Cote D'Ivoire: Pre-Election Concerns

Five years after Côte d’Ivoire’s disputed presidential election threw the country into turmoil and left more than 3,000 dead, its people are set to go to the polls again. Could we see similar unrest this October or will the West African nation turn the page and move forward?
Former president Laurent Gbagbo, who refused to quit when declared the loser of the 2010 election to Alassane Ouattara, is now in The Hague charged by the International Criminal Court (ICC) with crimes against humanity.
Côte d’Ivoire’s economy is booming and Ouattara has gained popularity. Gbagbo – seen as the only viable challenger – is unable to run.

There is every chance the vote will pass off peacefully, but this doesn’t mean all has been forgiven between the two camps.

The Dialogue, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was supposed to forge unity and resolve long-standing political and ethnic divisions, is one of the country’s most unpopular institutions and Ouattara is accused by some of presiding over “victor’s justice.”

With less than three months to go until the election, human rights experts and political analysts identify three key areas of concern:

Political prisoners
The detention of as many as 700 political prisoners remains a deeply divisive issue. Supporters of Gbagbo demand their release, but his opponents say justice must be served.
“The current government is not willing to create the conditions for a peaceful society,” Dahi Nestor, president of the pro-Gbagbo opposition’s National Youth Coalition for Change, told IRIN. “It continues to keep innocent people in prison. This is an attack on democracy. A normal country cannot go to elections with hundreds of political prisoners in its jails.”
Ouattara and his government maintain that those imprisoned were not arrested because of their political affiliation but because they broke the law. “We want reconciliation,” the president said, “but we do not want a lawless country.”

Selective justice?
The sentencing in March of former first lady Simone Gbagbo and two co-accused to 20 years in prison for “undermining state security” - and of some 65 others supporters of her husband to shorter terms -was confirmation to opponents of Ouattara of a lop-sided justice process.

Both sides were accused of civilian massacres in 2010-2011 and yet only those allied to the former president have been convicted of any crimes.
“Unfortunately, we will not have this equal justice before the next election, because the more we advance towards this deadline, the more that resources and attention are diverted to the polls,” Barthélémy Touré, a political analyst in Abidjan, told IRIN.

Too scared to return
Côte d’Ivoire’s constitution says no citizen can be forced into exile, but nearly 50,000 Ivoirians, including political and military exiles who fled to Liberia, Ghana, Togo and other countries during the 2010-2011 crisis, still cannot - or will not - return home, according to the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR.
Despite pleas from Ouattara for them to come back, many say they fear ending up in jail or being persecuted if they do.
Franck Kouakou Tanoh, a member of the Young Patriots – a pro-Gbagbo youth movement – has been exiled in Ghana since April 2011. “It is not the urge to return that we lack,” he told IRIN by phone, adding that he just don’t believe assurances that they will be treated fairly.
The opposition is also demanding the return of its leaders, including Gbagbo and former head of the Young Patriots Charles Blé Goudé, who is also awaiting trial by the ICC. The opposition says it plans to boycott the October elections if its demands aren’t met.

from here with more links

Cote D'Ivoire - Homelessness For Returning Refugees

 Tens of thousands of western Côte d’Ivoire residents who fled deadly election turmoil three years ago have returned home, where survival is a daily struggle as more than half of them remain homeless.

Voluntary repatriation by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has brought home 33,702 people from neighbouring Liberia since 2011. Around 400 have also returned from Guinea and an unknown number have come back on their own. The 2010-2011 post-election conflict forced some 220,000 people to flee western Côte d’Ivoire to Liberia.

UNHCR’s deputy representative in Côte d’Ivoire, Serge Ruso, told IRIN that 52 percent of the former refugees have no houses. Violence ignited by the disputed outcome of the November 2010 presidential run-off first broke out in the country’s west, where armed gangs supporting then opposition candidate and now President Alassane Ouattara raided villages, killed and drove out people seen as supporters of then incumbent leader Laurent Gbagbo.

Many of the former refugees restarting life at home without a roof over their heads have sought shelter with friends or relatives. Those whose land has not been illegally seized by their ethnic or political foes are slowly rebuilding, while the loss of both homes and farms to rivals has deepened desperation and longstanding rancour for others.

The government’s Post-Crisis Assistance Programme (PAPC) says 2,243 houses need reconstruction or refurbishment in the crisis-riven west, and that it rebuilt or restored 687 houses in 2012 thanks to World Bank funding.

Land has been at the centre of conflict in the region, and with the looming 2015 elections, lingering tensions over access to land could trigger violence.

Nonzi, 66, and his family survived the July 2012 attack on a camp outside Duékoué housing some 5,000 people who had been displaced by the 2010-2011 poll violence. The attack was seen as ethnically driven, as it was blamed on armed Malinké men backed by traditional hunters known as dozo who support Ouattara. The camp was home to mainly Guéré people who are Gbagbo sympathizers.

Land tenure in Côte d’Ivoire is either customary or statutory. Ninety-eight percent of land in rural Côte d’Ivoire is owned through customary law. The statutory system is applicable only when land is registered. The government in 1998 passed a rural land law aiming to recognize and formalize customary land rights by setting out procedures and conditions for them to be transformed into title deeds. But land ownership agreements are still predominantly verbal, a matter that has contributed to the recurrent disputes.

The land disputes add to political rivalries that often take on an ethnic dimension. Observers have criticized the government for failing to carry out far-reaching reconciliation and fair justice in the aftermath of the violent 2010-2011 election crisis. Côte d’Ivoire’s west is seen as having borne the brunt of the country’s years of crisis since the 1999 toppling of President Henri Konan Bédié.


“Today problems about land, community rehabilitation, improving infrastructure, development and reintegration of former fighters are a low priority,” Kourouma, Ivorian political analyst.

Still, many Ivoirians in refuge want to return home. The UNHCR plans to repatriate 16,000 refugees from neighbouring Liberia this year. In March, the agency and the Liberian government closed down the third camp in southeastern Liberia as more Ivoirians returned home.

“Those who are returning have no houses to go to. Some have benefited from community projects by aid groups, but considering the losses during all these years of crisis, this assistance is very little,” said Albert Gbahou, head of Yrozon village in the country’s west.

“Everyone is looking at the government for solutions to the problems. The refugees, the displaced who were dispossessed of their land need to get it back in order to settle. Since the returns begun, we have been working with families to help out those returning, but this is quite insufficient,” Gbahou added.

Land dispossession has deprived families of livelihoods in the agriculturally rich western Côte d’Ivoire, Human Rights Watch found in an October 2013 study.

“The current pre-election atmosphere does not favour peaceful return of refugees. As long as the problems they are facing are not resolved, there’s always a risk of a crisis,” said Ivoirian lawyer and political analyst Julien Kouao.

“We know that since 2000 we have been repeating our political mistakes and our misfortunes too. This is what confirms the fears of renewed crisis.”


From here

Middle class?

Defining the African “middle class” is a challenge. For the World Bank, it comprises everyone who earns between $2 and $20 per day. It’s a range that is far too broad and while the African Development Bank uses the same income range, it emphasises the need to subdivide the middle class into two. The upper middle class, by this definition, earns between $10 and $20 a day, and a vulnerable lower class is one that earns between $2 and $4 dollars a day. The latter are just marginally above the poverty line of $1.50 a day and can easily slip back into it.

According to the Moscow-based Institute for Emerging Market Studies, the African middle class will rise three times from 32 million in 2009 to 107 million by 2030 — the largest increase in the world.

Professor Marcel Benie Kouadio, economist and dean at the  Cote d’Ivoire’s Abidjan Private University Faculty tells IPS “The middle class has shrunk. Twenty years ago, teachers and doctors were middle class. Now, they can’t afford a new car. The Ivorian middle class lost its purchase power.”

Purchase power is a key word. Accountants differ with economists in their understanding of the middle class; rather than analysing income, they look at disposable revenue. Being middle class is about hitting a “sweet spot”, where people are able to spend money for things other than survival, says a report from accounting firm Ernst & Young.

The Dozos of Cote d'Ivorie

 In Cote d’Ivoire, traditional hunters known as dozos are accused of human rights abuses and extortion. But in several areas, they also remain the sole guarantor of local safety.

“They are there for our protection, they say. But they are mostly there to pick up the pennies we can spare them.” Marie Doh claims that she is not “that much” afraid of them, but still gives them 100 CFA (about 20 cents) “several times” a month.

Dozos are a traditional hunter brotherhood that has existed in several West African countries for centuries. They recruit beyond ethnic and religious lines, although most are Malinke and Muslim.

“It is a not a job we have chosen. It is a duty,” says Dembele Balla, Duékoué’s dozo chief. “I am a dozo since I was a little kid. I was initiated the traditional way.”

Each dozo must pass through a ritual initiation. They are believed to have mystic powers derived from amulets. Since the 2010-11 post-electoral crisis, dozos have informally contributed to military operations to secure the area. The chief says there are now 2,300 dozos in the Duékoué region.

Dozos are not a neutral self-defence group in this region plagued with ethnic tensions. Ivory Coast’s cocoa sector under President Felix Houphouet Boigny – who used to say the land belongs to whoever cultivates it – has attracted Ivoirians from other regions, known as allogenes, as well as foreign workers. This led to several clashes in the last decade with native Guerzes, who say they own the land, and migrants who often have paid for the land but have no clear property titles. In this context, dozos are perceived to protect foreigners and allogenes against disenfranchised, unemployed Guerze youth, who claim their ancestors’ land, and pro-Gbagbo militias who had terrorised the local population.

Farmer Yacouba Dosso warmly greets Fofana. “We are happy with dozos patrolling. They are our sole protectors,” says the cocoa grower. He explains that there are many robbers, especially during the cocoa harvests as planters come back home with huge sums of money that can reach one million CFAS (around 2,000 dollars). Police and military do not patrol the area.

Eugene Nindorera, head of the human rights division at ONUCI, explains. “There are true and fake dozos. There are people dressing up like dozos and taking up a rifle, with values that are not traditional dozo values.”

The government has adopted measures to demobilise and disarm dozos, as well as to redeploy security forces in the region. But the U.N. representative is sceptical.

“There is a gap between what is said and what is done. It is a question of political will. The government wants now to demobilise dozos, but it still not has enough policemen and military to do so,”

A report published by the U.N. mission in Cote d’Ivoire, UNOCI, claims that at least 228 people have been killed, 164 injured and 162 illegally arrested and detained by dozos in several regions of the country between March 2009 and May 2013. It says that 274 confirmed cases of looting, fire and extortion have been committed by dozos. On Jul. 20, 2012, an angry mob estimated at 1000-strong, allegedly led by dozos and members of the national army, attacked the camp. Among the 2,500 inhabitants, mostly ethnic Gueres and supporters of former president Laurent Gbagbo, at least 14 were killed and hundreds more injured.

Investment For Whose Benefit?

smallholder agri-investments

200,000 hectares of land given to multinational Louis Dreyfus in Côte d’Ivoire for rice export. 70 million pounds of UK taxpayer money to develop genetically modified crops. Privatization of seeds across continents. These are just a few projects in the last years under the banner of ‘investing in agriculture’.

This is why social movements are gearing up for one of the biggest emerging battles over the future of food sovereignty – the corporatization of investment.

 

The private sector portrays itself as the saviour of farming but as this newsletter shows it is small holders who are really investing in feeding people and building rural livelihoods.

Being taken in by the story of the overriding importance of corporate investment means, for example, that

‘codes of conduct’ to continue land grabbing are being developed instead of regulations to stop it. 

 

A closer look at Africa shows that corporate private investment is a strategy

i) to sell more chemicals and seeds to African farmers, and

ii)to secure low cost access to land and resources for global supply chains that feed the rich

- through controlling small holders. 

 

This will destroy the environment, kill genetic diversity and push thousands more into hunger.

In October the World Committee on Food Security (CFS) will meet to discuss principles for ‘Responsible investments in agriculture’.

We must shout out the message that not all investment is the same.

And ask important questions - Investment in what type of agriculture? By whom? For whose benefit?

Colombian farmers have just succeeded in rolling back seed privatization by asking this. And as the

Voices from the field show, small holders everywhere are rising to the task.

 

Kirtana Chandrasekaran, 

Friends of the Earth International

from Nyeleni

legal vultures

Socialist Banner has previously reported on the Ivory Coast environmental disaster caused by the company Trafigura. Many of the victims managed to gain a share of £30million compensation for the health affects by the illegal dumping of toxic waste.

But it seems that the multimnational were not the only sharks . The lawyers ,Leigh Day and Co, who represented more than 30,000 victims , poor , uneducated citizens of the Cote d' Ivoire have claimed 105 million pounds legal costs including a £50 million success fee , £20 million more than the compensation reward. Not just that but they have failed to ensure that all the claimants received the money . Only 12,250 of them had cashed their cheques.

Civil litigation experts said that the costs were unusually high. "£105m is a very high figure – I don't think I've ever heard a higher one in over 25 years of practice," said David Greene, head of litigation at law firm Edwin Coe.

Criminal Capitalism

A British oil trading giant has agreed to a multimillion-pound payout to settle a huge damages claim from thousands of Africans who fell ill from tonnes of toxic waste dumped illegally in one of the worst pollution incidents in decades.
Trafigura, a London-based company which bills itself as one of the world's largest oil traders, said it was in talks to reach a "global settlement" to the claim by 30,000 people from Ivory Coast, who brought Britain's largest-ever lawsuit after contaminated sludge from a tanker ship was fly-tipped under cover of darkness in August 2006.
The incident caused at least 100,000 residents from the west African country's most populous city, Abidjan, to flood into hospitals and clinics complaining of breathing difficulties and sickness. Investigations by the Ivorian authorities suggested that the deaths of at least 10 people were linked to the waste.

Trafigura struck a series of bargains on the international markets in 2005 and early 2006 to buy cheap and dirty petroleum, called coker gasoline, which the company believed could then be cleaned up at profit of £4m per cargo.Rather than send the oil to a refinery, Trafigura used the Probo Koala, a Panamanian tanker chartered by the company since 2004, as a floating processing plant while it was anchored off Gibraltar. "This is as cheap as anyone can imagine and should make serious dollars."
Using an ad hoc process of adding caustic soda and a catalyst to the coker gasoline, the oil was "cleaned" to produce a sellable fuel and a toxic sludge which sank to the bottom of the ship's tanks. "This operation is no longer allowed in the European Union, the United States and Singapore" it is "banned in most countries due to the 'hazardous nature of the waste'", one e-mail warns.

Problems began for Trafigura when it needed to dispose of the slurry. When the Probo Koala arrived in Amsterdam in July 2006 and tried to unload the contaminated slops, allegedly described as "watery cleaning liquids", the process caused a health alert and Trafigura was informed the cost of dealing with its by-product would rise from £17 per cubic metre to £80.Rather than pay the estimated bill of £500,000, Trafigura ordered the waste to be pumped back on to the Probo Koala and the vessel travelled to west Africa where in Ivory Coast fleet of 12 trucks hired by a local waste contractor, Compagnie Tommy, which had only received its operating licence weeks earlier, offloaded the sulphurous sludge from the cargo vessel and deposited the waste at 18 locations around Abidjan .

A United Nations report found that "there seems to be strong prima facie evidence that the reported deaths and adverse health consequences are related to the dumping".

Trafigura repeatedly deployed one of Britain's most aggressive firms of lawyers to dispute reporting on the case by media outlets including the BBC. Trafigura, a privately-owned multinational last year claimed a turnover of $73bn (£44bn). The figure is double the entire GDP of Ivory Coast, where half the population of 21 million live on less than a dollar a day.

“School has no value any more.”

“Most families can no longer afford to worry about whether their child does well in school,” a woman in the north-central town of Séguéla told IRIN. “Most now send their children to the fields or to sell in the market just to make a bit of money for food - especially the girls.” She added that since state teachers fled in the 2002 rebellion and schools fell apart, the education infrastructure has not recovered.

Slightly under half of Côte d’Ivoire’s 20 million people are now below the poverty threshold, living on less than about US$1.25 per day - up from 38.4 percent in 2000 and the highest in 20 years, according to results released by the national statistics institute .

70 percent of Ivoirians have difficulty eating adequately and 68 percent cannot afford proper treatment when ill.

“The state is creating thieves, prostitutes and liars,” said a would-be university student in Séguéla “When a person has absolutely nothing to eat and no money, what do you want them to do?”

Food for thought

As a result of the protests reported here Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo has cancelled custom duties after a second day of violent protests against rising food costs. Mr Gbagbo also cut taxes on basic household products .

But let no-one be under the mis-comprehension that tampering with the effects locally will solve the problem .

The head of the World Food Programme warned rising food prices had helped create a "perfect storm", leaving more people hungry than ever before. "The cost of our food has doubled in just the last nine months," said WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran. "We're very concerned about our operations."

Sheeran also confirmed what Socialist Banner keeps repeating - that capitalism is a "can't pay, can't have" system of society regardless of need .

"We are seeing more urban hunger than ever before," she said. "Often we are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it."

cocoa cop-out

Socialist Banner have previously reported here on the child exploitaion in the cocoa producing regions and another news item reveal little has changed .

Despite the international outcry in 2000 over child exploitation on West African cocoa farms, and efforts by governments since then to regulate the industry, very little has changed for an estimated 284,000 child labourers, according to campaign groups. Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire produce about three-quarters of the world's cocoa and according to the US State Department, they employ 200,000 children. Up to 12,000 of these children have been illegally trafficked across African borders to work on Ivorian cocoa farms, according to the NGO Stop the Traffik. Many of these children are forced to work in dangerous conditions, on slave-labour wages or for nothing in order to put chocolate into the mouths of consumers .

In 2001 nine West African governments came to a voluntary agreement with the US government known as the Harkin-Engel protocol (named after the two US senators who passed it), which aimed to decrease the number of children working on farms, improve working conditions, and certify that half of the cocoa produced in West Africa would be free of exploitative child labour by 2005. But according a spokesperson for industry association International Cocoa Initiative , delays - due to conflict in the case of Côte d'Ivoire, and other burdens on resources elsewhere - meant the deadline was postponed to 2008.

"Now the industry needs to put its money where its mouth is, to get West African children off farms and back into school where they belong," said Aidan McQuade, director of Anti-Slavery International, another NGO.

But Eileen Maybin, spokesperson for the Fairtrade Foundation :

"Cocoa certification is a 'band-aid' policy - it is attempting to address the problem of child labour without addressing the underlying cause, which is low cocoa prices...Unless chocolate manufacturers are willing to pay more for their cocoa, these poor conditions on farms will persist."

The Harkin-Engel initiative is funded by governments and cocoa manufacturers, but critics say it has not provided enough money to address the root causes of the problem: that poverty drives farmers to exploit children.

It is the capitalist market that decides how humanitarian the degree of exploitation will be .

Blood Diamonds - The Trade Continues

Problems are often swept under the carpet by supposed reforms and agreements and voluntary self-regulation . During the 1990s, diamonds were a significant factor in the civil wars that devastated Angola, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Nearly 4 billion dollars worth of diamonds are believed to have passed through the hands of the Angolan rebel group UNITA in the 1992-98 period. Since 2005 export of rough diamonds from Cote d'Ivoire has been banned by the United Nations due to violation of a ceasefire agreement between the Abidjan government and the New Forces guerrillas, which control the north of the country.

Yet the embargo does not appear to have prevented Ivorian diamonds from entering Europe. Last month it was reported that Belgian judicial authorities had confiscated 14 million euros (21 million dollars) worth of illegal diamonds of Ivorian origin. This was despite a screening system introduced by the Antwerp World Diamond Centre to block 'conflict diamonds' -- gemstones sold to fund a war effort.

"The borders of Cote d'Ivoire are porous," said Ian Smillie, research coordinator with Partnership Africa Canada, an independent group that works to build sustainable human development in Africa. "The borders of its neighbours are also porous. Diamonds don't stop in Burkina Faso, if that is where they are going. They all reach world markets in Europe, the U.S., Japan and India."

"..The diamond industry has failed to live up to its promise to create an auditable tracking system to ensure that diamonds are conflict-free." - Charmian Gooch, director of Global Witness

Cocoa wars

First came "blood diamonds" from Sierra Leone.

Then came "blood timber" from Liberia.

Now another West African conflict is being funded by yet another commodity beloved in the West: " blood chocolate." from Ivory Coast

Government and rebel leaders of the world's leading cocoa exporter, Ivory Coast, both siphoned off millions of dollars from the cocoa industry to finance the 2002-03 civil war that divided the once-stable and prosperous country in two, according to a recent report from Global Witness, a London-based group that focuses on resource-fueled corruption. The government received more than $58 million from institutions and cocoa revenues, while the rebel New Forces pocketed about $30 million since 2004 in taxes and revenues, claims the report titled "Hot Chocolate: How Cocoa fuelled the conflict in Côte d'Ivoire." Global Witness not only contends the cocoa trade drove the war economy but that the industry still serves the interests of both the government and the rebels who have reaped political and economic benefits with impunity.

Ivory Coast is the world's leading producer of the commodity, responsible for about 40 percent of global exports, which earned more than $1 billion in 2006.