After almost six months, the saga of the Ivorian ill-fated election is finally over. Yesterday, April 11, Laurent Gbagbo was arrested and his decade-long reign is over. There is disagreement as to whether he was arrested by the forces supporting Ouattara or by French forces. The French, the UN and Ouattara deny it, the Gbagbo camp asserts it. In either case, there is no doubt that without French intervention, this phase of the conflict would not have come to an end so soon.
Some Background to the Ivorian Crisis
As the standoff continues in the Côte d’Ivoire, I thought it’d be good to provide a little background. After all, there’s more to the story than a sore loser–Gbagbo–not wanting to give up his job as president. To get a little deeper, we have to look at how Côte d’Ivoire became the world’s largest cocoa producer.
Ivorian planters were initially slow to embrace cocoa and coffee as export crops, but once they did, they quickly ran up against the power of French planters who severely limited access to labor and other inputs. In response, the Ivorian planters formed the Syndicat Africain Agricole (SAA) in 1944. The SAA was more than an interest group. It was the training ground for a new nationalist planter class. The SAA also formed the basis for the Parti Democratique de Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI). Its leader, Houphouet-Boigny, ruled the country from 1960 until 1993.
