Paul Collier - Wars, Guns, and Votes

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by Democracy in Dangerous Places (pdf)


  lage was the ideal symbol in a society divided by religion and ethnic-

  ity might, however, be questioned.

  156

  WARS, GUNS, AND VOTES

  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.

  Meltdown in Cote d’Ivoire

  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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  WARS, GUNS, AND VOTES

  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

  160

  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-

  162

  WARS, GUNS, AND VOTES

  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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