Denounce the imperialist mugging of the Ivory Coast!
Behaving just like a gang of
muggers, the “international community” of imperialist powers once more
want to play the criminal game of “regime change”. This time the target
of the bullies is the West African state of Ivory Coast.
The scene is familiar: elections are held, the
incumbent head of state is declared elected by the country’s electoral
authorities – but the declared result is not to the taste of imperialism, which
favours the opposition candidate. The consequence? The United Nations dismisses
the verdict of the country’s own Constitutional Council, with Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon calling on President Gbagbo to “step down and allow his elected
successor to assume office without further interference”. The refusal to
withdraw the 9,000 UN “peace-keepers” as requested by the government at
a stroke transforms the blue helmets into an open instrument of imperialist
coercion acting in concert with the permanent French garrison. 800 of these
blue helmets defend the hotel from which the failed opposition candidate
Ouattara heads up the coup attempt. For good measure the European Union incites
the country’s armed forces to rebel against their president, giving succour to
the rebels firing on government troops in Abidjan and Tievissou.
In cahoots with Washington, the EU imposes travel
bans on the country’s head of state. The World Bank freezes loans to the
country, whilst the Central Bank of West African States is prevailed upon to
block the president’s access to the country’s funds, instead handing the keys
of the safe to imperialism’s preferred candidate. Meanwhile, in an effort to
present the attempted imperialist coup as the brainchild of the country’s
African neighbours, the Presidents of Benin, Sierra Leone and Cape Verde are bundled off to Ivory Coast to tell the president “that he must step down as
quickly as possible or face legitimate military force.”
Imperialism’s phony
concern over elections
The legitimacy or otherwise of elections is of no
interest whatever to imperialism, happy enough propping up undemocratic feudal
relics like the Saudi regime so long as they dance to the imperialist tune, or
organising sham elections at gunpoint in Afghanistan and Iraq. The problem only arises when it is feared that the outcome of an election might stiffen the national
backbone, making it harder for the interests of imperialism to prevail over
those of the sovereign nation. For example, the spirited defence of national
independence associated with the continued electoral success of ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe and of President Ahmadinejad’s government in Iran is what triggers the vicious campaign of
destabilisation orchestrated by the West, not any high-minded attachment to
democratic ideals.
It would seem from the scalded reaction to Laurent
Gbagbo’s November re-election, a reaction apparently shared by every
imperialist power on earth, that this former ambassador to the US no longer enjoys the trust of his former masters. Whilst none of the leading contenders for power
emerges from decades of corrupted comprador politics smelling of roses, all
having risen to prominence in the squabble for place and profit under
conditions of neo-colonial exploitation, it is clear from this unwonted
imperialist unity that there is a good deal more riding on the present
stand-off than personal ambition alone. All progressive opinion will speak with
one voice against this flagrant attack upon the sovereignty of Ivory Coast.
How imperialism ‘helps’
the Ivory Coast
Just as the old colonial oppressors used to piously
beat their breasts over having to bear the “white man’s burden”,
fulfilling their historical destiny by leading the benighted blacks towards the
light of civilisation, today’s neo-colonial busybodies would have us believe
that all the troubles of countries like Ivory Coast spring from African
backwardness – bad governance, corruption, greed, tribalism etc – which the
long-suffering “international community” tries so terribly hard to overcome.
Whilst few now dare defend the genocidal record of
open colonial oppression, so irreversible has been the anti-colonial tide
unleashed by October 1917, the same old self-serving racist assumptions lie
undisturbed beneath the neo-colonial surface. Yet a glance at Ivory Coast’s history since independence in 1960 should convince any honest observer that,
so far from being the antidote to that country’s post-colonial problems, continued imperialist meddling has been their cause.
An article in this journal published in 2007
explains the way in which the government was able to arrange matters so that
continued neo-colonial subjection to France could be combined with a degree of
national economic development, with ample scope for profit-taking by the
comprador elite at the helm.
“At the time, under the one-party government
rule of the Democratic Party of the Ivory Coast (PDCI) led by an old
collaborator with French imperialism, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, a canny person of
more or less social-democratic persuasion, the Ivorian ruling class was able to
negotiate with the French the right for Ivorians to retain control of a fair
proportion of the economy, including public services and vast amounts of
agrarian production, most of which technically belonged to the Ivorian state.
As a result, while French multinationals were accorded plenty of juicy
concessions at very low cost, enough was left for the Ivorian ruling class to
be able to develop the country and its economy for their own benefit and even,
to a limited extent, for the benefit of the masses of the people. The
government was able through the sale of agricultural produce in particular
(mainly coffee and cocoa) to generate the income to upgrade roads, improve
communications and raise the educational level of the masses. It also set up
very many local production units (factories) to try to ensure that it did not
become import-dependent, producing not only consumer goods but also
‘intermediate’ goods, i.e., commodities used in the production of consumer
goods, such as textiles and chemicals.”
This sweetheart arrangement persisted for the best
part of forty years, permitting a degree of national development alongside the
enrichment of the kleptocratic elite but all the time preserving France’s neo-colonial sway, so rendering the country vulnerable when the next wave of world
capitalist crisis hit – as it did towards the end of the ‘70s. The price of
its major export commodities, cocoa and coffee, plunged, coincident with a rise
in fuel prices and interest rates. In order to go on funding infrastructural development,
the economy needed to sweat maximum profit out of the narrow export regime to
which neo-colonial policy had kept agriculture tied. However with the price of
cocoa down through the floor this could only be done by depressing the wages of
rural workers. Yet how was home industry to continue developing if the
commodities it produced could not be absorbed by poverty-stricken rural
workers? Exposed in this way to the rigors of the overproduction crisis, the
economy fell easy prey to inflation and unemployment. All the while the
comprador elite continued feathering their own nest, whilst the tree on which
that nest sat rocked harder and harder. Between 1981 and 1984 agricultural GDP
fell by 12.2% and industrial by 33%; after a brief respite in 1984-86, the
overall GDP sank another 5.8%, with coffee exports alone plunging by 62%.
From this dire emergency, itself the result of the
failure to challenge France’s neo-colonial grip post independence, the
philanthropists of world capitalism offered to “rescue” the country – by
twisting the neo-colonial knife in harder. All the most flourishing sectors of
the economy were privatised and grabbed by France, in return for which
sacrifice Ivory Coast was permitted to run up unpayable debts with the World
Bank. The growing importance of oil production
in the ‘90s and beyond, far from strengthening national development, rather
hastened national disintegration as it made the country’s resources a yet more
attractive target for imperialist exploitation whilst multiplying the
opportunities for ethnic, regional and confessional division.
Imperialism’s present to the Ivory Coast: Civil War
In Houphouët-Boigny’s
honeymoon years of economic expansion, a shortage of labour had begun pulling
in a lot of migrant workers from Burkina Faso and elsewhere, so that by the
late ‘90s they totalled over a quarter of the population. Right from the start,
whilst happy to exploit this labour, the elite also made effective use of this
circumstance to spread division in the masses. Amongst Houphouët-Boigny’s
successors, witch hunts were launched against rivals who could not prove a
“pure” Ivorian blood-line back to their grand-parents. Tensions also grew
between the predominantly Christian and better-resourced south and the
predominantly Muslim north. When economic crisis had sufficiently destabilised
the country, it was around this north-south divide that civil war raged between
2002 and 2007 and threatens to re-ignite today – with the active participation
of both French imperialism (as in 2004 when the French military bombed Ivorian
planes and slew over 50 demonstrators), UN troops, and whatever proxies
imperialism can prevail upon to help undermine the country’s sovereignty.
The manner in which the jackals of
international monopoly capital pretend to be helping Ivory Coast heal the
wounds of civil strife, whilst intensifying the very exploitation from which
those divisions spring, outrages all civilised opinion. It is not in essence
the backwardness of Africa which condemns the masses to such repeated
tragedies, but the degeneracy of imperialism.
Hands
off the Ivory Coast!