In Ivory Coast,
French Muscle Plays
A Peaceful Role
Long Leery of African Wars,
Paris Secures Accord
With Troops, Diplomacy
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
SOUAPLEU, Ivory Coast -- When Capt. Loic Girard first drove through this forest hamlet in July, there was no one in sight. For several months this year, the people of Souapleu hid in the jungle, as the area was ravaged by fighting between government forces and rebels. Gunmen on both sides massacred thousands of people across the country.
But as Capt. Girard's French military patrol rolled by Souapleu's thatched mud huts in late August, dozens of half-naked children poured out to clap and sing. Village elders were waiting with a ritual meal. French troops had silenced the guns and had helped avert a bloodbath of the kind that engulfed neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia.
The French mission in Ivory Coast, a jungle-covered land three-quarters the size of Iraq, nearly collapsed at several points. Paris's pressure tactics at the bargaining table brought a quick accord but bred resentment in Ivory Coast. Criticism at home mounted as the military commitment rose to 4,000 soldiers, four times the initial contingent. Operational costs soared to an estimated $30 million a month for a country struggling to meet European Union strictures on budget deficits. This month, some lawmakers tried to slash government requests for additional military funding.
The tentative calm that France finally achieved came from a combination of better soldiers, superior weapons and tough diplomacy. While killing hundreds of Ivorians, the French troops have lost only two men during the operation. For several months now they have maintained a demilitarized "confidence zone" between the warring sides that has helped prevent a resumption of war.
After nearly a decade in which Western powers have largely refused to deal with trouble spots in Africa, France's operation offers a rare example of a Western nation pouring considerable resources and taking political risks to rescue an imploding African country.
"The lesson of Ivory Coast is how quickly a country can bounce back with the deployment of a small but disciplined force," says Alex Vines, head of the Africa program at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London and a United Nations expert on Liberia. Sporadic fighting resumed in Liberia following the departure this month of a small U.S. contingent.
Africa was all but abandoned by the world's wealthy nations after the 1993 U.S. debacle in Somalia and the failure to stop Rwanda's genocide the following year. But as dozens of African countries descended into strife during the past decade, and U.N. missions staffed by troops from the developing world proved helpless in Angola, Congo and Sierra Leone, it became clear that only first-rate Western military powers could stem the bloodletting.
Britain led the way by sending a small force into Sierra Leone to end its civil war in 2000. Then came last year's actions by France in Ivory Coast and the U.S.'s actions in Liberia this summer. Unlike France, the Pentagon didn't send soldiers for combat in Liberia but only to provide logistical support and air cover for a Nigerian-led peacekeeping force. About 200 U.S. Marines operated in Liberia for two weeks.
The new interest isn't dictated by compassion alone. In a post-Sept. 11 world, failed states in this region, with its oil and Muslim-Christian tensions, can easily become breeding grounds for terrorists who target the West.
Close Links
Ivory Coast, West Africa's economic powerhouse and a magnet for mostly Muslim economic migrants from across the region, maintained close links with France even after gaining independence in 1960. The country was an anchor of stability and prosperity for three decades, until that image was shattered by coups and rising strife after the death of its founding president, Felix Houphouet-Boigny, in 1993.
French Army Capt. Guillaume Ponchin (left) and an Ivorian rebel commander, Adjutant S. Bakayeko.
Tensions between the Christian-led government of President Laurent Gbagbo and Muslim northerners boiled over on the night of Sept. 19, 2002, when gunfire broke out in the capital of Abidjan. In previous months, the government had sought to label many northerners, including the main opposition leader, as foreign migrants rather than genuine Ivorian citizens. Thousands of these Muslims were stripped of Ivorian identity documents at police checkpoints and deprived of jobs. Muslims make up about half of the nation's population.
The previously unknown rebel movement was well-organized and staffed by many Muslim officers who faced dismissal from the ranks as part of the government's new cleansing campaign. After a night of street battles, these rebels failed to overthrow Mr. Gbagbo in a coup or to capture Abidjan. But they quickly seized much of Ivory Coast's north, including the country's second-largest city, Bouake, home to a major army base and ammunition depot.
The uprising jolted France. About 25,000 French citizens lived in Ivory Coast, and major French companies, including the Bouygues construction and energy conglomerate and France Telecom, had billions of dollars invested in the economy. Unlike other European colonial powers, France never fully severed links with its former African empire. It derives from the region much of its support in the U.N. and other global forums. Paris still oversees the money used by Ivory Coast and 13 other African nations, called the CFA Franc; the abbreviation initially stood for Colonies Francaises d'Afrique.
Paris quickly put together a force of about 1,000 men whose mission was to evacuate Westerners from rebel-held zones. Landing south of Bouake on Sept. 23, the French troops were expected to stay only a week and to refrain from meddling in any internal conflict, according to French government spokesmen at the time. France's defense agreement with Ivory Coast obliged the French to offer help only in cases of external aggression, not internal uprising.
But after taking French, American and other foreign citizens out of Bouake and into the relative safety of Abidjan, the French soldiers set up camp just outside rebel-held Bouake, taking control of the only highway to the capital. The tiny Ivorian army was in disarray at the time, with many soldiers joining the uprising. The French position stopped the rebels from marching on the capital, saving President Gbagbo's regime from imminent collapse and sparing Abidjan, a city of gleaming skyscrapers, from the kind of urban warfare that gutted the Liberian capital, Monrovia.
"If it weren't for the French intervention, we would be in power today," says Guillaume Soro, leader of the rebel movement, the New Forces.
In the following weeks, French troops set up similar positions elsewhere, turning lines of confrontation in parts of the country into buffer zones to separate the combatants. After the French dealt with a second eruption of violence months later, they expanded this idea with a broad "confidence zone" in which no Ivorian was allowed to carry a weapon.
The first critical test for the French came in the country's western jungles, not far from Souapleu, late last year. While the main front line south of Bouake lay dormant since the first French deployment, a separate rebel movement emerged in the west, funded by Liberian President Charles Taylor and manned in great part by Liberian irregulars and Mr. Taylor's allies from Sierra Leone. These fighters tried to move south to seize Ivory Coast's economic heart -- the cocoa-growing areas and the port of San Pedro. When Mr. Taylor himself operated as a guerrilla, he was based in western Ivory Coast. His own nation in ruins, he now craved the wealth offered by Ivorian gold mines and cocoa and coffee plantations.
France's toughest soldiers, from the legendary Foreign Legion, repeatedly came under attack. They killed hundreds of rebels, often youngsters or young teens high on palm wine and hashish. At one point, they fired more than 200 artillery rounds in just two hours, an intensity of warfare unseen in these parts. The Legionnaires suffered only nonlethal casualties. That has been true throughout the combat, as the French troops' 350 armored vehicles and a fleet of combat helicopters outmatched the rebels' weaponry. (Two French soldiers were gunned down by renegade rebels in August, in what both sides describe as a criminal act rather than a political incident.)
But the French couldn't stop massacres of civilians in remote villages. In addition, the rebels and loyalist fighters repeatedly violated cease-fires, forcing the French to deploy additional troops. By January, as French troops were under almost daily attack, the Parisian press increasingly used terms such as "quagmire" and decried the lack of a political solution or clear exit strategy.
That's when French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin took a break from sparring with the U.S. over Iraq and flew to Ivory Coast. He pressured Mr. Gbagbo and the rebel leaders to attend peace talks in France. The rebels wanted recognition and invested in business suits on the way to France; Mr. Gbagbo was worried that the French might pull out, leaving him to fight on his own.
The French kept up the pressure after the discussions opened on Jan. 15 in the town of Marcoussis near Paris. The French refused to let either side abandon the talks without reaching an accord and forming a new unity government. At one point, diplomats say, Mr. De Villepin even suggested Mr. Gbagbo's wife, who was closely involved with the loyalist militias, might face war-crimes charges.
Under the Marcoussis Accord, Mr. Gbagbo will serve until the end of his term in 2005. He is supposed to transfer some power to a new Muslim prime minister and a unity government where the rebels will hold nine of the 38 posts, including some important ones. Mr. Soro, the rebel leader, for instance, now is the minister of communications. The new government will consider key reforms sought by the rebels. Parliament already has adopted an amnesty for all the guerrillas.
Embittered Adversaries
France's methods and the terms of the accord embittered both sides. "France still decides everything here," says one of Mr. Gbagbo's top associates, Sebastien Dano Djedje, who emerged from the Marcoussis talks as minister of national reconciliation. "And the lesson people have drawn is that, if you want to become a government minister, it pays to take up arms."
After Mr. Gbagbo's return home, the Young Patriots, a loyalist movement, brought out hundreds of thousands of youths to demonstrate against what they regarded as France's betrayal. With tacit encouragement from Mr. Gbagbo, the activists went on a rampage against French interests, looting French homes and businesses.
The French military had to pull soldiers from the front lines to evacuate Western citizens once again. Enraged mobs of Young Patriots spat at departing French families at the Abidjan airport -- and waved American flags to seek U.S. support.
But, setting aside its rift with Paris over the looming war on Iraq, Washington threw its weight behind a U.N. Security Council resolution that permitted French troops to shoot at Ivorian government soldiers as well as rebels in order to protect themselves and local civilians. Amid rising hostilities, the French suspected the government of sponsoring attacks against them -- and were aghast at massacres of civilians by loyalist fighters.
The threat of force and the display of Western unity at the U.N. worked. Three days after the U.N. vote, Mr. Gbagbo went on television to call for calm and express his support for the Marcoussis Accord.
To prevent renewed violence, French troops and a recently deployed West African peacekeeping force have set up a "confidence zone" as much as about 35 miles wide that runs the breadth of the country along the former front lines. No Ivorian is allowed to enter it with weapons; any party looking to resume the fighting will first have to take on the French.
"It took the rebels some time to get used to this, but we haven't found anyone with guns inside here since July," says French Army Capt. Guillaume Ponchin, whose company patrols former battlefields in western Ivory Coast. Rebels or government soldiers who visit family in the confidence zone have adopted a habit of simply leaving their weapons at checkpoints leading into the area.
At one such checkpoint, Capt. Ponchin ordered his soldiers to take off their helmets and lower their weapons as he warmly greeted a local rebel commander. "It's a pleasure for us to be working with you," the rebel replied. "You are our brothers in arms."
The rebels' increasing reliance on the French showed just last month, when fighting erupted in Bouake between rival gangs trying to rob a bank branch. Some 23 people died in that shootout. The rebel movement's natural reaction was to call in the French, who took over the banking district and now man an encampment in the rebel capital.
France's success could carry the seeds of problems down the road. Some hardliners on both sides believe they can still score a total victory one day. Mr. Gbagbo has angered France, the U.S. and the U.N. by dragging his feet in the implementation of Marcoussis agreements and by continuing to support loyalist militias. Furious with his nomination of a crony as defense minister, Mr. Soro and other rebel ministers last month suspended their membership in the government and called for Mr. Gbagbo's resignation.
"The only solution is war. Everyone understands this now, and I'm getting ready," says Eugene Djue, the leader of a well-trained loyalist militia, the Union for Total Liberation of Ivory Coast.
But the French force's commander, Gen. Pierre-Michel Joana, dismisses this as bluster -- an assessment shared by senior U.S. officials. The probability of renewed conventional war in Ivory Coast is no more than "0.5%" because of the French presence, Gen. Joana says. Should there be another coup attempt in the capital, he adds, "it's clear that we'll defend the authorities that are there."
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
Updated October 8, 2003 |
