Cote d’Ivoire: Why the West wants Ouattara

According to the capitalist press, Cote d’Ivoire President Laurent Gbago is a dictator who lost the election to Alassane Ouattara, and the AU (African Union),
ECOWAS (Economic Community Of West African States) and the rest of the world should force Gbago to step down. Except that the election results were declared for Gbago by the country’s Constitutional Court, which is the deciding body, not the purely administrative Independent Electoral Commission. France and the United States, among other imperialist countries, want us to ignore Cote d’Ivoire’s constitution and pick and choose the winner they like. The writer Leo Gnahoua in his article ‘Ivory Coast: Obama is Wrong’ finds a parallel with the Bush vs Gore US election of 2000, which was also decided by a court and not administrators. Would Americans have accepted NATO or UN troops intervening for Gore?

Ouattara is a former IMF (International Monetary Fund) deputy director who was prime minister under President Felix Houphouet-Boigny. Gbago was a leading dissident and political prisoner against Houphouet-Boigny, later founding the FPI (Ivorian Popular Front). Houphouet-Boigny favoured French businesses and helped overthrow his neighbour Kwame Nkrumah, winner of the Lenin Peace Prize and independence hero of Ghana, the first non-Arab African country to be decolonised. Before Cote d’Ivoire’s independence from France Houphouet-Boigny was a French MP leading other African MPs in alliance with the PCF (French Communist Party), but broke with the communists under pressure from socialist Francois Mitterrand (later French President) saying, ‘I, a bourgeois landowner, I would preach the class struggle?’. In 1985 Cote d’Ivoire was the first non-Arab African country to restore ties with Israel.

In 2002 Gbago survived a coup attempt followed by a civil war, when France intervened with troops to get concessions for the rebels while recognising Gbago’s right to be president. Some commentators fear that if Ouattara is allowed to seize power from Gbago he will again favour the IMF and French businesses, whereas Gbago would require competitive bidding in the Ivory Coast’s favour, giving equal opportunity to Chinese and Russian investors. If the AU and ECOWAS intervene in Cote d’Ivoire on behalf of France and imperialism, it could be a dangerous example, threatening the sovereignty of other African countries under international pressure such as Zimbabwe or the Sudan.

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