Laurent Gbagbo’s intransigence has quickly gone from the noisome to the deadly to the potentially catastrophic. There are all kinds of signs that Gbagbo has decided “je suis l’etat,” and as a result with each passing day the likelihood of civil war — something with which the mass of Ivorians are all too familiar — increases.
Consider:
The UN has announced that Belarus has broken the arms embargo against Côte d’Ivoire by delivering three attack helicopters and related material to Gbagbo’s forces.
The economy could well be near collapse and there was a run on the country’s banks earlier this month as people rushed to withdraw their money before that money was no more, and then banks were closed to try to keep them solvent. This despite Gbagbo’s attempts to seize the banks to keep them open.
And of course violence has accelerated. The African Union has not proven especially effective in alleviating the crisis, showing its default inability to develop a coherent message, never mind a clear strategy. Individual countries (such as South Africa) have been paralyzed by the same sort of devastating neutrality that has allowed Big Men to devastate their countries for decades knowing that fictive Pan Africanism would protect them. (It is especially galling to see South Africa and the ANC play the neutrality card when not so long ago to be neutral on South Africa was to be indifferent to Apartheid.)
And for all of the romance of people’s revolutions, whatever happens in Côte d’Ivoire, even if it represents the will of the people, won’t be a shiny happy story. It will be an ugly, ruthless war in which civilians pay a heavy price and soldiers get bogged down in a war born of Big Man Ego. It will be a war that will threaten regional stability and security. It is a war that will put paid to the lie of people power even if the peoples’ will wins out.
