Thursday, August 12, 2010

The Poor, The Pirates And The Ballerinas

# Dr Gary K. Busch
# August 10, 2010

On August 7th, the fiftieth anniversary of its independence, the politicians of the Ivory Coast announced that the oft-postponed national elections would take place on October 31, 2010. Unfortunately, for the large bulk of the Ivoirian population this election is a cruel joke. Elections are meant to resolve problems; to clarify the political power issues; to charge political victors and parties with the responsibilities for the programs they campaigned for during the election. In this election the parties do not have programs; half the country is occupied by a piratical rabble of failed soldiers; no disarmament of the rebels has effectively taken place; no legitimacy is ascribed to the voting rolls or the electoral process; the occupying French forces and their UN supporters dominate the security of the country; and the aged and fading political party ballerinas from the past refuse to allow younger, more agile, performers to take on the major roles. It is a shambles and fools no one.

The origin of the word ’idiot’ is from the ancient Greek. It originally meant a free-born Athenian citizen with the right to vote. Later usages of the word through the Romans and subsequent cultures depict an idiot as someone of low intellect and easily fooled. The citizens of the Ivory Coast are being treated as ‘idiots’ right now; despite the fact that they have the right to vote their political masters are treating them as if they were of low intellect and are busy spending their time trying to fool them. The political leaders assert that there can be a vote for a new President when there has been no reuniting of the country; no disarmament of the rebels; the continued occupation of their country by the French soldiers and the UN; no social programs in place; no promises of how change might be effected; nor on what basis the idiots can choose among several grotesquely uninspiring candidates for office; each with an appalling record of previous rule.

What no one seems to have addressed is the fundamental question of the reunification of the country in advance of the election. The rebellion split the country in 2002. The North, where the rebels live, has been governed by tin pot warlords with no semblance of any civic responsibility. There has been virtually no education taking place in the North. There are no banks. There are no hospitals. Taxes aren’t collected. Rents aren’t paid. Roads and schools crumble. On average about under half of Côte d’Ivoire’s 20 million people now live below the poverty threshold, on less than about US$1.25 per day; the worst level in 20 years. The biggest industry is taking products from the farmers and selling them abroad without any taxes, customs or revenue, and importing tax-free goods for sale in the North It is a piratical enterprise subsidised by the poor of the South who do pay for their government services and whose contributions keep the transport links, water and electric power flowing to a North whose occupied indigenes pay nothing but tribute to the warlords of their region. In a time of record cocoa prices the farm gate prices paid to the growers has not risen. The value added goes to the pirates of the North and to the faded prima donnas of the South who are parasites on major international industrial agribusinesses.

The imposed peace of Linas-Marcoussis left a divided country with armed troops facing each other over a dividing line. Despite major efforts to get the rebels (and indeed the loyal militias) to disarm it has been a sham and a pretence. The rebels have demanded to be integrated into a National Army they fought against and are even demanding back pay for the time they were traitorously attacking the same army. They have proposed integration as opposed to real disarmament. The politicians have suggested that integration of the forces is the same thing as disarmament. The integration of forces is not the same thing as disarmament. Disarmament is removing weapons from the hands of people who are not authorised to have them. This was made clear by General Gaston Houseman Kone, Coordinator of the PNDDR (the disarmament process). He emphasised that disarmament meant taking weapons from the hands of those who do not have the right to bear them.

This is not some abstruse formulation. In the war against the elected government of Gbagbo, the forces gathered in the various rebel groupings were illegally armed and were often formed from Liberian, Sierra Leonean, Burkinabe and Gabonese privateers seeking plunder, rape and mayhem. Troops from Burkina Faso were transported south in army trucks. The French flew in planeload after planeload of weapons, communications equipment and artillery for the rebels. Anybody over the age of twelve had some sort of weapon. They still have them. They made up the large band of ‘irregulars’ that constitute at least 80% of the New Forces. This is not an army; it is an armed mob. On the loyalist side as well there were ‘militias’ who armed themselves for protection and to seek to defeat the rebels who were attacking them. They, too, remain armed. At the various peace negotiations, from Linas-Marcoussis onwards, it was recognised that for peace to take place these groups must be disarmed. This is the main sticking point with the rebels and their spokesman, Soro (now the Prime Minister). The rebels will not disarm; they have baulked at every deadline; refused to honour every timetable for disarmament. It is a fact of the peace process. Even now they demand a heavy price for keeping the situation as it is. Military issues could again undermine efforts aimed at organizing the elections. In a recent meeting of the top domestic and foreign militaries in Yamoussoukro, the New Forces military commander Soumaila Bakayoko presented a budget for the disarmament program that runs into hundreds of billions of Francs CFA. Unless they receive this money they ‘cannot’ disarm’ they say.

This has had a major role in preventing the preparation of a proper voter’s roll so that elections could take place. There are many ‘no-go’ areas of the North where it has been impossible to adequately inspect the documents and the entitlement of thousands of people. Despite spending millions of francs of European aid through the French company, SAGEM, to prepare the voter’s roll the process has been an expensive shambles in which no one believes. There is growing concern about “phantom voters”

The problem with trying to rectify these problems is that there is a government which is at war with itself. After Linas-Marcoussis and the subsequent agreements since 2002, culminating in the Ouagadougou Agreement the Cabinet is made up of representatives from the legitimate parties of the past (FPI, PDCI, RDR, PIT) and a bunch of jumped up warlord rebel parties. Each has its own ministry or ministries at its disposal. The recent government reshuffle didn’t change much but the cast of characters. There is no Cabinet; there is competitive anarchy. These imposed Cabinet members draw hefty salaries and expenses and ride in chauffeur-driven cars as they plot the downfall of their Cabinet colleagues and the impoverishment of their fellow citizens. The National Assembly has not been elected since 2000 and many of the delegates are dead, dying or haven’t visited their constituencies in years. They present no hope for the populace.

Just there is lawless theft in the North the South is not much better. In the years since the rebellion the power brokers of the South have found an accommodation with the companies which thrive in the large rich harvests of cocoa and coffee. Even more importantly they have taken large pieces of the burgeoning oil and gas businesses which are expanding rapidly. A new refinery is being built. New pipelines are being connected. The rebels in the North have not had a chance to dine at those tables so feel that what they steal from the public purse is justified in comparison to what the Southern politicians are harvesting. The recent case of Desire Tagro’s dispensation of cash to the pilgrims, who was unsurprisingly found innocent, demonstrates the size of the political cash pot available. There are many fat cats in the South who are thriving on a divided country. They use the excuse of the occupation of the rebels in the North as a hunchback uses his hump as an excuse for everything that happens. Just as the rebels in the North are not likely to give up their piratical enterprises for a peace and national unity where they go back to being shoemakers and truck drivers; the fat cats of the South are not going to take the fast money from the business community and put that cash into roads, schools, electricity and hospitals. That is why the election is a sham.

The faded prima donnas like Bedie, Ouattara, Banny, Gbagbo and their ilk are no longer able to perform their pas de deux or arabesques penchée with any smoothness of motion. They are tired, played out and uninspiring. The only result of the election is to be ‘more of the same’. Putting the mark of the idiot alongside someone’s name is not going to change the Ivory Coast.

This begs the question of how this was allowed to happen and to thrive. Surely this was not what the people of the Ivory Coast wanted. The answer to the external question “Cui bono?” is the French. The system of the Pacte Coloniale set the scene for this state of learned dependence. The vultures of French business have returned en masse to the Ivory Coast. The French have conned the United Nations in supporting their military presence there. The death grip on the Ivory Coast finances of the CFA franc and the control of the economy by the French Treasury has made economic independence a sick and feeble joke. Nothing has changed very much in the fifty years of Ivory Coast’s independence except that local politicians have cut themselves into the action in the French exploitation and control of the country. There is a rude but accurate saying which originated in Argentina but which can be applied just as well to the Ivory Coast – “If shit had value, the poor would be born without assholes.”

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