As Gbagbo's World Crumbles, State Television Played On

Thursday, as pro-Ouattara Invisible Commandos emerged from their hiding places in the neighborhoods of Abidjan and the head of Gbagbo’s armed forces abandoned him, the state television station RTI broadcast a story about bread. Trays of crusty baguettes were pulled out of large ovens. What could be more appropriate? Laurent Gbagbo is nicknamed The Baker because he rolls his enemies in flour, always managing to come out on top. But the city was encircled by the newly constituted Republican Forces, loyal to Ouattara, and his own soldiers and policemen were disappearing. The Baker was going to need a very large sack of flour to get out of this one.

After baguettes, RTI moved on to an interview with a socio-economist who said that all of Ivory Coast’s problems were caused by The West, which wanted to control the Ivorian economy for its own profit. “We need two things,” he said. “An independent economy and leaders who work for Ivory Coast and not for themselves.” This last comment caused the economist to disappear in a not-so-subtle edit. He reappeared a moment later praising “the president,” who at that hour on RTI was still Laurent Gbagbo. The next story was about a statue of the Virgin Mary in a traffic circle. The statue was delicate, white, and wore a bright blue sash. A young Muslim girl had seen the statue move its folded hands. “A manifestation of the Virgin,” said a priest. “The Virgin chose this Muslim girl.”

I skyped a student in the pro-Ouattara section of Koumassi, a suburb of Abidjan. The sound of machine gun fire was so loud it was difficult to talk. He said four Invisible Commandos armed with machine guns walked down his street earlier, reassuring residents that they meant them no harm and urging them to stay inside. He and his neighbors had gone out to see the smoke, which seemed to be coming from the police headquarters nearby. The shooting sounded like it was coming from near the airport. Huddled inside, they weren't sure whether to be hopeful or terrified.

I checked back in with RTI. In a soap opera, a man had been offered a post as minister in the government. He asked his wife if he should accept. “I just don’t want any bad things to come into our life because of this,” she demurred.

Her concern was reasonable. Two of Gbagbo’s ministers trying to flee to Dubai had just been stopped at the airport.

After the soap opera, finally, the news. Gbagbo’s spokesman said that President Gbagbo was closely following the situation, but because it was evolving so quickly, he had postponed his planned address to the nation.

Then there was a music video called “Let’s Respect the Constitution.” Texts of constitutional articles appeared on the screen as singers rapped and dancers danced. Anyone can use the military for a coup d’état. Gbagbo’s genius was to do it constitutionnally, using the nation's highest court.

As the city around them was in chaos, a panel of pro-Gbagbo journalists and academics summarized Ivorian history. Westerners had sent Alassane Ouattara to carry out their programs for their benefit. Gbagbo was a hero for democracy in Africa. Old footage played over and over of his younger pro-democracy activist days.

RTI’s sound became scratchy. Witnesses said there was shooting near the television station, which is close to Gbagbo’s residence. It seemed he had chosen to go down fighting. Finally, Thursday night, the screen went dark.

In the real world outside RTI, Ivorians are fearful, exhausted, and hungry. They huddle in their houses, hoping to survive. In the four months that Gbagbo has refused to step down, the suspicions and resentments between political parties, between northerners and southerners, and between ethnic groups have deepened and darkened. Ouattara’s young fighters want revenge for the killing of their friends and relatives. Gbagbo’s "young patriots" have nothing to lose and could wreak havoc.

In Abidjan, so much is at stake. Can hotheaded young men and hardliners on both sides be restrained? If so, perhaps Ivorians can break bread tomorrow in peace and security--without The Baker turning up the heat on the oven.

While the World Watches Libya, Abidjan Flees

While the world watches Libya, the people of Abidjan are fleeing their homes. Their city is a war zone. Forces loyal to Laurent Gbagbo shoot mortar rounds into their neighborhoods.

And it is about to get worse: thousands of young men who support Gbagbo have turned out to enlist in the army. These “Young Patriots” want to join the brutally repressive security forces that keep Gbagbo in power despite the fact that he lost a well-organized election.

For the past four months these young men have listened to nothing but pro-Gbagbo propaganda, an inflammatory plume of self-justifying, anti-northern, anti-French, anti-American, anti-UN, toxic xenophobic exhaust. Young, unemployed, mostly illiterate, and misled by Youth Minister Charles Blé Goudé, they are the raw human energy that can power a civil war.

The propaganda on state television tells them they need to “liberate” Ivory Coast from westerners, the United Nations, rebels and terrorists. How will they identify the rebels and terrorists? They will be northerners with northern last names on their identity cards or immigrants from Burkina Faso, Mali, Ghana, Benin, or other countries. Hundreds of Ouattara’s political activists have already died. They received the fatal knock on the door, the deadly visit in the night.

The friend I call Gnéré for her protection, a young mother and schoolteacher from a village in the north, is trying to get out of Abobo. “The tanks come in day and night now…shooting! The children are frightened. We can’t stay here any longer.”

A bus ticket to Bouaké, on the other side of the line, controlled by the New Forces and peaceful, costs 15,000 FCFA, about $30, and Gnéré needs seven. The banks and Western Union are closed. She has heard that you wait two days at the station for a seat. And Bouaké is only halfway to her village and her family. She can’t make it.

The refugees at her church are leaving for the north today but she can’t afford seven seats in their convoy, so she is going to try to make it to a town near Agboville about fifty miles away, where she can stay with a relative of her husband.

Another friend (let me call him Yacouba) is leaving today, too. He plans to buy gas with every penny he has and try to make it north to Korhogo, where his extended family lives. Marcory, Yacouba’s neighborhood in Abidjan, is considered strongly pro-Gbagbo although the presidential vote was nearly split there: 36,000 for Gbagbo and 33,000 for Ouattara. And split equals volatile.

Several nights ago, someone knocked on Yacouba’s door at one in the morning. When he asked who was there, a man he knew answered. No problem, the man responded, he just wanted to see him. But when Yacouba stepped out, thirty men were waiting. They were Ebrié. The Ebrié live in villages along the lagoons and are considered the original inhabitants of Abidjan. They are fiercely pro-Gbagbo. In Abobo, the Ebrié were accused by Ouattara’s supporters of harboring Gbagbo’s death squads and three Ebrié men had been murdered.

If what happened in Abobo happens here, their spokesman told Yacouba, we will hold you responsible. Whatever happens to any of our community here, the same will happen to you.

“They know my last name,” Yacouba said, his voice trailing off. Both his first and last names mark him as a northern Muslim, although Yacouba has spent his entire life in Abidjan and is Catholic. Four northern neighbors he spoke to had also received the threatening night visits.

“Have you seen the videos on the internet of the young men burned alive?” he asked me. To my negative response, he replied, “They’re horrible.” When he saw the images of crowds of Young Patriots joining the army, he knew it was time to go.

“Why doesn’t the United Nations act?” asks a student in Koumassi, a northerner come south for an education. “The United Nations has every resource. And yet they show up the day after to ask questions.” His suburb Koumassi is relatively calm. “Even if we don’t have much to eat, at least we are not in danger here.” But he worries about his older brother in Abobo.

“Gbagbo…” says their father in the north ruefully. A farmer, his harvest has been good and life is peaceful. But two of his sons are trapped in Abidjan. When the electricity is cut off in Abobo, the older can’t charge his cellphone and they have no way to contact him. “Gbagbo…” Their father’s voice is filled with bewilderment. “If he kills all the people, he will be president of what? The animals?”

Hundreds of people have already been killed and half a million have fled their homes. More are fleeing as you read this. The people of Ivory Coast, especially those in the city of Abidjan, need help fast. The International Crisis Group is urging ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West African States, to intervene. ECOWAS needs international support and they need to act quickly to prevent mass killings. The Young Patriots are lining up for Kalashnikovs. Once they have them, it will be too late.

The High Price of Onions in Abobo

Thursday morning, I called my friend Gnéré in Ivory Coast. She is trapped in Abobo, caught between the soldiers of the former president determined to stay in power at all costs, Laurent Gbagbo, and the so-called invisible commandos that are fighting back. Abobo is a city within a city, a densely-populated suburb of Abidjan, with its own city hall, mayor, and deputy in the National Assembly. Over four hundred people have been killed since Laurent Gbagbo lost the election. Because it is known as a Ouattara stronghold, more of those people have been killed in Abobo than anywhere else. Some two hundred thousand people have fled the area.

But Thursday morning? Just the way Gnéré answered was reassuring. She sounded more like her old self than she had in weeks. The strain and exhaustion was gone from her voice. After days and nights of fear, Abobo was calm. No gun shots. No mortar fire. They had slept all night. And after two weeks when she was afraid to go down into the street, she had gone to the market early that morning and had returned with onions and salt and cayenne pepper for her sauces. “The onions that are normally 100 francs were 200 and the pile that is normally 200 francs cost 400!” But even her outrage about the prices sounded cheerful. What a relief to be outraged about something as ordinary as the price of onions for a change.

I asked her about the bottles of gas she uses for cooking. None to be had in Abobo, she answered. “The trucks can’t get through the barricades. Gbagbo’s soldiers have cut off Abobo completely. You can’t even take the road to Adjamé to go to the market there.” She had a little charcoal left and was using that to cook with, and she still had rice, and for the sauce, peanuts. The peanuts were grown by her family who are farmers in the north; the last time she returned home for a funeral, she brought a burlap bag back with her. The peanuts were turning into a lifesaver now that Abobo was in a state of siege. We laughed about how much better her sauce would taste that night with the onions and salt and a pinch of cayenne pepper. Her husband would be pleased.

Eleven people share her small apartment and all of them had spent the last two weeks cooped up inside. That includes three active little boys who usually play soccer in the dirt streets whenever they aren’t doing homework.

Abobo’s deputy in the assembly ought to speak up about the commune’s problems—how it is cut off and surrounded by soldiers, how a densely-populated neighborhood is no place to wage an urban battle between government troops and “invisible” insurgent commandos whose identities and loyalties are not entirely clear. But the government is not functioning and even if it were, Abobo is represented by Simone Gbagbo, wife of the president-who-refuses-to-leave. Simone has never lived in Abobo. For the past ten years, she has presided over the presidential palace, and she flatly refuses to move out. So the palace’s rightful residents, the newly-elected President of the Ivory Coast, Alassane Ouattara, and his wife live in the Golf Hotel, a multi-story hotel whose landscaped grounds are bordered on one side by a lagoon, and on another, by the American Embassy. They cannot leave. Gbagbo’s soldiers blockade the road.

Obviously, a good night’s sleep and the ordinariness of the trip to the market had done Gnéré good and I hung up relieved. But neither Gnéré nor I were yet aware that the calm interlude was already over. At the market where she bought her onions, the most terrible tragedy yet had just taken place. Gbagbo’s soldiers fired mortar rounds into the marketplace. About thirty-five innocent people were killed. Witnesses say they were mostly women and children and that at least another forty were wounded. The United Nations, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch have all condemned this “blind violence” against civilians. So has the United States government.

When I called back on Saturday, we revisited that conversation. How brief it had been, our interlude of shared outrage at the high price of onions, how pleasantly mundane.

“I was so lucky!” Gnéré said. “Right where I was that morning!”

We appreciated and savored the luck of her good timing and lingered over our thankfulness. But once that was done, our outrage darkened and turned bitter again. How else can you feel about a man, a former democracy activist turned tyrant, who terrorizes innocent civilians to hold onto power?

Cross-posted on Open Salon March 20, 2011. Editors' Pick.

Dark Nights in Abobo

On a Sunday afternoon in late October, a week before the first round of the presidential election in Ivory Coast, I strolled the streets of Abobo with a young woman I will call Gnéré. She is a schoolteacher and the mother of four young children. I have known her since she was a schoolgirl herself in a village in the north. Abobo, where she lives now, is a densely populated neighborhood of Abidjan.

There was only one topic of conversation that day—the election. In a school classroom, voters crowded onto wooden benches and listened intently as campaign workers demonstrated how to mark the ballot by touching your finger to an inkpad. Nearby, a large crowd attended a rally for opposition candidate Alassane Ouattara. “We have nothing!” cried the young speaker. “It’s time for change!”

I felt the current of hope and determination running through Abobo that Sunday. And naïvely American, I had every confidence that Ivorians would succeed in putting their divided country back together peacefully at the ballot box. Gnéré, who lived through the violent 2000 election, was more realistic. She said she would prefer to vote early and spend Election Day at home with the children, just in case of trouble. But the country needed 60,000 literate poll workers, so she had agreed to work.

“The United Nations is here,” I reassured her.

“I hope they come to Abobo,” she answered with a determined smile.

I tried to picture peacekeepers in the maze of unpaved roads where we were. No street names, no house numbers. When I visit Gnéré, she meets me at the paved road so I don’t get lost.

By the time the run-off between incumbent Laurent Gbagbo and challenger Alassane Ouattara was held on November 28, I had returned home. When I called election night, Gnéré said that in Abobo, people voted and then went straight home. But there were no problems at the polling place where she worked. The voting and the vote count had gone smoothly.

Over eighty percent of Ivorian voters turned out. No one was surprised when Ouattara won Abobo with 59% of the vote to Gbagbo’s 41%. Nationwide, Ouattara received 54% of the vote to win the election. For one day, Ouattara’s activists in Abobo danced in the streets.

But Gbagbo refused to concede. His allies on the nation’s highest court overturned the results and proclaimed Gbagbo the winner. On the phone, Gnéré said that as soon as they heard the news, they ran straight home. They feared violence from Gbagbo’s street militias, the so-called Young Patriots.

“But the world is with you,” I replied. “The international community recognizes Ouattara. The president of South Africa is coming.”

“No president can convince Gbagbo to step down,” said Gnéré’s husband. “We who live here understand this.”

A few days later, the terrifying night visits began. Under cover of the curfew, hooded armed men in unmarked SUVs drove into Abobo and knocked on doors. Not just any doors--those of opposition activists.

“It’s very dangerous here,” whispered Gnéré into the phone. “We don’t sleep. We think people are getting killed.”

Some nights the hooded armed men robbed their neighbors of all their possessions. Another dark night, with the electricity out, a soldier knocked on a door disguised in a long boubou. When the family opened up to what they thought was a neighbor, the soldiers entered. The sound of shots rang out. The night terror continued. The United Nations estimates close to four hundred people have been killed. Many more have been beaten or have disappeared. Most are young activists for Ouattara.

Saturday night February 26, heavy arms fire kept Gnéré and her neighbors awake most of the night. Their neighborhood was under attack by Gbagbo’s security forces. “This time they sent tanks. Tanks! It sounds like they are right outside the door,” she said on the phone, “although they are on the paved road. The noise alone could give you a heart attack.” The children were terrified, but leaving was dangerous. Pro-Gbagbo militias were said to be on the lookout for strangers arriving in their neighborhoods and a northern last name like hers put you at risk.

About forty people took refuge in the courtyard of Gnéré’s church. When the streets are calm, she takes them food. But she is on her last bottle of cooking gas. She has a little charcoal and will cook with that as long as it lasts. Food prices have doubled and everyone makes do by eating less.

As we talked, I could hear someone crying. It was Gnéré’s younger sister, who left their village and came south to get an education. A week ago, going to middle school, she was caught in the firing and had to run for her life. She hasn’t been to school since.

“On est la-dé,” Gnéré said bleakly. “We are here-dé.” The dé adds emphasis. “No one will come to help us. We are in God’s hands.”

On Thursday, March 3, about nine in the morning, hundreds of women were desperate enough to go into the streets of Abobo to demand Gbagbo’s departure. Gnéré dressed to join the demonstration, but her husband asked her not to go, so she stayed inside. When the women reached the paved road singing and waving leafy branches, Gbagbo’s security forces shot directly into the crowd. Seven women were killed and many more were wounded.

Gnéré says the wail of shock and grief that went up in the neighborhood was awful to hear. “Why,” she asks, “didn’t the United Nations protect them?”

The country is on the verge of civil war. The United Nations says 200,000 people have fled Abobo. But on Gnéré’s street only one family has left. The rest have no place to go.

Posted at Open Salon. Editor's Pick March 14, 2011.