citizen Africans living in Côte d'Ivoire, with approximately half of them coming from Burkina Faso (ibid). Gbagboist argued that many of these names were also added to the list. It is, as one might imagine, very difficult to draw the lines of citizenship within the Ivorian</footnote>
email published by Wikileaks, a consultant for UNDP explained to his colleagues that the validly
of these names was “very unlikely” (Salseth 2009). In response to wide criticism of the registrar,
the electoral commission put one million of the new names on a ‘grey list’, requiring these
potential voters to prove their identity to a registration office before the election date. Although
the CIE later admitted almost no one from the ‘grey list’ presented themselves to the
commission, the final voter registration list inexplicably included the majority of removed names
(Pigeaud 2015, 100). Despite clear reason to doubt the validity of the registry, UN Country
Representative Choi proclaimed the voter list “solid, balanced and credible” (Security Council
2010).

4.3.2. Election Day

On November 28th, 2010, Ivorians turned out in high numbers to vote in the country's first
presidential election in a decade.<fnref n="114" /> The incumbent Laurent Gbagbo was the ten-year president,
purportedly a socialist and thoroughly anti-French. He was strategically religious, professing to
be a born-again Evangelical when it proved convenient, but also retaining a notorious genie
consort who supplied him with supernatural powers. More importantly, Gbagbo was a symbol of

<footnote>population. Although birthright is not granted to those born to foreign parents, citizenship can be obtained with proof of 5 continuous years in Côte d'Ivoire. That said, few people have official identity papers or a registered long-term address needed to claim citizenship, even if eligible. Given this picture, discrepancies were expected in the new electoral list however an increase of over two and a half million people was a massive shift. The new electoral list therefore raised suspicion that the RDR-led CIE had included a large number of fake names or non-eligible migrant workers, thus greatly increasing Ouattara's potential voting base.</footnote>

<footnote n="114">¹¹⁴ In a strange and largely forgotten episode that casts still more doubt on the process, the first round results put Bedié in the lead, with Gbagbo second. Ouattara found himself in third place and therefore out of the race. A few hours later, the electoral commission released new numbers reversing the results: now Gbagbo was in the lead with 35.5%, Alassane Ouattara was in second at 32% and Bedié would be cut from round two with only 23%. This bizarre incident has never been explained. Though, perhaps the silence that followed is not so surprising. Gbagbo felt much more confident going to heads against ADO rather than Bedié, heir to the Houphouët legacy. The new status quo also suited the interests of international onlookers given their open backing for Ouattara. With the most powerful players satisfied, no furthers actions were taken.</footnote>
the rags-to-riches Ivorian dream, a quality that ensured the admiration of his western support base. The incumbent faced Alassane Ouattara; former IMF Director, father of austerity in Côte d'Ivoire, American educated economist, long-time friend of French president Nicholas Sarkozy, millionaire, symbol of northern ascendency and heir to the mystic power of the Malinke Empire.

In the lead up to the second-round vote, the major worry of both candidates was how Henri Konan Bédié's Akan support base would cast their ballots. The Akan refers to all the population groups who migrated centuries ago from what is now Ghana. It includes the entire Boualé nation and most of the Eastern and lagoon groups. Together, the Akan account for a third of the Ivorian population. In a pledge to remove Laurent Gbagbo from power, Ouattara's RDR and Bédié's Boualé dominated-PDCI formed a coalition known as the RHDP (Le Rassemblement des Houphouëtists pour la démocratie et la paix, or The Assembly of Houphouëtists for Democracy and Peace). The coalition leaders vowed to support whichever candidate made it to the second round against Gbagbo. Few believed that decades of mistrust between Ouattara and Bédié would be forgiven once all cards were on the table yet these misgivings proved unfounded. One week after losing in the first round, Bédié called on his supporters to vote 'massively' for Ouattara. In exchange, Ouattara promised to appoint a PDCI prime minister if elected. On one hand, the Baoulé/Akans are stereotypically proud and hierarchical people, deeply respecting of authority.

ADO thus counted on this major voting base to follow Bédié's instructions and cast their ballots in his favour. On the other hand, under Houphouët, the Akan were prosperous farmers and landowners, and they filled the core of his expansive civil service. The Akan were thus especially hurt by the country's economic decline in the 1990s and the IMF-imposed austerity that followed. Many lost their former privileges and their once bright futures. Because of that, a significant portion of the Akan population felt drawn to Gbagbo's rhetoric, especially amongst
the younger generation.<fnref n="115" /> The result was a divided Akan vote that translated into a narrow election and immediate fraud allegations.

Although the second round of elections were declared free and fair by the ONUCI mission, witnesses on the ground recall extensive electoral fraud.<fnref n="116" /> Gbagbo supporters had a significant advantage to manipulate the vote in the South. National election monitors were paid 10,000 CFA per day to represent each political party at the polling station. International funding standards required that these positions be filled by people with some formal education, meaning the role was de facto reserved for Gbagbo supporters who tended to be middle class youth from urban areas. In the urban South, the FPI youth took all the election monitoring jobs and simply represented both political parties in many of the polling stations. The tactic was adopted for a very particular reason. In the lead up to the election it was discovered that Sils Technology, the company hired to coordinate the electronic vote, was headed by a Gbagbo ally (a man named Mr. Ahou Don Mello). To reduce the risk of fraud, the parties agreed to count votes by hand and physically transmit them to ONUCI for safe keeping. As one former electoral observer recounted to me, the pro-Gbagbo ‘monitors’ kept track of who voted in their locale. If it was clear ADO was winning a large majority in a given polling station, the supposedly neutral monitors coordinated with friends to ensure the voting boxes were stolen or tampered with before they could be collected (ibid).

The situation was no better in the North. The African Union observer mission declared rampant

<footnote n="115">¹¹⁵ Interview with Boualé youth leader from the NGO Action justice et paix, May 2014</footnote>

<footnote n="116">¹¹⁶ Interview with election monitoring NGO Office Head, Abidjan March, 2015.</footnote>
electoral fraud took place in the Sahel region and refused to validate the process.<fnref n="117" /> As the AU team stated:

> "After sharing information with other national and international election observers, we hereby state that the second round of the presidential elections in Côte d'Ivoire was held amidst major problems in various northern regions... These problems were stealing of ballot boxes, arresting of candidates' representatives, multiple voting, refusal to admit international observers to witness counting of ballots, and the murder of representatives of candidates. To that effect, we hereby declare that the second round of voting was not free, fair and transparent in these localities" (Mbeki 2011).

Moreover, the national election monitors sent from the South did not reach their northern polling stations. One former monitor laughed as he explained the situation, "When our friends told us they were planning to go across the 'zone de confiance' [border] to the north, we teased them. We laughed at them saying, 'How much is 10,000 CFA a day actually worth to you?! You'll come back beaten half to death, if at all'. Of course, we were right, none of them actually made it passed Bouake, they all came back swollen and beaten from just trying to cross the border."<fnref n="118" />

<footnote n="117">¹¹⁷ The AU was led by Joseph Kokou Kofigoh, former Prime Minister of Togo. Also present on the ground was the independent civil society Société Civile Africaine pour la Démocratie et l'Assistance Electoral, led by Seynabou Indieguene of Senegal, and the Coordination of African Election Experts (CAEE) from Cameroon, Senegal, Benin, Mali, Morocco, Gabon, and Togo led by Jean-Marie Ongjibangte of Cameroon. Their conclusions matched those of the AU delegation (Pigeaud 2015).</footnote>

<footnote n="118">¹¹⁸ Interview with former election monitor, Abidjan March, 2015.</footnote>
4.4. Counting the Costs

Once the polling stations closed, hand-counting votes and numerous fraud investigations delayed the announcement of the results beyond the constitutionally mandated three-day deadline. Paul Yao N'Dré, President of the Constitutional Council and an ally of Laurent Gbagbo, declared that the CIE had failed to present its results within the requisite timeframe and that it was now up to the court to declare a winner.<fnref n="119" /> Appearing on national television, N'Dré explained that the electoral code gave the court seven days to carry out its investigations, after which the task of validating the election transferred directly to the Constitutional Council. Per the electoral code, if the court investigations did not meet a one-week deadline, the Council would then have the power to either valid a winner or cancel the election and declare another within 45 days. With over 20,000 polling stations to review in a week, the courts predictably missed the deadline and the Constitutional Council assumed responsibility for either declaring a president or calling a new election (ibid).

Citing fraud, Constitutional Council President N'Dré cancelled the vote in thirteen northern departments and declared Laurent Gbagbo the winner. On one hand, the 13 northern districts accused of fraud had submitted visibly tampered results. Each polling station was required by law to have at least one representative from all major parties yet the results from the 13 sectors in the North showed not a single FPI vote. Manufacturing of identity cards was a problem documented by African Union observers throughout the electoral process and, as previously

<footnote n="119">¹¹⁹ Note that depending on how one reads the electoral code, N'Dré's declaration was inaccurate. The electoral code only states that a signed tally sheet from each polling station be transmitted to the Constitutional Council within three days after the election. That condition that was fulfilled, even if the Council had not completed its counting and investigations (Basset 2011).</footnote>
explained, most ‘grey names’ of unconfirmed voters ultimately stayed on the electoral list. These
combined factors gave legitimate reason for concern about voter results in the cancelled northern
regions. That said, N’Dré largely overlooked the fraud and intimidation that also plagued polling
stations in FPI controlled areas. Although some Southern constituencies were also cancelled,
there was no doubt that Gbagbo’s camp manipulated the electoral code thanks to their dominance
in the Constitutional Council.

The Constitutional Council’s maneuvers had all the characteristics of Gbagbo’s diplomatic style.
He had a knack for coming out on top that had earned him the pseudonym *Le Boulanger* (The
Baker) in reference to his ability to ‘roll his political adversaries in the flour, without getting
stuck himself’. Recognising Gbagbo’s classic touch in the Constitutional Council declaration, the
ONUCI refused to investigate the results of the second round. After all the trouble they went
through to hold the most expensive elections in the organization’s history to that date, the UN
and its diplomatic partners were not going to be outmaneuvered once again by the Bêté Baker
(C. Baniafouna 2012). Instead, the ONUCI stationed itself within ADO’s headquarters at the
Golf Hotel and called the President of the Electoral Council to a private meeting. On January 8,
2010 the Electoral Council President Bakayoko went alone to the Golf Hotel and made his
famous appearance on France 24, broadcasting live from the hotel with a panel of diplomats
seated behind him.<fnref n="120" />

Bakayoko declared President Alassane Ouattara the official winner of the presidency by a

<footnote n="120">120 Thabo Mbeki was vocal in his disapproval: “The President of the CEI does not have to power to speak unilaterally on behave of the CEI itself”, he wrote “despite this he went alone to the Golf on the request of American and French diplomats, as well as ONUCI Special Representative Choi” (Onana, 2011, p.328). Whether Bakayako acted out of greed, fear or conviction, Mbeki is correct that Bakayako’s action violated the electoral code, adding to a long list of irregularities that characterized the 2010 presidential vote.</footnote>
margin of 376,109 votes. Following the announcement, UN Representative Choi gave the
following statement:

"I certified the election in a neutral and objective fashion. We have worked with the Ivorian people for a long time, we know how they voted. Therefore it is objective, it is an irrefutable certification of the vote" (Varenne 2012).

Despite Choi's strong statement, the UN mission did not have the power or authority to validate electoral results in its Resolution 1765 (2007) mandate.<fnref n="121" /> The ONUCI mandate only allowed him to verify whether the elections had proceeded in an “open, free, fair and transparent” manner (Onana 2011). This was also strange choice of words for other reasons. It showed deep hubris on the part of the ONUCI to claim that a UN Special Representative knew the true convictions of a foreign population clear enough to overrule all accusations of fraud in a problematic national election.

### 4.4.1. Was There Ever a Democratic Option?

Who truly won? Given the amount of irregularities and fraud that occurred, there was never a 'true' winner to be declared. What is more, even if that number had somehow arrived in Choi's hand, it would not have changed the events that followed. The population was evenly divided

<footnote n="121">121 Thabo Mbeki accused Choi of overstepping the ONUCI mandate by violating impartiality. In his statements, he adds the cutting remark: "the very people who insist on the sanctity of the rule of law as fundamental to all democratic practice, elected illegally to recognise the provisional result announced by the chairperson of the CEI on his own". Choi responded that there was a difference between announcing the presidency and his actual words: he did not technically announce the winner, he merely stated the fact that president Ouattara had a margin of 8% more votes than former President Gbagbo. In support of Choi's statements, Ban Ki-Moon wrote to Mbeki explaining that the impartiality of the United Nations does not necessarily signify neutrality. Though simply boardroom semantics when first exchanged, these words immediately translated into six months of violence far more extreme than anything seen up to that point (Onana 2011).</footnote>
between the two candidates and neither side had confidence in the elections. Fraud was
extensive enough on both sides to shift results in either direction, and no amount of
investigations or cancelled ballots could undo that or restore public trust in the process.

Whatever the result, the losing side would never have believed it valid and that was assured long
before the votes were ever cast. The more essential point is that there was never a real
possibility of free and fair elections to begin with.

Regardless of who was declared winner, a large segment of the Ivorian population was not going
to accept the outcome and would challenge it with military force. Just as Gbagbo refused to
renege on his power, it is equally safe to assume that the *force nouvelles* would not have
accepted a Gbagbo win, had the tally gone the other way. Despite multiple peace accords
committing the rebels to disarm as a condition for elections, the *force nouvelles* refused to put
down their weapons prior to the vote. Soro Guillaume was clear in his statements that he would
not jeopardize military victories gained to that point until the elections were concluded.<fnref n="122" /> The
international community's blind commitment to a sequential democratization process in Côte
d'Ivoire meant citizens were sent to the polls at a moment when both sides were actively
reinforcing their military capacity. Leslie Varenne is a journalist who chronicled the electoral
crisis from her home in Abobo, a neighborhood so notorious for street violence that Abidjanais
simply call it ‘*La guerre*’. Describing the climate of the country just before the 2010 vote, she
wrote: “ONUCI failed [to prepare for elections], and knew it failed at its mission. Anywhere in
the country an AK47 could be bought for 45 euros” (2012).

<footnote n="122">122 This forced UN Special Representative Choi to renegotiate the terms concluded in Waga with Gbagbo. The incumbent President eventually agreed that elections could go ahead even without the rebel's disarmament, on the condition that disarmament would happen immediately after, under a guarantee of security from the UN.</footnote>
It is unsurprising that a winner-takes-all presidential election could not peacefully resolve a ten-year civil war in a country equally divided into two opposing camps. Yet even as the post-electoral crisis was exploding, the ONUCI mission continued to operate as though the election was a pathway to peace – and the only acceptable path, at that. As Choi and his colleagues in the ONUCI mission submitted their reports on the success of a fair and ‘widely recognised’ election, renewed violence, more horrific than any experienced during the conflict thus far, erupted across Abidjan (Basset, 2011).

Immediately following the Golf Hotel declaration of Ouattara's win, waves of violence began to sweep the capital city. 'Barrages' were erected dividing the neighbourhoods of Abidjan into a grid of self-imposed siege zones with the aim of keeping real and imagined enemies cloistered in their own quarters (Panaite 2016b). As tensions grew, a new phenomenon arose in which neighbourhood militias began 'sentencing trespassers' to the infamous 'Article 125'. A Dominican Priest explained the harrowing term: "the petrol costs 100 francs and matches are 25 francs. The tires are free. There are always tires lying around." Youth gangs mockingly termed the practice 'braising' those who found themselves on the wrong side of the barricades.

Rather than speculating over who truly won and lost the vote, the more important point is that there was never a democratic option. Long before the polls opened, it was clear the winner of the election would to be determined by violence. In the words of an election monitoring NGO Director:

> "Everyone debates over who committed fraud; over who really won the elections. This is not the point! The real issue is that neither Gbagbo or Ouattara were going to accept defeat, it never actually mattered what the results were. It was clear before we started that
regardless of who won, the other side were going take power with violence.”<sup>123</sup>

Both camps are accused of more than enough fraud to change the electoral result in either direction. In the end, it was the international peacebuilding community who declared the President of Côte d'Ivoire. As a former election monitor explained to me: “The international community decided one president had won and the population had decided the other, it turned out what mattered was the first thing over the second.”<sup>124</sup>

4.5. The Winners and the Losers of Neoliberal Peace

After the election, with the country on the brink of violent collapse, South African President Thabo Mbeki acted as mediator, communicating Gbagbo's willingness to negotiate a new peace settlement. Gbagbo's head was on the chopping block, making his suddenly conciliatory attitude hardly magnanimous. ADO, on the other hand, had the full support of the international community behind him and the legitimacy of an election declared in his favour by the UN. It is easy to appreciate why he had no interest in resuming negotiations with the Boulanger. That said, the military invasion by ADO's forces of Western Côte d'Ivoire and Abidjan that soon followed this failed attempt at diplomacy are the most horrific episodes of the war. A negotiated accord would have required concessions from the RDR leadership, but it also would have prevented the terrible suffering that soon befell the Ivorian population. In this moment, Ouattara had the opportunity to seek a solution other than the brutality that came next. After decades of

<footnote n="123">123 National election monitoring NGO, Head of Office in interview with author, Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire May 2015.</footnote>

<footnote n="124">124 Ibid.</footnote>
being outmaneuvered in his bid for president, he was not going to give in now that he finally
held the upper hand.

Dissenting from his colleagues on the global stage, Thabo Mbeki wrote a furious denouncement
of the international community for intervening on Ouattara's side (Mbeki 2011). As Joseph Koru
Koofigoh, former Prime Minister of Togo and chief of the AU mission of observers in the
election recalled:

> "Thabo Mbeki and I have spoken about this when he arrived in Abidjan {to help facilitate a resolution to the crisis}. Mbeki explained that Mr. Gbagbo was ready for discussions but that Alassane Ouattara was intransigent because he was supported by the international community. Voila, there's the problem. Instead of the situation we saw, if pressure was on both parties, dialogue would be possible and could have produced an exit from this crisis. I'm not interested in these theories about the radicals taken over in their entourages. It was the international community that aggravate the crisis" (Onana, 2011, 393).

In Mbeki and Koofigoh's view, unequivocal support for ADO from the French military and the
UN mission ensured that Ouattara had no incentive to accept any resolution short of an
unconditional surrender from Gbagbo's camp. Gbagbo, however, marshalled a devoted support
base that represented more than a third of the country, meaning his forced removal guaranteed
widespread and deadly violence.

### 4.5.1. The Golf Republic
In preparation for the military campaign to dislodge Gbagbo from the presidential palace, Alassane Ouattara, Soro Guillaume, Henri Bédié and their respective entourages moved into the Golf Hotel where they lived for the next five months surrounded by French and UN troops.<fnref n="125" /> One night in an average room at the Golf Hotel costs approximately 300 USD. There are more than 500 rooms and suites at the hotel, all of which were occupied for a five-month period by the RDR leadership and bankrolled by the ONUCI mission. Each day, the 1200 hotel residents were served three meals at the luxury restaurant. As one ONUCI staffer explained, “when the helicopters couldn’t fly, sometimes we didn’t get appetizers or dessert. Or sometimes we were required to eat African food.”<fnref n="126" /> Less than one third of the money donors contributed to the UN for humanitarian assistance actually made it to service delivery NGOs on the ground (Varenne 2012).<fnref n="127" /> The cost of maintaining the Republic of the Golf may help explain why the humanitarian funds were so inefficiently spent.

Gbagbo and his clan took refugee just a few blocks away from the Golf in the Presidential

<footnote n="125">¹²⁵ At the Golf Hotel in Abidjan, RDR politicians and other high-ranking personnel came and went from the tiny Republic thanks to multiple daily UN helicopter flights. To compete with Gbagbo's state-controlled radio and television, the ONUCI brought three tons of radio equipment by helicopter to create a pro-ADO radio station direct from the Golf via French satellite (Onana 2011). Only marabouts and the Red Cross could cross through the security line surrounding the hotel. Sex workers were also permitted to enter, as explained by a former pro-Gbagbo security director who relied heavily on these women to bring back insider information about happenings inside the Golf (Interview with anonymous ex-security official, June 2015)</footnote>

<footnote n="126">¹²⁶ The UN paid for the rental of the entire Golf over the full five-month period. These and other war costs were in part covered with loans from the French, now being repaid by taxes and customs on exports (Interview with anonymous ONUCI staff, August 2015). It is further rumored however unconfirmed that Côte d'Ivoire is also repaying the UN for the cost of the hotel during the Republic of the Golf.</footnote>

<footnote n="127">¹²⁷ The three men in charge - Soro, ADO and Bédié - are wealthy businessmen and political elites. The city could not get food, medications or petrol during this period while the three RDR leaders were using UN humanitarian aid to pay for their luxury hotel rooms and dinners. Moreover, as a political leader, Soro financially benefited from the violence. During the war, Soro made 15 billion CFA for his own use and worked with a budget of 50 billion CFA from the central bank of the rebellion (the following chapter has further details on the rebellion's financial structure) (Varenne 2012).</footnote>
Palace. As self-proclaimed President, Gbagbo still enjoyed wide support within the security forces. He ordered the troops stationed across Côte d'Ivoire to pull back to Abidjan and defend his residence. This left civilians in rural areas and in poorer Abidjan neighbourhoods at the mercy of the invading *force nouvelles*. With the Republic of the Golf and the Presidential Palace both heavily militarized, the chicest corner of Abidjan entered an armed stalemate.

### 4.5.1. Breaking Gbagbo

The international community put their faith in Ouattara's leadership. As journalist Leslie Varenne wrote, "the image of ADO abroad is that of a brilliant technocrat, humane and concerned for the well-being of his people" (Varenne 2012). Alassane Ouattara had a "black book full of all the important numbers" and called on his wide network for both military and diplomatic assistance in unseating Gbagbo.<fnref n="128" /> President Sarkozy leveraged France's seat on the Security Council to push through a series of resolutions that allowed the French Licorne battalion to orchestrate military operations against Gbagbo's stronghold. Also amongst Ouattara's associates in the diplomatic community, he was close friends with the Director General of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and with Robert Zoellick of the World Bank.<fnref n="129" /> The Golf was thus able to use its network of influential international allies to attempt breaking Gbagbo by both military means and by cutting off the flow of finances and goods to Côte d'Ivoire. Though still president in the eyes of much of the Ivorian population, Gbagbo soon found himself without

<footnote n="128">128 Former Director at Ministry of the Interior in interview with author, Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, April 2015</footnote>

<footnote n="129">129 From 2004-2008 the World Bank blocked Côte d'Ivoire from external funding, putting the condition that no further loans would be made available until a resolution to the civil war and occupation was reached (Piguead, 2015, 65).</footnote>
allies in the international community and with dwindling support on the African continent.

In January 2011, the EU imposed sanctions on eleven economic entities including the Port of Abidjan and San Pédro, the national oil company (PETROCI), the national energy provider (SIR), the electricity company (CIE), the National Bank and Agricultural Bank (the BIN and BFA), the cacao and rubber producers' associations, and the national broadcasting station (RTI). Although these actions limited Gbagbo's governing capacity, they failed to dislodge him from the Presidential Residence. The tactic instead punished average Ivorians for the belligerence of their political leaders. In particular, blocking Ivorian ports meant no medication could be delivered to a country caught in a protracted civil war.<fnref n="130" /> When the blockade failed to budge Gbagbo, the French and US diplomatic community mobilized their allies in Western governments and major international companies in an attempt to financially squeeze Gbagbo out of power. Together, the coalition of international finance groups closed all banks in Côte d'Ivoire.<fnref n="131" /> The bank closures severed the population from their savings, deepening chaos and misery in the streets, but again doing little to dislodge Gbagbo. Once again, it was the average Ivorian who suffered while both leaderships remained locked away in their palaces.

<footnote n="130">¹³⁰ Nearly every Ivorian I have spoken with about living through this period can name at least one close friend or relative who died or suffered debilitating illness during this period due to the blockade on medical supplies. Amongst my close work associates, one colleague lost two sisters, both from easily treated tropical diseases and another lost his older brother, a man who suffered from polio as a child and depended on regular medication to survive.</footnote>

<footnote n="131">¹³¹ To overcome the financial conundrum, Gbagbo allowed most banks to remain closed but nationalized the BCICI and used it as the new national treasury. Just like the rebellion did a decade before, Gbagbo also emptied the BCEAO (Banque centrale des états de l'Afrique de ouest) and used the funds to pay government salaries and other state bills. Presumably, he also topped up his military capacity by whatever means possible. Although the blockade made it difficult to import weapons, Gbagbo likely brought weapons over land thanks to allies in Liberia and Sierra Leone.</footnote>
## 4.6. Gbagbo's Crimes Against Humanity<fnref n="132" />

### 4.6.1. The RTI Radio Protest

In December 2010, Ouattara was officially president but Gbagbo still controlled the national broadcasting stations (RTI) that serviced the public airwaves and the state TV station. Gbagbo's control over public discourse left the Golf at a major disadvantage. Up against a master demagogue with exclusive access to the national media, the Golf Republic's first priority was breaking Gbagbo's propaganda machine. To complete this task, Guillaume Soro planned a march of thousands of supporters who would together descend on the radio station and take control of the RTI.

The December 16, 2010 march was never intended as a peaceful affair. The marchers were instructed to assemble at the Golf Hotel. From there, accessing the RTI radio station meant passing the Presidential Palace and thus crossing the heavily armed FDS defense line. Moreover, the RTI was itself defended by military personnel who would not simply abandon the broadcasting station to protesters.<fnref n="133" /> Neither Ouattara nor Soro, nor any other member of the high command at the Golf joined the marchers.<fnref n="134" /> Testimony before the ICC from a former police

<footnote n="132">132 Note that the ICC charges against Gbagbo were associated with four incidents however I have included details on only three. The fourth incident was a case of collective rape of Dioula women by FDS security forces. This final charge is not included here because I could not find information on the event or any informants with knowledge of the incident. This should not, however, cast doubt the veracity of the victims' claims.</footnote>

<footnote n="133">133 To reduce the risk of confrontation, the French, American and Japanese ambassadors offered to participate in the march with ADO and Soro, under the assumption that the FDS forces would not risk the potential consequences of firing on prominent members of the international community. Ouattara refused their participation.</footnote>

<footnote n="134">134 ADO abandoned the hotel to stay in the ONUCI headquarters for the duration of the march, only returning afterwards for a photo session in the hotel gardens with Soro (Varenne, 2012).</footnote>
commander confirms that *force nouvelle* members were interspersed throughout the protestors,
ostensibly for protection, since the planned march would confront a fully equipped army.<fnref n="135" />

Although accounts disagree regarding on who fired first, before the march even began, the Golf
defenses exchanged fire from their heavy weapons with the FDS army.<fnref n="136" /> Regardless of who
initiated the shots, sending protestors into enemy lines immediately following rocket fire
between two fully armed militaries produced predictable results.<fnref n="137" />

Although there was never a real possibility that the marchers would take the national radio
station from the FDS forces, the plan guaranteed a high civilian casualty rate. At the international
level, this spoke much louder than any broadcast ever could. ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno
Ocampo, a long-time friend of Ouattara, reacted immediately to the event. Within hours of the
confrontation, Ocampo released an indictment against Gbagbo for war crimes. A response so
rapid gives the impression he was informed prior to the march that ‘crimes against humanity’
were about to happen. Years later, standing before the ICC, Gbagbo and his defense team

<footnote n="135">135 As witness before the ICC, an ex-commander of the FDS Commando in Abobo (a man of northern origins who later deserted Gbagbo's forces to change sides) says he received no instructions regarding the march on the RTI. He heard there were ‘disruptions’ happening and was informed that there was total confusion and a human barrage made by the military to stop the march. In his version of events, the military took fire from amongst the civilian protesters and then responded in kind (Dubruelh 2016e). In a contrasting account, a witness from amongst the marchers told the ICC that the police arrived on the scene and fired on the marchers with automatic weapons. He presents a video taken from his iphone as evidence however the court affirms that it impossible to tell from the video who is shooting at whom (Dubruelh 2016g).</footnote>

<footnote n="136">¹³⁶ Radio France already reported the firing of heavy weapons on protesters before the RTI march had started (Colibasanu 2010).</footnote>

<footnote n="137">¹³⁷ A further witness for the prosecution at the ICC surprisingly claimed that the provocations had indeed come from within the marcher and were fired by FDS militants who were planted there by the Gbagbo regime. The statement was the first to claim that there were shots fired from within ADO’s ranks, let alone state that those shots preempted fire from the FDS. That witness later retracted the statement, claiming he misremembered and there was in fact no sign of provocation from amongst the protesters (Dubruelh 2016c).</footnote>
maintain that the march was a deployed as human shield, intentionally sending civilians into enemy fire with the goal of stirring outrage amongst international onlookers (Panaite 2016).

### 4.6.2. The Abobo Women's March

On March 3, 2011, between two to three thousand Abobo mothers took to the street crying “Gbagbo Dégage” (‘Gbagbo Get Out!’). The crowd of women met at the Banco roundabout, an intersection that serves as a gateway into the notorious neighbourhood of Abobo ‘la guerre’. This assembly point ensured their path would cross the FDS tanks leaving the commando camp on their daily tour to the gendarme base at Agban (Varenne 2012). The marchers circled the roundabout in the opposite direction from the tanks, meeting the FDS forces head-on. As the women came face-to-face with the tank column, shots were fired and panic ensued. Seven women were found dead in the aftermath of the attack and at least two others died from injuries.<fnref n="138" />

A witness explained the details as follows,

“At first we did not want to join. Abobo was in an open war at that point and marching would clearly be dangerous. But the Golf reassured us saying *Fognons* (the ‘Commando Invisible’) would secure the march, and we had complete confidence in them. The Golf also told us that ONUCI would be there. That’s why we went in all confidence, dressed in our boubous. We felt so secure that one woman marched with her baby on her back. She

<footnote n="138">¹³⁸ A cellphone video was widely circulated after the attack showing women lying in the street, supposedly dead, then getting up and speaking with a cameraman. ADO supporters insist the footage is a propaganda piece created by Gbagboist. Regardless of the veracity of the video, its existence remains a source of deep resentment for Gbagbo supporters who consider it clear proof that the Abobo women's march was staged for foreign media.</footnote>
died, but no one ever mentioned the child.” (Varenne 2012)

The leaders of the Commando Invisible later claimed they had no idea the march would take
place. When they got word that a protest was forming near the route of the FDS tanks, they
hurried to the site and tried to send the women home. The roundabout was not under their control
and was a guaranteed site of confrontation (ibid). Testifying before the ICC, the former
commander of the FDS insists that his elements responded to shots sent from around the women
and did not fire on the protestors themselves.<fnref n="139" />

Marchers allege that young men from the RDR collected six bodies and took them from the
scene (Varenne 2012). The bodies were buried in unmarked graves in a location unknown to
their relatives. The seventh woman's body was taken immediately by her family and buried the
next day.<fnref n="140" /> Refusing to take responsibility for firing on the women, Gbagbo demanded an
international inquiry to exhume the bodies and conduct autopsies, which ONUCI denied.<fnref n="141" /> The
following year, when ICC representatives arrived to investigate Gbagbo's war crimes, they did
not meet with the families of the dead even though the Abobo Mother's March was one of only
four accusations made by the court against the former President.<fnref n="142" />

<footnote n="139">¹³⁹ Speaking as a witness at the ICC, an ex-FDS reported his elements fired only after receiving fire from hidden element around the group of women (Dubruelh 2016f).</footnote>

<footnote n="140">¹⁴⁰ Witnesses further contend that the women who were shot took bullets in their backs yet the marchers were facing the FDS forces head on when the shots were fired. According to protesters and Commando members present, the shots came from the Mobil gas station, about 400 meters from the roundabout. Moreover, the cartridges collected by the Commando Invisible were 12,7 millimeters while Gbagbo's army is equipped with Russian guns that use 14 millimeters. The smaller caliber bullets were issued by the French military. While all of this is questionable evidence based on witness testimony, the details do raise questions about what really took place (Varenne 2011).</footnote>

<footnote n="141">¹⁴¹ Despite the chaos of this period, ONUCI was still enforcing procedures for the transport and autopsy of assassinated persons.</footnote>

<footnote n="142">¹⁴² Director of PK18 victim association in interview with author Abobo, Côte d'Ivoire, May 2015.</footnote>
4.6.3. The Market Shelling

A week later, on March 17, three missiles were fired on a busy market in Abobo. During the attack twenty people lost their lives and 60 others suffered severe injuries. At the ICC, Gbagbo's defense lawyer noted that a court in Côte d'Ivoire had already acquitted Gbagbo of the bombardment on the market for lack of evidence (Panaite 2016c). Gbagbo's lawyers further requested the UN Secretary General launch an independent inquiry into the market shelling in Abobo, insisting the information presented before the ICC was inaccurate (Stratfor 2011).

In the period of chaos following the election, most civilian deaths took place in the context of urban guerrilla warfare, making it difficult to demonstrate the direct responsibility of high-level military and government officials for civilian death. In contrast, the Abobo market shelling was an attack on a crowded civilian area with no strategic value beyond causing suffering in a pro-Ouattara neighbourhood. In international law, this has much more weight than murder committed under the shroud of guerrilla warfare. Both Gbagbo's *galaxie patriotique* and Ouattara's rebellion committed many attacks on civilians.<fnref n="143" /> In comparison to widespread and horrific executions by 'braising' and machetes, the market shelling was a relatively less traumatic event than many everyday occurrences during the period. The number of dead or nature of death are not the pertinent point, however. The Abobo market attack was significant to the ICC because the use of heavy weapons required approval from the *État major*, meaning Gbagbo or a high-ranking member of his leadership team must have ordered the strike. As such,

<footnote n="143">¹⁴³ For example, Human Rights Watch documented the killing of 37 West African immigrants by a pro-Gbagbo militia in a village in the West on March 22, 2011 (Papic 2011).</footnote>
the market shelling was potential evidence of Gbagbo's direct responsibility for civilian deaths.<fnref n="144" />

Gbagbo's lawyers insist that during the attack on the market, his FDS forces were engaged in urban warfare against the Commando Invisible, a guerrilla militia led by none-other than the notorious Commander IB. <fnref n="145" /> Colonel Edouard Kouaho Amichia, as witness before the ICC, explained that numerous armed groups were attacking the FDS Republican Guard in March 2011, including the RHDP youth, Commando Invisibles and the joint rebels forces (Ivoire Justice 2016b). During these confrontations, the Commando Invisible were armed with kalashnikovs and anti-tank weaponry, and operated from within crowded urban areas in Abobo (ibid). The FDS forces, therefore, insist the market was bombed because they were engaged in an urban guerilla war with unclear targets, and not as a direct attack civilians.

Whatever the motivations, the Abobo market attack was indeed an assault on civilians and, as such, was a war crime committed by the Gbagbo leadership. In acknowledging that, it is important to note a double standard applied by the ICC given the actions of the pro-ADO forces and international peacekeepers during the same period. The comportment of *force nouvelles* and

<footnote n="144">¹⁴⁴ A defected officer from the FDS explained to the ICC that using mortar required permission from the 'état major' (Ivoire Justice 2016c). The attack on the market was done with obustier cannons, as was made clear by the multiple bullet like wounds seen in victims' bodies. According to military personnel interviewed by the author, these cannons can be operated either from long distances or short (ranging from 30kms to a few meters) and are operated by 7 to 10 people, however fewer people can operate them with less accuracy. More significantly, although these weapons require a high level of approval, in an active threat environment, "authorization to fire a cannon can come from below the general officer level, potentially brigade or battalion level". While the prosecution argues that the weapons were fired from the camp command center with Gbagbo's knowledge, these details on potential firing distance and chain of command suggest that many possible military scenarios could have resulted in the attack on the market.</footnote>

<footnote n="145">¹⁴⁵ As a military strategy, the Commando Invisible would create barricades and burn tires to attract the FDS then hide in the urban squalor of Abobo. When the FDS arrived, they would attack from their hiding places. By January 2011, Abobo was in the hands of the rebels from all corners, excepting only the state held military camp (Ivoire Justice 2016c). Gbagbo aligned Colonel Edouard Kouaho Amichia explained to the ICC that they were simultaneously facing unnamed armed groups, RHDP youth, Commando Invisibles and FRCI rebels in March, 2011 (Dubruelh 2016a).</footnote>
its various militia units is discussed at length in the following section. As regards the joint
foreign mission, witnesses report that the UN and French also used heavy weapons against
civilian targets. Notably the foreign forces launched an attack on the university residences where
segments of Gbagbo's *galaxie patriotique* were based.<fnref n="146" /> Although many students had fled at this
point, the residences were still home to those with no safer place to go or who were unable to
flee the city centre before the barrages went up. Interviewees who were in the residences during
the attack allege that, following the air strikes, French forces shot and killed civilians trying to
escape the buildings.

Like the other charges listed above, the Abobo market attack was a crucial moment in the
campaign to overthrown Gbagbo. The use of heavy weaponry against civilians was a prerequisite
to securing Security Council approval for direct military intervention. Until these criteria were
met, the joint foreign mission's mandate did not allow direct military support to Ouattara. In
March 2011, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt were on the brink of revolutions later characterized as the
Arab Spring. In comparison, the woes of 21 million Ivorians were all but forgotten at the
Security Council. After months of relative obscurity, the market bombardment refocused the
attention of the world's top diplomats back on the Ivorian crisis. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-
Moon invoked the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), stating that the Ivorian crisis triggered an
international responsibility to intervene in Côte d'Ivoire for the protection of civilians (Ipinyomi
2012). China and Russia agreed to change their stance and vote at the Security Council in favour
of a 'humanitarian intervention' aimed at ousting Gbagbo.<fnref n="147" /> The resulting UN Resolution 1975

<footnote n="146">¹⁴⁶ FESCI leadership in hiding, in interview with author Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, December 2015.</footnote>

<footnote n="147">¹⁴⁷ India and China expressed their discomfort, stating for the record, “... United Nations peacekeepers... cannot be made instruments of regime change. Accordingly, the United Nations Operation in Côte d'Ivoire (UNOCI) should not become a party to the Ivorian political stalemate. UNOCI should also not get involved in a civil war, but carry</footnote>
henceforth granted the ONUCI and the French supporting mission permission to destroy
Gbagbo's heavy weapons and take control of the Presidential Palace (Ipinyomi 2012). With that
new mandate, ONUCI transformed from a peacekeeping mission into a regime change operation
(Bellamy and Williams 2012).

4.7. Taking the West

By mid-March 2011, Ouattara could boast support from all major international institutions, but
he presided over a territory roughly the size of a golf course. Months after the contested election,
Gbagbo still controlled the media, the army, the main urban centers and retained a significant
civilian support base. ADO announced to the international media that he would end the stalemate
by calling "a million people into the streets". Yet the mass uprising never followed. Even the
neighbourhoods most devoted to Ouattara did not come out in his defense. Presumably exhausted
from years of war, the civilians of Abidjan were unwilling to once again see friends and relatives
die 'cadeau' (for nothing) in the endless and bloody power struggles of their leaders. To make
matters worse, Ouattara was a technocrat by training and did not demonstrate the zeal and
decisiveness of the revolutionary leader his international supporters and rebel allies had
presumed him to be.¹⁴⁸ It was becoming clear this stalemate would not resolve itself. The
coalition of foreign diplomats and RDR leaders who together comprised The Republic of the
Golf needed a new solution.

Following the shelling of the Abobo market, the ONUCI and French joint military mission now

<footnote>out its mandate with impartiality and while ensuring the safety and security of peace- keepers and civilians"
(Bellamy and Williams 2012).</footnote>
had a mandate to support regime change. It did not, however, have the authority nor the troops
needed to mount this operation on ADO's behalf. The Golf Republic needed to greatly expand
its army if it was going to take the country from Gbagbo and his supporters by force. Initially,
the Golf put out a call for additional recruits in Abobo and the occupied northern areas where the
rebellion had originally built their ranks. This time the response was tepid, especially from the
northern communities. Over the last ten years these areas had suffered under the ComZone rule
and gained little in return from their self-styled liberators.

A new recruitment call was sent to the West. As seen in the previous chapter, land and labour
are an endemic source of conflict in this region and have been for nearly a century. In most of the
country Ivorians experienced the civil war in short periods of intense conflict punctuated by long
lulls where citizens suffered from deprivation more than overt violence.<fnref n="149" /> The Western region,
in contrast, experienced ten years of sustained and escalating conflict.<fnref n="150" /> Over the years of
conflict, the chaos of civil war had turned long-standing land feuds into violent cycles of

<footnote n="149">¹⁴⁹ In part, the extreme violence bled over from a decade before when Houphouët-Boigny, motivated by personal investments in *heava* (brut rubber), equipped and backed Charles Taylor in his civil war against Samuel Doe. As my contact in the Ministry of Solidarity explained: “The Guere [Doe’s ethnic group and the traditional residents of the centre-West pro-Gbagboist region] in Liberia were not going to tolerate seeing a Yacouba [Taylor’s ethnic group and the traditional residents of the ADO allied Northwestern region] come kill their brothers and sisters once again. Many of them went to join as mercenaries. When the war started in Côte d’Ivoire a lot of Liberians came to avenge the destruction – to them, they saw the same war still continuing”. In interview with Director, Ministry for Solidary, Abidjan Côte d’Ivoire April 2015.</footnote>

<footnote n="150">¹⁵⁰ Attributing the most extreme acts of violence in Côte d’Ivoire as the excesses of Liberian mercenaries was a common refrain amongst former combatants on both sides. For example, an ICC witness admitted that killing Dioula and RHDP linked residents in Youpougon did occur, but claimed this was done only by mercenaries and by Liberians. He blames the extremes on the Liberians saying it was impossible for the leadership to control their excesses (Dubruelh 2016d). Having collected a significant number of victim testimony through work with the CDVR, I believe this is a slogan used to mask the shame and fear ex-combatants feel for their role in destroying the once thick social fabric of the region. Although the Liberian mercenary armies were without question an important element of the conflict, it is not the full story behind the extreme forms of violence seen in the West during the months of March through June 2011. Victim testimony makes it clear that the role of a spill over war is often overstated. In my view, the claim that Liberians were responsible for atrocities in the West is used to hide more than it explains about the Western campaign.</footnote>
revenge, with the *autochthone* and migrant populations expelling and killing one another in
turns. Eleven thousand young men were recruited from Western Dioula and Malinke
communities, only to be sent back into the West to invade the territories where they had grown
up alongside Krou villagers.<fnref n="151" /> In this recruitment campaign, the Golf Republic and its
international supporters formed an explicitly ethnic army, and then sent these poorly trained
recruits to attack villages in the country's most unstable region.

The expanded army was renamed the Force Republican du Côte d'Ivoire (FRCI) and was
founded under the direct command of Alassane Ouattara in April, 2011. Declaring the FRCI a
national army under an elected president meant the international coalition backing the military
were officially supporting a state organ rather than a rebel movement.<fnref n="152" /> The UN as well as the
US and French diplomatic corps were party to plans for the Western campaign from its first
conception. In his book *Scorpion et Crocodile*, French military historian Notin describes Soro
Guillaume presenting the assembled members of the international community his strategy for
invading the West within the first 24 hours of their arrival at the Golf in December 2010 (Notin
2013). These international representatives had full knowledge of the Golf's plan to attack the
country's most volatile region and helped recruit an ethnic army from that region to carry out the
operation.<fnref n="153" /> As Varenne put it, an "ethnically formed army was sent into the "powder keg" ...

<footnote n="151">151 The new *force nouvelle* army also included an additional 12,000 recruits committed by Burkina Faso, Mali and Senegal.</footnote>

<footnote n="152">152 Soro stepped aside to allow the amalgamation of the *force nouvelles* with defected FDS forces. The act gave the impression to outside onlookers that Ouattara was now commander of a coalition military, fighting against an isolated dictator and his few remaining supporters. My sources in the security services contend that the new FRCI army contained few defectors, and those who did switch sides, did so in secrecy (Interview by author with anonymous former security personnel, May 2015, Abidjan)</footnote>

<footnote n="153">153 These villages included Tabou, Duékoué, Petit Duékoué and Bloquein.</footnote>
the ONUCI knew, it was present and it did nothing” (2012).

A wave of civilian massacres spread across the West as the FRCI army took over the region. As an international consultant working with the CDVR, my primary role was to help organize child statement-taking sessions at the national truth commission. The most shocking thing that emerged from this testimony was a large body of evidence demonstrating systematic efforts to eradicate the Guéré communities in Western Côte d'Ivoire.<fnref n="154" /> In the region surrounding Duékoué and Bangolo, we collected accounts of FRCI and traditional hunters (known as Dozos) systematically raping children and burning families alive as collective punishment.<fnref n="155" /> Child testimonies described the FRCI actively seeking out men and boys for mass execution. Their testimonies included descriptions of their fathers, uncles and brothers being lined up and killed by Dozos and men in FRCI uniforms. Survivors and NGO staff described the massacre sites as “littered with personal identity cards”, a detail supporting the claim that the FRCI were systematically targeting ethnic Guéré men and boys.<fnref n="156" /> These statements are part of a significant body of evidence pointing to an ethnic cleansing campaign of the Guéré by the FRCI forces.

<footnote n="154">154 In some cases, Guéré families were burned alive in local churches, a death presumably chosen for its symbolic meaning in a war that – by this point in time – had taken on a religious dimension. It should be noted that leaders of the religious community on both sides, Muslims and Christians, were for large part vocal advocates of peaceful resolution during the Ivorian war. On numerous occasions, members of both sides took significant risks to help and protect civilians of all faiths. Interview with Human Rights NGO staff, Duékoué, Côte d'Ivoire, August 2015.</footnote>

<footnote n="155">155 As one social worker explained to me “there’s something sick left over here from the war. Duékoué has a problem with violence and especially with rape. We don’t understand. When I speak with the kids who come in, I’ve found that three quarters of them have been raped.” Director of a state-run social services center, Duékoué Côte d’Ivoire in interview with author August 2015.</footnote>

<footnote n="156">156 There are equally Dioula or Burkinabe witnesses who recall being forced to show their identity cards before a massacre perpetrated by Gbagboist during the ‘Crise’. The following testimony is a case in point: CDVR Affair N°79 – ‘On April 9 2011 people came asking for identity cards. After that, six women went towards my older son, they too also killed. My son’s life was saved by some money one of my daughters had with her. The seventh day of the ceremonies for my dead son. While I was with my daughter-in-law, two other girls where killed as was my daughter-in-law and co-wife. My own daughter came to hide in my room with me, they threw tear gas and began firing on us. My daughter has been blind since that day’” (See transcript of CDVR public hearings).</footnote>