lage was the ideal symbol in a society divided by religion and ethnic-
ity might, however, be questioned.
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The high-risk strategy nearly came off, but not quite: Cote
d’Ivoire is now regarded as one of the region’s least tractable devel-
opment disasters. Its transformation is a story of economic shocks,
elections, guns, wars, and coups. The meltdown started with a mis-
managed economic shock, was compounded by an election, followed
by a coup, which then escalated into a war, fueled by a scramble for
arms that induced the international community to impose an arms
embargo, which failed. Indeed, Cote d’Ivoire during a single decade
has all the events that this book is about. In what follows I have re-
lied heavily on the expertise of Jennifer Widner, a political scientist
at Princeton.
From independence until 1980, Cote d’Ivoire was a huge suc-
cess. Houphouët-Boigny aspired to build a strong economy through
a 1950s-style French model: strong state institutions supporting pri-
vate-sector growth. This strategy contrasted markedly with the pre-
vailing model of socialism. Indeed, at independence, the president of
neighboring Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, had challenged him to a wa-
ger that in ten years Ghana, with a standard socialist model, would
far surpass Cote d’Ivoire. Nkrumah lost: by the 1970s Ghana was in
a state of economic and political collapse, and he himself had been
ousted by a coup, whereas Cote d’Ivoire was stable and prosperous.
The core of the growth strategy was immigration: immigrants
were welcomed to come and cultivate cocoa on unused land. This
produced a tidal wave of immigration from Burkina Faso, the
landlocked, resource-scarce neighbor. By the 1980s an astounding
40 percent of the labor force was immigrant. Politically, the model
worked because Houphouët-Boigny gave immigrants some politi-
cal power and naturally won immigrant support. The quid pro quo
for native Ivorians was that cocoa was heavily taxed. The revenue
financed jobs in the civil service, and these went overwhelmingly to
locals. Potentially, the longer this system continued, the more stable
it would become: immigrants would become such a large bloc that
they would be essential.
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157
Since Houphouët-Boigny ran a one-party state, it looked as if
he could afford to play it long, but in the event, his risky strategy
was derailed by economic shocks. In 1980 the world price of cocoa
and coffee collapsed and the price of imported oil rocketed. The
ensuing economic crisis was partly met by borrowing: by 1993 debt
had accumulated to $15 billion. Even with this massive borrowing,
average incomes duly collapsed by around a third. Poverty soared.
The politics compounded these economic problems. The tax on
cocoa had been disguised as a price stabilization scheme: the price
was guaranteed, but at a level that had been below the world price.
As world cocoa prices fell to levels nobody had anticipated, the price
guarantee duly kicked in: the cocoa-producing immigrants were be-
ing subsidized instead of taxed! To keep the political deal in place
the civil service continued to expand, exacerbating the collapse of
the private economy. Whereas in 1980 half the urban workforce had
proper jobs, by the early 1990s three in four were scratching a living
informally: the urban poor were set to be a powerful political force.
As jobs dried up and incomes fell, young men were forced to con-
sider working the land. But by now the best land had been occupied
by immigrants.
By the early 1990s Houphouët-Boigny was well past any rea-
sonable sell-by date: he was an old man who had been in power for
more than thirty years. But he was tenacious for power. To maintain
his grip he created a highly confused situation concerning the suc-
cession. Then, in December 1993, he dropped dead. He had con-
structed confusion so brilliantly that he had become genuinely in-
dispensable: his death was not announced for at least a week because
rival contenders were battling it out. With no clear rules, whoever
got the crown was going to face continuing challenges. It was in-
evitable that some political aspirant would exploit the potential for
anti-immigrant sentiment. In the event, they all did so. Since by now
the economy was a disaster there was a desperate need for economic
reform, but any payoff was already mortgaged to repay debt.
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The politics went wrong in discrete steps. Henri Konan Bédié
became the president, but Alassane Ouattara, who had been the
prime minister, had the stronger economic credentials. There was
immediately a massive economic shock: the common West African
currency was devalued by 50 percent, creating a powerful redistri-
bution of income. The big losers were civil servants, whose wages
were eroded. Since the civil servants had less to spend, those scratch-
ing a living in informal urban activities were also hit. In any devalu-
ation the big beneficiaries are exporters: in Cote d’Ivoire this meant
the immigrant cocoa farmers. The devaluation also launched an aid
boom, essentially as a reward. Aid suddenly spiked from around
7 percent of income to more than 20 percent, and growth at last
started to pick up. The new Bédié government thus started with
both an opportunity and a crisis. The opportunity was economic re-
covery, but the crisis was a precarious mandate and a political pow-
der keg of anti-immigrant sentiment. The very policy that opened
the growth possibilities radically accentuated the political problem.
Bédié had beaten his ambitious and technocratic rival, Ouat-
tara. Unfortunately, they did not manage to achieve the harmonious
relations that in Britain Tony Blair achieved with the gracious per-
sonality of his defeated technocratic rival, Gordon Brown. Instead,
after four months Ouattara left to a top job at the IMF and became
the prince over the water. Since Ouattara was from the north and
Bédié from the more populous center of the country, Bédié decided
to play heavily upon the politics of identity. However, the first politi-
cian to play the anti-immigrant card was Gbagbo, a minor politician
from an area where immigrants occupied much of the cocoa-grow-
ing land. Bédié followed suit, reversing the ruling party’s political
position by 180 degrees. One big advantage of the reversal was that
Ouattara, being a northern Muslim, could be cast as an immigrant
and declared to be a noncitizen. To make sure, Bédié changed the
constitution to disenfranchise Ouattara as a candidate from the next
elections.
Meltdown in Cote d’Ivoire
159
As the 1995 polls approached, it was evident that no opposition
politician other than Ouattara could command a significant share of
the vote. Gbagbo avoided ignominious defeat by declining to stand
and persuaded the gulli
ble Ouattara-linked party to join him in boy-
cotting the polls. Both opposition parties formed militias to enforce
the vote boycott: recall that electoral violence tends to be the strategy
of the opposition. By default, Bédié won in an election widely per-
ceived to be unfair. By emphasizing identity, Bédié ignited a powder
keg. Antipathy toward immigrants intensified as the political press
broadcast highly inflammatory reports of unfairness of one com-
munity toward another. The president forged ahead with a policy to
remove many northerners from positions in government.
Economic retrenchment and Bédié’s pursuit of identity politics
conspired to irritate the military. In the country’s heyday the security
forces were well paid but small: following the standard precaution-
ary arrangements, it was divided into several branches: there were
eight thousand gendarmes, sixty-eight hundred soldiers, eleven
hundred in the presidential guard, nine hundred in the navy, and
seven hundred in the air force. Even in the Houphouët era there had
been a few coup attempts. In 1990 army troops had seized the air-
port outside Abidjan and mutinied to secure better pay. A general
named Gueï had intervened and negotiated an end to the mutiny,
being rewarded with promotion to chief of staff.
Gueï initially continued as chief of staff after Bédié’s acces-
sion to the presidency, but there was little trust between them: the
armed forces were disproportionately drawn from communities
outside Bédié’s ethnic base. Gueï refused requests from Bédié to ar-
rest Ouattara and to put down electoral violence in Abidjan. Bédié
naturally got scared of the army. He was in a difficult position: recall
the dilemma, reduce it, or buy it off? He decided to reduce it, but
gradually, by salami slicing. He started by dismissing General Gueï
along with seven hundred soldiers.
What of the prince over the water? Objectively, Ouattara’s best
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WARS, GUNS, AND VOTES
prospects of ousting Bédié were if the economy continued to un-
ravel. Once reforms were launched, the fate of the economy was
seen as being in the hands of the IMF. Astoundingly, Ouattara was
now number three in the IMF, creating an acute perceived conflict
of interest.
Economic reforms were massively redistributing income to
immigrants at a time when immigrants were inevitably hugely
unpopular. Politicians were bound to play the opportunistic anti-
immigrant card. The regime’s reformers were boxed in by the po-
litical priority of Bédié, which was to weaken Ouattara. Frustrated
by the slow pace of reform, the IMF, the French Treasury, and the
World Bank all came to the view that Ouattara was the solution
to the problem: aid was rapidly curtailed. Within the government
there was an understandable perception that these institutions were
playing for regime change.
I recall in late 1999 speaking in Cote d’Ivoire at one of the sur-
real occasions that the development agencies love to sponsor: a con-
ference on good governance. With sublime incongruity it was pre-
sided over by President Bédié. Sure enough, it did not take long for
governance to get decidedly worse.
Bédié’s manipulations to maintain power generated the sec-
ond discrete step in the move toward civil war: a military coup. On
Christmas Eve, 1999, about 750 Ivorian troops mutinied over unpaid
bonuses. A group of senior military officers went to see President
Bédié to demand higher spending on the army. He fobbed them off,
telling them to come back the following week. Instead they came
back later that day and deposed him. Whether General Gueï was
behind the coup from the start or brought in to legitimize an other-
wise desperate situation is unclear. In any event, the former general
assumed control and transformed the mutiny into a bloodless coup.
Gueï promised fresh elections within six months.
Recall the French security guarantee for Francophone Africa.
Prior to Rwanda, any coup attempt in Cote d’Ivoire that had got out
Meltdown in Cote d’Ivoire
161
of hand would have been put down by French troops. But on this
occasion the French chose not to intervene. Gueï convincingly posed
as offering a neutral brief interlude of clean-up: this was the surgical
strike. Perhaps for a few weeks he even meant it. From this point on
a rapid political sequence took the society to civil war.
Once Gueï was in power everything rapidly began to unravel.
He indeed stuck to the commitment to hold elections within six
months. However, once in power he realized that he had a natural
proclivity for the job of president that it would be wrong to deny the
nation. So he decided that he himself should be a candidate. From
Gueï’s perspective, however, elections posed a problem. Although
his talents were evident to himself, there was no great upwelling of
voter support: the country was polarized between those who wanted
Ouattara to be president and those who wanted Bédié back. For-
tunately, Bédié himself had demonstrated how to deal with such a
difficulty. Gueï declared them both to be ineligible, securing agree-
ment from his handpicked Supreme Court, which, having got the
hang of it, also ruled out a further twelve candidates.
Had he looked to the role model of President General Abacha
of Nigeria he might have been spared his one blunder: Abacha had
pioneered a multiple-party election in which each of the five parties
chose Abacha as its candidate. Sadly, Abacha had died before be-
ing able to contest his planned election against himself. Being less
imaginative, Gueï decided that he ought to have an opponent. He
accepted the kind offer of Laurent Gbagbo, the sure loser, to run
against him so as to legitimize his victory. In doing so Gueï made the
classic error of dictators, an overestimation of how much his people
loved him. Most people did not bother to vote in this sham election,
but among those who did, most voted for Gbagbo.
Normally even this inconvenience would not have derailed an
incumbent president, let alone one who ran the army. The purpose
of an election was to anoint the incumbent with the magic oil of
democracy, not to choose a president. Sure enough, Gueï simply de-
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clared himself the winner and disbanded the electoral commission.
Evidently we should regard this as a further coup.
However, Gueï’s truly serious miscalculation was to overes-
timate not his votes but his firepower. Gbagbo had massively ex-
panded his armed militia, the Young Patriots, financed by President
Compaoré of Burkina Faso, who was annoyed by the xenophobic
policies that Gueï, in a policy turnaround, had swiftly embraced. In
response to the coup attempt, Gbagbo deployed his militia of violent
and disaffected youth against the army. Normally a gang of youths
versus a professional army would not stand much chance, but the
&
nbsp; army had been purely decorative and very small: it had never ex-
pected to fight and was not prepared to do so. It was also divided:
indeed, some of its officers had already attempted a further coup
against him. Gueï had responded by gutting the army that Bédié had
already been salami slicing. As a result, within the narrow confines
of central Abidjan the militias were able to outfight the army. They
also turned on northerners living in the capital, dumping bodies of
those they killed in the lagoon. Gbagbo came to power through the
mixture of an illegitimate election and a rebel uprising.
Under the circumstances it might have been reasonable to
restage the elections, as both Bédié and Ouattara duly requested.
However, since Gbagbo would have been heavily defeated against
either of the major politicians, he had no interest in holding a fair
election. He used his party connections with the French socialist
government, which duly recognized his victory. As president, his
continued survival in power depended upon avoiding a further elec-
tion. This in turn depended on the situation becoming and remain-
ing sufficiently perturbed that elections could not be held. In 2001
there was the first of thirteen internationally brokered efforts at rec-
onciliation, all of which failed.
Having managed to lose an election even against his hand-
picked opponent, Gueï had only one route back to power, for which
he had evidently acquired a taste. Sure enough, in September 2002
Meltdown in Cote d’Ivoire
163
he staged a comeback coup. Several hundred soldiers participated in
attacks in Abidjan, Bouaké, and Korhogo, with Gueï in charge of
the Abidjan rebellion. In Abidjan the coup failed: again, within the
confines of street warfare, Gueï’s army was no match for Gbagbo’s
militia, and Gueï himself was killed along with his family. The re-
bellious soldiers retreated north to Bouaké and Korhogo.
Within a week of the failed coup attempt, the soldiers who had
rallied around Gueï were joined by an array of excluded politicians.
They quickly seized towns in the north and center of the country,
calling themselves the Forces Nouvelles (FN). The third, failed coup
attempt thus evolved into a rebellion and hence into civil war.
Outside urban areas a conventional army with heavy equip-
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