Ivory Coast

Power Struggle's Escalating Violence

For months, Mr. Gbagbo’s efforts to hold on to power had included assaults by his troops on neighborhoods of Abidjan and deaths among soldiers and civilians in several other districts of the city. Many hundreds have been killed since the election and attacks on civilians were frequent. One of the last peaceful, sustained expressions of public dissent in the city — women protesting with branches symbolizing peace — was mowed down in volleys of machine-gun fire from Gbagbo security forces. Human Rights Watch said on March 16 that such repression against civilians gave “every indication of amounting to crimes against humanity.”

Armed forces associated with the Ouattara camp had previously clashed with Mr. Gbagbo’s forces on the streets of Abidjan, as well as elsewhere. Civilians, caught in the cross-fire, deserted neighborhoods wholesale. At least 700,000 people have fled their homes.

Mr. Gbagbo had maintained power by continuing to pay the salaries of soldiers and key civil servants. But his access to the country’s accounts at the regional central bank was curtailed since mid-January. Shippers of cocoa, the country’s major export, largely acceded to trade bans called for by both Mr. Ouattara and the European Union. At least five banks, including two French banks that control most of the market, shut.

On the surface, the tough international sanctions appeared to succeed against the strongman, despite Mr. Gbagbo's rubber-band fixes for his battered economy. In March, he had declared that his government would take over the purchase and export of cocoa, the country’s signature crop. 

Economic and Regional Consequences

Once-gleaming downtown Abidjan, a magnet for immigrants from all over West Africa in the days when people spoke of the Ivorian “miracle,” became a forest of darkened high-rise windows. Investors pulled out; jobs vanished. More than four million young men are unemployed in a nation of some 21 million people, according to the World Bank.

The world’s shift of focus to the uprisings in the Arab world emboldened Mr. Gbagbo, analysts said, and bloody incursions continued into neighborhoods that supported the opposition. In March, nine newspapers opposed to Mr. Gbagbo closed, saying they could no longer withstand police harassment and constant threats of violence against their journalists.

Mr. Gbagbo, a leftist university professor-turned-populist strongman whose term ended in 2005, had rebuffed entreaties from neighboring heads of state that he step down, and West African nations threatened to use military force to oust him if he refuses to leave. But the tough line taken by African nations against Mr. Gbagbo weakened, with a number of influential nations, including South Africa and Angola, edging away from the regional position that he must go. Ivory Coast had been seen as a test case in the continental commitment to enforcing democracy.

International Intervention

In April 2011, France, which has showed a newfound muscularity by championing military strikes against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces in Libya, attacked heavy artillery and armored vehicles at Mr. Gbagbo’s residence and presidential offices, bent on ending the conflict.

France’s prime minister, François Fillon, told members of Parliament that French representatives were negotiating with two Ivory Coast generals loyal to Mr. Gbagbo as the forces of his rival, Alassane Ouattara, blockaded the presidential palace in Abidjan, the nation’s commercial and economic center. Mr. Gbagbo was holed up in a bunker beneath his residence.

France, Ivory Coast’s former colonial ruler, has more than 1,500 troops in the country. In a statement on April 4, France said it had joined the operation there at the request of the United Nations, with the intent of “neutralizing heavy weapons that are used against the civilian population and United Nations personnel in Abidjan.”

The international military involvement risked bolstering one of Mr. Gbagbo’s most potent propaganda weapons: that he was being singled out by foreign forces, notably the French and the United Nations, in an attack on Ivorian sovereignty. These ideas, repeated nightly for months on state television, energized thousands of Gbagbo supporters and soldiers, giving them a fervor that they display over and over.

Surrounded, outnumbered and under repeated attacks, Mr. Gbagbo held out for a week against all odds, refusing to budge from the presidential residence in a last stand that for a time both befuddled and infuriated the international powers that are demanding his surrender.

It remained uncertain whose forces had physically captured Mr. Gbagbo in April 2011. Both French ground forces and troops loyal to Mr. Ouattara had pressed into the city toward the official residence.

News reports quoted officials from Mr. Ouattara’s camp as saying that Mr. Gbagbo was seized by pro-Ouattara forces. A senior American diplomat, who spoke in return for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation, said Mr. Gbagbo was being held at Mr. Ouattara’s headquarters at the Golf du Hotel in Abidjan.

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