Jailed Ex-President Lingers as a Force in Ivorian Vote
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Version 0 of 1. ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — New highways crisscross parts of this once-beleaguered nation. A $330 million toll bridge has relieved traffic that had clogged the way to a vital seaport. Two major French retailers are moving here; Heineken plans to open a new brewery. After a decade of violence and political turmoil, Ivory Coast appears to be in the midst of an economic comeback. The nation’s growth rate, hovering at about 8 percent for each of the past three years, is twice that of the rest of the countries in the region. As president since 2010, Alassane Ouattara has presided over this growth. An economist by training and a former top official at the International Monetary Fund, Mr. Ouattara would seem well suited to help the nation recapture a title it once held as an economic leader in West Africa. Whether he has a chance to keep the growth on track will be decided on Sunday, when Mr. Ouattara, 73, is hoping to win a second term in presidential elections. The image of Mr. Ouattara , nicknamed Ado, is plastered across dozens of billboards that tower over bustling traffic in Abidjan, the economic capital. “With ADO, our salaries are up,” one reads. “With ADO, I have water and electricity,” reads another. “With ADO, my projects are financed.” Mr. Ouattara’s victory is all but assured in the elections, from which a handful of rival candidates have already dropped out. But the nation is deeply divided, having fallen into chaos and devastating violence after Mr. Ouattara was elected. Beyond that, the recent economic gains have not been spread evenly throughout the country, leaving a sizable number of people, especially in the countryside, without jobs, reliable power and good roads. “Ivorians are anxious to turn the page on conflict and return the country to its position as economic powerhouse,” said Terence P. McCulley, the American ambassador to Ivory Coast. “The challenge will be ensuring economic growth is shared and that all Ivorians feel that they’re part of that economic growth.” For now, Mr. Ouattara’s chief challenge is keeping the peace on Election Day, the baseline needed for any future economic gains. Toward that end, a security force of 34,000 soldiers, including 6,000 United Nations peacekeepers, has been deployed across the country since the start of the month. High-tech voting cards with bar codes are being used to ensure against fraud. Five years ago, Mr. Ouattara narrowly won a runoff against the incumbent, Laurent Gbagbo, who had been president since 2000. Mr. Gbagbo is casting a long shadow over this year’s race, even from his prison cell at The Hague. He will face trial next month on charges of crimes against humanity for setting off five months of postelection violence that left at least 3,000 dead. Mr. Gbagbo refused to give up power for months when he lost the race, dragging Ivory Coast to the brink of civil war and holing up in the basement of the presidential palace as Mr. Ouattara’s supporters swept across the country and international forces entered the fight. France and the United Nations struck targets at his residence, his offices and his military bases, calling it necessary to protect civilians. The long standoff exposed old wounds in the nation that at the time had barely healed from a bloody civil war that started in the early 2000s. Some human rights groups also accuse Mr. Ouattara ’s camp of atrocities but he has faced no charges. Mr. Gbagbo maintains a huge following of loyalists in Ivory Coast, many of whom feel he was the true winner of the 2010 elections and was unjustly ousted by meddling international forces who wanted to hand power to Mr. Ouattara. “A lot of people who support him think he was railroaded,” said John Mukum Mbaku, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and economics professor at Weber State University in Utah. “It could be a problem.” Some of Mr. Ouattara ’s opponents are running on a Gbagbo platform, pledging their allegiance to him. At a rally last week in the Marcory neighborhood, young people on scooters popped wheelies to thumping loud music with lyrics switched to praise Mr. Gbagbo and the opposition candidate who made a crowd-pleasing campaign pledge. “I promise that the first thing I do if I’m elected is to liberate Laurent Gbagbo,” the candidate, Pascal Affi N’Guessan, told the wildly cheering crowd, which already had been screaming “Liberate Gbagbo!” over and over. The economic progress in Abidjan has failed to reach much beyond the cocoa-rich south, leaving behind many supporters of Mr. Gbagbo. “You can’t eat bridges,” has become a favorite saying of the opposition. “The economic recovery is still very imbalanced,” said Richard Banegas, an Ivory Coast expert at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. “In the countryside and remote areas of the country, nothing has changed.” Some citizens have already decided to boycott the elections, egged on by candidates who have bowed out of the race, declaring it a sham. Low turnout could delegitimize an Ouattara victory, further distancing an already dismissive electorate from its president. Some observers say the big result of this election will be the voter participation rate. “A high number would help Ouattara have legitimacy for his second term,” said Rinaldo Depagne, West Africa project director for the International Crisis Group. “His first term was one of stabilization, his second should be the one of reconciliation and normalization.” Mr. Ouattara has tried to reach out to his rivals’ supporters, some of whom remain unconvinced that he is even an Ivorian citizen. Instead, they contend he is from nearby Burkina Faso, a rumor that has dogged him for years and even derailed a prior bid for the presidency. He told Reuters last week that if elected he would seek to scrap a portion of the Constitution that requires presidential candidates to be Ivorian by birth, a clause that seemed geared toward excluding northerners who have family ties to Burkina Faso and Mali. Mr. Ouattara also visited Mr. Gbagbo’s home region of Gagnoa last month. But Mr. Gbagbo’s popularity is so entrenched that when elections researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, surveyed voters in the region, asking whom they planned to vote for on Sunday, a number of them said Mr. Gbagbo, despite his imprisonment. “The hard-liners in the former president’s party are going to boycott and do everything possible to delegitimize the process,” said Leonardo Arriola, a Berkeley professor who studies democratization and political violence in Africa. On a recent visit to the neighborhood of Yopougon, a bastion of Mr. Gbagbo’s opposition party, Ivorian Popular Front (F.P.I.), many people said they planned to do just that. “Why vote when my candidate is in jail and I already know who will win?” said Nicaise Wappo, who is sitting out the vote. Instead, he is stocking up on food and planning not to send his children to school during election week. “We never know what can happen,” Mr. Wappo said. “Elections in 2010 traumatized us.” |