IVORY COAST: Alassane Ouattara to be inaugurated amid hopes of peaceful future for Ivory Coast

Record ID: 181586

  • Title: IVORY COAST: Alassane Ouattara to be inaugurated amid hopes of peaceful future for Ivory Coast
  • Date: 21st May 2011
  • Summary: ABIDJAN, IVORY COAST (ORIGINALLY 4:3) (FILE - 1999) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF IVORIAN MILITARY IN STREETS OF ABIDJAN
  • Embargoed: 5th June 2011 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Cote d'Ivoire
  • Country: Ivory Coast
  • Topics: Domestic Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVA5EC3ZAQN5MFUYC87WI8GHMZVX
  • Story Text: Ivory Coast will inaugurate its newest president, Alassane Ouattara, on Saturday (May 21), potentially bringing to an end 18 years of political turmoil since the death of the country's first leader Felix Houphouet-Boigny.
    Former IMF official Ouattara, hails from the West African country's Muslim north, has a father from Burkina Faso, and received French military backing to defeat rival Laurent Gbagbo -- making him a poster-child for the main issues of ethnicity, religion and anti-colonial sentiment that have roiled the nation for more than a decade.
    Ouattara, 69, served as prime minister under the country's first post-independence president Felix Houphouet-Boigny, where he earned a reputation for good economic management. He later joined the International Monetary Fund and rose in the ranks.
    But he was excluded from running for president in 2000 elections after coup leader Robert Guei tightened the rules to bar anyone whose parents were not both Ivorian.
    Issues of citizenship, and rising frustrations between local tribes and immigrants, later blew up into a northern rebel assault on Gbagbo in 2002. In September of that year, dissident soldiers attacked the main city of Abidjan to try to overthrow Gbagbo and, although the attempt failed, the rebels seized the north, dividing the country in two.
    Parts of Ivory Coast have long been prey to deep ethnic rivalries that led to feuding between local tribes and immigrant farmers from neighboring countries such as Mali and Burkina Faso, who settled in northern Ivory Coast and now form the backbone of the cocoa workforce.
    Religious and tribal faultlines fueled the 2002-03 civil war and mirror the divide that played out between Ouattara and Gbagbo, whose traditional power base is in the Christian south that includes Abidjan.
    The elections in 2010 were intended to reunite the country's rebel-held north and government-controlled south, but instead led to more violence.
    A dispute over who won the November 2010 vote triggered all-out conflict between pro-Ouattara and pro-Gbagbo forces that killed thousands of people and displaced more than a million.
    Ouattara won the election by eight percentage points according to U.N.-certified results, but Gbagbo rejected the outcome, alleging fraud in Ouattara's northern power base.
    Rebels from the 2002-03 war rallied to Ouattara's side and formed the bulk of his force, which swept south into Abidjan in March and received U.N. and French military support. On April 11, 2011, Gbagbo was finally arrested after French forces stormed the compound where he was holed up in a bunker.
    As well as political turmoil, Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa grower, is also struggling to revive its conflict-shattered economy.
    Cocoa exports resumed after a more than three-month halt, and the country's acting agriculture minister said he did not expect the crisis to have cut into this year's crop.
    With Gbagbo arrested, and relative calm returning to the streets of the main Ivorian cities, Ouattara took his presidential oath on May 6, cementing his rule over the West African state in a tense ceremony.
    Gbagbo remains under house arrest in Ivory Coast's north and is being investigated for alleged human rights abuses but both Ouattara and Gbagbo's soldiers have been accused of atrocities during the fighting.
    Analysts say it will be important for Ouattara to follow through on a pledge to reconcile divisions, investigate human rights abuses, and include untainted officials from Gbagbo's political party in government.
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