Forgotten World (236): Cote d’Ivoire
It’s time – it’s been almost three months – for one of the regular weeks of postings in my long-running series called Forgotten World – a look at parts of the world that too rarely feature in our media or thoughts. You can check the previous 235 entries here.
In recent months, the media has covered the civil war in Cote d’Ivoire but largely failed to explain its origins. It all goes back, as so many African problems do, to the achievement of independence – in this case, from France in 1960. For more than three decades after independence under the leadership of its first president, Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the country was conspicuous for its religious and ethnic harmony and its well-developed economy.
However, Houphouet-Boigny invited other Africans into the country, promising them that, if they cleared forest, the land was theirs to plant cocoa and other crops. As a result, by 1990 it was estimated that between and third and a half of the population had come from neighbouring countries, many of them Muslims from nations like Burkina Faso and Mali to the north.
When Houphouet-Boigny died in 1993, splits opened up between the mainly Muslim north and the mainly Christan south and an armed rebellion in 2002 effectively divided the nation in two. The latest manifestation of that divide came in the November 2010 presidential election when, in the view of the international community, the incumbent Laurent Gbagbo was defeated by the Muslim challenger Alassane Ouattara. Meanwhile the 20 million Ivorians are suffering the economic consequences of the protracted conflict.