Pardoning Profit: Neoliberal Transitional Justice in Côte d’Ivoire
by
Joanna M. Rice
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy Graduate Department of Political Science University of Toronto
© Copyright by Joanna M. Rice 2020
Pardoning Profit: Neoliberal Transitional Justice in Côte d’Ivoire
Joanna M. Rice
Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of Political Science
University of Toronto
2020 Abstract
This dissertation builds on an emerging critical literature that contends transitional justice aligns with neoliberal governance by overlooking socioeconomic harms and by protecting elite interests. Using Côte d’Ivoire as a case study, the dissertation argues that contemporary transitional justice does not merely align with neoliberalism in postwar contexts; it advances this reordering of governing and social order by limiting the moral obligation on government and society to respond to structural injustices. By restricting the moral obligation to address the suffering of others to a limited set of human rights violations, transitional justice establishes a new moral order where harms caused by individual rights violations are recognised as intolerable and demands justice, but the suffering caused by grave inequality, deprivation and other forms of structural injustice are implicitly tolerated and hence more easily overlooked by the state and by fellow citizens. Transitional justice institutions thus shape post-conflict justice into a process that protects elite interests and excludes transformative reforms or more radical demands such as wealth or land redistribution. The national reconstruction process that followed Côte d’Ivoire’s decade long civil war combined neoliberalisation and transitional justice as core priorities of the post-conflict regime. This dissertation shows that transitional justice in Côte d’Ivoire had the dual function of reinforcing neoliberal reforms while also legitimizing this reordering of
ii governance as just and democratic. As such, it served as the ideological foundation for President
Alassane Ouattara’s expansive and market-oriented governance reform agenda while simultaneously advancing a discourse domestically and abroad about the rights-respecting and liberal democratic nature of the new government.
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Table of Contents
PARDONING PROFIT: NEOLIBERAL TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE IN CÔTE D’IVOIRE ...... I
TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... IV
CHAPTER 1 ...... 1
1. NEOLIBERAL TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE ...... 1
INTRODUCTION ...... 1
NEOLIBERAL TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE ...... 10
THE HUMAN RIGHTS CRITIQUE ...... 11
THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RIGHTS CRITIQUE ...... 18
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? ...... 24
CASE STUDY: CÔTE D’IVOIRE ...... 26
RESEARCH METHODS ...... 28
NEOLIBERAL TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE IN COTE D’IVOIRE ...... 31
1.3.1. COMMISSION DIALOGUE, VERITE ET RECONCILIATION ...... 33
TOLERABLE AND INTOLERABLE SUFFERING ...... 37
CÔTE D’IVOIRE AT THE ICC ...... 42
PERMISSIBLE AND PUNISHABLE WAR CRIMES ...... 44
1.3.1. WHY CÔTE D’IVOIRE? ...... 45
1.3.1. THE QUESTION OF INTENTIONALITY ...... 48
CONCLUSION ...... 52
2. PURSUING MORAL RENEWAL: AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE ...... 55
INTRODUCTION ...... 55
PURSUING MORAL RENEWAL ...... 56
THE TURN TOWARDS RECONCILIATION ...... 59
MERGING FIELDS: PEACEBUILDING AND TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE ...... 64
THE ‘TOOL-KIT’ APPROACH ...... 69
2.1. CRITICAL RESPONSES ...... 71 iv
CONCLUSION ...... 74
3. REWRITING INEQUALITY AS ETHNIC CONFLICT ...... 77
INTRODUCTION ...... 77
THE IVORIAN LAND AND LABOUR CONFLICT...... 79
THE PRO-DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT ...... 91
DIVIDING THE YOUTH ...... 94
THE SUCCESSION CRISIS ...... 99
IVORITÉ ...... 101
A COINCIDENCE OF DIOULA REPRESSION AND OUATTARA’S AMBITION ...... 105
L’ ANNEE TERRIBLE...... 110
GBAGBO ELECTED ...... 113
“LE CHARNIER DE YOUPOUGON” ...... 114
SO BEGAN A DECADE AT WAR ...... 117
A VIRTUOUS REBELLION ...... 118
‘LES ESCADRONS DE LA MORT’...... 119
A TOPOLOGY OF YOUTH VIOLENCE ...... 123
REWRITING INEQUALITY AS ETHNIC HATRED ...... 128
ATONING BEFORE THE ELITE ...... 132
TRANSFERRING BLAME TO AVOID TRANSFORMING INJUSTICE ...... 135
CONCLUSION...... 136
4. PERMISSIBLE AND PUNISHABLE WAR CRIMES: SELECTING THE HEROES AND THE VILLAINS OF NEOLIBERAL PEACE ...... 139
INTRODUCTION ...... 139
NEOLIBERAL PEACEBUILDING ...... 141
THE FRENCH INTERVENTION ...... 145
THE WAGA ACCORD ...... 147
CÔTE D’IVOIRE VOTES ...... 149
“FREE AND FAIR” ...... 149
ELECTION DAY ...... 151
COUNTING THE COSTS ...... 155
WAS THERE EVER A DEMOCRATIC OPTION? ...... 157
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THE WINNERS AND THE LOSERS OF NEOLIBERAL PEACE ...... 160
THE GOLF REPUBLIC ...... 161
4.5.1. BREAKING GBAGBO ...... 163
GBAGBO’S CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY...... 165
THE RTI RADIO PROTEST ...... 165
THE ABOBO WOMEN’S MARCH ...... 167
THE MARKET SHELLING ...... 169
TAKING THE WEST ...... 172
THE ABIDJAN CAMPAIGN ...... 179
THE ICC IN CÔTE D’IVOIRE ...... 183
NAVIGATING LEGAL PRINCIPLE AND PROCEDURE ...... 189
4.1. CONCLUSION, ...... 192
5. THE PROFITS OF PARDON ...... 196
INTRODUCTION ...... 196
FIRST WAVE NEOLIBERALISM IN CÔTE D’IVOIRE ...... 197
COMZONE INC...... 204
DEVELOPING THE NORTH ...... 207
BUILDING NEOLIBERAL PEACE IN CÔTE D’IVOIRE...... 211
POST-CONFLICT NEOLIBERALISATION ...... 215
ÉMERGENCE VINGT-MILLE-VINGT ! ...... 217
RECONCILIATION IS GOOD BUSINESS ...... 221
LAND PRIVATIZATION FOR RECONCILIATION: A CASE STUDY ...... 224
CONCLUSION ...... 227
6. CONCLUSION ...... 230
NEW KIND OF IMPUNITY FOR A NEW GOVERNANCE ERA ...... 231
AN ELITE EXCHANGE ...... 233
TOLERABLE AND INTOLERABLE SUFFERING ...... 242
PERMISSIBLE AND PUNISHABLE WAR CRIMINALS ...... 247
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? ...... 249
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 254
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APPENDICES ...... 288
APPENDIX 1: RESEARCH METHODS ...... 288
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... 296
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Chapter 1
1. Neoliberal Transitional Justice
Introduction
Advocates of transitional justice claim that, in order to build peace that lasts, citizens need justice both in the form of redress for the past crimes and in the form of strong and reliable governing institutions going forward. This helps end cycles of violence by providing an alternative to vengeance and by signifying a clear break with the past. In the wake of mass atrocity and repressive rule, transitional justice marks the start of a rights-respecting era, where rule of law is reestablished and the population is assured that justice will be done should their rights and freedoms again be denied. Transitional justice, in this sense, establishes the moral order of a country in the aftermath of war or atrocity. Ruti Teitel was one of the first scholars to describe transitional justice as a distinct field of study and practice. Even in these earliest pieces, she identified renewing the moral foundations of a society as a core aim of transitional justice (Teitel
1997). Amongst its achievements as a tool of moral renewal, transitional justice has helped end impunity for state-sponsored violence, it has facilitated the rejection of racist governments, and it has contributed to building more inclusive communities and institutions. These are remarkable feats that are rightly celebrated by those who advocate for transitional justice as a means of building more peaceful and just societies. There is, however, another side to the role transitional justice plays reestablishing the moral order of countries transitioning from periods of repression
1 2 or war.
Transitional justice is deployed in incredibly difficult contexts, under circumstances where it is impossible to satisfy every need and act on every priority. Given its inherently overburdened agenda, transitional justice must determine what priorities will guide justice-seeking and what concerns must be left aside. It is thus a truism at the heart of transitional justice work that, in the aftermath of war or atrocity, not all injustice will be corrected, much suffering will never be repaired and many perpetrators will go unpunished. The best transitional justice can offer is to seek an acceptable and fair way forward given the tough realities it operates within. In this sense, every transitional justice process is a negotiation between competing priorities that determines which injustices cannot be ignored and which injustices simply cannot be addressed. That negotiation creates a particular moral order going forward, defining what calls for justice matter most during the transition, what moral obligations will direct governance in the new era, and what demands for justice or reform will be excluded from the readdress and reconstruction agenda. There are, in other words, certain parameters around the moral order that transitional justice establishes in post-conflict countries.
These parameters, I contend, have proven largely inflexible to the changing dynamics of conflict over the last forty years. Those parameters outline a fixed moral order, predetermined by the political and physical human rights lens transitional justice uses to view the past and devise reforms for future governance. That narrow lens excludes structural injustice, inequality and deprivation as core concerns for doing justice and reestablishing moral governance in transitioning states (Mamdani 2002; Mani 2008; Miller 2008; McAdams 2011; Nesiah 2016).
That exclusion happens to the benefit of a national and global elite who can reaffirm and legitimatize their privileges and their dominant standing by deploying transitional justice.
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Transitional justice serves this purpose by signaling that moral and just governance is reestablished, while simultaneously silencing demands from the victims’ community and other marginalized groups for wealth redistribution and other transformative reforms. Transitional justice, in order words, lays the moral groundwork for post-conflict governance that is both elite- driven and business-friendly, and exclusionary to low-income and marginalized communities.
This dissertation therefore goes beyond the argument that transitional justice is largely blind to the structural roots of conflict. The core concern here is with the moral order established by transitional justice in post-conflict contexts, the result of which is to silence demands for structural change and secure a sanctified place for the economic sphere and ruling elites beyond the reach of post-conflict reforms and outside the moral obligation of the state to its citizens.
The global spread of transitional justice has advanced political and physical human rights over the last forty years, but these processes have also closed judicial space to demands for social and economic justice. In doing so, it excludes citizens who cannot feel justice is done without major structural change included on the post-conflict governance agenda. In contemporary wars, the experience of victimhood is irreducibly connected to economic deprivation and the need for structural change for a majority of victims. In that sense, the ‘justice’ of transitional justice is unsuited to addressing the abuses experienced in contemporary conflict and is often unsympathetic to the suffering victims face in the aftermath. The loss of a breadwinner, a business, or the ability to support one’s family due to injury or trauma are primary constitutive elements of victimhood, often shaping victims’ lives more profoundly than an original, overt act of violation. Consider the following transcript excerpt from the Commission de Dialogue, Vérité et Réconciliation (CDVR) hearings of a woman known to the commission as ‘Affair 27’:
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‘The Secretary of the session calls Madame Y. She enters and takes her place. The
Secretary recounts the facts concerning her situation. The victim seems disoriented; her
eyes are haggard. She does not speak French and is accompanied by an interpreter.
President Banny (speaking Baoulé): Madame, are you alright?
Victim (speaking Baoulé): Thank you. We were in the bush in Duékoué. They killed my
husband and cut him into pieces. They then forced me to prepare his flesh and eat it.
Finally, I managed to escape, I ran to a village and they took me to Brobo. Please help me
be who I was before, please help me find some health again.
President Banny (in French): She was forced to eat the flesh of her own husband, she
asks us to find her care. She has a child, doesn’t she?
Interpreter (in French): According to her, the man who helped her in Brodo got her
pregnant. She is asking over and over again for some funds to start a business. She says
she needs to care for herself and the child.
A child of two years is presented to the Commission then handed to the mother who
begins breastfeeding.’
In this testimony, the woman, known only by her case number, is making a demand for justice articulated as employment so she can meet her family’s basic sustenance needs. She experienced unspeakable horrors and yet her testimony presents those experiences as inseparable from the ongoing suffering of desperate poverty. Accordingly, her vision of resolution and her demand for justice is focused on gaining the ability to make a living for herself and to care for her child.
After the session, she received a thirty-minute debrief with a counselor and was given a bus
5 ticket back to her hometown, with some cash for meals on route. This arrangement is drastically unaligned to her suffering and the forms of redress she requested. So much so, it feels unsettling, to suggest that the truth commission contributed to ‘doing justice’ in her case. She may not be speaking in precisely these words, but this woman envisions justice as a change away from an economic and social reality where she and her child have no prospects beyond the misery and indignity of desperate poverty, as it compounds past abuses.
Where poverty and victimhood are inseparable, moving beyond past violations is impossible for conflict victims without also addressing wider structural oppression and social inequalities. This is because, for many conflict victims, the consequences of structural oppression and grave inequalities stand in the way of the basic right to life and livelihood. Given that, any discussion of post-conflict justice is incomplete without a clear picture of how conflict victims and their families will survive and regain a sense of dignity. A post-conflict judicial process that fails to address this reality serves to silence the core of victim needs and demands. Transitional justice, I contend, does just that in many of its contemporary applications. By narrowing the scope of post- conflict justice away from clear and urgent needs voiced by citizens, the process establishes a new moral order in transitioning states that excludes the possibility of transformative change and blocks structural reforms that would displace elites or hurt their interests.
I use the term ‘neoliberalising’ to describe the way transitional justice serves as a gatekeeper, limiting the scope of justice-seeking to a project compatible with the interests of national and global elites. For David Harvey, the absence of a moral obligation on the state to address the economic and social welfare of citizens is a core characteristic of neoliberal governance (2005).
As seen, transitional justice is similarly blind to the economic and social dimensions that meaningful justice requires given the lived realities facing conflict victims and their
6 communities. In transitional justice, like in neoliberal politics, poverty is the individual responsibility of the poor, meaning citizens have no right to be free from the suffering it brings and no guarantee of assistance in meeting even basic survival needs (Brown 2015).
Neoliberalism is a governance approach that prioritizes personal freedoms and liberty, especially in regards to free markets, free trade and private property rights. In defending freedom of the markets, advocates insist the influence of the state in public life must be reduced. Under neoliberal governance, free market principles determine institutional and legal reforms, thus reordering social and political life according to competition-led efficiency. In this view, any imperfect attribute of a free market economy, be it mass unemployment or soaring inflation, is considered a sign of imperfect freedom in need of still greater liberalisation. Yet when it comes to policy implementation, reforms necessary to ‘free’ the public sphere from government interference require extensive new regulation and legislation. Thus, in practice, neoliberalism is not characterised by diminishing the state so much as it is a reorientation of the role of the state towards securing free markets and strengthening elite privilege in both the public and private sphere (Tadjbakhsh, 2009).
In the post-Cold War global governance era, neoliberal principles shape peacebuilding and post- conflict reconstruction operations. As pioneers of neoliberal economics during the height of the
Cold War, Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys described military intervention and neoliberal financial reforms as a joint mission in countries occupied by US forces (Klein 2008). With the collapse of the Soviet Union, a wave of brutal civil wars broke out around the global. In response to the shifted geopolitical order, earlier neoliberal securitization literature influenced new conflict theories that identified high poverty rates and economic isolation as root causes of
7 civil war (OECD DAC 1995; Collier and Hoeffler 2002 & 2004; Pugh 2005; Suhrke and
Buckmaster 2005). In this view, the plights of post-conflict societies are primarily understood as economic dilemmas, requiring an approach that coordinates peacekeeping with programs promoting economic growth, foreign investment and business success. Correspondingly, global governance institutions based in New York, Washington and Geneva began prescribing increased financial growth and expanding markets as requisites for peace and stability (Berdal and Malone 2000; Russet and O’Neal 2001; Friedman 2005; Barbara 2008). Pugh coined the term ‘The New York Dissensus’ to describe a policy platform, first appearing in a 1992 report from the UN Secretary-General, that folds 1989 Washington Consensus principles into the global peacebuilding mandate (Pugh 2005). In a related critique, Roland Paris titled this new mandate
‘liberal peacebuilding’ in reference to the underlining assumption that peace is achieved through a combination of democratization, freeing markets and increasing international cooperation
(1997). Today peacebuilding missions align efforts to reinforce democratic systems, foster new civil society and reestablish rule of law, with programs that strengthen property rights, transform tax systems, and secure market reforms (United Nations 2006).
Contemporary peacebuilding thus contributes to the global spread of neoliberalism to countries undergoing major political and social transitions after war. I characterise contemporary peacebuilding as a neoliberal project because its mandate promotes liberal values – such as democracy, human rights and rule of law – but those values are bound within economic restructuring requirements defined by Washington Consensus principles.1 Within that wider
1 Pieterse refers to an ‘augmented Washington Consensus’ as a term for the revised set of global governance principles devised following the failure of Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) era development. These principles are at the core of the contemporary peacebuilding model. The augmented Consensus promotes strong and effective governance institutions in parallel with opening markets, deregulation and foreign investment as key measures for
8 mandate, the contemporary peacebuilding model includes transitional justice as the central component of operations, deployed to coordinate post-conflict justice and governance reforms
(Annan 2004). In this role, transitional justice, advances a wider neoliberal reconstruction agenda by keeping poverty and structural violence outside the scope of post-conflict justice and reform.
That said, my contention that transitional justice has a neoliberalising effect on post-conflict environments goes beyond an omission to act in defense of economic and social justice.
My central claim in this dissertation is that transitional justice advances market-oriented and elite-led governance reform in the aftermath of war or regime change through the establishment of a moral order that legitimizes and upholds neoliberal governance. Neoliberalism is not merely the prioritization of business interests over social and environmental needs and democratic processes. It is a governance approach that reorients political institutions and social arrangements such that business interests take precedence over citizens’ wellbeing (Brown
2015). It is not a new observation that former conflict and disaster zones are a source of greenfield sites for neoliberal governance (Klein 2008). Investors see potential in post-war chaos for market expansion, resource extraction and lucrative reconstruction contracts. Notably, this happens in a context where national governing institutions lack the capacity to tax profits or regulate industry (ibid). Yet rebuilding in alignment with business interests conflicts with the
managing sustainable development (Pieterse 1998). For instance, the 2003 World Bank report on a revised Consensus concluded that ‘creating wealth depends greatly on a set of rules securing property rights, governing civil and commercial behaviour, and limiting the power of the state’ (Ayers 2008). Despite the notable addition of social and political dimension, economic liberalization remained central. Accordingly, the term ‘good governance’ refers to a UN wide effort across its missions to promote increased accountability, local participation, sustainable growth and strengthened rule of law. ‘Good governance’ refers both to building democratic institutions and a commitment to strengthening property rights, trade regulation and liberalizing tax systems. Some important examples of the approach appear in the UNDP Discussion Paper on Governance for Sustainable Development (United Nations 2014) and the UNDP commentary on good governance and development (United Nations Development Programme 2011). For additional examples see “Promoting good governance in public private partnerships” (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe 2008) and “Putting Economic Governance at the Center of Peacebuilding” (Hamilton and Wachs 2008). Also, see the World Bank overview page on governance and development (World Bank 2017).
9 priorities and needs of a population who have suffered terrible violence. For a neoliberal rebuilding project to be viable to citizens as well as onlookers from the international community, its advocates must somehow legitimize the logical jump between market-orient reconstruction and the claim that these are the priorities of a liberal and democratic regime that is committed to its citizens. Transitional justice institutions resolve that tension. By limiting the scope of justice, transitional justice establishes a new moral order that does not interference with – indeed, it supports and legitimizes – neoliberal governance. This moral order shapes policy and legislation, but more importantly, it has the deeper societal impact of defining what kinds of suffering and abuses are henceforth tolerated and intolerable in the political community. In other words, transitional justice establishes a post-conflict moral order that limits state responsibility to its most vulnerable citizens and justifies a lack of empathy amongst more fortunate citizens for the suffering of others.
Throughout this dissertation I refer to ‘parameters’ established by transitional justice that align justice-seeking and moral responsibility with neoliberal principles. I use this term because the image of drawing a border around the potential reach of justice illustrates a function of the transitional justice model usually hidden by the assumption that these institutions are neutral, if not inherently benign. No transitional justice process can address every form of injustice experienced during war or atrocity. That is a truism of working in post-conflict contexts. These institutions must place some limit on the scope of justice-seeking as a practical necessity of their operation. That limit establishes a parameter between justiciable and non-justiciable concerns.
This distinction, in turn, defines the requirements and limits of the new regime’s moral obligation to address injustice suffered by its citizens. As such, that parameter may be practically necessary, but it is never neutral: it defines which types of suffering and criminality
10 require justice, reform and repair, and which calls for justice will be overlooked or only addressed in piecemeal ways.
As a necessary function of its operation, transitional justice establishes a parameter of intolerable forms of injustice and injustice that is deemed unfortunate yet permissible. As seen in the testimony of ‘Affair 27’, the forms of injustice that are excluded by that parameter are the same concerns pushed outside the public sphere by neoliberal governance. The implication is that transitional justice legitimizes tolerance for the forms of suffering caused by structural violence and compounded by implementing market- and business-oriented governance reforms in a context of post-war deprivation and destruction. The further implication is that transitional justice also legitimizes certain forms of criminality. Namely, the criminality behind an oppressive and exploitative social and economic order, preserved to ensure the continued dominance of business and ruling elites, and to advance their interests in the post-conflict area.
Neoliberal Transitional Justice
Transitional justice became a ubiquitous part of contemporary peacebuilding operations because the approach demonstrably contributes to advancing accountability, ending cycles of violence, and promoting national reconciliation (Annan 2004). It is not a coincidence, however, that deploying transitional justice towards those ends is an approach to peacebuilding that gained prevalence in parallel with the rise of neoliberal global governance. Transitional justice is popular in the current era because the model does not merely strengthen human rights and democratic values, it strengthens the particular version of those values found in neoliberalism.
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There are practical aspects of its current use that especially emphasize the neoliberalism of the transitional justice approach – most notably, its central role in contemporary peacebuilding operations. That said, the reason transitional justice aligns with and advances neoliberal governance is not an extraneous circumstance of the model’s current uses. Rather, the opposite is occurring. Transitional justice is so prevalent in the current global governance climate because its neoliberalising effect is inbuilt to the model, thus laying the moral foundation on which neoliberal peacebuilding is built.
The Human Rights Critique
Human rights violations are the basic units from which a transitional justice process is built. A national transitional justice process comprises a collection of ad hoc post-conflict institutions, selected from a list of possible initiatives sometimes referred to as the ‘mechanisms’ or ‘pillars’ of transitional justice. This list includes truth commissions, reparations programs, criminal prosecutions, memorialization projects and various types of vetting or institutional reforms. Each institution plays a role in documenting and responding to specific incidents of human rights violations. In contemporary examples, numerous mechanisms are adopted simultaneously, with a truth commission usually serving as the central coordinating body (ICTJ 2013). This is because truth commission investigations are generally the basis for reparation programs and criminal prosecutions; their recommendations are the source of institutional and legal reforms; and memorialization, peace education programs and community reconciliation projects are often
12 incorporated into truth commission outreach programs. 2 In an ideal scenario, the various coordinated mechanisms of a transitional justice process offer victims and the wider citizenry a broad form of justice-seeking that addresses past injustice while also helping rebuild the governing institutions and moral fabric of a post-conflict state.
Thus, at its most essential, a truth commission is an institution built to pressure liberal democratic reforms and advance accountability efforts by documenting and publishing testimony of grave and systematic human rights violations. Truth commissions operate on the assumption that recording many individual incidents of human rights violations can offer a window into widespread patterns of abuse and thus form the basis for a holistic kind of justice that includes repair, redress and reform. The testimony-based format of a truth commission was developed under the assumption that many accounts documenting the bare facts of human rights abuses will combine to tell a wider truth about the political and social circumstances surrounding those incidents. In theory, the sum of many individual incidents creates a comprehensive account of the abuses committed by a violent or oppressive regime.
In practice, however, the approach has a different effect. The version of ‘truth’ found by compiling many incidents of human right violations provides only a narrow window into the past. A truth commission tells the story of who wielded weapons and who succumbed to their
2 Commission mandates usually include some language on the actions expected or required from government to implement its findings and recommendations, although it is generally considered undemocratic for an independent investigative body to legally force its recommendations onto the future state (ICTJ 2013). There are also practical reasons why this is unadvised by most TJ practitioners. The Liberian TRC, for instance, was established by legislation that bound its future recommendations into law. This ultimately produced a legitimacy crisis for the Commission as well as new government. Liberian President and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and many members of her government were listed amongst individuals to be vetted from public office, prompting President Sirleaf and her government to overrule the recommendations of the report and discredit the commission process.
13 blows – moments in which direct perpetrators abused identified victims. It is a historic record that rarely exposes exploitation networks, complex motivations and other political realities surrounding specific acts of violence. The fundamental, constituting role of human rights violations in the transitional justice model makes transitional justice a powerful tool for advancing political and physical human rights however that same approach has ensured individual, timebound experiences are the primary focus of post-conflict justice-seeking.
Transitional justice is demonstrably ill-suited to addressing experiences that are not easily articulated as individual human rights violations (Miller 2008). This reflects a wider pattern, documented in recent decades, of human rights activism being at once a powerful tool for drawing attention to injustice while simultaneously limiting the transformative potential of social movements founded in this tradition. 3 French philosopher Alain Badiou is especially influential in his critique of human rights and the activist movements adopting this approach. Human rights, in his view, reflect an agreement from powerful authorities to not permit the worst possible abuses, so long as the basic tenets of liberal capitalism are maintained. Human rights do not help us envision a world transformed for the better nor do they build towards radical change (Badiou
3 See Sikkink 2011 on the potential of a human rights framework to bring social justice. Contrasting this view, there is a large body of literature on the limitations of the human rights approach. As a very brief summary, these critiques tend to focus either on human rights as a threat to culture and community cohesion, or – taking a more political lens – focus on the tendency for human rights to weaken or usurp revolutionary struggles. Amongst the best-known cultural critiques, Esteva and Prakash (1998) warn that human rights threaten cultural diversity because they demand that a single, liberal democratic, vision of good society is universally adopted. Authors argue that in many non-Western contexts this damages community life and cohesiveness by advancing individuals rights over the cultural fabric of community-based societies (see Charles Taylor 1992). On a related point, Spivak (1988) sees the human rights movement and its claims to intervene in foreign countries in defense of vulnerable groups as a direct evolution of the civilizing discourse used in the colonial era to justify domination (on this point, also see Inayatullah and Blaney 2012). Political critiques emphasize that the human rights approach depoliticizes injustice and dampens radical efforts for political change (Badiou, 2002). In a related critique, Samuel Moyn (2012) claims that the rise of individual human rights has come at the cost of broader reaching social movements such as economic and structural injustice (also see Harri Englund 2006). These critiques speak to a tendency for human rights to help address basic individual needs while simultaneously preserving the status quo against the demands of broader political struggles.
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1998 and 2001).4 In other words, human rights may help prevent the very worst from occurring, but they have a damping effect on revolutionary struggles demanding transformative change.
They do not reimagine social and economic life, instead making the much more limited demand of ensuring individuals are free from the most heinous forms of abuse. It is hence not an accident that the spread of human rights activism accompanied the end of the Cold War and the rise of the global capitalism. This parallel timeline is noted by David Harvey who contends that the liberal insistence upon individuals as the foundational element in political and economic life opened the door to human rights activism. As a result, contemporary social movements rarely look beyond the individual level, rendering today’s activist tradition poorly suited to mounting larger structural critiques (Harvey 2005, 78).
The same limitations that the human rights approach has placed on contemporary social movements are also seen in the transitional justice model. As a lens for understanding the past and shaping the future, human rights violations document a collection of individual, timebound experiences. Yet behind these specific incidents there are long legacies of collective suffering and structural injustice that remain largely unseen. This is especially problematic given the individuals most vulnerable to human rights violations – and who suffer the consequences most severely in the aftermath – come from groups put at risk by oppression and economic hardship
(Sambanis and Elbadawi 2000; Goodhand 2001; Merry 2011). We have already established that the pain of a human rights violation is not limited to the time of its occurrence nor to the direct target of that abuse. This is particularly true where poverty and inequality reinforce physical,
4 This critique of human rights appears in a number of Badiou’s works, however the ideas detailed above appear in Badiou, Alain (2001) Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso). My summary of the argument is informed by his explanation of the piece in a 2001 interview by Cox, Christoph and Whalen, Molly “On Evil: An Interview with Alain Badiou.”
15 material and emotional damages. That complexity is hidden by the purported universalism of human rights. The claim these rights are inalienable and equally possessed by all humans also implies it is equally unjust to all humans when those rights are violated. To imagine that diverse victims of terrible abuse all share a similar, core experience depoliticizes how and why violence occurs. It also reflects a privileged understanding of violence in which structural and economic injustice are peripheral to some imagined core constituting experience of victimhood.
This dynamic was apparent in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) where, in hopes of stemming future conflict, the commission intentionally depoliticized its operations by viewing the past through the framework of universal human rights. By focusing on human rights as a common denominator amongst all victims, the TRC pushed the context surrounding abuses into the background. The human rights framework adopted by the South
African TRC allowed Commissioners to demonstrate equal concern for like experiences regardless of the race or politics of individuals involved. The commission focused on creating detailed and accurate accounts of specific human rights violations, opting not to see these experiences through the politicizing lens of the daily oppression, poverty and humiliation perpetrated by the Apartheid regime against the black majority (Mamdani, 2002).5 In doing so, the commission invited outrage from some civil society groups by implying there was some
5 Mamdani (2002) gives the critical perspective presented here. For a discussion of the intentions and operations of the SA TRC, see Boraine (2000). As former TRC Head, Alex Boraine was known to reiterate a version of Mamdani’s critique in public statements, but presenting it as a positive feature of the TRC. When speaking retrospectively about the design and methods of the truth commission, Boraine emphasized, as a point of pride, that both the National Party and the ANC took the TRC to court. Most notably, the family of Steven Biko brought the amnesty provision before the South African Constitutional Court. In this case, the court upheld the legally of the amnesty process (AZAPO v. President of the RSA, 1996). Boraine considered anger from both sides a sign of the objective and fact-driven nature of the Commission. This reflection comes from discussions by the author with G. Simpson, founder of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.
16 degree of moral equivalency between the actions of anti-apartheid activists and a white supremacist regime committed to violently holding power.6
The truth commission’s objectivity was a deliberate decision, intended to help facilitate a peaceful transition to inclusive democracy (Tutu 1999). It communicated to the still powerful white minority that the new regime was committed to moving on in a spirit of reconciliation, and that this spirit superseded the demands for more radical action from segments of the majority population. The TRC was able to communicate that reconciliatory message because human rights serve as a guarantee to all sides that each individual testimony will be assessed with neutrality and objectivity. In this sense, a human rights framework creates the impression of a common denominator linking vastly different experiences of wrongdoing. The value of neutrality and objectivity as a peacebuilding tool is evident in the South African example. The political
6 These feelings are expressed in studies conducted by the South African Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation with victims at the time of the TRC (CSVR 2006). The moral equivocating problem caused by the commission’s commitment to objectivity and legality is also visible in the anger shown for the amnesty process by victims (for example, see the court case opened by Steven Biko’s family). The tension caused by this equivocating is particularly well-demonstrated by the unrepentant attitude of some black perpetrators appearing before the commission during amnesty hearings. Their words and their demeanor communicate that their actions were the work of freedom fighters, not criminals equivalent to the former regime and its security apparatus. For example, see the amnesty hearing for the three men who stabbed and stoned to death the American graduate Amy Biehl in a township outside Cape Town. A clip of the hearing can be seen in “Truth Commission Special Report: Episode 56 Part 3”, available on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4xOZFzwr3w. Biehl’s family came to South Africa to participate in the amnesty hearing and expressed forgiveness as a step towards the greater cause of reconciliation. The young men applying for amnesty in her case make it clear they are in no way equal to the white police officers who sat in their same seats. They explain they murdered Biehl as activists in a struggle for freedom. The closest they come to apology is expressing regret for killing the wrong sort of white person, with one explaining: “I realised we made a mistake, I took part in killing someone we could have used to achieve our ends”. Winnie Mandela famously refused to play the role of ‘perpetrator’ for the sake of the TRC in her public hearings. Winnie Mandela was accused by numerous witnesses of direct responsibility for multiple cases of torture and murder, the most famous one being the brutal murder and torture of the fourteen-year old UDF member Stompie Sepei. In her opening statements, Winnie Mandela makes it clear she will not ask for amnesty because she does not need it. She plainly says she has done nothing wrong. Following days of testimony from victims and witnesses, the closest Mandela comes to an apology is repeating Tutu’s words after he publicly implores her to show remorse. She finally responded “…for that part of those painful years when things went horribly wrong and we were aware of the fact that there were factors that led to that, for that I am deeply sorry.” For a further discussion on Winnie Mandela’s testimony and the moral tensions it represented in transitional South Africa, see the account of her hearings by TRC journalist Antjie Krog in ‘Country of my Skull’ (Krog 2000).
17 negotiations that culminated in the TRC ended a civil conflict that saw over 20,000 deaths over the preceding decade (Hamber 1999). Whatever criticisms one might mount against the TRC, facilitating a non-military end to that conflict remains a remarkable achievement. It is nevertheless also important to identify the limitations of the approach, especially when applied to the deeply political task of doing justice for a terrible past.
Neutrality and objectivity are forms of moral equivocating that depoliticize the historic record, allowing the more complex motivations for and consequences of violent conflict to fade into the background. When looking through an objective lens, it is easy to lose sight of the very different ways people from separate social classes and life situations experience violence and oppression.
This translates into a tendency for transitional justice to favour the status quo when it comes time to recommend reforms and seek resolution to past injustice. The problem with this approach is evident in the South African example. The South African TRC transfixed the country and, for that matter, the world more than any similar transitional justice process before or since. It conducted painstaking work detailing tens of thousands of accounts from victims and perpetrators of human rights violations, as they described pain and cruelty, and sometimes also apology and forgiveness. With those accounts as the basis for building a new era, the TRC reported on the past as a long series of individual experiences of political and physical human rights violations. Economic deprivation and structural violence were at the heart of Apartheid, and the atrocities of that regime were largely motivated by a desire amongst its leadership to maintain racial inequality and white dominance in the economic and public sphere. 7 Yet the
7 In its most resent assessment released in 2015, the World Bank assigned South Africa a GINI index of 63, making it the world’s most unequal country, according to this indicator. At that time, South Africa had a population of 55 million with 12.8 million living below the poverty line and representing 19.2% of the population. Although there was significant improvement from a highwater mark of 16 million in 2000, poverty rates are once again rising. On equity indicators, data gathered by the World Bank shows that from 1990-2017, the GDP has grown nearly five-fold
18
South African transitional justice process responded to a long history of racial oppression with a redress and reform agenda that largely preserved the economic and social status quo. The result was a post-conflict reform and reconstruction agenda that launched the country into new cycles of violence, perpetuated by the continuation of a deeply unjust status quo.
The Economic and Social Rights Critique
My critique of the SA TRC echoes Mahmood Mamdani’s seminal response to the transitional justice process in South Africa, published soon after the release of the TRC report. His critique emphasized how the TRC’s focus on overt incidents of abuse masked the daily indignities and social injustices at the core of Apartheid (Mamdani, 2002). The piece first articulated a now common criticism of transitional justice. In order to receive assistance and recognition, critics say, transitional justice mechanisms require victims to make claims of political or physical human rights violations and, in doing so, preclude structural violence, oppression and deprivation as violations meriting justice (Duffield 2001; Laplante 2007, 2008; McGovern and
Lundy, 2008; Mani 2008; Miller 2008; McAdams, 2001; Nesiah 2016). In other words, violent conflict and structural oppression are deeply intertwined yet transitional justice targets only the
(from 111.9 billion USD to 510.9 billion USD) and per capita income grew from 9900 PPP USD to 12,889 PPP USD. However, for the bottom four-fifth of those on an income distribution scale, there has been no significant growth in their share of national income since 1990. The only notable difference in income distribution is a shrinking middle and lower middle class, and a growing share of wealth held in the top fifth of the income distribution scale. For the bottom three-fifth of the population, their collective share of the economy has actually shrunk from 17.5% to 15.4% since the transition to democracy (Sulla 2019).
19 most overt examples of violation, as though such incidents have a tangible reality that exists independent from the context where they took place.
Structural violence, as defined by Uvin, is a combination of high inequality, social exclusion, and humiliation (Uvin 2004). In the post-conflict and post-dictatorship contexts where transitional justice operates, this manifests as unequal access to public services and resources, exploitation of vulnerable groups by those in power, and exclusion of minority or marginal groups from civic life and a decent livelihood. Elites preserve this status quo by using their privilege to consolidate opportunities and resources in the hands of a wealthier and more powerful few. Yet, to quote
Vasuki Nesiah’s words, “challenging impunity has often been equated with individualized criminal prosecutions rather than efforts to contest the abuse of power enabled by structural injustice” (Nesiah 2016). Transitional justice, critics contend, largely ignores that wider context, approaching victimhood as a matter of individual and timebound suffering, delinked from its roots in structural inequality and oppression.
Victims do not experience violence as a distinct moment that happened in the past, and it misrepresents their experiences and needs to frame their accounts in this way. For a widow unable to provide sufficient food and shelter to her children following the wartime death of the family breadwinner, his death is a no less salient form of suffering than the many ways this tragedy manifests in her daily life. This point was illustrated in the moving account of a widow and mother of five I interviewed at a small victim centre in a ghetto outside Abidjan.8 When he was alive, her husband made a modest living as a repairman. Now her only income comes from
8 Anonymous widow in interview with author, Abobo, Côte d’Ivoire, June 2015.
20 begging and sex work. Her children, she said, stood outside the door of the school every day trying to overhear the lessons because she was so behind on school fees, they were no longer allowed to enter. In her account, she made no distinction between the pain of losing her husband and the pain she felt watching her children go to sleep hungry every night in a leaking shelter or suffering from illnesses that would be easily treated had she money for a doctor. What is more, her account is not unique. Stories like this are common in every post-conflict context I have worked.9
Whatever good intentions may motivate transitional justice efforts, there is a growing body of research pointing to the fact that these initiatives are misaligned with the needs and expectations of victims (Hamber, Nageng and O'Malley, 2000; Mani, 2008; McGovern and Lundy 2008;
McEvoy 2008; Mendeloff, 2004; Nesiah 2016). It is not only scholars voicing this concern.
Many practitioners also acknowledge the exclusion of economic and social injustice is a major shortcoming in their work. This is evident in the increased attention transitional justice initiatives have dedicated to these matters in recent years.10 Most national-scale transitional justice programs launched since the new millennium included features like a designated truth
9 I worked on long term assignments as an international advisor to truth commissions in Côte d’Ivoire and The Gambia as well as providing technical advice to transitional justice institutions and victims associations in Nepal, Canada, Libya, Syria and to members of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Rights.
10 The OHCHR Report “Transitional Justice and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights” gives a practical overview of the increasing role granted economic and social rights in transitional justice mechanisms over the field’s history (OHCHR 2014). More recently, the United Nations and International Centre for Transitional Justice joint working group on transitional justice and the SDG+ responds to the lack of attention given to economic and social crimes in transitional justice. The group represents a new strategic direction for global UN work on TJ, now joining development and post-conflict justice-seeking as linked pursuits at the United Nations (Working Group on Transitional Justice and SDG+, 2019). As a specific example of an increased concern with economic justice in transitional justice, Colombia enacted a Victims’ Reparations and Land Restitution Law in 2011 even before planning its truth commission (Correa 2015). Likewise, the mandate of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission in the Philippines included root causes of marginalization, looking at displacement of indigenous communities and land grabs of their traditional land (Colina 2018).
21 commission report chapter on marginalized communities, or special hearings on financial crimes and corruption. Though all timely efforts to address a clear deficiency in the field, these adaptions fall far short of providing substantive solutions to economic and social injustice.11 The standard transitional justice toolkit includes investigations, limited trials, public hearings, reporting, possibly reparations for direct victims, and often memorialization or community reconciliation initiatives. These are appropriate tools if we consider the aim of transitional justice to be some combination of fact-finding and reconciliation. The approach inevitably produces piecemeal results when applied to the task of addressing economic and structural injustice, particularly given the scale, gravity and complexity of these concerns in a post-conflict context.
More than anything, recent efforts to address structural injustice with the standard transitional justice ‘tool kit’ have illustrated how ill-suited the model is to addressing deep-rooted social and economic injustice. Consider, for example, the words of the Head Investigator at the Sierra
Leone TRC. He described their work on economic crimes as follows,
“Of course, we felt these stories were important, that is why we included the
special chapter and hearings. But the fact is, no one read that chapter and those
were our least popular public hearings.”
Without denying the importance of economic and social justice to Sierra Leonean conflict victims, the investigator explained the unpopularity of special procedures on economic crimes as
11 As an illustrative example of an effort to address economic injustice with transitional justice mechanisms, ICTJ senior expert on reparations, Ruben Carranza, provided me with footage from the collective reparations program in Peru. One initiative built a fish pond in a Peruvian peasant community were state forces massacred more than thirty people. The pond is presented as a success story in the film, without addressing the glaring question of what logic weighs a food-generating development project as compensation for a massacre.
22 a matter of public disinterest. These issues, he concluded, are simply not as captivating as more visible and overt human rights violations. Perhaps there is an alternative explanation. If transitional justice initiatives contributed in substantive ways to transforming inequality and economic deprivation, the commission would surely attract public attention. Drawing public interest would be no issue if special hearings were replaced with a wealth redistribution program, restructuring the economy, or serious consequences for the elites both in-country and abroad who profited from the war.12
Such a suggestion will inevitably be met with the response that justice simply cannot mean transforming every victim’s life, particularly in a case like this where there are untold thousands of victims and millions of others affected. The core purpose of adopting a transitional justice approach is to do something when the scale of brutality and injustice is so vast, that nothing seems possible. Transitional justice is a limited approach; it simply cannot fix every problem and address every need. A transitional justice process is comprised of ad hoc and temporary quasi- judicial institutions deployed in a tense and politicized environment. These institutions do not wield the power to implement major institutional reforms, let alone orchestrate something as
12 Reparations were made available to victims of who suffered more than 50% physical incapacitation or sexual violence. For most victims, that assistance was piecemeal, at best, and it did not even reach all eligible recipients. The National Commission for Social Action (NACSA), the Sierra Leonean state entity responsible for reparations, received $ 3 million US from the United Nations Peacebuilding Fund and an additional $ 5.5 million US from donors over the operational period of 2008-2014. Although the truth commission foresaw reparations in the form of pensions and social services for victims, most victims received a one-time interim relief payment of 100$ US. Select cases deemed most severe also received medical operations, vocational training and micro-grants (Ottendörfer 2014). Weaknesses in the registration process and implementation meant funds were unevenly distributed across regions, with some rural areas most affected by the war overlooked. Also, funds were often distributed by chiefs or local officials along patrimonial lines. By consequence, these dynamics subjected victims to the same inequalities and power relations at the root of the conflict (ibid). The NACSA 2017 annual report - the most recent available on the website - recognises that the program has still not reached all eligible victims (National Commission for Social Action NaCSA 2017). The NACSA says reparations were delayed due to the government’s focus on reforming the military, police and justice sectors. Indeed, in contrast to the experience of many victims, a benefits program and demobilisation payments were available to ex-combatants (IRIN 2009).
23 radical as large-scale wealth redistribution or transformative social reforms. Furthermore, it is irresponsible and unfair to raise victim expectations by writing impossibly wide mandates only to disappoint later when those promises go unfulfilled.
There are recent cases in which the architects of a transitional justice project attempted to adopt a transformative mandate. The best known of these examples is the Kenyan Truth Justice and
Reconciliation Commission. The Kenyan TJRC adopted an extensive mandate including the promise of land reforms and mechanisms to address high-level corruption. The commission made little progress and was ultimately highjacked by political interests, with expert observers blaming its overburdened and unrealistic mandate. 13 As the Kenyan case illustrates, transitional justice institutions are too limited to deliver tangible results on the politically volatile and enormous task of correcting longstanding structural injustice.
Since the potential for transitional justice to significantly advance structural and economic injustice is demonstratively limited, many practitioners conclude these matters are better left off the agenda. Transitional justice, they argue, should focus on advancing accountability and reparations for political and physical human rights violations and, where possible, contribute
13 Kenya is one of the first countries to include investigating large scale corruption and land expropriation in a truth commission. The TJRC’s initial two-year mandate was extended three times. This was due to a combination of an overburdened commission and political interference permitted by the Chairmen, Bethuel Kiplagat. With a mandate covering all manner of economic and political crimes, and an investigation period going back to 1895, the commission was crippled by the scope of its project. The final report is criticized for giving piecemeal recommendations that are difficult to link with practical programs or reforms (Ndungú 2014). The Land Chapter was one of the most controversial in the report. Some of the TJRC commissioners were persuaded to give an advanced copy of the report to the president and, under pressure from his office, agreed to alter paragraphs that alleged criminal activity by President Kenyatta’s family (Ndungú 2014). These commissioners also agreed to delay the release of report until after the 2013 elections. Further undermining the TJRC, the National Assembly amended the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Act to only require that the government ‘consider’ recommendations rather than be obliged to implement. As a follow-up to the TJRC, the anti-corruption mechanism adopted by the Kenyatta government is an elite-led effort, designed to leave patronage systems intact and ensure impunity for those in power (Carranza and Ndonga 2019). Ronald Slye, a former TJRC commissioner critical of the commission’s outcome, commented that the government has “only addressed corruption rhetorically or selectively, through what is perceived as prosecution of individuals who are not in favor of the current leadership” (ibid).
24 some small steps towards wider structural reform, perhaps through truth commission report recommendations or through programs like security sector vetting. After all, transitional justice was designed to achieve a particular set of aims, and we undermine our ability to deliver even these more limited goals by extending the transitional justice mandate to an unbounded list of structural and economic injustice concerns.14
Where do we go from here?
The scholars and practitioners advocating a limited yet achievable transitional justice mandate offer a well-reasoned conclusion, and one that this difficult to counter. I would argue, however, that this position is informed by a narrow view of the problem. Their rationale is based on the common assumption in liberal discourse that any effort to advance human rights and liberal values is inherently worthwhile.15 Such thinking suggests that, since advancing rights and freedoms is never wrong, the only relevant discussions in the field of transitional justice are about its potential positive impacts. As the argument goes, since there is demonstrably little that can be achieved on economic and social injustice with the transitional justice approach, there is
14 For examples in the TJ literature by technical experts recommending a limited mandate, see ICTJ’s practitioners guide to writing TRC mandates (Gonzalez 2013). Also, Albing-Lackey cautions against including corruption in truth commission mandates, noting it is not a human right under international law (Albin-Lackey 2014). Lars Waldorf notes TJ already creates high expectations amongst victims and thus risks creating more disappointment when it oversteps the already stretched limits of the model, explaining there are simply not sufficient time, resources or capacities to expand the project to broader issues of economic and social rights (Waldorf 2012).
15 As an important early contribution to critical literature on liberalism, see Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) regarding the (not-automatic) conditions under which a person gains the ‘right to have rights.’ Also see Micheal Walzer’s (1984) ‘Liberalism and the Art of Separation’, in which he describes the role of liberalism in creating borders around social and political life, separating off public from private spheres. Amongst many others contributors, influential critiques of a post-Cold War ‘liberal consensus’ include Étienne Balibar (2009) and Jacques Rancière (1999).
25 nothing more to say on the matter. Countering that position, I contend the topic holds great relevance precisely because the model is so poorly suited to addressing these concerns.
Regardless of whether there is a solution available within transitional justice, the model’s failure to address structural injustice is not neutral. That failure has consequences on victims’ lives and on the potential of their communities to recover from war by shaping governance and public institutions in the post-conflict era. Irrespective of whether transitional justice could advance economic rights or resolve structural violence, leaving these matters unaddressed is, itself, adopting a stance on the issues, and one with important impacts for transitioning societies.
Transitional justice does not operate in a sphere separate from economic crimes and structural violence; oppression and poverty reinforce past abuses, extend suffering and create new vulnerabilities to abuse and repression. Omitting these matters from post-conflict justice- seeking establishes a new regime where overt acts of violence are indeed reprehensible, but other more insidious forms of injustice are implicitly tolerated. As a result, the ‘justice’ promised by transitional justice safeguards the economic sphere from restructuring and ignores demands for substantive change expressed by victims’ groups and other marginalized communities. As seen in the preceding pages, that limited vision of justice and the resultant tendency of transitional justice to safeguard the status quo is built into the transitional justice model itself. The transitional justice approach is based on a commitment to liberal principles such as respect for human rights and dignities, yet, as we have seen, the model places inbuilt limits to those principles. Paralleling neoliberal governance, transitional justice advances liberal values but only to the point those values might interfere with economic interests or threaten an established social hierarchy. When deployed as a state-building tool, meant to reestablish moral order, the vision of justice and morality advanced by transitional justice serves to reinforce neoliberal
26 governance and, more importantly, gives legitimacy to this reordering of society.
Case Study: Côte d’Ivoire
After a decade of civil war, the new Ivorian regime implemented a reconstruction agenda characterised by sweeping neoliberal reforms and an extensive transitional justice process. That transitional justice process is best known for launching the ICC trial of former president Laurent
Gbagbo: the world’s first international criminal trial of a head of state for crimes against humanity. Ivorian transitional justice further included a lengthy series of domestic special trials, a national truth commission, a large-scale demobilisation program and the promise, still unfulfilled, of a national reparations program. That national process of justice-seeking and democratic renewal accompanied a neoliberal reform agenda praised in the global business community. “Never before has an African country been so well sold to international investors as
Côte d’Ivoire in the last five years”, reported one business consulting firm (Gweth 2017). That success was equally celebrated in the international finance community. At the end of Alassane
Ouattara’s first presidential term, the IMF listed Côte d’Ivoire as one of the ‘World’s Ten Best
Reformers’, following a jump of 10 spots in the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business’ country index
(International Monetary Fund 2016). A combination of political stability, justice-seeking and economic growth far beyond projected figures earned President Ouattara’s management of the transition rare praise in an era when most civil wars reignite within a decade of signing peace accords. When Côte d’Ivoire’s UN peacebuilding mission finally ended in 2017, the UN
Secretary General finished his statement by recommitting UN support to the Ouattara
27 government, citing “the implementation of outstanding reform activities with a view to ensuring that the hard-won peace can be sustained and the country and its people will continue to progress and thrive” (Office of UN Secretary-General 2017).
High praise from the world’s most powerful global governance institutions speaks to why Côte d’Ivoire is an illustrative case study of transitional justice’s neoliberalising effects. That effect is more consequential than the mere alignment of transitional justice and neoliberal reforms on the national reconstruction agenda. The more important impact of that effect is the fact that powerful global actors deem Côte d’Ivoire’s reconstruction as a success story. In the international media and in UN documents, Côte d’Ivoire’s transition is characterised as a liberal democratic success where justice was done for the past while simultaneously attracting vast foreign investments and regrowing the business sector. Côte d’Ivoire’s reconstruction was indeed a success story for the
Ivorian elite, whose kleptocratic rule was at the root of the conflict in the first place. It was also a success for domestic and foreign business owners who profited from the war and again from the sell-off of national resources and industries in its aftermath. The view was quite different, however, from the lower rungs of the social hierarchy.
As the coming chapters detail, neoliberalisation and transitional justice – the dual priorities of national reconstruction –– combined into a reconstruction agenda that negated the socio- economic origins of the war and legitimized aggressively market-oriented governance as just and good. Moreover, it achieved this while avoiding accountability for the ruling elite and punishing enemies of free-market capitalism on the international stage in a one-sided judicial process. Told in these terms, the Ivorian ‘success’ appears to be a cynical story of foreign and national elites profiting out of conflict. Yet here is the dynamic that makes this such an illustrative case of the neoliberalising effect of transitional justice: the Ivorian reconstruction agenda was not merely a
28 business-oriented economic growth plan with a cynical pretense of justice to hide elite profit- seeking. Post-conflict justice was extensive and supported by massive national and global investments of time and resources. Rather than simply hiding the wrongdoing of elites or the suffering of low-income communities, transitional justice rewrote the moral script defining what constitutes good governance and a just society. That work redefining moral values to align with the priorities of neoliberal governance established a new moral order in postwar Côte d’Ivoire where aggressive neoliberal reforms could be pursued in the name of justice and democratic transition.
Research Methods
I lived in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire for a year and a half prior to conducting my field work. During this time, I worked for an international organization as a technical consultant on two separate contracts supporting the TRRC truth commission as well as civil society groups engaged in the transitional justice process. In this role, I worked closely with victims’ associations and with the truth commission statement-taking team (a group who, in their regular jobs, worked for community centers, local NGOs and social services as psychologists, nurses, social workers and in other similar roles). My work focused on involving children and youth in the transitional justice process, meaning I also built a large network of youth activists from both sides of the political spectrum. At the end of my contract, I remained in Côte d’Ivoire for nearly one year of fieldwork. During that time, I conducted approximately 75 interviews and focus groups (see
Appendix 1 for a detailed list). To complete this research, I relied heavily on the network I built of victims’ leaders, social workers and youth activists both as participants and to help identify other potential interviewees. My fieldwork was divided between time in Abidjan and trips
29 inland to visit local community centres. On my trips inland, I did two tours of the centre-west region, one of the south-west, and one crossing the central and northern regions.
During the course of my fieldwork I interviewed direct victims of the conflict as well as persons from other vulnerable groups who could potentially be put at risk by participating in my research. Lee Ann Fujii’s work on ethical considerations in political science research emphasizes the need to think broadly about the potential risks a specific context might pose or a particular individual might face as a research participant (Fujii 2012). As a framework to help guide those ethical considerations, Fujii suggests thinking through the dilemmas of power difference, the dilemmas of proximity and the dilemmas of publication involved in field research
(ibid). I will briefly address these points as they relate to the Ivorian postwar context and to participants in my field research. Please refer to Appendix 1 for additional information on steps taken to protect research participants from potential harm.
Dilemmas of power difference were a major concern in my fieldwork as many of those interviewed knew me from my previous job where I represented a powerful international organisation dedicated to victim support. Although I was careful to explain before and during interviews that my doctoral research was not related to my former job, the expectation from some interviewees that benefits might come from participating was understandable. Managing that expectation was thus an ongoing challenge. More concerning still were the ‘dilemmas of proximity’. Some research participants faced possible social and, in some extreme cases, potentially also physical risks by affiliating with a foreign researcher. Conflict victims face social stigma in this context, particularly when those victims are female. Moreover, very few perpetrators were jailed at the end of the conflict and some were even granted positions in the security services. It is therefore possible that some perpetrators continue to keep an eye on
30 people they once victimized. By consequence, there is a possibility that being seen with a foreign researcher could have serious consequences for conflict victims.
To mitigate the risks posed by dilemmas of power and proximity in my field work, I conducted most interviews with people who had an existing public profile as an activist or official: for example, NGO staff, victim leaders, or government employees. Victims’ accounts were very important to my research and I interviewed approximately twenty direct victims. Note that in all but a handful of cases detailed below, these interviews were with the leaders of local victim associations. Interviewing victims’ leaders meant I met with people who regularly spoke in public about their experiences. These were also people who regularly engaged with foreigners, with the state and with the media. For these individuals, participating in my research posed little new risk of social stigma, of threats from perpetrators, or of psychological stress. This choice of interviewee had some downsides. For example, I interviewed significantly more men than women. That said, given I was primarily seeking information on experiences dealing with transitional justice institutions, the victims’ leaders were well-placed to share this information.
I had the opportunity to interview some individuals from more vulnerable groups thanks to my prior association with local NGOs and community centres. Those I refer to as ‘more vulnerable’ include former child combatants, female conflict victims, persons who were minors during the conflict, and sex workers. For interviews with more vulnerable individuals, I relied heavily on the assistance of social workers or other psychosocial support persons. These interviews were held as focus group discussions, as per the stated preferences of those involved, and accompanied by a psychosocial support worker with an established relationship to the participants. Also, I did not reach out to these more vulnerable individuals directly. Support workers identified potential participants who were most likely to enjoy being interviewed and
31 who were unlikely to experience stress or harm by participating (i.e. such as social stigma or pressure from family members). Asking support workers to assist me also meant the participants had access to a reliable and trusted person should any concerns arise after the interview that required follow up.
As stated above, a majority of those interviewed were victims’ leaders and professionals working in the human rights sector. Regarding the dilemmas of publishing information shared during interviews, these actors face a small but nonetheless real risk of harm if identified. Reprisal could, for instance, become a concern if the political situation in Côte d’Ivoire worsens and criticisms that were once tolerated become dangerous. A minority of interviewees are from vulnerable groups and could face significant social, physical or psychological harms if identified.
Recognizing the potential risks to both these groups of publishing identifying information, the names and other identifying details of interviewees are changed throughout this dissertation. I have provided only the minimum details needed to present a coherent account: details such as a hometown or general job title. As an exception to this rule, I have provided the names and job titles of well-known public figures who consented to being interviewed in that capacity. Please find further details on confidentiality and consent procedures in Appendix 1.
Neoliberal Transitional Justice in Côte d’Ivoire
In Côte d’Ivoire transitional justice served the dual function of reinforcing neoliberal reforms while also legitimizing this reordering of governance and social norms as just and democratic.
The Ivorian transitional justice process established an ideological foundation for Alassane
32
Ouattara’s expansive neoliberal reform agenda while advancing a discourse domestically and abroad about the liberal and democratic nature of the new regime. Côte d’Ivoire became one of
Africa’s fastest growing economies and the continent’s most attractive foreign investment markets during President Ouattara’s first term (Ananou 2015). During that period, inequality grew apace with the country’s rapid postwar industrialization and privatization. Due to a massive increase in the cost of living and the dismantling of public services, social development indicators in Côte d’Ivoire match states with a fraction of its industrial and economic power
(World Bank 2015).16 Approximately half the population now lives below the extreme poverty line: a significantly higher percentage than seen during the pre-war economic crisis and even during the ten-year conflict itself (World Bank 2015).
Civil war gripped Côte d’Ivoire for the decade following the launch of a rebellion in September
2002 aimed at ending President Laurent Gbagbo’s regime. Western powers intervened in the
Ivorian war firmly on the side of the rebels and their champion for the presidency, Alassane
Dramane Ouattara (or ‘ADO’, as his countrymen call him). Ouattara is a former IMF director and was the political leader behind the rebel forces. Although pro-Ouattara forces were no less destructive or cruel than their Gbagboist adversaries, the foreign intervention justified its support to Ouattara as a humanitarian necessity required to prevent a genocidal campaign by Gbagbo’s forces, declared imminent, against the Northern Dioula population. Stability returned in 2012, but only after a bloody electoral crisis culminated in the joint French-UN regime change
16 According to the World Bank, Côte d’Ivoire has an economy and financial resources comparable to Morocco and Tunisia (World Bank 2015). While Côte d’Ivoire had a life expectancy of 52 years in 2015, both Tunisia and Morocco’s were 76 years at that time. In the ECOWAS group, only Chad, CAR, Lesotho, Nigeria and Sierra Leone had lower life expectancies than Côte d’Ivoire when this data was collected. In 2017, Morocco had a primary education completion rate of 93%, compared to Côte d’Ivoire’s 73% completion (no data was available for Tunisia that year). Also in 2017, the under-five years child mortality rate in Morocco is 23 children out of 1000 while Tunisia is 17 out of 1000. In Côte d’Ivoire, the rate was 84 out of every 1000 children (World Bank Group 2020).
33 operation that finally secured Ouattara’s presidency. In the conflict’s aftermath, the new government and the United Nations Peacebuilding Mission to Côte d’Ivoire (ONUCI) together launched a national transitional justice process.
Ivorian transitional justice was a public demonstration that just and good governance had returned to the country. The process signalled that this new regime was committed to liberal democracy and would be a responsible member of the international community. Today that image continues to ring truer than any evidence to the contrary. That image endures despite significant body of testimony linking the rebel forces to acts of ethnic cleansing. It also endures while assistance for the war’s many victims is left off the reconstruction agenda and while the number of desperately poor Ivorians rapidly grows. As we will see in the coming chapters, the transitional justice process ultimately provided almost no support to victims and undermined their demands for assistance. Instead, serving a quite different purpose, transitional justice played a foundational role establishing the legitimacy of the new government. The legitimacy garnered by the transitional justice process made neoliberal reforms not only acceptable to citizens and foreign observers, the close alignment between neoliberal governance and the moral order established by transitional justice institutions made those reforms appear to be a moral imperative in the transition to peace and good governance.
1.3.1. Commission Dialogue, Vérité et Réconciliation
The Commission Dialogue, Vérité et Réconciliation (CDVR) was established by presidential decree in July, 2011, with the goal of achieving “reconciliation and reinforcing social cohesion in
34
Ivorian communities” (CDVR 2014). President Ouattara named Charles Konan Banny
Commission President and appointed a panel of ten Commissioners. 17 According to the CDVR
Report, the group were named ‘following a long consultation process’, although no further information is available regarding the consultation procedure or participants (ibid). Although the commissioners represented diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds, all were elites based in
Abidjan.18 Charles Banny is, himself, one of the country’s wealthiest individuals as well as a former Prime Minister.19 In the CDVR Final Report, the commissioners summarize their methodology as the work of ‘ending conflict in public life’. The statement on methods places surprisingly little emphasis on investigations or collecting testimony, and makes no mention of reparation or accountability. The commission’s work, the report explains, was “bringing the population together over a shared vision and values based on respect for difference, respect for the state and its institutions, a common culture of civil law and a return to solidarity” (ibid).20
17 Three of them were honorary commissioners, inactive in the work of the commission, though nonetheless beneficiaries of the generous salary allocated to this role. The honorary commissioners included the multi- millionaire and football superstar Didier Drogba, whose representative arrived at the CDVR headquarters every four months to collect his salary. This fact is particularly unsettling when contrasted to the almost complete absence of funds allocated to reparations and support for victims (this information was shared in an interview with an anonymous staff member at the CDVR, April 2013). 18 The group further included prominent businessmen, a high-power commercial lawyer and a politician. Their high standing in Ivorian society was reflected in the budgeting of the commission. A source within the CDVR alleged that the commissioners assigned themselves annual salaries ranging from $100,000$ to $400,000 USD, claiming the salaries should match their regular jobs. Note that the median income in Côte d’Ivoire is approximately one US dollar per day. The group took multiple international trips in the course of their work, further subsidizing their salaries with per diems. Both in the CDVR report and in a public statement made at the time of its release, Banny justified how little of their mandate was finally completed by complaining that the 15$ million USD budget allocated to the CDVR could not cover the significant costs of operations (UNOCHA 2014). After the salaries and expenses of the commissioners were paid, it is unsurprising there was little left for operations, let alone for victim support. 19 Banny was a Presidential candidate during the 2015 election, meaning he was campaigning for office while still heading the truth commission. 20 Only one of the CDVR’s listed ‘operational methods’ includes a reference to truth-seeking. The list of methods starts with the simple statement, ‘dialogue’, followed by the above cited quote on bringing the population together. The third method is listed as “accessing the truth and identifying lies, and ridding public life of the lies that continue to circulate”. The fourth method regards promoting good governance, promising “to make a rights respecting
35
Although the commission was operational for three years, little work was done before the final six months. 21 The commission achieved little in terms of investigating or establishing the truth about the past. Nevertheless, the process was highly publicized, and narrated by constant television and public statements from the Commissioners and the government about reconciliation amongst ethnic groups and the responsibility of all Ivorians to participate in
“perfecting the Ivorian nation”.22 The powerful impact these messages had on the post-war environment is evident in the fact that more than seventy-thousand people found their way to
CDVR statement-taking centers in the three month window when the commission collected testimony.
The national statement-taking campaign lasted only three months, from April through July
2014.23 Nonetheless, during this short time, the CDVR collected 72,483 statements detailing
104,548 incidents.24 Although the sheer number is impressive, the majority of statements were
country, where the security system and government work for everyone”. The other four listed ‘methods’ are all focused on promoting unity, social cohesion and ‘the shared value of living together’ (CDVR 2014). 21 The CDVR Final Report acknowledges that little was achieved in the first two years of the process (2014). In their statement on the matter, the commissioners blame both a lack of funding and the government’s lack of preparatory work prior to appointing the commission. It was also the case that the commissioners were slow to hire staff, agree on a work plan and implement programs. This is, at least in part, due to the fact that most members of the senior staff continued to do their regular jobs on top of their duties at the commission. 22 This was a slogan adopted by the CDVR and prominently displayed on a banner across the Commissioner’s platform at public hearings. 23 Although there was a small pilot phase and some preparatory work, the offices essentially operated for the CDVR from 28 April through 31 July 2014 when the national statement-taking campaign was in effect. For the majority of the three years that the CDVR operated, ‘local commissions’ had no official function but were nonetheless rented and staffed, paid for by international donations and Ivorian taxpayers. In the final year of the commission and even beyond the official end of the CDVR, Charles Banny effectively used the local commissions as campaign offices in his bid for president in the 2015 elections (Interview with anonymous CDVR staff, April 2013).
24 It is worth noting that the CDVR had some merit as a fact-finding body. Statement-takers were responsible for keeping statistics on the testimonies they collected across the country. This means the aggregate number of violations published in the tables included in the CDVR report are a fairly accurate reflection of witness and victim statements. Although a desk review of public sources and three months of statement-taking without further investigations cannot be deemed a representative or highly reliable source on a decade long conflict, those numbers are nevertheless the most comprehensive data available of the Ivorian conflict. Of the 104,548 specific violations
36 never analysed, let alone verified. The CDVR Final Report was handed to President Ouattara in
December 2014, just four months after the statement-taking campaign ended and one month after the final boxes of statements arrived in headquarters (ibid). This is not enough time to code, verify and analyze seventy of thousand cases and that fact is obvious when reading the CDVR
Final Report. The report provides only a few pages of analysis, and does not refer to any specific incident or testimony, despite identifying more than one hundred thousand grave human rights violations.
Instead of findings, the CDVR report ends with some reflections from the Commissioners.
Though only a few pages long, the statement reveals much about the CDVR leadership’s understanding of their role in the country’s transition. The authors offer moral guidance to a population they characterise as divided by hatred, and they hold up transitional justice as a means of renewing public life in a modern liberal democracy. The opening paragraph reads, “our society has lost the culture of restraint; the ability to comport oneself, to endure hardship, and respect norms and morality.” It continues, “this has hurt the economic, social and political order.
It has formed a culture of excessiveness and impulse, and it does not allow the development of entrepreneurship… instead encouraging dependence, denegation of solidarity and a reduction of
reported by the CDVR, 12,082 were cases of murders, disappearance or forced disappearance; 10,730 were accounts of torture or other severe injuries; 45,939 were reports of destroyed property; and 1,359 were accounts of gender- based violence. Approximately 47% of these incidents happened in the final year of the war, with the other half spread out over the preceding decade (CDVR 2014). This is valuable information, particularly given a lack of reliable casualty rates is used, even today, to misrepresent the severity and impacts of the war. Though a snapshot of the war rather than undisputable fact about violations committed, the CDVR report is the only comprehensive data that can counter the official numbers given by the United Nations. The UN officially maintains that an estimated 3000 people died during the entire ten-year period, including military deaths (note the CDVR death rate counts ‘murdered and disappeared’ individuals, meaning those who died on active military duty should not be included. This distinction, however, is not specifically stated in the Final Report. Moreover, these lines are difficult to define in any contemporary war, and the various kinds of ad hoc militias active in Côte d’Ivoire make it more difficult still in the Ivorian case). For reasons explained in Chapter Four, the official UN numbers are misleadingly low and downplay the devastation caused during the conflict. As we will later see, the remarkably low death count helps tacitly hid the complicity of the UN and other members of the international community in some of the more horrific episodes of the civil war.
37 the concept of fraternity to only fellow beneficiaries”, which the report then defines as “in- group/out-group thinking”. Overall, the CDVR process, and especially the commission’s final report, put little emphasis on the actual work of truth-seeking. The focus was almost entirely on giving moral lessons to the population and performing symbolic acts of turning the page on the country’s past.
Tolerable and Intolerable Suffering
The CDVR reproduced the narrative that had dominated international news and diplomatic communiqués during the conflict: an account of bloody civil war motivated by ethnic hatred
(Human Rights Watch 2001). As seen above, the CDVR report issued to the public was little more than a methodological overview of the commission’s work.25 The impacts of the CDVR instead came from the statement-taking process, from airing public hearings, and from
25 If anything, there was a pro-Gbagbo bias at the CDVR. That bias was a poorly kept secret once Banny launched his presidential campaign and began making public statements accusing ADO of dividing the country and promising, if elected, to return Gbagbo from the Hague (Campaign speech by Banny at an opposition campaign rally, Youpougon, Côte d’Ivoire August 2014). This was, of course, a tactic for attracting Gbagbo’s support base rather than a genuine concern for the jailed ex-president. Nevertheless, it showed the CDVR was no instrument of the ADO administration. The commission was independent and had numerous open confrontations with the president around funding, extensions and other matters of its operations. This was seen by the international community as evidence that the ADO regime was truly committed to uncovering the truth and ensuring a legitimate transitional justice process. That said, looking beyond public squabbles over operational details, the more significant matter is that the commission made no bold claims about the root causes of the conflict and gave no researched analysis of what happened. It presented no challenge to the leadership of either ADO or Gbagbo’s camp, instead painting a picture of violent youths and leaving elites from both sides unnamed. If anything, Ouattara likely wanted the CDVR to discredit his layman rebel soldiers by characterizing them as radical and violent youth. During the war civil, amidst claims of championing the marginalized Dioulas’ cause, the rebellion had appealed to and recruited tens of thousands of youth from the most marginalized and lowest-income communities in the country. After the war, these men expected to be well-rewarded for their role putting ADO in office. In the years that followed, ADO’s neoliberal restructuring of the economy and his elite-oriented governance went drastically against those expectations. During the post-war period, these former rebels became a thorn in the new government’s side. They used blockades and public disturbances with increasing frequency to extort more and more ‘demobilisation’ funds from Ouattara’s regime. These incidents are ongoing and have grown in recent years, culminating in a mutiny in 2019 that won each fighter 18,000 euros in exchange a return to calm (Bauselaire 2019).
38 statements made by its leadership and government partners in the media and in speeches.
Although the hearings were effectively closed to the public, select transcripts and footage were released. These provide vignettes into the war, as curated by the commissioners. Testimony was balanced in the sense that both sides of the conflict were represented amongst participating victims and perpetrators. That said, the commission did not analyze or investigate the testimony it collected. The CDVR presented the past exclusively through the lens of an ethnic war, fought by radicalised youth. As we see in Chapter 3’s detailed account of the conflict, that narrative hides more than it reveals. The sum of incidents of violent confrontation between ethnic ‘others’ does not add up to the larger context of exploitation and plutarchy that surrounded the conflict nor does it expose the political manipulations and acts of extortion that characterised the top leadership on both sides of the partition line. That wider context disappeared from the CDVR’s account, leaving only snapshots of the most overt and horrific acts of the war.
Reframing the narrative in this way circumvented a long history of structural inequalities, imposed under colonial rule and maintained by an oligarchic and often heavy-handed ruling elite.
The truth commission instead told about a national crisis of moral failure driven by irrational hatred of ethnic and religious others. It is true that youth militias and ad hoc auto defense squads committed the bloodiest acts of the war, however the youth-led violence that characterized the conflict was a response to decades of exploitative rule, culminating in a series of economic and political crises. The civil unrest that followed from those crises was manipulated by the ruling class as they negotiated power struggles within the top tier of Ivorian society. Rather than an ethnic conflict, the Ivorian civil war is more accurately characterised as a violent eruption at the breaking point of a kleptocratic regime that was still holding over from the France Afrique era.
Ouattara’s rebellion primarily recruited poor and extremely poor descendants of regional
39 migrants and northern labourers, whereas Gbagbo’s core supporters were from a middle class rapidly slipping into poverty. In both instances, these were young people reacting to their exclusion from a social and economic system that benefited a small few at a time when opportunities were shrinking for the rest.
The transitional justice model is premised on the assumption that history can be pieced together by aggregating many individual accounts of the past. This tends toward overemphasizing hatred of ethnic ‘others’ as a motivation for violence. When giving testimony before a truth commission, victims are encouraged to focus on the specific acts of cruelty they were invited there to describe. They are usually directed back to the ‘facts of the case’ by a legal counsel should their testimony veer to other matters. The focus on individual acts of brutality inevitably writes a narrative where abuses result from personal failings such as anger, hatred or intolerance.
This, in turn, shifts blame onto the most visibly violent individuals, shielding the architects and beneficiaries of conflict from culpability. As a result, the transitional justice approach is apt to overemphasis the role of ethnic hatred in a conflict and, by the same token, is ill-equipped to analyse the complex structural and historic roots of conflict.
Transitional justice thus tends towards simpler narratives in which violence is caused by moral failure, resulting from intolerant or misguided people, rather than rooted in social injustice or oppression. Wherever prejudice is considered the primary reason for conflict, the response will focus on ‘changing hearts and minds.’ This makes peace and reconciliation a technical project of re-educating illiberal masses rather than recognizing that the resentment of those hearts and opinions of those minds are bound within longstanding and often legitimate grievances. The narrative hides the reality that, to address the past and prevent the reoccurrence of conflict, reforms aimed at affecting transformative change and addressing legitimate citizen grievances
40 are needed. This, in turn, excuses the ruling class from the responsibility to acknowledge and address structural injustices.
In Côte d’Ivoire, characterizing youth militants as would-be ‘genociders’ pushed blame onto radicalized young Ivorians and, in doing so, helped exonerate the oligarchs who orchestrated and profited from the war. The CDVR, headed by a group of state-appointed political and business elites, went even further. It presented the ruling elites as champions of forgiveness, ready to rebuild together despite the uncooperative and unruly masses. This was an astute deployment of transitional justice on the part of the CDVR leadership and their government sponsors. Even when a perpetrator regime is overthrown, as it was in Côte d’Ivoire, the new elites who replace them are often equally enmeshed in the sources of structural injustice. Transitional justice tends to be blind to this reality, homogenizing the interests of victims and citizen groups with the interests of the new decision-makers in a replacement regime (Nesiah 2016).26 As a result, transitional justice is easily hijacked by members of the ruling class and used as a platform for the new face of an old elite to gain legitimacy and to control narratives about the past. As CDVR commissioners and in government statements, the Ivorian elites declared their dedication to build peace and reconcile a country divided by hate. The newfound commitment to reconcile amongst the elites had important effects beyond that stated aim; it served as a mutual agreement amongst
26 The transitional justice model was invented as a tool used by pro-democracy activists and their civil society allies, many of whom where direct victims themselves, to undermine the lingering power of unseated authoritarian regimes in Latin America from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. Today, the contexts where transitional justice efforts are deployed rarely match that original one. The critique made by Nesiah (2016) reflects the consequences of that shift in context. Civil society movements and victims’ groups are secondary players in the decision-making and implementation of contemporary transitional justice. Instead, these processes are now constructed by high-level politicians, with the funding and oversight from the UN and foreign donors. Although the role of national and foreign elites shaping these processes does not necessarily undermine the independence and objectivity of TJ institutions once established, these mechanisms are nonetheless designed and deployed by high level politicians and foreign policymakers. They thus have a fundamentally different focus and impact than those not created by and for victims or civil rights activists.
41 elites to preserve the status quo, while presenting their continued dominance as a triumph for peace and liberal democracy.27
Here we reach the crux of the issue. The tendency of transitional justice to treat ethnic hatred as a root cause of conflict protects elites from accountability and helps preserve their interests during post-conflict reconstruction. This is because ethnic war, by definition, is caused by irrational hatred of an ethnic other. The problem, then, is an intolerant citizenry and not legitimate grievances such as desperate poverty, social exclusion or oppressive rule. Focusing on the population’s moral failings as the cause of conflict pushes structural inequalities and elite privilege off the reform and justice-seeking agenda, with important implications for future governance. Transitional justice, as we have seen, is deployed to re-establish moral order in the wake of atrocity. By consequence, transitional justice does not simply push structural injustice outside the parameters of its operations, it establishes a new moral order in which these forms of suffering are largely irrelevant to the work of righting past wrongs. This, in turn, advances neoliberal reforms in a post-conflict country by establishing a new standard of good and democratic governance in which poverty, inequality and exploitation are off the reform agenda.
In this view, such suffering is deemed the concern of those experiencing it, and neither the fault nor the responsibility of political leaders or fellow citizens.
27 For example, anyone following the story of ethnic war told by the international media would be confused to discover that President Ouattara invited a significant number of FPI political elites to his inauguration party, yet few of his militant leaders were included on the invite list (Fofana 2009).
42
Côte d’Ivoire at the ICC
Compared to the CDVR, criminal prosecutions both nationally and at the international level played a more enduring role in the country’s transition. A series of domestic special trials launched soon after Ouattara took power and is ongoing today. For the purposes of this dissertation, the domestic trials are set aside. The Ivorian accountability process is instead analyzed through the International Criminal Court (ICC) case against former President Laurent
Gbagbo and his Youth Minister Blé Goudé. Gbagbo was the first head of state to stand trial before an international court on the charge of crimes against humanity. The international community once held up his trial as the symbol of a new era in global justice, where dictators would finally be held accountable (Okello 2019). To the great surprise of many onlookers, the
ICC judges acquitted both men in a six-to-one ruling on January 15th 2019 (ICC Trial Chamber
2019).
Gbagbo was not only acquitted, the trial did not go beyond the prosecutor’s submission, meaning the defense had not even presented its case when the judges decided the process could go no further (ibid). 28 The decision to end the trial followed seven years of proceedings during which time 132 witnesses were called (eighty-two heard), ten thousand documents were reviewed and
28 The official statement from the ICC outlining the failures of the prosecutor’s case listed the following four points: First, the prosecution could not demonstrate a ‘common plan’ existed to keep Gbagbo in power, let alone that such a plan involved crimes against civilians. Second, the evidence did not substantiate the claim that the state or its organization aimed to attack civilians, nor that a policy of attacking civilians existed. Third, the prosecution did not show that the speeches of Gbagbo or Blé ordered, solicited or encouraged crimes to be committed. The judges actually wrote in their decision that the speeches presented to the court showed the opposite: that the two men encouraged peaceful resolution to the conflict in their public statements. Finally, the prosecutor could not show that either of the accused knowingly or intentionally contributed to the crimes for which they were charged. The judges went further, saying that the prosecution primarily provided indirect evidence not specific to the actual charges. They noted that such indirect evidence is not permissible in court but, even if they had accepted it, that indirect evidence still did not provide proof of a policy of attacking civilians (ICC Trial Chamber 2019).
43 hundreds of hours of video footage submitted. The presiding judge described the evidence as
“mountains of documents purportedly supporting that case, none of which could confirm it in the slightest” (Peniguet, 2019). The official delivery of decision declared that this rare instance of an acquittal before hearing from the defense reflected “how exceptionally weak the Prosecutor’s evidence [was],” later repeating that “the credibility and reliability of the evidence [was] seriously questioned” (ibid).
At the time of Gbagbo’s arrest, the international community and the ICC prosecutor’s office were certain of his guilt.29 During the seven-years spanning Gbagbo’s arrest and acquittal, his
ICC indictment for crimes against humanity was a powerful symbol of the widely-accepted belief that Laurent Gbagbo is a war criminal and his regime was a dictatorship. Likewise,
President Alassane Ouattara’s reliance on international justice and his close cooperation with the
ICC was an equally powerful symbol of his rights-respecting, democratic government. After years of investigations, multiple extension requests, hundreds of witness statements and thousands of documents, the prosecution could not find sufficient evidence to build a viable case against Gbagbo, let alone secure a conviction. The vast gap between public expectations of the case and the reality that followed relates to the role of the international justice system enabling the global governance community by building the moral legitimacy of likeminded regimes and discrediting opponents of the western liberalism.
29 For example, see Luis Moreno Ocampo’s statement on the day the Gbagbo was charged by the ICC. Ocampo declared Gbagbo planned and directed while “[his] forces targeted civilians believed to be supports of Mr Ouattara, and the attacks were often directed at specific ethnic or religious communities” (JusticeInfo 2011). Hillary Clinton, then US secretary of state, also issued a comment on that day warning ‘dictators around the world to take note’ (D. Smith 2011).
44
Permissible and Punishable War Crimes
Many individuals who led the rebellion and subsequent civil war were behind Côte d’Ivoire’s miraculous postwar economic recovery. These warlords and their men committed grave atrocities against civilians, including episodes of ethnic cleansing and mass executions. In the aftermath of conflict, Ouattara’s warlords were granted effective immunity by transitional justice institutions at both the national and international level. Meanwhile, the ICC, with guidance from the international peacebuilding mission to Côte d’Ivoire (ONUCI), opened a one-sided trial against Laurent Gbagbo and Blé Goudé. No member of Ouattara’s regime was indicted despite the known involvement of his warlords in civilian massacres with significantly higher death tolls than the crimes for which Gbagbo and Goudé stood trial.30 That said, this is not merely a cynical story of victors’ justice. Neither the new Ivorian regime nor the international community ignored demands for accountability after the war. Quite the opposite: both the range and scale of
30 Note that stating the culpability of Ouattara and his associates is not an assertion of Gbagbo’s innocence. Gbagbo’s camp committed grave and systematic human rights violations. The ICC charges reflect events that indeed took place, even if the ICC could not prove Gbagbo’s direct role in planning or orchestrating those crimes. Even his staunchest supporters do not deny the existence of pro-Gbagbo death squads, contesting only the extent of their crimes and whether Gbagbo in fact commanded the groups. The high-profile murder of a Canadian-French journalist Guy-Andre Kieffer who disappeared while investigating corruption in the cocoa industry is the most detailed available account of Gbagbo’s shadow security service at work (Kieffer 2004). The matter of Gbagbo’s direct involvement in the death squads and alleged war crimes remains a fierce debate in Ivorian society. In seeking an answer to these questions, I interviewed numerous people close to the former president, including individuals from his professional and his personal life, as well as representatives of the RDR opposition who worked with him. These associates expressed the overall opinion that Gbagbo was an academic and an idealist by nature, and did not have the stomach to directly plan the violence that was ultimately done in his name. Even Alassane Ouattara, who worked closely with Gbagbo earlier in their political careers, expressed this same opinion in the first year of the conflict – though, evidently, he changed his mind later on (FIDH 2000). That said, Gbagbo could benefit from death squads and their crimes without needing to personally command the units or order attacks on civilians. He had high ranking officials acting on his behalf who were able to stomach the violence that maintained his regime. Most infamous amongst them were Simone Gbagbo (though she was also later acquitted of crimes against humanity in an Ivorian court), her security chief Anselme Seka Yapo "Seka-Seka" (found guilty of murdering General Guei and implicated in Kieffer’s murder (Jeune Afrique 2016h)), and General Bruno Dogo Blé (Trial International 2015).
45 transitional justice mechanisms deployed in Côte d’Ivoire show a major financial, time and personnel investment made in the name of post-conflict justice. Amongst those mechanisms, the
ICC trial in particular legitimatized the claim that Côte d’Ivoire’s transitional justice process was morally sound and reflected the ethical standards of the highest office in the international justice system.
The ICC’s selective accountability reflects the principle that human rights and freedoms are of fundamental concern in global governance institutions, but only to the extent these values do not impinge on important economic or elite interests. Rather than a case of victor’s justice, the ICC
Côte d’Ivoire trial reflected the neoliberalism of contemporary global governance policy and practice. The Ivorian transitional justice process embodied that principle by creating a clear delineation between punishable war criminals and war criminals who, though perhaps reprehensible, are nevertheless permissible in the eyes of the international community. In practice, this principle translated into an international criminal trial in which, on one side, the men and women most responsible for human rights abuses committed in support of Gbagbo’s pseudo-socialist state are held accountable by domestic and international justice. On the other side, those most responsible for similar as well as much graver abuses do not have the title of war criminal attached to their name, even in cases where their crimes are well-documented in public records and painfully alive in national memory. Instead, these men are addressed by domestic and international institutions only according to their new identities: as the industry leaders and business tycoons they became after the war, in large part thanks to wealth and resources expropriated during the conflict.
1.3.1. Why Côte d’Ivoire?
46
For all the criticisms one can mount against it, the transitional justice process in Côte d’Ivoire was not illegitimate by international standards. There are examples of transitional justice rendered a sham by political interference or co-option, but Côte d’Ivoire is not one of them.31
Elements of the Ivorian transitional justice process were poorly implemented, and the process showed signs of manipulation by powerful interest groups.32 Nevertheless, we cannot dismiss the problems with Ivorian transitional justice by simply saying these would have been avoided, if only Ivorians had followed the established international standards and principles. The Côte d’Ivoire process checked most boxes demanded by foreign donors and watchdogs (Hayer 2001;
OHCHR 2006; ICTJ 2013). No matter how disappointing the final results of Ivorian transitional justice may seem, those outcomes were not the result of a co-opted or sham process. Moreover,
31 Paige Arthur discusses how the field developed standards of legitimacy and illegitimacy in her conceptual history of transitional justice (Arthur 2009). The Kenyan TJRC is a recent example of arguably (or partially) illegitimate transitional justice that received wide international attention after the Commission Chairman cowed to the ruling party and helped cover up of their role in the post-electoral violence, corruption and land grabs (see earlier footnote on the Kenyan TJRC). The standard example of illegitimate transitional justice is the 1974 Ugandan ‘Commission of Inquiry into the Disappearances of People in Uganda since 25 January 1971’. Incidentally, this process - essentially an impunity-granting body - was the first truth commission to call itself such. The case study is discussed in Hayner’s article Fifth Truth Commissions (Hayner 1994). Myriads of other examples are available of political leaders manipulating these processes in whole or part to control narratives about the past, punish or delegitimize political rivals, avoid accountability, and win international recognition as good governments while avoiding substantive reforms. For some critical assessment in the academic literature, see Csilla Kiss (2006) on Hungarian post-USSR transitional justice, Susan Thomson (2011) on the Gacaca Courts in Rwanda, and Sandra Rubli (2013) on the Burundian process.
32 The thin CDVR report and a lack of investigations or analysis was an embarrassment to many of the commission staff and to those in the international community working with the truth commission. The commission was nevertheless well-received by the public and operated at least well enough to collect a huge number and diversity of testimony in a short period of time (UNOCHA 2014). It should also be mentioned that the failures of the CDVR report were not the result of a state coverup or an unwillingness to analyse their data on the part of the commissioners or senior staff. The CDVR poorly managed time and financial resources and, from the start, had an unrealistically short operational period. It thus ran out of time and money, and should have been extended – a problem common to virtually every truth commission. Instead, the CDVR ended abruptly because both Ouattara and Banny were running in the presidential election in 2015 and neither were willing to extend the commission into the election year. Had that timing been different, Banny would perhaps have requested another extension and the report could have improved. That is not to say, however, that the focus on ethnic violence and youth perpetrators would likely have shifted. This framing was built into the CDVR mandate and operations from the first stages of the process and firmly held by key members of the commission (CDVR 2014).
47 the degree of manipulation and operational problems seen in the Ivorian case were not uncommon. By definition, transitional justice operates in contexts where institutional failure is the norm. For the approach to be useful, it needs to be robust to that reality or face the existential problem of only functioning where it is unneeded.
Transitional justice mattered to Ouattara because it was an opportunity to show that liberal democratic rule had replaced dictatorship in Côte d’Ivoire. It was therefore important to the regime that Ivorian transitional justice was backed by international supporters and widely perceived as legitimate both in and outside the country. Thus, for the large part, the CDVR followed established international standards defining a legitimate transitional justice process.
First, the process was independent from government interference. During the two years I worked as an advisor to the commission, I did not observe political interference by the state. Moreover, the commissioners openly challenged the Ouattara administration on a number of issues without consequences to their operations. Second, the CDVR was also an impartial process. The commission was careful to present a balanced account at its hearings and in public statements, and strived to equally hear from perpetrators and victims in both camps. Third, the commission was broadly inclusive. Commissioners and staff represented diverse ethnic and regional backgrounds. The commission also collected a remarkable number of statements from diverse demographics and regions, and implemented special measures to ensure women and children could fully and safely participate. Finally, the government encouraged international oversight at every phase, meaning technical advisors and watchdogs monitored each stage of the process.
Given the CDVR largely respected established international standards and guidelines, its failures reveal problems with transitional justice as a field as much as they point to matters unique to the
Ivorian context. Likewise, the ICC is the highest body in the global justice system, meaning its
48 one-sided trial, built on assumptions rather than evidence, speaks to problems with international justice more than it exposes issues specific to Ivorian transitional justice. While elements of both the CDVR and ICC trial were shaped by unique dynamics in the Côte d’Ivoire context, these processes also speak to wider issues within transitional justice as a global field and practice. For that reason, Côte d’Ivoire is a useful case study when analysing the effects of transitional justice on post-conflict governance and social reforms. The proceedings and outcomes seen in the
Ivorian case are more or less typical of the transitional justice model, as currently defined by international standards and guidelines. It is an example of the accepted transitional justice model, molded to serve elite interests at both the national and international level, but nonetheless largely aligned with established standards and best practices. Anyone interested in transitional justice therefore ought to be interested in Cote d’Ivoire as a typical example of how these processes operate and their impacts on post-conflict contexts in the contemporary era.
1.3.1. The Question of Intentionality
A key question remains regarding my contention that transitional justice has a neoliberalising effect on post-conflict environments. I claim that effect is inbuilt to the transitional justice model.
Does this claim imply transitional justice is intentionally deployed to advance neoliberalism in post-conflict sites, or is that effect an accidental outcome of an otherwise benign project?
Neoliberalism is a term used by those critical of the approach. For these critics, labelling a policy or program neoliberal is an allegation that social welfare is being neglected in favor of financial growth and business success (Brown 2015). The architects of a transitional justice process surely do not wish to actively deny social justice to less fortune citizens or block victims from
49 achieving a better life. Even the best-intentioned of policymakers, when tasked with the challenge of rebuilding after a period of conflict and destruction, will nonetheless find it convenient to adopt a reform agenda that garners praise for his or her commitment to justice and liberal values, while simultaneously avoiding any serious challenge to the standing and economic prospects of the elite. Recall it is a common pitfall of the transitional justice model to assume replacing an aggressor regime means an overhaul of the governing structure. In reality, the new regime is often comprised of elites from the same background and social standing as their predecessors (Nesiah 2016).
There is no easy solution to the tension between citizen demands for transformative justice and the neoliberal governance priorities pushed by the international community and often shared by national elites (as was the case in Côte d’Ivoire, for instance). Transitional justice allows policymakers to navigate that tension, not because the model offers a solution, but rather because the field has effectively turned a blind eye to the challenge it presents. In the absence of a good solution to the challenge posed by economic and social injustice, transitional justice literature and practice are essentially devoid of debate on the complications of balancing economic interests with social justice demands. Decisions at the intersection of justice and economic interests are treated as technical matters, outside the scope of the field, to be discussed in closed door meetings between foreign experts and governing officials. It is quite unlikely those state officials and donor country representatives overtly scheme to deploy transitional justice as a means of minimalizing victim demands while advancing business interests. Nonetheless, these actors are aware, if only inadvertently, of the convenience provided by a ‘growth versus justice’ blind spot in the transitional justice model. This is evident wherever a new regime deploys transitional justice as a strong statement on human rights and democratization, yet
50 simultaneously restructures economic policy to favour markets over social spending or dismantles social movements that make more radical demands for change.33 It is equally evident in the contemporary global governance and peacebuilding model. Transitional justice offers policymakers a comfortable middle road between requiring a new regime to demonstrate its commitment to citizen rights, but without compromising future economic opportunities for the sake of correcting past wrongs.34
This explanation gives little insight, however, into the motivations of practitioners championing
33 See Sriram on the alignment between neoliberal peacebuilding efforts and the timing of transitional justice initiatives (Sriram 2007). Carranza writes on transitional justice contributing to a separation of the economic sphere from other peacebuilding priorities (Carranza 2008). Some country case studies of neoliberal restructuring following from peacebuilding missions that featured transitional justice as a core part of the post-conflict agenda include Pemunta on postwar neoliberal peacebuilding in Sierra Leone (2012); Bliesemann de Guevara on peacebuilding constraining recovery due to neoliberal reforms that restricted governance in Bosnia and Herzegovina (2008); and Robins on the co-option of the peacebuilding agenda by elites through transitional justice in Nepal (2012).
34 Founded by Koffi Annan in 2003, the UN Peacebuilding Commission and, later, its subsidiary the Peacebuilding Support Office, are the global coordination bodies of peacebuilding efforts worldwide. Under Annan’s leadership, the Peacebuilding Commission adopted transitional justice into its operational principles. To borrow the term of used by international law scholar Thallinger, it is a central authority offering ‘guardianship’ to these processes (Thallinger 2007). The neoliberalism of peacebuilding is seen in an operational agenda that links classic liberal values such as democratic governance, equal rights, equal access to justice and rule of law into a wider economic project that includes freeing markets, deregulation of business and labour, and encouraging rapid growth and foreign investment. Evidence of this dual agenda is found in the package global governance tools deployed by UN peacebuilding missions in postwar zone. The World Bank adopted justice and rule of law as central part of its core agenda from the mid-1990s, and specifically began coordinating with transitional justice initiatives from 2010. The Bank committed in 2011 to continue including justice as an “integrated part of projects focusing on public sector reform, governance and anti-corruption, citizen security, private sector and economic development, urban and social development, poverty reduction, gender equality, and natural resource management” (The World Bank 2015). More recently, the World Bank developed a Humanitarian-Development-Peace (HDP) Nexus approach as a guiding principle of postwar projects, with the aim to leverage a country’s ‘comparative advantages’ to address the causes and consequences of war. The impact of such efforts is significant, given the World Bank Group State and Peacebuilding Fund are currently the largest global trust fund available to conflict zones (Bank 2019). Since 2017, The United Nations and World Bank ‘Partnership Framework for Crisis-affected Situations laid out a coordinated support platform for conflict and post-conflict zones. That support framework includes a list of recovery needs assessments as well as governance effectiveness assessments and public expenditure reviews (United Nations Peacebuilding 2019). Stated goals of the joint framework connected implementing the UN peacebuilding Pathways to Peace as a tandem to 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as defined in the SDG+ initiative (ibid). Note that SDG+16 refers to transitional justice as necessary to the effective implementation of the agenda.
51 the transitional justice approach. Each step in a transitional justice process, from design through all phases of implementation, depends on the work of many national and international activists and advisors. These people chose their profession because it offers an opportunity to assist some of the most vulnerable populations on earth. Without question, such individuals do not purposefully contribute to undermining the hopes of conflict victims for meaningful change.
More likely, there is incongruence between the intentions and impacts of these actors because such a reality is hard to perceive, especially since no one ever wants to see such incongruence in her or his own work. One’s field of vision is limited when positioned inside a transitional justice institution and clouded by the complexities of surrounding circumstances, making it is difficult to see the long-term effects of one’s efforts.
That said, with some reflection, it is possible to perceive that many small decisions contribute to an overall pattern of failing to meet victims’ expectations and needs. I am referring to the daily decisions that practitioners make to tolerate desperate poverty and other forms of terrible suffering caused by structural injustice. These decisions are made based on the operational principle that such struggles are indeed tragic, but beyond the purview of transitional justice.
Practitioners equally make daily decisions to continue moving ahead with a justice-seeking process, even when it is evident elites are using the mechanisms for personal gain, or to write a narrative that shields them from scrutiny. Such decisions are justified by a belief that transitional justice will advance universal human rights and help defeat impunity, even if progress is slow and the wins are small. In this understanding, it becomes extraneous that, for most victims, their suffering and their demands for change are outside the scope and potential impacts of transitional justice. Since justice and human rights are universally desired and righteous pursuits, every small step towards those goals is better than nothing. Anyone who has worked as a humanitarian
52 will recognize the language of ‘small steps’ and ‘incremental change.’ Although these are a valuable reflections in tough times, these idioms are easily overstretched to excuse mistakes and ignore evidence that one’s work is not having the intended impacts or may even be working against one’s best intentions.
Conclusion
It is not a new observation that transitional justice comes from a liberal democratic governance tradition, and that these origins limit its potential to support transformative change in contexts recovering from war or atrocity. Others have found that the focus on individual human rights violations within a transitional justice approach contributes to the failure of these institutions to acknowledge a wider context of structural injustice (Mamdani, 2002; McEvoy 2008; McAdams
2011; Nesiah 2016). Others have also documented that this incomplete analysis of injustice translates to a tendency for transitional justice to deliver piecemeal forms of relief to victims
(McGovern and Lundy 2008; Mendeloff, 2009; Miller 2008; Snyder and Vinjamuri 2003; Mani,
2008).
Beyond an inbuilt liberal project, a new critical literature has emerged claiming transitional justice actually has a neoliberalizing effect on the contexts where it is deployed. In a chapter theorizing the political economy of transitional justice, Maria Carolina Olarte and Hannah
Franski observe that the global spread of transitional justice has supported neoliberal globalisation through its failure to question core assumptions at the heart of TJ operations: namely, the assumed separation of political and economic spheres, and the assumption that
53 liberal democracy is neutral and a universal good (Franzki and Olarte 2014). Simon Robins has written a case study illustrating this dynamic in Nepal’s transitional justice process (2012). The piece demonstrates how transitional justice allowed Kathmandu-based elites to supersede the more radical advocacy agenda of the rural and indigenous victims’ community. The discourse used in Nepal’s transitional justice process served to push social and economic reforms off the agenda of an ultimately neoliberal political transition (Robins 2012). Josh Bowsher builds his theory of neoliberal transitional justice from Wendy Brown’s framing of neoliberalism as a dual process in which “people are ‘amassed’ as stakeholders taking part in economic activities while simultaneously being individualised as “responsibilised’ and self-sufficient entrepreneurial units”
(Bowsher 2018). Bowsher contends that transitional justice parallels that process by bringing a traumatized society back together with a ‘shared truth about the past’ but, in doing so, simultaneously individualizes citizens as victims of human rights violations. This dual act results in an ‘empty solidarity’ that Bowsher considers foundational to neoliberal governance. Thus, in
Bowsher’s view, transitional justice establishes an environment for neoliberalism by restoring social cohesiveness, but on terms that do not threaten the neoliberal project (ibid).
My contribution to this emerging literature is an explanation of transitional justice’s neoliberalising effect as a consequence of the ‘parameters’ around moral obligation that these institutions establish in contexts undergoing major political transition. By restricting the moral obligation to care about the suffering of others to a limited set of human rights violations, transitional justice establishes a new moral order where the suffering caused by individual human rights violations is intolerable and demands justice, but the suffering caused by grave inequality, deprivation and other forms of structural injustice are implicitly tolerated and hence easily overlooked by the state and by fellow citizens. Transitional justice institutions thus shape post-conflict justice into a process that protects elite interests and excludes transformative
54 reforms or more radical demands such as wealth or land redistribution. Moreover, this dynamic extends well beyond rebuilding a judicial sector to be more business-friendly. Transitional justice reshapes the moral order of a post-conflict context in ways that secure a sanctified status for the economic sphere and its elite beneficiaries, beyond the reach of justice institutions and post-conflict reforms. My contention that transitional justice has a neoliberalising effect thus refers to more than a technical project of advancing policies in support of business and financial interests (though these outcomes are certainly part of the dynamic I am describing). The neoliberalising effect is foremost an ideological project. Transitional justice advances neoliberal reforms by reshaping the moral order defining state responsiblities and societal norms in ways that legitimize government prioritizing of economic growth and business success over social justice and citizen wellbeing.
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2. Pursuing Moral Renewal: An Intellectual History of Transitional Justice
Introduction
The field of transitional justice was first described as a series of self-contained national movements promoting social change and accountability during democratic transitions from dictatorship in the 1990s in Latin America (Teitel 1997). This early scholarship emphasized the potential of transitional justice to renew a nation’s standards of morality by strengthening accountability, rebuilding civic trust and reaffirming rule of law (Zalaquett 1989 reprinted 1990,
Teitel, 1997, Joinet 1997, Kitz 1995). Hence, from its earliest days, transitional justice was credited with the ability to rewrite the moral code of post-conflict states. Today, as in the past, practitioners deploy transitional justice mechanisms as a means of renewing the moral order and, in doing so, shaping the comportment of governments and citizens in a post-conflict era. In a significant departure from the earlier examples, however, most contemporary transitional justice processes are embedded within wider peacebuilding operations. This configuration has seen transitional justice rapidly reproduced in a wide variety of contexts with little adaption from a now standardized model. By deploying a standard form of transitional justice around the globe,
56 these initiatives reflect the vision of justice and moral order shared by elites from the global governance community and their allies in a newly appointed national government. Moreover, this top-down approach has come at the expense of voices from victims and local communities.
The implication is that transitional justice, as a form of moral renewal, advances the goals and values of high-level state and global governance actors much more readily than it reflects the groups it purportedly represents.
The present chapter reviews transitional justice literature with two purposes. First, the chapter presents an intellectual history of the field, mapping a shifting yet consistent use of transitional justice as a means of moral renewal in countries transitioning from war or atrocity. Second, the chapter documents the merging of transitional justice into a core component of contemporary peacebuilding. I contend that in this role transitional justice has become a powerful tool for advancing the values and governing principles of the neoliberal global order in countries undergoing major political transition.
Pursuing Moral Renewal
Transitional justice became a field of study in the early 1990s in response to investigative commissions created to document the crimes of recently deposed dictatorships in Chile and
Argentina. In both countries, former military leaders remained powerful players despite citizen- won transitions to democracy. The continued influence of the ousted regimes and the threat of their reprisal meant criminal trials were impossible in the foreseeable future. Rather than accepting impunity, the new democratic leadership in Argentina, shortly followed by that of
Chile, envisaged an alternative form of accountability. Jose Zalaquett was Commissioner to the
Chilean truth commission, the Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación. In his seminal
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1989 article, “Confronting Human Rights Violations Committed by Former Governments”,
Zalaquett outlined the many challenges of rebuilding democratic principles and rule of law following authoritarian rule. In his reflections, he explained that the aim of establishing a true democracy in the wake of atrocity requires accountability for the crimes of the regime, yet the fragility of transition often makes criminal prosecutions of the former rulers impossible
(Zalaquett 1989 reprinted 1990). In response to this dilemma, he asserted that even in a context where impunity is inevitable, the state still has a responsibility to reduce victim suffering by uncovering the truth about past crimes. Zalaquett held truth-telling about the fate of lost loved ones as a minimum requirement of justice after atrocity, reasoning that a truth-telling process can, at very least, acknowledge suffering of victims and their families, and form the basis for reparations and institutional reforms (Zalaquett 1989 reprinted 1990).
Ruti Teitel is credited with coining the term transitional justice as a way to describe the ‘self- conscious efforts of the post-Cold War transitional regimes in Latin America, as [the new democracies] experimented with a new conception of justice’ (Teitel 1997, 2000 and 2008). A body of literature soon developed reflecting on the lessons learned from the original Latin
American efforts (Orentlicher 1994; Popkin and Roht-Arriaza 1995; Roht-Arriaza 1995; Mendez
1997). The human rights lawyers and activists writing this foundational literature shared the goal of building a body of jurisprudence that would help secure an inalienable and universal right to judicial action in response to the crimes of authoritarian regimes. Where criminal trials were impossible or impractical, the transitional justice scholarship advocated for fulfilling that inalienable right to justice by establishing non-criminal investigative commissions with extensive
58 mandates that include recommending reparations and devising reforms to government, security forces and social services.35
The human rights activists, commission staff and legal scholars involved in documenting the early Latin American initiatives were motivated by the conviction that transitional justice could, and should, travel abroad to be reproduced globally in the wake of atrocity.36 Notable amongst these scholars, Neil Kitz took on the immense task of publishing a comprehensive four-volume compendium of transitional justice jurisprudence written to that date (1995). The volume emphasized the multi-faceted nature of transitional justice by cataloguing past initiatives into
‘pillars’ of the field. These categories included commissions of inquiry, select prosecutions, lustration and purges, and restitution or reparations programs. Kitz’s pillars are still reflected in the list of mechanisms contemporary practitioners consider the cornerstones of transitional justice: truth-seeking, criminal accountability and amnesty, reparation, institutional reform and, added more recently, memorialization and reconciliation initiatives.
Even in the early days, some of the field’s forerunners already envisioned transitional justice not merely as an alternative to criminal prosecution, but as a much-needed addendum. In his work
35 Velasquez Rodriguez vs. Honduras was a key legal victory for transitional justice proponents. This decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights gives the first reference to a ‘right to truth’ by deeming forced disappearance a form of torture committed by the state against the family and loved ones of the disappeared. This a first major victory for the early Latin American transitional justice advocates would become the basis for many future claims that truth-seeking and investigative commissions are the legal right of victims and the wider political community. In an early piece, written when the field was first building a basis in laws and norms, Mendez and Vivanco explained the active way practitioners developed transitional justice jurisprudence, emphasizing the importance of pulling together different elements of international, regional and domestic law in order to build the case for a right to truth, justice and reparations in the wake of atrocity and repression. (Mendez and Vivanco 1990). 36 Notably, in the early work of Roht-Arriaza and Popkin, while arguing for the expansion of the field, they already began reflecting on the risks of applying the same processes too broadly beyond the unique contexts where they first emerged (Popkin and Roht-Arriaza 1995).
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‘Trying the Violators of Human Rights’ Malamud-Goti (1989) explained the distinction between perpetrator trials, which he considered always a form of a victors’ justice, and the holistic vision of accountability possible within a transitional justice approach. Perpetrator trials, he wrote, reflect a political decision focused on displacing members of the old regime. In contrast, the primary aim of transitional justice is to provide victims with a sense that justice is being done and, in doing so, create the foundations for democratic values and rule of law in wider society.
Notably, even in this early piece, his argument is premised on the idea that transitional justice serves as a form of moral renewal, deployed to reestablish societal principles destroyed by war, repression or atrocity.
The Turn Towards Reconciliation
The negotiated transition ending Apartheid in South Africa represented a first major reimagining of transitional justice. Rather than framing transitional justice as an alternative to accountability, the architects of the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SA TRC) were primarily focused on the potential for transitional justice to serve as a forum for national reconciliation. To a large extent, reconciliation was a new iteration of the same moral renewal efforts seen in Latin American truth commissions. Like the examples before it, South African transitional justice was adopted to re-establish moral standards for society and governance by balancing the responsibility to do justice for the past with the practical imperative of moving forward and rebuilding. As a notable difference, however, the project now aimed to reshape beliefs and reform behaviour on all sides of the conflict rather than clearly setting blame at the feet of a defeated dictatorship.
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Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Chairman of the South African Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, was an influential proponent of the idea that retributive justice brought little of what a society and, he argued, also victims need in order to leave behind the legacies of unjust and repressive rule. He envisioned a national scale truth-seeking and reconciliation project as the antidote to state-sponsored violence and moral corruption normalized under Apartheid (Tutu
1999). In Tutu’s vision, restorative justice was not meant to invalidate victim demands that perpetrators be punished for their crimes. Instead, he proposed truth and reconciliation as an alternative form of punishment that would allow other national priorities to also hold precedence, given the highly tenuous circumstances surrounding the transition to democracy (Minow
1999).37 Trials against the architects and henchmen of Apartheid were a dangerously divisive option in a moment when the country could not risk further discord (Amstutz 2005). More to the point, the terms of the transition negotiated between the ANC and the National Party promised immunity to most members of the Apartheid regime. Accepting these constraints, Tutu and his contemporaries proposed restorative justice as a 'principled compromise' that gave up demands for punitive action in exchange for national healing and reconciliation (Dwyer 1999). Of course, there is no universally shared understanding of ‘reconciliation.’ The scholars and lawyers who designed the SA TRC faced the nearly impossible tasks of defining this future ‘reconciled’ state and, much more difficult still, devising tools that would bring a deeply divided and incredibly diverse country to that place.
37 For Martha Minow (1999) the appeal of restorative justice was that it began looking at criminal regimes and their institutions with a more complex and holistic understanding of how a criminal apparatus operates and maintains repressive policies.
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From 1995 and lasting nearly a decade, defining reconciliation and envisioning ways it might be achieved was a central project of transitional justice practice and literature. Authors and practitioners presented varying perspectives on reconciliation. Some saw the problem as a process of cultural transformation whereas others approached the question as a philosophical project. Some writers focused on technical measures, recommending policy and institutional reforms, while others cited the necessity of strengthening social movements and civil society.
Still others focused on reconciliation as a psychological project requiring various forms of individual and communal therapy.38 Some feminist theorists also showed enthusiasm for
‘reconciliation’ as a gender-sensitive alternative to criminal justice. They observed that, unlike perpetrator trials, truth commissions did not require intensive investigative techniques focused on
38 Scholars approaching reconciliation as a cultural change were influenced by the work of Johan Galtung and his ‘conflict transformation’ approach to peacebuilding (Galtung 1996). These scholars include Hugh Miall, whose work emphasizes the need to shift public attitudes through transitional justice initiatives, and Louis Kriesberg who writes of reconciliation as a cultural process that requires understanding and overcoming ‘social asymmetries’ resulting in marginalization of less privileged groups (Miall 2004; Kriesberg 2007). A similar approach was advanced by Bloomfield, Barnes and Huyse who write on reconciliation as a process of society learning to share both suffering and collective responsibility ( 2003). Amongst those more focused on reconciliation as a political process, Hizkias Assefa emphasizes the role of civil society actors in nationwide reconciliation programs while Neil Kritz writes on reforming governance policy as a key contributing factor in reconciliation (Assefa 2005; Kritz 2009). Long and Brecke designed a quantitative study to measure the effects of reconciliation, examining the frequency of ‘reconciliation events’ in post-conflict contexts (Long and Brecke, 2002). The South African TRC President, Alex Boraine, took a more technical direction in his writing on reconciliation, describing a process of constructing a shared history and actively limiting the possibility of denial about the past (A. Boraine 2006). Relatedly, in another set of practical efforts, various NGOs have produced guidebooks on how to promote reconciliation, for example see the Cartias’ handbook ‘Working for Reconciliation’ (Starken 1999). In the field of political science, scholars adapted existing theories of political pardon to the practical challenge of national reconciliation, with Torpey (2003), Griswold (2007) and Douglas (2001) contributing to this topic. Beyond these political theorists, other philosophical and theological writing discuss collective experiences of mercy, forgiveness and acknowledgement as the core of reconciliation (Report of the South African TRC, 1998; Minow 1998; Lederach 1995; Tutu, 1999; Rigby 2001). Psychologist Dan Bar-On writes on reconciliation as a social healing process involving the whole society in a kind of collective therapy (Bar-Tal 2000). Also looking at reconciliation through the lens of psychology, James Gibson gave the contrasting view that truth-seeking is as likely to cement resentment as engender reconciliation (2000). Similarly, Alfred Allan wrote on the traumatizing effects on victims of participating in a national reconciliation process (Allan 2000). South African Brandon Hamber is best known for long term studies with victims on the psychological impacts of truth-seeking, however he also wrote on the psychology of reconciliation during the course of the TRC process (1998).
62 the most degrading aspects of a crime. Approaching justice as a process oriented towards story- telling and forgiveness offered more flexible and supportive spaces for victims of sexual violence and other vulnerable groups (Dissel and Ngabeni 2003; Daly and Stubbs 2006). A further school emerged that approached reconciliation as a communal and cultural process, built around the southern African idea of ‘Ubuntu’, a concept meaning harmony and unity (Allen
1999).39 Citing Ubuntu as a community-oriented approach to forgiveness, authors imagined that pardoning perpetrators was an empowering act for victims that could simultaneously heal society and form the basis of a new civil order (Kiss 2000; Llewllyn and Howse 1999; Boraine 2000).
The common thread joining all these approaches was a sense that the apparent tradeoff between justice and peace made in a transitional justice process need not be seen as a sacrifice so much as an opportunity to move the political community forward by gaining the benefits of national reconciliation and healing.
Although reconciliation focused transitional justice originally appealed to psychologists and social workers, their enthusiasm diminished by the late 1990s when the world had witnessed enough transitional justice processes to begin studying the long-term impacts of participation on victims (Hamber 1999). Researchers found that reconciliation places an incredible moral and emotional burden on victims and their loved ones. For the sake of the wider community, victims are encouraged to face and even forgive perpetrators in exchange for abstract promises like
39 Quoting Allen: “Giving victims an opportunity to tell their stories demonstrates that they are now admitted to the category of responsible agency from which the predecessor regime attempted to exclude them. It is a form of recognition that acknowledge the historical fact of exclusion from legal recognition and seeks to reverse the imposition of passive status by encouraging victims to act in public by telling their stories.... a kind of public ritual of recognition of the moral agency of those previously excluded - a public marker of these citizens' rightful passage into equal consideration and respect" (Allen 1999). Allen’s is a claim about the power of feeling accepted through public performance. He understands reconciliation as an emotional response that comes when a victim feels the sympathy and acknowledgment of public officials and other community members. Also see Roman and Choi 2009 on reconciliation as a political outcome of public performance.
63 forgiveness, healing and national reconciliation (Gutmann and Thompson 2000). In an overview of psychological reports and ethnographic case studies about victims’ experiences with truth commissions, Mendeloff concluded that at least 70% of victims reported feeling let down by the process and approximately half regretted their participation (Mendeloff 2009). His research revealed that, although many victims reported positive feelings immediately after participating in a truth commission or similar measure, these effects were short-lived and often followed by feelings of abandonment and renewed trauma. In the medium to long-term, where reparations and psychological care were not made available (and, in practical reality, these supports rarely are), many victims reported feeling betrayed and more isolated than they had prior to participating in transitional justice (Mendeloff 2009. Also see Hamber 2002-2003; Hamber,
Nageng and O'Malley 2000; Gibon 2004; Theidon and Laplante 2007).
As these studies suggest, transitional justice efforts have limited measurable impacts when it comes to improving the lives of victims. These critical pieces give empirical evidence of something already implicitly observable in the transitional justice model; namely, that victims’ wellbeing is a secondary concern. Victims’ lives do not radically change by participating in transitional justice. Had that been the primary aim, the field and the mechanisms it deploys would have developed in quite different directions. The focus may be on victim experiences, but these processes are about moral renewal for the wider political community. The purpose is to reestablish right and wrong, and not merely by naming and shaming members of the last regime.
Transitional justice sends a message to all citizens about the societal and governance changes and commitments needed to establish a more just society. Victim testimony to a truth commission is not merely – I would argue, not mostly— for the sake of a victim’s own sense that justice is being done. It is a symbolic expression of the sacrifice a nation accepts in order to leave
64 the past behind and establish a new moral order. 40 The main innovation of the reconciliation school was to treat that sacrifice as its own form of justice, claiming it opens the possibility to a more holistic kind of redress that can only come from reconciling and renewing the political community. In other words, in this configuration moral renewal, itself, became the ‘justice’ of the transitional justice model.
Merging Fields: Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice
In the post-Cold War era, the notion that transitional justice could help end conflict while renewing moral order resounded in the international community. Transitional justice, advocates declared, could end cycles of violence after egregious atrocity, found a new era of democracy and even achieve a certain form of justice while doing so. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, global governance institutions based in Western democracies gained unprecedented authority and influence to determine a new world order. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, these institutions and their leaders struggled with a new challenge posed by devastating and horrifically violent civil wars that erupted in the wake of a shifted geopolitical order. As chief prosecutor at the
ICTY, Justice Richard Goldstone famously wrote that transitional justice “removes history as a point of contention among former adversaries, allowing them to work together constructively in new a power-sharing arrangement” (1996). Goldstone’s rearticulation of transitional justice
40 Hannah Arendt made a similar observation in her account of survivor testimony during the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Even in this early example, she notes that survivor testimony was selected, not to tell their experiences or because it was relevant to the case, but to tell a founding narrative for the Israeli nation. She explains that the majority of witnesses came from Poland and Lithuania, giving testimony of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chelmno and Majdanek. Only four witnesses came from Theresienstadt even though it was the only camp where Eichmann had considerable authority. Prosecutor Hauser stated that survival had earned these witnesses the right to be ‘irrelevant’ to the case and called his witness selection a ‘picture painting’ exercise (Arendt 1963).
65 illustrates that peace-making between former belligerents, not reconciliation or victim rights, became the stated aim of national scale transitional justice efforts during the post-Cold War era.
As one piece in a wider peacebuilding strategy, diplomats and international legal experts in the late 1990s onwards deployed transitional justice as a negotiating tool to help convince warring factions to come to the table and seek political solutions to their military disagreements (Boraine
2000).
In the years immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union, failed humanitarian interventions in Rwanda and Bosnia prompted a reassessment of the diplomatic community’s peacekeeping strategy. Kofi Annan’s UN Secretary-General 1992 Report, An Agenda for Peace, made ‘peacebuilding’ a mainstream concept in the international community. The report declared that the UN would shift its focus from managing ceasefires into a long-term commitment to consolidate peace and initiate rebuilding after war. The shift introduced a holistic approach to peacekeeping that would take on the complexity and the long-term challenges of managing nation-scale military interventions and humanitarian emergencies in post-conflict contexts.
There is significant crossover between prominent United Nations officials and high-level transitional justice practitioners, and this was the case from the first days of the field.41 During the early 1990s, in his role as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Restitution,
Compensation and Reparations for Gross and Consistent Violations of Humans Rights, Theo
41 UN Conventions played a significant role in building the field. Of particular importance, the Geneva Convention and its additional protocols are key original sources for building transitional justice jurisprudence and practice. Of particular note, see “Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field” (1950). Also, the Convention for Armed Force at Sea (1950), the “Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War” (1950) and the “Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War” (1950).
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Van Boven played an important role adapting the Latin American experiences to a global practice. A second major contribution came from Diane Orentlicher who, in 2004, was appointed by the UNHCR as an Independent Expert to update the Joinet ‘Impunity Principles’ on the rights to reparation, accountability and non-recurrence after atrocity (Orentlicher 2005; Joinet 1997).
Her work transformed Joinet’s more philosophical piece on emerging jurisprudence into a policy-oriented document outlining the rights and obligations expected from international law in the aftermath of war or atrocity.
By the mid-2000s, a global network of lawyers and transitional justice experts was deployed internationally across UN missions and operational sites. This is referenced in Kathryn Sikkink’s term ‘justice cascade” describing a new status quo where heads of state can no longer count on impunity in the face of a global accountability network (Sikkink 2011). In El Salvador,
Guatemala and Haiti, UN experts lead truth commissions and other judicial initiatives within coordinated peacebuilding operations (Laplante 2008). In Sierra Leone, Liberia and Timor Leste, the UN deployed transitional justice as a bargaining piece during peace talks, trading effective impunity for truth-seeking and an end to war. In Kosovo, the UN worked with transitional justice experts to organize trials and truth-telling efforts along with vetting and reform programs for the local judiciaries, police and prison services. Reflecting these developments, a 2004 report to the
General Assembly by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan described transitional justice as a guarantor of global peace and declared that transitional justice should have a central role in all future UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) missions.
Annan’s optimism that transitional justice would be an important contributor to the wider aims of global peacebuilding was not unfounded. Transitional justice opened a middle road that permitted compromise between warring factions without ignoring the demands of victims and
67 their communities. That said, including transitional justice in peace negotiations provided political and military leaders with blood on their hands the opportunity to participate in post- conflict governance. A pattern emerged of powerful actors relying on transitional justice as a soft option for addressing citizen demands for accountability. Snyder and Vinjamuri (2003) express this succinctly,
“Elites adopt truth commissions and other accountability strategies as much
for political cover as for any other reason, in order to give legitimacy to less
human rights-friendly policies that enable more hard-headed bargaining to
proceed.”
Transitional justice became a way for actors from all sides of a conflict to demonstrate their commitment to rule of law and justice without disturbing the status quo or exposing themselves to the scrutiny of judicial institutions (Tepperman 2002). Through transitional justice, yesterday’s belligerent became today’s peacebuilders, gaining recognition from the international community and the subsequent benefits of donor support.
This approach to transitional justice – a crude trade of peace for impunity, with some form of truth-seeking added on the end – is referred to as ‘peace for justice’ or ‘truth for justice.’ The idea that truth-telling is a sufficient stand-in for justice within a peace agreement was always an uncomfortable compromise and is rarely accepted today as a legitimate transitional justice practice, even amongst the most pragmatic practitioners. Moreover, international legal norms no longer permit amnesty for war crimes, meaning any national level amnesty can be overruled in a
68 regional or international court.42 In practice, regimes still design transitional justice processes that include amnesties, but in the broader field, ‘peace for justice’ is a settled debate.
Although the field has moved on from the core dilemma ‘peace for justice’ once posed, the approach reshaped the practice of transitional justice in ways that never shifted back. Adopting transitional justice into peacebuilding meant the design and scope of these institutions became matters codified in peace settlements and negotiated by powerful actors. Questions regarding the scope or type of justice needed, or the sacrifices victims are expected to make for the sake of peace, became issues in a wider dossier negotiated between high-level representatives of the state and the diplomatic community. In the original Latin American and South African examples, transitional justice was a response to pre-existing settlements. In that sense, it was an effort to make morally untenable concessions already made in the name of peace more acceptable to society and to victims. I am not claiming that original model offered victims better settlement terms: the original model responded to settlements that included no justice. Victims’ groups and civil society actors adopted transitional justice in hopes of changing that reality, even a small amount. Including transitional justice in high level discussions, from the start of a
42 Amnesty was most famously assigned by the South African TRC however it was not alone in this practice. Notably, the amnesty laws that accompanied truth commissions in South Africa, Argentina, Chile, Peru and El Salvador were part of a peace agreement that preceded the decision to hold a truth commission, with the commission designed as a step towards justice in the face of practically and legally imposed impunity. In these examples, excluding only South Africa, amnesty laws were since challenged and revoked. After the South African TRC, amnesty and truth commissions merged into a single process. Official or effective amnesties where also agreed to in the Sierra Leone, Liberia and Timor Leste truth commissions. Although these were widely celebrated cases at the time as examples of successful peacemaking through transitional justice, these are also cases of the ruling class trading victims’ rights to justice in exchange for the end of conflict. This is not necessarily an illegitimate trade, but it clearly requires serious reflection on what kind of grave risks face society as a whole that would merit denying victims their right to justice. The ongoing Gambian TRRC is currently granting amnesties to perpetrators of war crimes in exchange for full confessions. The TRRC offers victims minimal consultation and no veto over these decisions. In a context where the former regime has no political power and there is no threat of a return to violence, this practice is morally dubious, at best. Notably, amnesty has a different and more controversial standing in law than a reduced sentencing agreement or plea deals, such as those adopted in the Peace and Justice Act negotiated during the Colombian peace process.
69 settlement process, can unquestionably advance justice in ways that were impossible in those original examples. That said, as a major contrast from these earlier examples, victims and civil society activists are no longer the main drivers behind the design and implementation of transitional justice. The mandates, mechanisms and objectives of contemporary transitional justice are determined by government actors and by representatives of the international community, in accordance with established global standards and best practices. Victims and civil society groups are consulted at a later stage about how their interests and concerns fit within that model. Setting aside the question of whether this leads to better or worse outcomes for victims and citizen groups, it certainly produces profoundly different outcomes and makes transitional justice a fundamentally different experience for those participating.
The ‘Tool-Kit’ Approach
Merging transitional justice with global governance produced a shift in transitional justice scholarship towards more instructive works focused on the ‘how-to’ of post-conflict justice- seeking (Brahm 2009; Abrams and Hayer 2002; Crocker 2000; Husye 1995). Priscilla Hayner wrote the much-cited article “Fifteen Truth Commissions” soon followed by her book on the same topic (Hayner 1994; Hayner 1996; Abrams and Hayner 2002; Hayner 2001). The two works compared past truth commissions with most of the text devoted to listing the criteria
Hayner considered necessary in a legitimate and well-implemented process. Mark Freedman followed with his own contribution to the technical literature with the publication of “Truth
Commissions and Procedural Fairness” (Freedman 2006). The book gave clear and easily transferable instructions on the legal procedures he deemed necessary in a truth commission. In these and similar volumes, technical experts created a succinct set of instructions aimed at helping governing elites, UN staff and NGO partners to reproduce transitional justice anywhere
70 in the world (Freedman and Hayner 2003; UNHCR 2006; ICTJ 2013; Grieff 2006). The ‘tool- kit’ approach to transitional justice created an explosion of handbooks and pamphlets outlining the best practices needed to gain international recognition as a creditable and legitimate transitional justice mechanism.
The shift towards technical assistance came at the expense of victims’ activism and involvement.
In the ‘tool-kit’ model, expertise comes from outside in the form of expensive consultants who can boast little local knowledge but much general experience navigating international organizations and high-level policymaking circles. Critics warn that the field now follows a cookie cutter approach, reproducing transitional justice initiatives rapidly and across a broad array of contexts by overlooking key aspects of local history, conflict dynamics and victim experiences (Colin 2008; Pensky 2008; Tepperman 2002; Mendeloff 2004). As McAdams writes,
“…The challenge of reckoning with the past is not like a fancy buffet, where
one pauses to review a menu of options and then chooses the most attractive
dishes: ‘I’ll take two truth commissions, one short trial, but no property issues,
thank you.’ If only the challenges of governance were this easy!” (McAdams
2011)
Rama Mani further explains that transitional justice now appears in a huge diversity of contexts while making only minor changes in the original model: “In its eagerness to promote transitional justice”, he writes,
“…the international community has a tendency to simplify the complex claims of
rectificatory justice in low-income post-conflict societies, and to search for a single
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definitive solution that could be applied, with minor adaptation, across disparate cases”
(Mani 2005)
Likewise, for Christine Bell, approaching post-conflict justice as a ‘toolkit’ of possible activities means ignoring a vast number of widely varying conceptual and political dilemmas; challenges that cannot be resolved by reducing transitional justice to a list of technical options (Bell 2009).
Standardization means that transitional justice is rightly criticized for presenting blanket solutions to complex and context specific problems. Despite these critiques, the ‘tool kit’ approach remains prolific, in large part because it is so well-suited to the current trend of embedding transitional justice within peacebuilding missions. As a standardized tool of moral renewal, transitional justice signals a national commitment to liberal principles like human rights and individual freedoms, but it also leaves complex political dilemmas like inequality, structural violence and economic crimes off the agenda. That is to say, transitional justice is deployed within a peacebuilding operation to address crimes that are clearly connected to longstanding economic and structural injustice, yet the mechanisms – by applying a standard toolkit – overlook complex social justice demands in favour of political and physical crimes.
2.1. Critical Responses
This brings us to the critique that transitional justice approaches the challenge of doing justice for the past in ways that divide violations and victimhood from broader oppression and structural violence. Mahmood Mamdani (2002) published his critique of the South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission soon after the TRC’s report was released. In the piece, Mamdani identified the TRC’s lack of consideration for economic and social crimes as a fundamental failure of the transitional justice model. In his view, the report downplayed the economic and
72 structural consequences of Apartheid. It focused on the conflict between “a fractured political elite” when the greatest crime of Apartheid was creating and maintaining a racist governing apparatus that prospered by repressing the majority population. He argued that the true challenge of building a new South Africa was not reconciling victims of political crimes, such as torture and assassination, with their perpetrators. Moving beyond the past would instead require overcoming the deep injustices that endured between the beneficiaries of Apartheid and the population oppressed by that political system.
Zinaida Millar (2008) expanded on Mamdani’s critique, contending that, as a consequence of its blindness to the economic or social history of conflict, transitional justice actually contributes to structural injustice. For Millar, separating strategies for economic redistribution, land reform and structural reforms from transitional justice helps perpetuate the myth that “the origins of conflict are political or ethnic rather than economic or resource based.” In her argument, allowing this myth to go unchallenged advances an “entrenched ideology of elites” that pretends the history of economic oppression is disconnected from the specific human rights violations documented by a transitional justice process.
For Mana Rami, the consequences of leaving structural and economic injustice unaddressed in transitional justice processes are easily identified:
“The trends are well documented in South Africa, Guatemala, Haiti or Kosovo, levels of
criminal violence and consequent homicide after the purported transition to peace exceed
those during the violent conflict, meaning before ‘peace agreements’ were concluded or
transitions occurred” (Rami 2008).
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Without making an explicit claim to a causal connection between increased criminal violence and transitional justice efforts, his piece notes that crises of criminality and social violence in post-conflict settings have grown ‘apace’ with the global transitional justice movement. In other words, for Rami, peace and justice efforts that leave the structural roots of conflict unaddressed merely transform the violence of war into new kinds of exploitation and conflict. By removing structural injustice from the peace and reform agenda, transitional justice played a central role transforming political violence into ‘criminal’ or ‘social’ violence.
Rami, Miller and Mamdani helped grow an emerging body of critical literature by authors concerned that transitional justice contributes to securing or consolidating the power of elites and, at times, also neo-imperial interests in post-conflict environments (McGovern and Lundy
2008). We need not look far to find examples of transitional justice deployed to advance democracy and liberalism (or, as I contend, neoliberalism) in territories conquered by western world powers. As Lundy and McGovern write,
“… [transitional justice projects] are directed at reconstituting post-conflict societies in
the image of western liberal democracies, establishing this model as the ideal type and
setting externally defined limits to the field of permissible action.”
Examples of this liberal democratization project were seen during the US invasion in Iraq and the coalition occupation of Afghanistan. High-level policy makers in international organizations and governments adopted the discourse of transitional justice in these military campaigns to justify intervening in ‘failed statehood’ (Bell, Campbell and Aolain 2007). In these examples, contemporary transitional justice took on neo-colonial undertones as a civilizing project deployed to correct morally bankrupt governments and rebuild in the image of western liberal democracy (Bell and O'Rouke 2007).
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That moralizing effect of transitional justice advances liberalism and, more specifically, a version of liberal ideology that discounts the significance of the economic and social context surrounding conflict. In this regard, transitional justice does not simply align ideologically with liberal principles, it reflects the aims of neoliberal governance. Transitional justice advances those aims within a national process of moral renewal, deployed in a political community to re- establish moral standards for governance and social order. That moral renewal project renders transitional justice a powerful tool of neoliberalism by doing the ideological work of legitimatizing governance that is diverted away from citizen demands and towards elite interests.
Conclusion
Within the transitional justice model, citizen demands for major structural reform and redistribution are set aside to instead address political and physical rights violations. This was a characteristic of transitional justice from its origins however the consequences are much more pronounced in contemporary contexts than in the original examples seen forty years ago. This is because the nature and the root causes of systematic human rights violations transitional justice addresses have much changed during that period. Today transitional justice is most often adopted after largescale civil wars in low-income and high-inequality countries. These wars can result in direct victims numbering in the hundreds of thousands, the majority of whom experience physical violence as intrinsically connected to ongoing and often extreme poverty.
The type of perpetrators leading this violence are also different, as is the nature of their crimes and the impacts of those crimes on the prospects of peace and reconciliation. Only a minority of victims in a contemporary transitional justice process testify about hidden crimes, committed on
75 orders from an established security apparatus, within a wider system of state repression. Truth commission mandates are still written with that image in mind and these stories remain a disproportionate focus of their work, but this reflects adherence to an old model rather than the realities of contemporary conflict. Today victims are more likely to speak of horrific and often intentionally visible acts, committed by loosely associated warlords, militias, neighbourhood defense groups, rogue security forces and various other actors, many of them joining the violence for profit or to settle scores.
The aim of transitional justice, from its origins, was to find a moral and just response to past violations that would ensure victim suffering is corrected and can never happen again. In the earlier contexts, that goal was significantly advanced by investigating and – when possible – punishing key perpetrators within a military or police apparatus. This is because the approach had the direct impact of exposing and dismantling structures of repression in these contexts. The same model is a poor fit within the chaos and social collapse of most contexts where transitional justice is applied to today. Truth commissions repeat horrors that are already well-known and shame individuals who often glory in their own brutality or, on the other extreme, who acted in a context of such chaos and terror that commissions get caught in the polemics of deciding who is really a perpetrator and who is a really victim.
More importantly, the tendency of the transitional justice model to look for the victims and perpetrators of earlier contexts in current cases is problematic because it has produced a transitional justice approach that often hides more than it reveals about the structures and beneficiaries of contemporary conflict. Behind the overt violence there is a political and economic class who manage governance and the business sphere in ways that first created and then profit from a context of violence and repression. These people are often impossible to link
76 with atrocities happening on the ground. They are seldom directly involved; they merely create and benefit from those circumstances, while others fight over the resultant injustice and social breakdown. By consequence, this elite class is hidden in plain sight by the blind spot of the transitional justice model on matters of structural violence and social injustice.
Transitional justice is a process of devising resolutions and reforms needed to correct the past and ensure it never happens again. Considering that aim, its work ought to focus foremost on the elite class standing behind the overt horror of war, regardless of whether those are the direct perpetrators of human rights violations. As the architects and beneficiaries of structural inequalities and social injustices that result in the kind of social collapse seen in modern civil war, exposing and dismantling that system would get much closer to achieving the stated goals of transitional justice than is possible within the current standardized model, framed within the narrow parameters of the human rights approach. In practice, transitional justice does not just fail to expose the culpability of elites in creating violence and repression, the model is easily leveraged to legitimize and re-establish their dominant standing in society. In its current applications, transitional justice is deployed to hide the architects of structural violence and protect the beneficiaries of grave social injustices at the root of the conflict. As such, it has become a means for advancing neoliberal restructuring in postwar contexts by securing elite and financial interests during the transition and undermining citizen demands for transformative reforms and redistribution. The following chapters illustrate this process through a case study of the civil war and subsequent transitional justice process in Côte d’Ivoire.
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3. Rewriting Inequality as Ethnic Conflict
Introduction
Testimonies gathered by the Ivorian national truth commission are filled with accounts of youth gangs from opposing ethnic groups attacking and pillaging urban neighborhoods and rural villages. These are stories of irrational blood lust, spurred by hatred of an ethnic ‘other’. By framing the conflict narrative in this way, the truth commission pushed the moral obligation to do justice for the past off the ruling class and onto the wider population. The CDVR did this by addressing Ivorians as xenophobic people who must atone for their intolerance. That narrative excused the business class and ruling elite for their role creating an oppressive political and economic governance system that, long untenable, finally broke down into civil war. The truth commission, however, avoided serious consideration of the structural injustice and longstanding oppression that drove the country to war in the first place. With its focus on horrific scenes of ethnic violence, the CDVR depicted a country crippled by illiberal hatred and saved by the willingness of a cosmopolitan ruling elite to reconcile. Moreover, it perpetuated the image of the
78 new regime as one committed to development and stability, charitably helping a population of would-be genocidaires atone for their terrible past by launching a nationwide transitional justice project.
As we will see in the coming pages, the discourse of ethnic war and the perception that youth were the primary instigators of violence misrepresent both the nature and causes of the conflict.
This reframing of the past was deployed by the ruling class, through the work of the national truth commission, to deflect their responsibility for the civil war onto the masses and to legitimize a national reconstruction process made by and for the country’s wealthy elite. Since ethnic hatred is always a detestable justification for violence, the only obligation this account demanded of the new government was to re-educate an intolerant population. Rewriting a long history of struggle and oppression as an ethnic war thus exempted the new regime from addressing the root causes and consequences of conflict. If longstanding structural injustice were recognized as the root cause of conflict, fundamental and legitimate grievances stemming from that experience would need to be addressed in order to do justice for the past and prevent future unrest. Addressing such grievances would require major institutional reforms and redistribution of wealth, resources and opportunities. By perpetuating a narrative of ethnic war at the CDVR, the ruling class avoided demands for serious structural reform. Not only that: this narrative also ensured that building a better future was articulated as helping the masses learn tolerance and reconciliation. Accordingly, the responsibility for achieving that better communal life was transferred off the elites and onto the wider, ostensibly intolerant, population.
Focusing on ethnic hatred as the driver of conflict is one of the clearest ways transitional justice advances a neoliberal moral order in post-conflict contexts. Masking the structural injustice and economic reasons for the country’s collapse behind a narrative of xenophobic violence ensured
79 that, as a new liberal democratic regime, the Ouattara government was under no moral obligation to address the demands of an ostensibly racist population. A just national reckoning for the past, instead, became a project of ‘responsible’ ruling elites overruling the impulses of the ‘intolerant’ population. The Ouattara regime’s neoliberal reform agenda exacerbated the root causes of the conflict, deepened the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small economic elite, and hurt communities already struggling in the aftermath of a decade long civil war. Yet the way transitional justice framed responsibility for the conflict and, by extension, the moral obligation to right past wrongs, meant that this reconstruction agenda was celebrated as the work of a good government, committed to citizen well-being. The transitional justice process, in this way, built a new moral order in Côte d’Ivoire that cast the Ouattara government as a liberal democracy, committed to good governance, even while it redirected governance towards rapid economic growth and freeing markets, at the cost of worsening poverty for the majority population.
The Ivorian Land and Labour Conflict
Colonial rule in early twentieth-century Côte d’Ivoire played an important role constructing contemporary ethnic categories and giving those categories political salience. Under French rule,
Côte D’Ivoire was governed by a policy of indirect colonization called the Indigénat. Although the Indigénat was portrayed as a form of accommodation to local custom and traditional governance, in reality it established and consolidated a tiered legal regime in which different
80 rules and rights applied to Africans as compared to Europeans (Loucou 2012, 112).43 The policy was successful in part because it exploited the willingness of some traditional leaders to use the colonial presence as a means of settling pre-existing power struggles. Thus, in administering the
Indigénat, colonial overlords relied on local chiefs ready to collaborate with them, and replaced those who resisted with more cooperative allies (ibid).
To increase revenue from its most lucrative West African colony, French authorities set up plantations throughout the fertile Western region by importing migrant labour from the arid
North and from Upper Volta (today’s Burkina Faso, Guinea and Mali). The West of Côte d’Ivoire is the traditional homeland of the Krou, an ethnic subgroup including Bêté, Dida, Wê,
Kroumen and Guère peoples. The West is also the heart of the cocoa, coffee and rubber industries, making the practice of replacing traditional leadership with nobles sympathetic to
French authority most heavily practiced in that region (ibid, 260; Chauveau 2000). The so-called
‘Baoulé-French compromise’ refers to a colonial governing strategy that secured resource exploitation for the French by handing over local authority and industry management in the fertile West to landlords from the monarchic Baoulé ethnic group based in the centre-East.
Notably, Côte d’Ivoire’s celebrated first President, Félix Houphouet-Boigny (FHB), and the majority of his governing class were Baoulé industry leaders-come-politicians who grew to prominence thanks to their ethnic group’s privileged standing under French rule.
43 Indigénat laws included punishments for refusal to pay colonial taxes, refusal to participate in forced labour (12 days a year were required of all adult men), disrespect of European ‘agents’, prohibition on any speech, song or story disrespectful to a French or European representative and the prohibition from opening any school or religious space without colonial permission.
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The French colonial overlords also had a special, though more exploitative, relationship with the
Sahel nomadic groups encouraged to migrate from northern lands to labour on plantations in the
West. In Ivorian parlance, these peoples are often grouped together under the language category
‘Dioula’ or simply under the somewhat pejorative term ‘Northerners.’ 44 An ever-increasing stream of northern labourers was necessary to continue expanding the lucrative plantation system in the West. Colonial administrators took advantage of the vulnerabilities Dioulas faced as foreigners working manual labour in the traditional Krou territory (J. P. Dozon 1997). Displaced from their homeland and granted less rights than the locals, migrant workers were considered more compliant and dedicated labourers than the Krou inhabitants. The colonial administration also valued the Dioula for their traditional role as regional traders. Dioulas served as commercial agents for the early circulation of European goods in local markets and were relied on as mediators between European entrepreneurs and local communities (Cutolo, 2010, 537).
The success of the colonial planation system depended on a double act of exploitation in the
Western region. Dioula labourers were exploited with low-paid, uncertain living conditions and precarious work. Yet the system equally depended on expropriating land from Krou communities in the region. To sustain that system of double-exploitation, and thus continue expanding the lucrative cocoa industry, the colonial administration devised a land policy that has remained a source of deep tensions to this day. In 1935, in a move to consolidate its foreign control, the
44 A ‘Northerner’ is a term often used to encompass Dioulas, Malinkes and Burkinabes, regardless of whether they are migrants or born to Sahel communities indigenous to Côte d’Ivoire. While Côte d’Ivoire has a large population of migrant workers from outside today’s borders, there are equally Sahel communities dating their presence in Ivoirian territory back to the 12th century. There is no historical basis to the claim that these Senufo, Malinke and other Sahel groups are ‘less indigenous’ to Côte d’Ivoire than the Southern ethnicities. Indeed, the southwestern Krou groups were themselves migrants from the West, much like the southeastern Akan migrated from present day Ghana. There is thus an implicit offense in the term ‘northerner’ as it can imply that all people from Sahel regions, even those descended from groups who have lived in Côte d’Ivoire for centuries, are foreigners.
82 colonial administration declared that all land left unused for 10 years would become state property. The policy put pressure on chiefs and their communities to transform ‘la forêt noire’
[uncut forests] as quickly as possible into cocoa and coffee plantations (later also pineapples, palm oil and rubber). In its official wording, the declaration gave original occupants the opportunity to transform their status as traditional owners into legal deed holders. In practice, the process of declaring landownership was bureaucratically difficult and based on foreign laws and values. It is unlikely the colonial regime ever expected the autochthone population to participate in the administratively complex process of securing a deed. Instead, the declaration effectively forced westerners to loan their land at a much faster rate to regional migrants in order to keep their claim as landholder and inhibit the colonial state from repossessing it as ‘unused’ plots to be reallocated to agribusiness (J. P. Dozon 1997; Chauveau and Bobo 2003).
While the Krou traditionally lived from sustenance farming, the newly cleared lands and their migrant labour force produced cocoa and coffee for sale in European markets. Foreign agribusinesses were granted special privileges by colonial administrators, benefiting from trade incentives and assistance provided by the French authorities (Loucou 2012, 123). Most phases of commercial cocoa production – collection, transport, storage and shipping – were privatized early in the colonial period, meaning these sectors were firmly in the hands of foreign entrepreneurs at the time of independence in 1960. In that year, foreign investors controlled 50% of the Ivorian economy, and France received 65% of Ivorian exports while providing 74% of imports (Loucou 2012, 141 & 153). In the years that followed, Houphouet-Boigny’s Franco- oriented governance policies consolidated the economic dominance of French businesses and entrepreneurs in Côte d’Ivoire.
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At decolonisation, the French authorities handed the property rights for most of the national territory to the new independence era government. Effectively, this made the central government the landlord of most citizens in Côte d’Ivoire (Boone 2007). The significance of this land transfer is a complex but crucial feature of Ivorian politics even today. First, it should be noted that
Houphouet’s Parti Démocratique de Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI) was neither democratic nor was it originally a political party. The PDCI was the descendent of Côte d’Ivoire’s first labour syndicate, the Syndicate des Agricultures Africaines (SAA). This was a colonial era labour union formed by successful Ivorian plantation owners who unionized to defend their trade and land rights in the face of foreign competition. The SAA was the product of colonial policies that had supported the development of a small but wealthy economic elite made up of Ivorian – primarily
Boualé – plantation owners and industry leaders. In 1960, when the French transferred authority to the Ivorian people, they handed power directly to the PDCI: an oligarchic political party formed from the SAA and headed by cocoa industry tycoons. Under Houphouet-Boigny’s leadership, the PDCI ruled Côte d’Ivoire for the next thirty years as a one-party state.45
Once in power, the new PDCI government revitalized colonial era policies aimed at growing the agricultural sector by all available means. Houphouet-Boigny announced his own version of the colonial land law in a 1962 Declaration proclaiming, “la terre appartient a lui qui met on
45 Independence era PDCI elites accrued vast wealth in the cocoa and coffee industries thanks to tight controls exerted over Ivorian agriculture by the dominant role their syndicates played in Ivorian politics (i.e. the PDCI party itself was one such syndicate). The syndicate system was not limited to agribusiness, however. By 1952, nearly a decade before independence, there were 22 syndicates across Côte d’Ivoire representing 63% of the state economy (see Loucou 2012). The syndicate network reached into the core of each industry, controlling production and trade down to the level of the individual workers themselves. Building on the colonial administration, Houphouet created a complex patronage system that combined the state bureaucracy and the syndicates within it. The result was a vast patronage network connecting each rural farmer or urban labour, through syndicates and bureaucrats, direct to the authority of President Houphouet-Boigny.
84 valeur” [the land belongs to he who works it]. The declaration met with such resistance in the
National Assembly that it technically never entered Ivorian law. Nevertheless, Houphouet’s authority was so absolute that the decree held the character of law in the eyes of many Ivorians and foreign businesses. In a second famous decree, President Houphouet characterized himself as a Pan-Africanist paternal figure, welcoming ‘brothers’ from all other French West African states to ‘share a life in common, here in Côte d’Ivoire’ by coming to fell the lush Western forests and cultivate the land (Dembélé 2002 in Cutolo 2010; Chauveau 2000; Losch 2000).
Together, the two declarations amounted to reviving the former colonial policy of giving western indigenous communities the choice between land expropriation by the state or inviting northerners to cut virgin forests and cultivate the land under customary tenancy bonds. This resulted in an alarming rate of expansion of the agricultural sector, with 90% of the country’s woodland deforested in the half century following independence.46 Effectively, President Félix
Houphouet-Boigny had re-established in the independence era, the double act of exploitation at the heart of the ‘Baoulé-French compromise’. Under his rule, French and Boualé industry elites shared the significant profits of a booming agricultural sector, while migrant labourers endured precarious working conditions and Western autochtones could do little to prevent their traditional lands from being expropriated for cocoa cultivation.
Houphouet and his ruling elite thrived by establishing an internally-contradictory property rights system that pitted migrant workers against indigenous westerners. In his speeches, Houphouet generously invited workers from Mali and Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) to come share the
46 Following the boom of agribusiness in 1950, 16.5 million hectares of forest were cut in Côte d’Ivoire. This deforestation rate was one of the highest in the world during the 50 years following independence. The situation is unimproved in recent years: from 1990-2015, Côte d’Ivoire had the world’s single highest deforestation rate according to the UN FAO ( Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2016).
85 wealth of Côte d’Ivoire. In a more accurate formulation, the Sahel labourers were invited to help expand agribusiness by entering a labour bond known as a ‘tutorat’ with the original inhabitants of the tropical West. At independence, traditional forms of land ownership were largely intact despite fifty years of colonial rule. Only a small number of individuals or communities held any form of legal deed, as remains the case today. Instead, Western land was – and to a large extent, still is – governed by tutorat relationships: a perpetual debt system binding migrant laborers to the autochthone communities on whose traditional lands the newer residents live and work
(Chauveau, 2000). There are positive stories of friendly co-inhabitation under the tutorat, however there are also many accounts of the customary tenant system being manipulated by both debtors and lenders, depending on the details of the given case.
Tutorat relationships are part of a cultural obligation within Krou subgroups to share wealth, food and land with any foreigner who comes to stay in their territory. According to this tradition, parcels of land were allocated to the migrant labourers who arrived under colonial and
Houphouet era migrant labour policies. The price of the land was usually symbolic: often a small sum of cash or a bottle of gin.47 Although the land thereafter belonged to the ‘stranger’ and could be passed on to the next generation, the continuance of that ‘gift’ depended on meeting ongoing and undefined obligations to the host, and could be revoked if the relationship faltered.
‘Strangers’ are expected to contribute financially or in kind to family events and in times of need for the duration of their stay in the Krou community, with funerals and marriages being the most common occasion to call on a tutorat debtor. Two generations later, descendants of the original
47 Gin (and other alcoholic drinks) has symbolic meaning in Krou culture and is given for its ceremonial use. For instance, it is often involved in welcoming guests to the community. This tradition has fed negative stereotypes about Krou as ‘lazy’ or ‘drunks’, as we will see later in this chapter.
86 migrants find themselves the beneficiaries of free or very cheap fertile farmland acquired by their forefathers. Yet, on the other hand, they are still indebted to ‘tutor’ hosts in a relationship governed by ill-defined and potentially unending obligations.
Historians often describe the tutorat as the original source of the social exclusion experienced by
‘northerners’ in Ivorian society.48 In this interpretation of the customary law, the tutorat locks migrant families into a permanent status as indentured tenants of traditional land owners. In this understanding, foreigners are generously welcomed but they will never be full members of their adopted community nor will they ever truly own the land they farm, no matter how many generations pass. In the West of Côte d’Ivoire today, a traveler will hear many accounts of Krou hosts who took advantage of the migrant labourers living on their lands, sometimes over many decades. That said, the resentment expressed by some Krou farmers towards Dioulas neighbours who benefited from the cultural obligation to gift land is also understandable. Significant areas of farmland were acquired at little or no cost, usually with agreements for minimal or merely symbolic rent. The value of land has risen dramatically since these tenancy bonds were made by the grandparents of the current occupants. In the time since, the modern world has wiped away many customary obligations and social realities that once made those agreements beneficial to all sides. Furthermore, the Krou are amongst the country’s poorest residents. Now that farmland has become scarce and highly prized, that relative poverty further deepens resentment felt towards
Dioula families farming on tutorat acquired land.
48 For example, see Fofana (2009) and Soro (2004).
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Arbitrating these cases is nearly impossible due to the contradictory laws governing land ownership in Côte d’Ivoire. Firstly, Ivorian property law establishes that land can never be permanently transferred from its customary owners and, in particular, can never be owned by foreigners. However, it is equally the case that the law forbids traditional landowners from forcing rent upon the descendants of migrant workers, unless such payments were originally included in a legal contract. This second clause is effectively irrelevant, as legal contracts almost never exist. Tutorat arrangements were made by the grandparents of current residents, most of whom were illiterate and who would have depended on customary justice to resolve any issues arising from the exchange. Finally, Ivorian law further prohibits customary landowners from expelling so-called strangers from traditional land. This principle was recently clarified in the legal code to officially forbid land evictions of migrant farmers (Mitchell 2014).
When the contradicting pieces of Ivorian land laws are considered together, the contemporary legal standing of tutorat amounts to the following; even with a contract, traditional lands cannot permanently change ownership. Migrant workers thus have no claim to land ownership regardless of what terms were negotiated for the use of the land, what payments were made, and the number of generations that have passed. It is equally the case that autochthones have no right to expel foreign workers or force payments from those occupying land on their traditional territory. Again, this holds regardless of what terms were originally negotiated for land use, how much time has passed, and whether the migrant community has significantly grown in the interim years. The legal deadlock is unfair to both sides and inevitably leads to conflict. That said – and this is a point we will return to shortly – the legal deadlock also has clear beneficiaries. Large agribusinesses profit from cheap labour working on vast stretches of rent- free land that are effectively, though not officially, co-opted from the traditional owners by
88 labourers who can occupy it, but cannot own it, and thus can only put it to temporary use: namely, for farming cocoa.49
It is no surprise that land rights became a permanent source of tension between indigenous and migrant groups in Côte d’Ivoire. Although these tensions intensified with the 1990 economic crash, violent outbreaks over land began during the colonial era. That said, given the incomprehensibility of the legal code, the unfairness of the tutorat and the high-stakes of land ownership, much more remarkable than infrequent clashes is the fact that most Western communities co-existed in relative peace during pre-war period. For decades, western villages lived under a land and labour system that was deeply unfair to both migrants and to the original residents. Despite this, until civil war broke out in 2002, peaceful settlement was the most common outcome of land conflict (Chauveau and Bobo 2003). In most instances land disputes were settled on a case-by-case basis by customary authorities from both groups.50 While imperfect, this local solution was relatively successful for three-quarters of a century. Thus, rather than accepting the common claim that ethnic hatred has long festered in the West and finally spilled over into a civil war, the impression we ought to gain from this account is that these communities managed an incredibly difficult social history with restraint and mutual accommodation.
During the war years this picture of accommodation was replaced in popular culture and newsreels with accounts of ethnic hatred and bloodlust, first springing up from the West and then infecting the country at large. Indeed, the best-known account of the tutorat system is an entirely
49 Account of the Grand Beriby Abron Chiefs in interview with author, San Pedro, Côte d’Ivoire August 2015. 50 ibid.
89 fictional one. Written for an urban intellectual audience during the long years of stalemate between the civil war’s dramatic origins and end, Les Catapilas is a novel by Venance Konan, the editor-in-chief of Côte d’Ivoire’s largest news agency and publishing house, Fraternité Matin
(Konan 2009). Despite being fictional, the novel has shaped contemporary understandings of
Ivorian land conflict more than any real-life account.51 The story is written from the perspective of Frank, a foolish and lazy Bêté man. He is a drunk and forever scheming how he will afford to attend some out-of-town festival or lure a young woman into bed behind his wife’s back. The term ‘Catapilas’ is a Bêté patois referencing to the American-made Caterpillar excavators used in
European plantations to clear land in the West. The Bêté protagonists in the novel dub ‘their strangers’ Catapilas as a good-natured mockery of the tireless work ethic of the Dioulas as they clear vast swaths of land for cultivation. Frank cannot think long term and is known for his aversion to work. Throughout the story we see him selling parcel after parcel of his family’s traditional land for next to nothing to the quiet, good-natured and ever-obliging head of the
Catapilas clan. Within a few years, the Catapilas have transformed the Bêté village from a backwater into a bustling trade center. They also control local industry and finances. When Frank finally awakens to the new status quo, he becomes obsessed with his hatred for the Catapilas.
Thanks to the help of a radicalised, unemployed nephew from the city and a corrupt party official, the town’s Bêté men band together on a xenophobic mission to destroy the Catapilas and take back their traditional land: a particularly cunning plan given the land is now cleared, cultivated and productive, and their once lost little village is a lively trade hub.
51 “Forget anything else; everything you need to know about the war you can read in Catapilas!” This was stated in an interview with a French business owner whose family had lived in the Western region as planation and hotel owners for three generations (Grand Bériby, Côte d’Ivoire, June 2014). The comment is one of many mentions over my time in Côte d’Ivoire pointing to the novel as an important source of information about the war.
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As seen in the preceding pages, the historical record shows a quite different picture than the one recounted in Konan’s novel. Land conflict grew overtime because of an unfair land and labour system built on the double exploitation of both labourers and traditional landowners. Migrant labourers were promised land and a share in Côte d’Ivoire’s riches if they migrated South, yet the state never regulated labour rights nor compensated the traditional landowners in areas where migrants were sent to work. For their part, Krou communities had little choice but to hand over territory to foreign workers before their ‘unused’ land was expropriated by the state and reallocated to agribusiness. The Houphouetist elites left it to local customary authorities to muddle through the fallout and, in the meantime, became exceedingly rich off the cocoa industry, booming thanks to an abundance of cheap labour and free land.
Yet these architects and primary beneficiaries of land conflict are omitted in Catapilas. Instead the book presents a decontextualized account, portraying violence in the West as a matter of petty personal failings and nasty ethnic stereotypes. Catapilas is certainly an important historical record, but not for the story itself. The book taught its wide readership a simplistic and divisive conflict narrative, and it did so at the height of the national partisan. The story revitalizes colonial era stereotypes of industrious Dioulas and backwards Krous, replacing a complicated historical record with simple clichés. (R. Marshall-Fratani 2003). In doing so, the novel hides both the exploitative policies at the root of conflict and the primary beneficiaries of that exploitation. As an influential account of the early phases of the civil war, the book helped transfer blame for the discord caused by an untenable and exploitative land system away from the governing elites and onto the autochthone farmers and migrant labourers who suffered most from it.
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Catapilas was not intended to capture the complexity of land conflict in the Western region.
Rather, the book contributed to a conversation happening amongst urban intellectuals in Abidjan more than a decade after the events depicted in the book. The clichéd account of Bêté farmers analogized then-President Gbagbo (a Bêté) and his urban youth supporters as a means of debunking their anti-foreigner rhetoric and glorifying the rebellion against them. As such,
Konan’s is one of numerous sources that collapse rural land disputes and urban political unrest into a single timeline (M. McGovern 2011; Notin 2013; Soro 2005). These accounts describe the war as an eruption of long festering conflict between northerner migrants and xenophobic
Ivorian youth. This, however, is a misleading narrative on three accounts: first, the timing of events leading to the conflict; second, the key instigators of that violence; and, third, the geography of where those events played out. In fact, the first decade of civil unrest in Côte d’Ivoire was concentrated in the urban centre and happened for reasons unrelated to rural land disputes. It took a deliberate effort from warring political elites, eager to capture the power vacuum left by Houphouet-Boigny’s death, to connect rural dynamics in any meaningful way to the political violence that was already happening in the urban centre.
The Pro-Democracy Movement
Despite accounts often seen on social media or in international newsreels, ethnic tensions rising from the rural land crisis did not spark the civil war in Côte d’Ivoire. At its origin, unrest in
Côte d’Ivoire began with a bi-partisan, pro-democracy movement that was vocally committed to ethnic and religious unity, actively cultivating an image of Ivorians standing together against
Houphouet’s one-party rule. The movement began in urban centres and, quite explicitly, was not mobilized along ethnic lines. Eventually that movement divided into camps and leaders on both sides exploited ethnic allegiances to justify their calls for escalated violence. This happened only
92 gradually, however, and it did not manifest in violent clashes along ethnic lines until years after political violence along party lines was a well-established fixture of urban life.
In the early 1990s, a formidable pro-democracy movement grew from Houphouet-Boigny’s impressive record of developing higher education in post-colonial Côte d’Ivoire (Woods 1996).52
The independence-era President discovered that his remarkably successful education policy had produced a new generation of educated citizens, unwilling to accept centralised and often arbitrary one-party rule. The President now faced a generation of leftist-oriented students and professors, schooled in the language and principles of French enlightenment, and espousing a new vision of nationalism divorced from the colonial mimicry they identified with Houphouet- era elitism. The movement mobilized around a shared contempt for the small ruling elite and the enduring influence of their allies in the French administration. FHB, one-time hero of independence, now faced a united movement of youth activists, crosscutting ethnic groups and led by Ivorian-born, Paris-educated socialist intellectuals.
During this same period, Côte d’Ivoire sank into a severe economic crisis. IMF reforms imposed on the country in exchange for debt relief stripped Houphouet-Boigny of the financial means to continue his former strategy of co-opting the growing intellectual class into government posts.
IMF mandated austerity measures hit the education sector especially hard, cutting the generous housing and salary benefits that teachers and students had once enjoyed. Many in the teachers’ syndicate felt they were being targeted as punishment for their open resistance to the regime
52 In 1950, there were only 1,268 students in secondary schools. Thirty years later, the figure had grown nearly twenty-fold. Furthermore, the number of students at the university of Abidjan exceeded the 6,000 places available three-fold at the end of the 1980s (Woods, 1996).
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(Daddieh 1988).53 Notable amongst the more militant teachers was a history professor from
Abidjan University named Dr. Laurent Gbagbo. In defiance of the regime, a group of student activists invited Professor Gbagbo to give a public lecture entitled ‘Youth in Politics’. In a country where political science was banned as a topic of study, this action was deemed flagrant insubordination and met a heavy-handed state response. The meeting was banned, prompting a student march on the University administration. The government sent troops to ‘protect the
Rector’, resulting in the arrest and beating of several hundred students.54 The repression only helped grow more protests, which, again, met an even harsher state response.55 Rather than dissuading the opposition, state violence sparked further civil actions and soon spread to a general strike. Once the police and gendarmes began switching sides to join the striking teachers and students, Houphouet-Boigny understood that his coercive tactics had reached their limit. He agreed to negotiate with the professors and student activists in a ‘national consultation process’,
53 Though he tried on various occasions, Houphouet-Boigny was unable to co-opt the teacher’s syndicate into the ranks of the PDCI. In the one-party state, this explicit non-affiliation with the regime was considered a grave provocation (Daddieh 1988). 54 The student marchers were jailed in the Akouedo military barracks where many reported being tortured. The incident was used as a pretext for the government to close the university’s independent research centers, an action interpreted by the students and teachers as an attempt by Houphouet to stamp out a growing pro-democracy movement among intellectuals (Woods 1996). 55 This action pushed then Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara to pass ‘anti-breaking’ laws [lois anti-casseurs] against the opponents of the regime, essentially criminalizing all civil action (Pigeaud 2015). Readers familiar with Ivorian history will see the irony that Prime Minister Ouattara’s own law meant to crush opposition, would later be used to deny him and his supporters the same right to protest a decade later. In September 1991, acting under the new ‘anti- breaking law’, the paramilitary commando was sent to the student’s residence, known as the ‘Cité’ in Youpougon. The operation was led by another future president, General Robert Guéï. The paramilitaries were accused of committing numerous acts of forced disappearances, beatings and rapes. Outrage at the unprecedented violence secured an independent investigative commission into the incident. The report, issued January 29, 1992, clearly linked the General Robert Guéï and his soldiers to rapes and other crimes committed at Cité Yopougon and recommended criminal action. Houphouet-Boigny was known for the dubious governance principle coined in the slogan that he ‘prefered injustice to unrest, as injustice can be fixed”. True to his words, Houphouet rejected the commission finding, citing his reluctance to fracture army loyalty. The following month more protests followed resulting in mass riots and the arrest of the entire opposition class, amongst them Gbagbo and his wife as well the leaders of the PIT (the worker’s party) and Lidho (Côte d’Ivoire’s first human rights’ NGO) (Woods 1996).
94 resulting in the decriminalization of opposition parties and the first competitive elections. On
May 31, 1990, Côte d’Ivoire became a democracy. Marking the occasion, Gbagbo’s Front
Populaire Ivoirien (FPI) became the first legal opposition party.56
Dividing the Youth
The ‘Fédération des Étudiants et Scolaires de Côte d’Ivoire” (FESCI) was founded in the St.
Families Church of Riveria on May 31, 1990: the very day Houphouet conceded to multi-party democracy. That said, the student organization had long existed underground at the heart of the youth-led pro-democracy movement. Going back to the colonial era, labour syndicates form the main terrain of Ivorian politics, and FESCI was no exception. Officially FESCI was a syndicate for the defense of student rights, but for its members “FESCI was a school; it was a school of politics”. 57 This student movement formed a new generation of political actors. With few exceptions, the men and the few women who today comprise the younger generation of Côte d’Ivoire ruling class entered politics through FESCI. In the words of a former FESCI communications officer: “We were all formed in FESCI together, it was only later that people chose their camps.”58 Though it is hard to believe today, during the first years of the multi-party
56 The RDR opposition party was founded a year later under the leadership of Djeni Kobena. As a close friend of Kobena, Laurent Gbagbo helped draft the founding statute of the RDR. In the first years of democracy, the two opposition parties worked together to weaken the PDCI. 57 FESCIsts, as they call themselves, will explain that being accepted into the ranks required unfaltering discipline and respect for the hierarchy. To enter FESCI, members spent a period in probation where they were expected to learn deference to authority and commitment to the movement. Fittingly, FESCI’s constitution commits all members to defend democracy and the head of state with military discipline (Former FESCI leaders now in hiding, in a group interview with author, Abobo, Côte d’Ivoire, August 2014). 58 Former FESCI Communications Director, interview with author, Abidjan, August 2014.
95 democracy, future Jeune Patriot leader Blé Goudé and future Rebel Commander Soro Guillaume were college roommates. After the war, the former was put on trial at The Hague while the latter served as President of the National Assembly, but the two men started their political careers together, as close friends and colleagues in the FESCI national office.
The political ambitions that split FESCI in two explain Côte d’Ivoire’s youth factions better than the common narrative of ethnic hatred, and yet the details of that divide are known only to the few surviving FESCI members who witnessed it. These events were recounted to me by a former
National Office member who held a leadership post at FESCI when Soro and Goudé fell out and divided the youth movement as a byproduct of their dispute. Blé Goudé served as National
Coordinator at the same time that Guillaume Soro was the General Secretary of FESCI. The post of General Secretary was the most senior in FESCI’s hierarchical organogram, with the GS serving a one-year term, after which national elections are organized. Though democratic in principle, in practice the national office would present a single candidate and that person invariably won. During its 5th general elections in 1998, this precedent was broken, sparking the power struggle that divided the youth movement into warring factions.
As the end of his tenure neared, Soro negotiated with other members of the National Office that a friend would replace him as General Secretary. It was not lost on the others that Soro’s candidate was shy and had no talent for words. Soro clearly saw his timid friend as a way to maintain control despite the official end of his term. In the lead up to the elections, Goudé left
Abidjan on a national tour to mobilize FESCI’s followers on campuses outside the city. As a man with an impressive – now infamous - talent for oration, he used the tour to build a mass following in the regional offices. Less than a month before elections, Goudé announced his candidacy for General Secretary, prompting Soro to accuse his one-time friend and ally of an
96 unforgivable betrayal. On the day of the election, Blé Goudé talked circles around his inarticulate opponent and easily secured a victory. The Soro clan stormed out in protest. Victory celebrations were short lived, however, as Soro and his supporters returned within the hour, armed with machetes. Although the Soro camp were better armed, their opponents were more numerous, and the battle ended with three deaths and numerous injuries. Soro disappeared into exile, his supporters left the organisation, and the remaining FESCIsts returned to daily operations under their new Secretary General, Blé Goudé.
The event permanently divided FESCI into factions. Those factions grew into the youth leagues of the opposing political parties that constituted the two sides of the decade long civil war, with the very same Soro Guillaume and Blé Goudé leading their respective camps. Blé Goudé and his followers remained allied with their long-time mentor, Laurent Gbagbo and his party the FPI.
Soro Guillaume disappeared underground for two years, only to resurface on September 19,
2001 under the pseudonym Dr. Koumba. On the night the rebels first attacked Côte d’Ivoire, this mysterious Doctor appeared on the radio and announced the start of a virtuous rebellion opposing the tyranny and xenophobia of President Gbagbo. Only his former friends from the
National FESCI Office recognised the voice of Soro Guillaume.
In his 2005 autobiography, Soro wrote that he took to the microphone that night in order to end the slaughter of the Dioula people at the hands of Laurent Gbagbo and his Jeune Patriot supporters. He justified the rebellion as a fight to end an allegedly ongoing massacre, claiming these horrors had already begun in Côte d’Ivoire and risked reaching the scale of the Rwandan genocide (Soro 2005). It is significant that Soro wrote this version of events four years later, after the country was partitioned in two and his rebellion had transformed into civil war. By that later point, the rebellion’s origin story claimed ‘Rwandan-scale’ ethnic cleansing was underway
97 and the rebellion was necessary to stop the slaughter and restore democracy. That story does not, however, align with events on the ground during that first year of Gbagbo’s decade long presidency and the period leading up to it.
In the two years between Soro’s exile and his return as a rebel leader, Côte d’Ivoire was certainly in tumult, but ethnic hatred was not driving that unrest. During this period, the kingpins of the
Ivorian political elite clashed over the power vacuum left by Houphouet-Boigny’s death. To feed their political ambitions, these men sent their youth supporters to brawl and die in the streets. An unknown number of people were forcibly disappeared or killed in the ensuing violence. As the faction that ultimately came out on top in that struggle, Gbagbo and his youth supporters bear responsibility for many of those crimes. Even still, the violence that Soro described in his autobiographical call to arms – the slaughter of civilians for no reason beyond ethnic hatred – only began at a much later period: after Gbagbo took power, after Soro’s rebellion attacked, and after the ensuing battle consolidated into a civil war. By 2011, a decade into the conflict, killing ethnic ‘others’ was indeed perpetrated by both sides with terrible frequency. This was not, however, the case during the first year of Gbagbo’s presidency in 2001.
Even Soro Alphonse, the current President of the RDR Youth League and a veteran of the rebel forces, conceded that targeted killings of Dioula began after Soro’s return. That is, after he launched a rebellion with an army raised in the North and funded by Burkina Faso President,
Blaise Compaoré.59
In Côte d’Ivoire, both national and foreign policy-makers deployed the language of ethnic hatred as a means of transferring responsibility for terrible violence off the kleptocratic ruling elites and
59 Soro Alphonse, RDR Youth League President, interview with author, Abidjan, May 2015.
98 onto the masses, with youth movements serving as the primary targets of that scapegoating.
Perpetuating that dynamic, observers in the global North helped the political elite skirt responsibility for the growing chaos by easily believing accounts claiming African youths were butchering one another for no better reason than simply hating an ethnic ‘other’. Seeing youth as merely xenophobic belligerents meant that, throughout the decade of conflict, the international community responded to the horrific violence committed against young people with cold indifference, as though the kids were just getting what their delinquency deserved.60 Terrible crimes were committed by young militants and these individuals share responsibility for the suffering caused by the war. Ivorian youth did not, however, act as a homogenous mob and their violence was not an irrational response to ethnic hatred. Ethnic hatred entered the conflict as a tool deployed by political elites to shape the country’s collapse to their interests and to overwrite the much more complex reasons young Ivorians joined the fight.
The civil war did not originally form along ethnic lines, even if this discourse eventually took over. As we saw, during the first decade of political unrest, Ivorian youth activists mobilized in a united movement. After the democratic transition was achieved, that unity began to crack under the ambitions of the movement’s leaders and their allies in the political class. Yet, even after the resulting groups transformed into violent factions, these groups represented opposing political parties and not ethnic divisions. Those faction only fought one another along ethnic lines later in the conflict timeline, and then because of a deliberate effort by their respective political leaders to rewrite the conflict into an ethnic one (as we saw Soro do just above). The
60 For example, marking Gbagbo supporters as xenophobes and hooligans by the ADO regime secured international military assistance in the invasion of Abidjan and, allegedly, ‘hundreds of extrajudicial executions’ of teenagers affiliated with Gbagbo’s regime after his arrest (Varenne 2012; Pigeaud 2015; Onana 2011. Members of FESCI interviewed also allege these executions took place, August 2014).
99 message of this chapter therefore is not that ethnicity was unimportant to the dynamics of the
Ivorian civil war. Ethnicity indeed became central to Ivoirian politics. Ethnic allegiances were exploited in Gbagbo’s many ploys to hold power. Likewise, stoking fear of ethnic violence at home and abroad was central to Ouattara’s strategy for seizing power from him. The point is rather that the ethnic hatred – supposedly the driving force of the country’s violent collapse – only manifested after the fact. By that I mean, ethnic hatred was not a deep grievance, growing from a dark history of hate and driving Ivoirians to take arms. The war was rooted in the political repression and exploitation of the ruling class: grievances shared across ethnic lines. As we will see in the coming pages, the motivations expressed by combatants on both sides reflect those more complex and deep-rooted struggles.
The Succession Crisis
Land disputes in the rural West and the fractured youth movement in Abidjan were two sites of social unrest that initially had little to do with one another. To understand how these separate struggles merged into a civil war, we need to look back at the power vacuum left by Houphouet-
Boigny’s death and the succession battle that ensued as rivals vied to fill it. During the presidential secession battle, candidates used citizenship debates to delegitimize the claims of their opponents and solidify their own claim to the presidency. These citizenship debates would become the linchpin that linked growing resentment in the west to youth fractions in the urban centre.
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Houphouet died on December 5th, 1993. According to the Constitution, the President of the
National Assembly would inherit the presidency until the end of term. This position was held by
Henri Konan Bédié, the adopted son of Houphouet and President of the PDCI party from the time of FHB’s death to the present day. Seventy-two hours after Houphouet died, Prime Minister
Alassane Ouattara attempted to circumvent the constitution by establishing a ‘presidential college’ that would manage an immediate transfer of power into his own hands. Despite objections from the Prime Minister, Bédié assumed the presidency, with backing from French
President Jacques Chirac.
To secure his position, President Bédié amended the constitutional requirements to run in presidential elections by adding the now infamous Article 35 to the constitution. All presidential candidates would henceforth be required have a father and mother born on Ivorian soil. This legislation originally targeted then-leader of the RDR, Djeny Kobena, whom opponents claimed was of Ghanaian heritage. Although not the original target of the law, Ouattara was also disqualified due to the allegation that his father was Burkina born.61 The 1993 Constitution also blocked anyone who had represented a foreign country in an official government post from the office of President. Again, this provision barred Ouattara, who served Burkina Faso as President of the West African Regional Bank before obtaining his Ivorian citizenship when he became
Prime Minister of Côte d’Ivoire. Soon after Bédié’s ascendancy, Ouattara resigned his post as
Prime Minister and returned to Washington as one of three joint directors at the IMF.
61 Note this claim has no documented evidence such as a birth certificate or birth registry supporting it. More to the point, neither Côte d’Ivoire nor Burkina Faso existed as countries at the time of his father’s birth.
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Ivorité
The concept of ‘Ivorité’ was invented during Henri Konan Bédié’s presidency. Definitions of
Ivorité vary depending on where the speaker sits politically. In its official meaning, the term refers to a political platform created by President H.K. Bédié to promote Ivorian industry and culture, ostensibly as an act of resistance against continued European dominance in these sectors.
For RDR supporters, however, Ivorité is a xenophobic principle used to legislate hatred and exclusion of northerners. CURDIPHE was a group of academics at the FHB University in
Abidjan assigned the task of devising the concept and its practical applications. On the surface, there is nothing explicitly anti-northern about CURDIPHE and its Ivorité publications. Indeed, there are many Dioulas and Malinkes communities indigenous to Côte d’Ivoire and this is celebrated in CURDIHPE works. The authors go to lengths to explain that the purpose of
Ivorité is to embrace the diversity of Côte d’Ivoire as the cornerstone of this nation-building project (CURDIPHE 1996).
In more subtle ways, however, Ivorité was indeed antagonistic to groups from the North. There is an underlying sentiment in CURDIHPE works that Ivorité is about ‘returning peoples to their correct place’ (R. Marshall-Fratani 2003). In this sense, Ivorité was a way to formalize and legitimize the claim that northerners and migrant labourers were taking up too much space, jobs and resources in the South. For instance, CURDIHPE research findings exaggerated immigration statistics, adding to the sense that the south was ‘flooded’ with migrants from the
Sahel (Touré 2000). CURDIPHE leveraged a liberal discourse of ‘cultural rights’ and the perceived legitimacy of academic research to create a body of literature that helped politicians exclude migrants from full citizenship and deny their leaders a place in national governance. On its own, Ivorité was a pseudo-intellectual project undertaken by remnants of the Houphouet-era
102 elite: the musings of an aging ruling class, nostalgic for the good days when no one questioned their privileges. Once the concept was pulled into citizenship debates surrounding the succession crisis, Ivorité became a powerful and destructive force in Ivorian politics.
Prior to the invention of Ivorité, the main social cleavage in Ivorian society divided the wealthy and powerful Baoulé from the Krou and Dioula who, together, shared the experience of being politically and economically marginalized by French and Baoulé elites. As seen, the booming economy of Houphouet’s golden era depended on a French-Baoulé compromise made at the expense of both Krou traditional landowners and Dioula labourers. It should thus come as no surprise that conflict was brewing for generations between the Baoulé elite and the western Krou subgroup (Chauveau 2000). From the 1960s through the early 1990s, East-West relations (i.e.
Baoulé into Krou lands) rather than North-South relations (i.e. Dioula into Krou lands) were the primary source of social tensions in Côte d’Ivoire (ibid). At times those tensions erupted into violence between the Baoulé entrepreneurs and the Krou inhabitants of land expropriated by agri-industry chiefs from the central region. The presence of Baoulé industry elites in the West was always a tense arrangement, but it was tenable during the Houphouet years due to the first president’s strategy of quelling dissent through a combination of economic rewards and targeted repression.
Possessing neither FHB’s charisma nor cash reserves, President Bédié needed a different strategy if he hoped to preserve the tenuous status quo in the West. Bédié revealed his Ivorité inspired solution to his countrymen in his famous 1997 declaration, the ‘Call of Fengolo’. In this speech,
Bédié recounted a murderous conflict between the Wê (a Krou group) and the Baoulé, communicating his fear of this core cleavage in Ivorian society. He changed the story, however, to highlight the threat of encroaching outsiders and ended by announcing a ban on foreign land
103 ownership.62 The declaration changed nothing in the actual law; foreign land ownership was banned long before. The words, however, allowed the Baoulé president to redraw the map of political allegiances, binding together eastern industrialists with western indigenous communities against the perceived incursion of northern migrants. The speech became famous because it reimagined Krou and Baoulé identity as a common experience of ‘Ivorianness,’ and in contrast to Dioula ‘northernness’. Bédié, in other words, was actively shifting alliances away from actual lines of oppression and toward the newly invented ethnic category ‘Ivorité’.
The genius behind Ivorité was that it consolidated Bédié’s hold on the Presidency while preserving the colonial model of siphoning wealth out of the cocoa region at the expense of both migrant labourers and autochtone farmers. Bédié spent twelve years as Ivorian Minister of
Finance at the height of Houphouetism (1966-1977) and, consistent with this resume, his presidency guaranteed the continuation of French business interests in Côte d’Ivoire (Pigeaud
2015). Bédié used the notion of Ivorité to pander to westerner frustrations while simultaneously avoiding any reforms that might hurt the interests of his friends and political allies in the Baoulé and French cocoa elite. During Bédié’s presidency, like today, poverty crosscut ethnicity, with indigenous farmers and migrant workers suffering together in an exploitative agricultural sector.
Ivorité counteracted an otherwise natural alliance between these poorer segments of Ivorian society. During this period Krous and Dioulas alike were largely excluded from politics
(Chauveau 2002). Ivorité created the impression of common ground between Krou and Baoulé, at the expense of the northern migrant groups. Ivorité, in other words, was a way to maintain the
62 This was a reference to the ‘Guebié Genocide’ when, in October 1970, a young Bété called Kragbé Gnagbé led a farmer’s revolt. The claim that 4000 people were killed during the repression that followed is debated. Nevertheless, the account remains an important symbol of Bété resentment and sense of repression at the hands of Boualé leaders (See R. Marshall-Fratani 2003).
104 lucrative status quo by starting a citizenship debate rather than reforming the antiquated colonial policies that continued to enrich Côte d’Ivoire’s ruling class.
Once citizenship debates were folded into the land crisis, it was a short step to begin describing migrant labour as an unwelcome burden on the crumbling economy. At its origin, Ivorité was a conservative innovation from an old elite looking to preserve its privileged standing. The concept took on a different dimension once adopted into the anti-colonial leftist discourse of the
Abidjan youth movement. Rapid globalization during the 1990s meant trade relations between
Côte d’Ivoire and France continued to tilt in favour of the former colonizer. As Peter Geschiere and Francis Nyamnjoh contend, fear of globalization and the rise of autochthony were two sides of the same coin in pre-war Côte d’Ivoire (Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 2000). Opposition candidate
Laurent Gbagbo reduced globalization and colonization to one and the same thing in his propaganda, explicitly drawing a connection between France’s continued influence in Côte d’Ivoire and his constituency’s growing resentment of so-called Northerners. The result was a sense that economic domination from outside and the abundance of foreign workers inside both manifested from the same dynamic (ibid, 443). Thus Gbagbo supporters began associating
Dioula identity with the persistence of colonial policies. Suddenly the anti-colonial discourse of the youth movement was consistent with an emerging anti-immigrant rhetoric. The polarisation that resulted from this repositioning left no neutral space (R. Marshall-Fratani 2003). Ivorians found themselves caught between two political camps with no room between. One could either ascribe to Dioula nationalism and support the pro-Ouattara rebellion with its French backers, or one could stand for Ivorité and its anti-colonial but also increasingly xenophobic principles.
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A Coincidence of Dioula Repression and Ouattara’s Ambition
The popular appeal of Gbagbo’s propaganda to young supporters was connected to the economic collapse Côte d’Ivoire experienced at the end of Houphouetisme. Houphouet’s export-led, cocoa-dependent economy kept both workers and residents in the planation region out of dire poverty, but also offered few opportunities for advancement. The real profits of the Houphouet era went to the Caisse, a central marketing board that served as a personal bank account for
Houphouet and his close associates at home and in France. By the time FHB’s state-run economic model fell apart, land was growing scarce and unemployment was on the rise. The economic crisis that ensued certainly hurt Dioula communities, however – at least in the public perception – it had a harder impact on autochthone farmers. IMF mandated austerity in the
1990s led to the devaluation of the CFA currency, which, in turn, caused commodity prices to skyrocket. Dioulas traditionally run the small business sector in Côte d’Ivoire, meaning increased prices translated to profits for these businesses. Dioula communities were thus able to weather the 1990 reforms more easily than their Krou and Akan-Boaulé counterparts.63 This, combined with general economic tumult and a sense of scarcity, meant longstanding land
63 As a different explanation, Dioulas are historically the least privileged groups in Ivorian society, living in the arid and unindustrialized North, or as migrant communities in the South. In that sense, the perception that Dioula weathered the crisis with relative ease could merely reflect the fact they had less standing and opportunities to lose in the first place. The Akan is the subgroup based in the centre and east of southern Côte d’Ivoire. The group includes the Baoulé nation and various smaller lagoon and eastern farming groups. Unlike the dispersed and locally self-governing Krou, the Akan are traditionally hierarchical and organized into a feudal system under a handful of influential kings. Akan - especially Baoulé - dominated industry and politics from before independence. Speaking in terms of the net drop quality of life, it was likely the Akan who lost most from the economic collapse and austerity, given the privileges they expected from life and the opportunities left for them after austerity. As we will see, the enemies Ouattara made within this group when he was the IMF’s hand-picked PM would come back to haunt him later.
106 disputes heightened into violent confrontations in the cocoa growing region. In some cases,
Dioulas were violently expelled.64
When recounting their motivation for launching a civil war, the RDR leadership draw on accounts of Dioula expulsions in the West during the economic crash. This is captured in the words of Soro Alphonse, National President of the RDR Youth:
“We’ve always been second class citizens, ‘strangers’. For years you couldn’t advance
with a Dioula name. You couldn’t have a position in government. The systematic attacks
started in 1994. Do you know the word genocide? That is what they had planned for us.
Every day they would spray us with bullets like chickens. Living in these conditions, did
we have any choice but to fight back? You ask why we started the rebellion? They were
killing us everyday! Who really started the war?! It was not us…”65
Although this account aligns with most media representations of the period, Soro’s claim is anachronistic. It is true that organized violence entered politics in the mid-1990s but, as we have seen, those early episodes were explicitly not a confrontation between ethnic and religious groups. During the period he is discussing, there were episodes of violence in the West, but there were equally confrontations between Krou and Boualé. More importantly, given the difficult conditions of co-existence in the region, the remarkable thing about inter-ethnic relations in the
West is that they were generally peaceful. It is true that systematic discrimination was a major problem in education and employment, but this affected anyone not connected to the small elite
64 The best-known incident of this was a mass forced exodus of Dioulas in the western border town of Tabou in 1998. 65 Interview with RDR youth leader Soro Alphonse, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire August 2015.
107 who inherited political and industrial power from the colonial authorities. When Gbagbo took power there were approximately the same small number of Dioulas and Krous in government posts. 66 The rebellion became the champion of the Dioula cause, but not for the reasons Soro described.
The front line of the civil war was drawn through the collapsed youth movement as the fractions formed alliances with the FPI and RDR political parties.67 The politicians leading those parties deployed the youth fractions for their own purposes and, ultimately, at the cost of thousands of
Ivorian lives. As one former FESCI explained,
“When FESCI was together, the students were too strongly united. No one [from the
political class] could have ever succeeded without finding a way to divide the youth. [The
war] was a strategy to divide and defeat us.”68
66 The statement that Dioulas had no prospects in state legislature is only part of the story. Full records of who sat in state ministerial posts are available on the Ivorian government website going back to the independence era. Analysing the last fifty years of governments, there is a clear over representation of Baoulé. Krou subgroups, Dioulas and other Akans groups are all comparatively underrepresented, and in approximately the same proportion. During Gbagbo’s regime, the number of Krou representatives increased more than other groups. That said, under Gbagbo, Dioulas and non-Boualé Akan representation also increased compared to HKB and Bédié’s governments (Portail officiel du gouvernement de Côte d'Ivoire 2006). 67 The latent threat of a united youth resistance proved itself in an unlikely way. In the final days of the crisis, a conspiracy was uncovered between KKB, Soro and Blé Goudé. The three old friends from the FESCI planned together to co-opt the leadership of the three main political parties from their aging leaders. At a moment when these men are meant to be mortal enemies, there is something much more complex happening. Then again, if we accept the thesis of a generational conflict being an important factor in the Ivorian civil war, perhaps an alliance of the three is not so surprising. 68 This was explained by a former FESCI national office secretary who was in jail at that time, without trial, in the maximum-security prison known as MACCA (interview with author, Abidjan Côte d’Ivoire, December 2014).
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As was the case with their young supporters, political ambition and not ethnic hatred caused the divide between Gbagbo and Ouattara. 69 Prior to the succession crisis, they were allies, albeit uncomfortably so, working together to carve out new political terrain in the antiquated
Houphouetist regime. Their political alliance, important as it was to dismantling the one-party state, dissolved with Houphouet’s death. Although Bédié immediately assumed power, he was resented by his peers in government and unpopular with voters outside his Boualé stronghold.
Expecting HKB would not last long in power, his rivals vied for political influence. Amongst those rivals, neither Gbagbo or Ouattara were likely candidates to rise to prominence. Both men were disliked by the late President and that opinion remained influential, even from the grave.
Moreover, at the time of Houphouet’s death, neither man was a dominant player on the Ivorian political scene: Gbagbo was a university professor with little support base outside his student followers, and Ouattara was a wealthy technocrat who had lived nearly all his life abroad.
Nevertheless, the two men soon dominated a political arena that had had no space for them just a few years before. They achieved this feat by mobilizing, then sacrificing, huge followings of militant young supporters.
Gbagbo and Ouattara found themselves in a political struggle where success depended on their ability to channel the momentum of a frustrated and mobilized youth population. Writing at the height of the tensions between the RDR and FPI, Yacouba Konaté explained the war “as the eruption into politics of rebellious youth, trained in the ranks of FESCI, and now no longer
69 While I am arguing that Gbagbo did not initiate the incursion of ethnic violence into politics, it is nonetheless true that Gbagbo benefited from the ethnic polarisation caused by the launch of the rebellion and he used that polarisation to his advantage. Polarizing the political arena created the pretext of crisis that presented the rebellion as an existential threat to Côte d’Ivoire. This refocused the energy and frustrations of his supporters off the many unfilled promises of his regime and corruption in its ranks.
109 willing to sit in the shadows of their elders” (Konaté 2003, 50). When the alliance of the FPI and
RDR broke down, Gbagbo was poised to take over the youth movement. As a professor and activist, Gbagbo was a spokesman for the youth during the democratization struggle and a vocal critic of Houphouet’s neo-colonial rule.70 Facing a charismatic and populist rival, Ouattara and his RDR leadership found themselves at a major disadvantage when it came to turning the powerful tides of youth mobilization in their favour. As a national symbol of austerity and foreign accommodation, Ouattara held little appeal to the FESCI youths. He needed a way to draw supporters from that politicized youth movement onto his side.
As RDR Youth President Soro Alphonse explained, the civil war ultimately resulted from “a coincidence of Alassane Ouattara’s ambition and the repression of the Dioula.”71 ADO and his associates saw Ivorité and rising tensions in rural western communities as a chance to garner their own mass following amongst urban Dioulas. In other words, the anti-northerner rhetoric coming out of the economic collapse was a useful coincidence at the time of Ouattara’s rise in the RDR leadership. Ouattara lived a privileged family life abroad, building his career as a high- ranking technocrat in international finance and development institutes. He had no connections to the struggles of the most marginalized members of Côte d’Ivoire’s labouring class, but his
Malinke heritage and his exclusion from the Presidential elections under Bédié’s Article 35
70 It is worth pointing out that Gbagbo never succeeded in uniting the youth masses into a coherent and controlled organization. Under his auspices, the once coherent youth movement broke into a loose network of protesters, auto- defense groups and, later, militias of armed and semi-armed groups known together as the galaxie patriotique (Interview with former head of FESCI security, Abidjan, May 2015). This matter also came up at the ICC when the prosecution tried to build a case around the claim that the galaxie patriotique was a united movement, directly doing the binding of the upper leadership (Peniguet 2015). As a witness for the prosecution explained, there was too much competition and resentment between the factions of Gbagboist and each group acted with significant autonomy (Panaite 2016).
71 Interview with Soro Alphonse, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire August 2015.
110 constitutional amendment were enough to qualify ADO as a voice for the Dioula cause. The image was reinforced by a well-circulated myth that the spirits in his mother’s ancestral home had foretold Ouattara’s return to Côte d’Ivoire would restore the once great power of the
Malinke empire. For his part, Gbagbo is a Bête from a farming family in the West. He equally saw the political potential of exploiting tensions in the region. Gbagbo began fueling his support base with talk of the noble Krou farmers, reduced to poverty by the incursion of cunning migrant workers (Dunn 2009; Mitchell 2012). Seeing an opportunity to gain politically from the collapse of a once united youth movement, both ADO and Gbagbo actively served as lightning rods for the anger of Côte d’Ivoire’s youth at a time when the country was in economic shambles and descending into political chaos.
L’ année terrible
The year 2000 is referred to simply as l’année terrible in Côte d’Ivoire, and an account of this period must begin by introducing the two figures who set the year’s terrible events in motion.
The first of these men was the former national army’s top general, Robert Guéï. During the succession crisis, Guéï had refused President Bédié’s orders to repress pro-Ouattara protestors, stating it is not the role of the army in a democratic state to engage in ideological fights on behalf of the regime. In response, Bédié sent the celebrated General into retirement (Kieffer 2004). The second of these men is Ibrahim Coulibaly or, as he is more commonly known, IB. Coulibaly was a veteran soldier and devoted Ouattara loyalist. He served ADO as his personal security guard and oversaw the Ouattara family’s protection for many years.
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On Christmas Eve 1999, IB led a successful coup d’état against the Bédié regime. Fighting alongside him were Guéï’s former soldiers from the Ivorian peacekeeping mission to Central
African Republic, men known as the Zinzins. As one former combatant close to IB explained,
“We held the coup so Ouattara could be president. IB considered him like his
father. For him, like for many people from the north, Ouattara represented hope
that we would see an end to the humiliations we were enduring: we were
convinced he was indeed Ivorian and that he would be the first northerner to hold
this important post. We mobilized for Ouattara, we were certain he would win a
transparent election” (Pigeaud 2015).
Not all the Zinzins shared IB’s dedication to Ouattara, and in the end a compromise was needed.
This is why the Zinzins dragged General Guéï from retirement and placed him in charge of a caretaker government until new elections could be held (Kieffer 2004).
The longer Guéï stayed in power the more he enjoyed the luxuries of the President’s office. The
General who had reluctantly left his village to temporarily hold the presidency realised ‘comment la pouvoir est douce’.72 Believing Ouattara was his only real threat in a general election, Guéï organized a referendum on Article 35. In a vote of questionable validly, Guéï cemented the rule: presidential candidates must be born of an Ivorian father and mother, must never have renounced
Ivorian citizenship, and must never have benefitted from possessing another nationality
(Pigeaud 2015). The three clauses under referendum were written with the explicit purpose of
72 This is a common phrase in Côte d’Ivoire meaning ‘power is sweet.’ The quote is from a former FESCI national office member, interviewed by the author, Abidjan Côte d’Ivoire, August 2015.
112 disqualifying Ouattara. For Ibraham Coulibaly, the General had committed an unforgivable betrayal of the soldiers who put him in power and would pay dearly for it.
The “White Horse Plot” was an attempted coup on Guéï named in reference to a white horse that the superstitious General sacrificed on the advice of his marabouts in advance of the October
2000 presidential election.73 The General was already suspicious that his security chief, Ibrahim
Coulibaly (IB), had unseated Bédié on orders from his adoptive-father, Ouattara. The White
Horse Plot finally gave Guéï the excuse he needed to purge his army of Ouattaraists. The coup leaders were imprisoned and tortured, amongst them was “le Grenade” (Souleymane Diomandé),
Cherif Ousame, “Zaga Zaga” (Oumar Diarrasouba), Zacharis Koné and “Watta” (Cherif Ouattara
Issuaka).74 Those who survived would, one year later, return leading a rebellion as the commandants du zones or, as they are more commonly called, the ComZones.
With Ouattara excluded from running and his most dangerous military adversaries imprisoned or dead, Guéï felt certain he would secure an uncontested victory and finally called an election. In protest of Guéï’s deceit and manipulations, both the RDR and PDCI parties boycotted the election, pitting the incumbent against FPI leader Laurent Gbagbo. As a history professor with few connections in the halls of power, Gbagbo seemed no threat to the famous general. Indeed,
73 Those who believe in traditional Ivorian religion claim the sacrifice granted Guéï the power to become invisible and teleport out of his home on the night that IB and his camp launched their first coup attempt. 74 Zinzins are considered powerful spiritual warriors who are virtually immune to death by any ordinary means. In an effort to destroy their spiritual protections, the Zinzin where brutally tortured by Guéï. According to local legend, amongst all the imprisoned Zinzins, only The Grenade’s gris-gris (protective amulets) failed, resulting in his death. Amongst the scars these men still carry, Zacharis Kone is rumored to have deep burns from hot iron rods administered across his back. During the civil war, the torture scars of the Zinzin were held up as proof to new recruits that gri-gri protections would keep them safe during battle. Ultimately, an estimated 100 thousands young recruits followed the Zinzins into a rebel war against Gbagbo’s fully equipped and professional army (Interview with former rebel combatants, April 2014, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire).
113 were the other major parties able or willing to participate, Laurent Gbagbo would likely have disappeared into the background at this juncture in the story.
Gbagbo Elected
Alain Diabeté cannot hide his emotion when explaining the events of October 24, 2000.75
Diabeté is a Dioula from the northern border town of Odienne who, for many years, served as a
Director in the Ministry of the Interior under his lifelong friend Laurent Gbagbo. He was with
Gbagbo in the presidential palace on the day of the latter’s arrest and Diabeté served three years in prison for his role in Gbagbo’s government. On the night of the election, Diabeté was driving back to Abidjan from his hometown in the North when the polls closed. As he drove the corridor into the city through the sprawling neighbourhood of Youpougon, a huge commotion was forming around him. Fearing the worst, Diabaté was panicking and cornered in gridlocked traffic when the news came; the deafening noise was not an attack, it was the youth of
Youpougon, Gbagbo’s urban stronghold, celebrating the unexpected victory.
By the time he reached the city center an hour later, the situation had changed for the worse.
Guéï declared himself president, overriding the National Electoral Commission. Thousands of
Gbagbo supporters flooded the streets with the intention of taking back the presidency. Guéï’s military fired indiscriminately on the crowds amassing in the central district of Cocody. The bridges that connect Abidjan’s downtown to the rest of the city were blocked, trapping the protestors on a thin peninsula. The death toll rose as youth jumped from the high extension
75 Note the vote was October 22 and he was declared winner two days later.
114 bridges trying to escape gunfire. Taking advantage of the chaos, IB and his group attacked the
Akouedo military camp in Abidjan and liberated their imprisoned comrades. Alassane Ouattara also decided it was the moment to act, sending RDR youth supporters to join the fight in a bid to claim power for his own excluded party.76 In the resulting chaos, Guéï’s soldiers confronted crowds of youth from the two opposing political parties, while the youths also fought amongst themselves. In the end, Guéï abdicated and Gbagbo’s electoral win was confirmed. Officially reported death tolls range between 100 and 400 people from that single night, although people like Alain Diabété, who lived through the incident, insist the numbers were much higher (Pape and Vidal 2002).
“Le Charnier de Youpougon”
The night of Gbagbo’s election is best remembered for events that take place two days later. In the aftermath of a bloody FPI victory, a cache of 57 bodies was discovered on the edge of
Yopougon near the military base. The charnier was reported to the international news as a massacre of Dioulas by Gbagbo’s security personnel. This mass grave became the focal point of a new narrative that linked Gbagbo and his supporters to an attempted ethnic cleansing of the northerners. This version of events first appears in the documentary ‘Côte d’Ivoire: La poudière identitaire” (The Identity Powerkeg), made with the help of a Belgian film studio.77 The RDR youth movement later had its own team producing short videos featuring horrific scenes of killings by machete and burning alive. These films were made readily available in the markets of
Abidjan and other urban centers as evidence that Côte d’Ivoire was on the verge of a genocide.
76 Navigué Frank (Youth Leader FPI) interview with author, Abidjan Côte d’Ivoire April 2015. 77 The film, sponsored by a Belgium organization called the Foundation for the Prevention of Genocide, is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvyu1pJuHyk.
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Though the veracity of the footage is questionable, the videos served their purpose both inside the country and as a reference for the international media. 78
According to one of two survivors of the charnier massacre, on the night of Gbagbo’s election, a gendarme entered an Abobo ‘court commune’ (a shared courtyard between makeshift housing) and started an altercation with a young Dioula, resulting in the death of the gendarme. In revenge for the officer’s death, the police allegedly went on a rampage in the neighbourhood, rounding up Dioula men and boys who were then tortured and killed at the Akeodo military base. This witness today serves as the President of the state sponsored victims association, a man we will meet again in the following chapter. His testimony, as reported by Human Rights Watch, states that during the night of October 24th, the military visited houses in Abobo, collected 59 men and tortured to death all but two of them. The survivors were forced to transport and bury the bodies in the mass grave.
In contradiction to that testimony, the bodies were found unburied the following morning in conspicuous pile. Having unseated Guéï during the riots of the night before, Gbagbo was president for less than a day when the charnier was discovered. He denied all allegations of his role in the murders and asked for an international investigation. The UN inquiry raised some questions about the authenticity of the charnier, though not the accusation that a massacre of
Dioula men and boys took place in Youpougon on the night election results were declared ( La commission d’enquete international pour la Côte d'Ivoire 2001). Likewise, an independent
78 This project was explained to me by one of its producers and the current leader in the RDR youth wing. Although he stood by the authenticity of the footage, he confirmed there are some inconsistencies in the stated timeline of events shown in the videos. Executions by burnings and machetes only became a major feature of the civil war later on. The FPI opposition claim that much of the footage is cut from newsreels or online videos of the civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia.
116 report by Fidh, one of Côte d’Ivoire’s two oldest human rights NGOs, agreed with the UN findings regarding the charnier (FIDH 2000). These investigations discovered some evidence that the bodies in the charnier had not died of torture, finding signs of various causes of death including victims of drowning and bullet wounds. For Gbagboists, the charnier was a body pile left in a conspicuous place by Ouattara’s supporters, who had collected victims of the previous night’s chaos.
Given the evidence available, the following conclusions seem the most likely explanation of these events. First, all investigations confirm the claim that a gendarme was killed in Abobo and that the police exacted a terrible revenge on the community. Many human rights abuses happened under General Guéï’s authority and his security forces were known to be uncontrolled.
Gbagbo, on the other hand, had just assumed power, making it unlikely he commanded the security forces of his electoral rival within the first hours of his presidency, especially given his supporters were clashing with those very troops during the hours that the massacre took place.
Even Ouattara made a public statement saying he did not believe Gbagbo was responsible (FIDH
2000). Gbagbo’s regime was responsible for many violent deaths during his tenure as President.
The charnier de Yopougon, however, seems to have been a cache of bodies, belonging to protestors who died during clashes the night before, and brought to this location to perpetuate the fear that Gbagbo was planning an ethnic war against Dioulas. Though doubts circulated immediately regarding the authenticity of the charnier, it still served its intended purpose. A year later, when the rebel forces attacked Côte d’Ivoire, their fight was justified by the claim that ethnic cleansing against Dioulas had begun the moment Gbagbo took power. That narrative attracted significant international attention and ensured that the international community put their support behind the rebel cause, first tacitly and later with active military backing.
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So Began a Decade at War
“Once I arrived in Burkina, I began calling all my old friends… We waited two and a half
years in Ouagadougou. To prepare my men for the September 18 attack, we went into the
bush and trained for six months. The Burkina state gave us villas there to live in. We
trained in three groups as we would need three simultaneous attacks: Abidjan, Bouake
and Korhogo…We entered in Côte d’Ivoire and these things didn’t work out quite as
planned, but we did manage to cut the country in two.” IB, 7 April 201179
These are the words of Ibraham Couliblay as he described preparations for the rebellion. This is the same IB who started his career as the right-hand man and personal security chief of Alassane
Ouattara. Thanks to Blaise Compaoré’s patronage, IB and the Zinzins prepared the rebellion over two years in Burkina Faso. Ouattara has never admitted to assisting with these plans, however he began regular visits to Blaise Compoaré in 1998. In a momentary slip during a recorded statement in 2003, Zakaria Kone (a Zinzin and later ComZone) admitted that Ouattara, not IB,
“took care of us” from his exile in Paris and that it was he who provided the weapons needed for the assault launched September 19th, 2002 (Pigeaud 2015). Under the military leadership of IB and the political command of Soro, the rebellion began as three simultaneous attacks across Côte d’Ivoire: one in the arid Northern capital, Korhogo; one in Bouaké, the trading hub that connects
Sahel traders to the tropical industries in the south; and one in Abidjan, the lagoon bound
79 IB gave the speech Ma part de verité to the media on April 7 2011 explaining his version of events in the first years of the partition. A video of this speech is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSJ0qtDsDhU
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Southern metropole once dubbed the Paris of Africa. By the morning of September 20th, former
President Robert Guéï was dead, as was Gbagbo’s Minister of the Interior. Bouaké and Korhogo were in the hands of the rebels and Abidjan was under siege.
A Virtuous Rebellion
Jean-Christophe Notin is a historian of French military intervention. In his book Le scorpion et le crocodile, Notin describes the original force nouvelle (later renamed force républicains de
Côte d’Ivoire, or FRCI) as a brigade of seven pick-up trucks with a few automatic weapons mounted on the roofs (2013). His account paints the picture of a small band of freedom fighters facing impossible odds with bravery and grit. This picture of benign freedom fighters moved by a righteous cause is a popular narrative in the foreign media, however it is at odds with the reality of the well-equipped and at times sadistically violent forces that laid siege to Côte d’Ivoire in the fall of 2002.
‘Mon Afrique” is the sole luxury hotel in the crossroads trading town of Bouake. It is frequented by high society Abidjanais and expats when work or leisure sends them away from the comforts of the cosmopolitan capital. Despite being the only chic hotel in Bouake, ‘Mon Afrique’ was never pillaged by the rebels in the ten-years they occupied the city. The hotel owner was dubbed by the international media ‘Mama FRCI’ and famously gave French grammar lessons to the rebels. This anecdote is held up as evidence that Soro led a virtuous rebellion against Gbagbo’s cruel dictatorship. The rebels supposedly compensated businesses damaged by fighting and punished their own ranks when caught pillaging (ibid). In the spirit of branding the rebellion a fight for freedom, Che Guevara became an important symbol for the force nouvelle, with hand painted images of him appearing on trucks, buildings and t-shirts. Presumably those adopting the
119 communist’s image did not understand Alassane Ouattara - the man they fought to put in power - was committed to dismantling Gbagbo’s socialist schemes and establishing neoliberal capitalism in Côte d’Ivoire.80
Tales of restraint towards the business community of Bouake contrast with the treatment of the less affluent population. On October 6, 2002, hundreds of gendarmes were taken prisoner in
Bouake by the rebel forces. Amongst them, at least 40 were executed and another 10 killed at the mass gravesite where the bodies were taken. At least 30 of their children and five other civilians were also executed with the officers (Amnesty International 2003). Amnesty reported: “the survivors were left for two days with the decomposing corpses, not receiving any food. Some of them were required to transport the dead and bury them in a mass grave.” This episode was part of a larger manhunt for police, gendarmes, military and forest rangers by the force nouvelle as it consolidated its control in the northern region (Pigeaud 2015).81 Just two weeks after the massacre of state security officers in Bouake, the French newspaper Libération published an article stating, “in Bouaké and Korhogo, the insurgents are demonstrating professionalism and discipline without falter” (Ayad 2001).
‘Les escadrons de la mort’
Gbagbo’s regime reacted to the attacks by launching a regime of terror in Abidjan. The response was cruel and heavy-handed, and does not reflect the image of anti-colonial liberators his
80 Both sides claimed Che Guevara as their own, making the symbolism of the war confusing to outsiders. 81 Note that in contrast to the North American image of a jovial park ranger, Ivorian rangers are some of the best- armed and trained fighters in the country. This is because protecting national reserves from poachers is one of the deadliest jobs in the security services.
120 supporters continue to project. Most infamously, a campaign of forced disappearances shook the city. During the first year of the rebellion, accusations circulated widely at home and abroad that masked death squads (‘escadrons de la mort’, as they are locally known) roamed Abidjan after curfew, killing off political opponents of the Gbagbo regime. Testimony to the CDVR confirms that RDR members were indeed kidnapped and murdered during the first months after the rebellion started.82 Even staunch Gbagbo supporters admit that the escadrons were indeed a reality, disagreeing on the degree and nature of the kidnappings rather than the fact thereof. Pro-
Gbagboists give the low estimate that ‘a few dozen’ people disappeared into the hands of the masked men. At the other extreme, the RDR leadership estimate the escadrons forcibly disappeared approximately 400 people (Fofana 2009). Whichever the case may be, the killings were concentrated in the middle-class neighborhood of Deux Plateaux where most of the NGO,
UN and foreign entrepreneurs lived, making the events highly visible to the international community.83
While the existence of the escadrons is not in question, there is still debate about their primary purpose and whether Gbagbo was directly responsible for these crimes. In their own accounts, IB and Soro launched the rebellion as a pre-emptive attack against a pending threat of ethnic cleansing. The escadrons are treated in this narrative as the primary instrument of that massacre.
Although there were indeed ambitions in some cadres of the Gbagbo regime to begin ridding the
82 The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights fact-finding rapport (2003) on the escadrons claimed that “elements close to the government, the presidential guard and militia groups of the president’s ethnicity” comprised the death squads (Fall and Seck 2003). Nonetheless, evidence linking Gbagbo to the murders was difficult to find. Just how difficult became apparent in April 2003 when Gbagbo won a defamation case in a French court against the newspaper Le Monde, claiming they systemically and without proof associated him with the death squads.
83 GIZ Expert interview with author Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire March 2015.
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South of Sahel migrants by creating a registry program, these policies were never implemented.
Moreover, those close to his regime claim this was never a dominant perspective in Gbagbo’s inner circle.84 Charlie ‘Watta’ oversaw security for FESCI at the height of the escadron crisis.
He explained his understanding of these events as follows,
“We in the [FESCI] central office still do not understand what was happening, but of
course there’s a lot of speculation. It wasn’t orders from Gbagbo directly. I organized
security for FESCI nationally, so all orders passed by me. What was really happening
was the work of the Jeune Patriots. You have to remember that the Jeune Patriots were a
mafia and they worked like it; they controlled Abidjan that way. A lot of them were
nothing but delinquents, there because they knew they’d profit. As a mafia, they always
had accounts to settle with someone. FESCI had divided violently and the country was
facing a rebellion – we were in a civil war. There were always lot of debts to pay and also
profits to be made … I can tell you that these groups were not getting orders from
Gbagbo; they were acting on their own accord. The guilt and complicity of Gbagbo was
that he knew what was happening and turned a blind eye. There were no prosecutions, so
the Jeune Patriots learned they could do whatever they wanted and still get away with it.
Here, Gbagbo was guilty.”85
84 For example, the witness for the ICC prosecutor disagreed with the prosecutor’s characterization, insisting that Gbagbo had a multi ethnic army (Dubruelh 2016). According to a US State Department briefing, Gbagbo had a ‘mini Côte d’Ivoire’ of religions and ethnicities advising him (State Department 2009). In discussions with former government associates of Gbabgo, interviewees characterise him in the same way (Interviews with NGO President and with former Director at the Ministry of the Interior, April 2014). 85 Former Head of Security at FESCI National Office, interview with author, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, July 2015.
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Gbagbo created a regime of terror to crush the threat posed to his government by the rebellion and to punish anyone who dared side with them. For that he can indeed be characterised as ‘a political killer’, but he was not the ethnic killer portrayed in the international media and at his
ICC trial.86
Charlie and his associates openly admit to committing violent crimes against their political rivals, but he and his fellow Gbagboist youth leaders take insult at the suggestion that ethnic or religious hatred motivated these actions. The same is true when speaking to former rebels willing to explain their role in violations committed in the name of protecting ‘northerners’. Ask a rebel fighters to explain his motivation for killing southerners and the response is always a matter defending his community from attacks that seemed imminent.87 In all interviews conducted with combatants from both sides, not one fighter expressed hatred for his rivals based on an ethnic or religious identity.88 All interviewees expressed frustration with their lot in life and felt that circumstances in Côte d’Ivoire were deeply unfair to themselves and their families. Even still, most former fighters interviewed actually showed sympathy for their supposed ethnic enemies, who they understood to be facing similar struggles to their own. 89 All expressed regret for the political circumstances that drove neighbors, friends and football buddies into violent confrontation.
86 Ruth Marshall in discussion with author, Toronto Canada, October 2015 87 Anonymous former force nouvelle youth combatant in interview with author, Abobo, Côte d’Ivoire July 2015. 88 I use the male pronoun here because I did not interview female combatants. Although some women were registered in DDR camps and women had various other roles in the fight, female fighters were comparatively rare in the conflict (Interview with GIZ consultant on DRR, June 2014) 89 I found evidence of this line of thinking in interviews with former combatants on both side. Former fighters tend to explain their actions with lines like ‘we only massacred the [foreign] mercenaries’, ‘we never spilled Ivorian blood if we could help it!’ and ‘we didn’t kill our brothers!’ Though the veracity of the claims is likely weak, they reflect the fact that, despite everything, the idea of a multi-ethnic Ivorian ‘brotherhood’ is still strong in their minds.
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A Topology of Youth Violence
In most accounts of the Ivorian civil war, the chief architects of ethnic violence were Blé
Goudé’s infamous Jeune Patriots (JPs). The Jeune Patriots were an unofficial counter- insurgency movement who ruled Abidjan’s streets as an ad hoc national defense squad.90 Their stated purpose was to protect Gbagbo’s regime from foreign military intervention by using street protests to control national politics.91 The Patriots saw themselves as inheriting the legacy of great African socialists such as Sankara, Kwame n’Krumah and Patrice Lumumba (Dembele
2003). Western media outlets actively discouraged these comparisons, instead painting the Jeune
Patriots as murderers, thieves and would-be genocidiers. In turn, the Patriots considered the
Western media one of their chief enemies in the struggle to preserve Gbagbo’s regime (Konaté
2003).
The international news portrayed the Jeune Patriots as young fascists, serving Gbagbo as death squads and assassins (Notin 2013). It is unlikely, however, that Gbagbo relied on the Patriots for assassinations or other similarly sophisticated military operations. The President had trained mercenaries and private security personnel at his disposal who could undertake such tasks more
90 Unclear boundaries always existed between Jeune Patriots, FESCIst, ‘barragists’, pillagers and the unaffiliated youth who simply took to the streets en masse when they saw protests forming, often profiting from the chaos to pillage. FESCI was not interchangeable for the Jeune Patriots, through there was clear crossover especially amongst the younger generation of FESCIsts. During the war years, the Secretary General of FESCI circulated the campus with a full escort of body guards. More disturbing still, the FESCI of the civil war years are accused of running prisons inside the university and of attacking anyone who challenged to their authority on campus (Konaté 2003). As Charlie Watta explained, “Once the war started, Blé {Goudé} filled the campus with delinquents, little nobodies, people who were not even students”. These new recruits, many of them not even university students, formed the central contingent of the Jeune Patriots.
91 Interview with postwar president of Jeune Patriots, Yopougon, May 2014.
124 reliably and discretely.92 Instead, the Patriots’ role was to control the streets. They mounted massive and bloody street demonstrations against French, UN and other international facilities.
Though controllable when Gbagbo chose to intervene, the image of a frenzied mob was an explicit strategy the Jeune Patriots employed to attack international institutions.93 The perception of chaos permitted Gbagbo’s FDS forces to feign powerlessness in the face of unruly youth while the Patriots sabotaged infrastructure belonging to the international coalition backing the rebellion (Konaté 2003).94
Clashes between Jeune Patriots and the RDR youth became a fixture of urban life during the country’s long partition. At every election or significant political junction, the two groups met in the streets for mass protests that inevitably descended into violent confrontation. As FESCI
Security Head, Charlie Watta, explained to me,
“There were not usually open machetes, but they hid ‘armes blancs’ or they’d be in the
streets protesting, and then suddenly it would turn into an attack on a neighborhood. Most
of them were just kids from Abobo joining so they could do whatever they wanted;
pillage, steal.”
92 The killers of Canadian journalist Guy-André Kieffer, for instance, were mercenaries and police officers and not part of the youth movement (Kieffer 2004) 93 Former FESCI Head of Security in interview with author Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire August 2015.
94 Jeune Patriots protested the ‘incursion of sovereignty’ by the international coalition on January, 18 2006 in Abidjan as well as the Western towns of San Pedro, Daloa, Duékoué and Guiglo, creating barricades and attacking ONUCI personnel and goods. The confrontations resulted in ONUCI killing 5 protestors and electing to leave Guiglo and Duékoué. The attacks showed evidence that the police and Jeune Patriots were working together to assault western institutions, with both side feigning inability to control the chaos. The FDS was notably absent in stopping the protests, FDS General Mangou is quoted saying “I am a republican, I would never give the order to fire on protestors who are trying to defend the institutions you are trying to dissolve” (Djehoury 2007; also discussed in interview with former Gbabgoist Director at Ministry of the Interior, A. Diabete, Abidjan, August 2015).
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Here my informant is describing the acts of RDR militants, however he openly confirms that his side also hid weapons when marching out to meet the RDR youth.
Brawls in Abidjan and other urban centers between the Patriots and RDR youth paralleled a different kind of youth violence in rural areas. ‘Les barrages’ refers to a roadblock network set up by pro-Gbagbo rural youth claiming to protect their community from rebels. In a sense, these barrages did serve that stated purpose. The rebels did attack towns and villages by entering the region separately on public transit, dressed as civilians and concealing their weapons, then regrouping in the bush nearby to launch an assault.95 The ‘barragists’ were not, however, a formally coordinated military operation. They were ad hoc ‘auto defense’ groups, mimicking the
Patriots they saw on TV (Chauveau and Bobo 2003). Barragists tended to be young men displaced by war rather than local villagers. Chauveau and Bobo found that these were often people whose homes were already under rebel control and who now lived as burdens on relatives in the government-controlled South. With no jobs or other source of income, racketeering and building barrages meant newfound freedom for village youth. The barragists won a sense of importance as self-proclaimed village security guards, and manning barrages provided these young men with unprecedented authority and wealth in their geriarchic and industry-barren communities.
More than anything else, the purpose of barrages was to extract small bribes from passing vehicles. The roadblocks suddenly created a rural war economy for a generation that grew up
95 These tactics were explained to me by a group of young former rebels who entered the fight in 2002 in the Northwest, and stayed with Chief Ousmane’s troops until the final days of the war in Abidjan. In explaining this tactic, the former rebels gave the example of taking the gbakas (public vans) into the western mountain town of Man from all directions dressed as civilians and hiding their weapons. They met at a rendez-vous point in the mountains late at night before attacking the town in the early morning. This is one of a number of testimonies recounted to me of rebels using public transport to enter towns prior to an attack.
126 with no prospects (R. B. Marshall-Fratani 2003). Chauveau and Bobo found that the barragists would take approximately 500 CFA from each person in the vehicles that passed, meaning each individual was making up to 15,000 CFA (30 USD) a day – a rate vastly higher than any local job, had jobs been available. The same study also discovered that the racketeers did not only target Burkinabes and Dioulas. They also extorted Baoulés, Tagana and even members of their own ethnic groups if the unfortunate traveler did not have identity papers. There is no reason to doubt the claims that barragists were much rougher to Dioulas, but the Chauveau-Bobo ethnography nonetheless adds weight to the argument that barrages were foremost erected to gain profit and status, not because of ethnic hatred.
The rebel forces had their own roadblock system that paralleled that of the barragists. The following testimony given before the CDVR by a former force nouvelle fighter confirms that both sides used essentially the same tactics to profit from travelers and imprison or kill suspected enemy combatants:
FN: “When the war erupted, I was in PK 18 [a pro-ADO Abidjan neighborhood], I
helped with ambushes. I killed them, just like they killed us. After that, I was sent to
Issia [a rebel held town in the north]. When guarding the corridor, we made the
passengers pay before they could pass through.”
CDVR President Banny: “And if they didn’t pay?”
FN: “We made them pay…we made arbitrary arrests, people were put in prison. Some we
freed, others were transferred to Abidjan…. if we got our hands on an FDS, we’d kill
them on sight and take their weapons.” (CDVR 2014)
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It is important to recall that even the petty bribes taken by barragists amounted to vastly more money than these young men could touch in any available job, then or now. Moreover, these profits pale in comparison to the vast wealth accrued by high-ranking rebel commanders and politicians during this period. As we will see in Chapter 5, the war economy that formed during the rebellion still dominates Côte d’Ivoire’s business sector today.96
Like in urban areas, patterns of rural violence also show that ethnic hatred was not a primary driver of conflict. Chauveau and Bobo observed that daily life in multiethnic villages actually continued with relative normality for most of the war. Even at the height of the conflict, they found traditional authorities from ‘autochthone’ and ‘northerner’ sides of the village were often able to negotiate peaceful solutions to tensions in their communities. Despite being dubbed a hotbed of ethnic hatred, their study discovered that rural villages in the West were relatively safe places for northerners, so long as they were known community members. The authors even recount a story of young Guère joining together to help rebuild the houses of Burkinabe neighbors destroyed during a land dispute (Chauveau and Bobo 2003). The gesture indicates that, at the village level, many Gbagboists still saw a clear difference between the rebel fighters and their Dioula neighbors.
This record emphasizes that the war was not a conflict fueled by ethnic hatred. Rather, it was the result of a power struggle amongst elites tapping into the sense of disenfranchisement and ruined
96 For example, today Fofana runs a taxi empire and Wattao is the owner of a gold mine (Jeune Afrique 2013). The ComZones are also the core of the new security forces: Wattao (deceased January 2020) was head of Ouattara’s security; Cherif Ousmane leads the 1rst battalion, an elite unit of commandos; Morou Outtara is head of the East battalion (the area he controlled during the partition); ‘Cobra’ Losseni Fofana is head of the West Battalion (also the territory he held during the rebellion); Martin Kouakou Fofié heads the Centre battalion and Zakaria Koné heads the Central command. Vetcho lead the 3rd battalion in Bouaké until recently joining the national administration school in order to return within the Ministry of Defense (Miew 2019).
128 prospects felt amongst the country’s large youth population, and then providing those youths with the means to vent their anger while gaining profits and status. That said, my account does not deny violence ultimately followed ethnic lines, nor do I wish to downplay the fear stoked by the anti-northerner rhetoric Gbagbo’s regime employed to counter the rebellion. Both Gbagbo and the rebels fermented fear and resentment along ethnic lines in order to justify the violence they deployed against their political opponents. My account does not disregard that reality, but rather emphasizes the root causes of the conflict hidden underneath the commonly repeated narrative. Before Côte d’Ivoire knew ethnic conflict, it had experienced a long history of oppression by the ruling elite. Eventually that history saw the rise of a young, frustrated and well-organized new citizenry that clashed with the ambitions of the country’s self-serving leadership. Once the original battle for democracy was won, elites from all political camps sacrificed that mobilised generation in pursuit of personal ambitions. In time, the ensuing battle consolidated into ethnic allegiances, but only after years of economic crisis and political manipulations. We will see in the following chapter that political narratives fueling ethnic hatred eventually transformed into self-fulfilling prophecies, however the key message in this chapter is that that shift happened slowly and for much more complex reasons than the intolerance or bloodlust of youth.
Rewriting Inequality as Ethnic Hatred
In her opening statements, ICC Chief Prosecutor Bensouda described the Côte d’Ivoire civil war as a confrontation of Gbagbo’s would-be génocidiers against ADO’s dream of liberal
129 democracy.97 Seven years later, the ICC’s acquittal decision called “the credibility and reliability” of the prosecutor’s case “seriously questioned” (Peniguet, 2019). Presiding Judge
Cuno Tarfusser accused Fatou Bensouda of “relying on shaky and doubtful bases, inspired by a
Manichean and simplistic narrative of an Ivory Coast depicted as a ‘polarised’ society” (ibid).
Although the judges’ decision offered a long missing challenge to the dominant narrative, these words came only after seven years of dead-end litigation and nearly a decade after Gbagbo and
Goudé were arrested. In the meantime, the agenda for peace, justice and reform in the new regime was designed and implemented according to the belief that the country went to war because Côte d’Ivoire was an ethnic ‘powder keg’.
Prior to the ICC court decision, transitional justice in Côte d’Ivoire taught Ivorians and international onlookers a single history, framed by graphic episodes of ethnic violence and youth radicalism. The transitional justice process shaped national discourse by emphasizing certain voices and excluding those with more nuanced stories to tell. This became apparent in conversation with a former FESCI leader held in MACCA, Abidjan’s maximum-security prison:
“There were 300 of us put in Macca together including a lot of Gbagbo’s military, after
they’d been denounced. ADO released the military personnel but kept the students
inside… The students were tortured with water, burning and whipping. I haven’t seen a
lawyer three years later and wasn’t even accused of a crime until 2014.”98
97 The emphasis of my argument is on role of the ICC in simplifying and decontextualizing the violence committed. This account is not meant to deny efforts within the ranks of Gbagbo’s regime to entrench and exploit growing ethnic tensions during this period. First Lady Simone Gbagbo and Mamadou Koulibaly propagated discourses fostering hatred and drew on anti-immigrant rhetoric to attract supporters (Losch 2000a). For more details on the role of Gbagbo’s party leadership exploiting those existing tensions, particularly in the early years of Gbagbo’s presidency, see R. Marshall-Fratani (2003), J. P. Dozon (1997 & 2000), and Chauveau (2000).
98 Anonymous FESCI National bureau officer in prison, in interview with author, Côte d’Ivoire, December 2014.
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As his account explains, those directly involved in battles were welcomed into the discourse of forgiveness and reconciliation promoted by the state sponsored transitional justice process.
Indeed, former armed combatants are key actors in the transitional justice process: they are recipients of demobilization packages, confessors before the truth commission and witnesses in special national courts and at the ICC. Those with more nuanced experiences from the pro-
Gbagboist student movement disappeared into hiding or, for the less fortunate, into prison. In an irony of the Ivorian transitional justice process, direct perpetrators of human rights were given the privilege of being charged for their crimes and thus gained the opportunity to serve a fixed sentence or seek clemency. In contrast, people who played a nuanced role in the conflict and tell a complicated version of the past were left outside national truth and reconciliation. This came out in a focus group interview with former FESCI national office staff living in hiding.
Gbagbo’s military force was led by the national army, with foreign mercenary units and Jeune
Patriots backing the fight. Student organizers, in contrast, had non-combatant roles and primarily led street demonstrations against the international intervention. When I asked why they did not approach the truth commission as a way to tell their side of the story and perhaps seek a pardon, they laughed and explained that the CDVR was not meant to tell history as they understood it.
Rather than investigating the long and complicated path to civil war, the truth commission reinforced the narrative that conflict resulted from radicalized youth killing one another out of ethnic hatred. The first public hearing of the commission was a spectacle of reconciliation acted out between a Malinke youth involved in burning a Guéré village. The youth fell to the floor, crying at the feet of the village chief. He crawled across the stage muttering his remorse and explaining his actions, “I was part of your community, but we foreigners were pushed to this
131 violence!” The commission had hired a film director to coordinate the scene. That director sat behind me during the spectacle whispering to his colleagues that the first ‘episode’ had ‘played out exceptionally well’. It was a scene that rewrote a century of conflict over land and labour rights into an emotional drama in which a delinquent youth begged pardon from a wise old traditional leader. Kneeling and crying before the Commissioners’ platform, the youth was pardoned by CDVR Commission President Banny on behalf of the chief and the five surviving
Guéré communities. That a commission president would claim for himself the authority to pardon a perpetrator on behalf of an entire ethnic group shows the hubris of the Ivorian elite as they shaped national discourse through the transitional justice process.
The first hearing was a decontextualizing and depoliticizing performance that set the stage at the so-called “Théâtre de souffrance.” The ‘Theatre of Suffering’ was a basement conference room at Abidjan’s chicest golf club where the public hearings were held. The venue was down the road from both the Golf Hotel and Presidential Palace where, just a few years before, the central drama of the Ivorian electoral crisis took place (these events are discussed in the next chapter).
The CDVR hearings sought out victims able to narrate a historic record worthy of the venue’s macabre name. In Commission President Banny’s own words, the CDVR told stories of
“innocent victims, the weak, and amongst them some of our weakest, children and young women.” Conspicuously absent from the witness stand were the political leaders who divided the population over decades of poverty, exploitation and austerity. While the commission shaped history into an account of xenophobic masses targeting the nation’s most vulnerable, the elites orchestrating the process used the opportunity to represent themselves as benign leaders, committed to peace and stability.
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Atoning Before the Elite
The truth commission was operated by handpicked elites. Charles Banny, President of the
Commission, was the former Prime Minister of Côte d’Ivoire, a successful business man and, himself, a player in the Ivorian conflict. The commissioners and department heads were also all notable members of Abidjan’s upper class, selected from across partisan lines and representing the business and political elite of the new Côte d’Ivoire. The staging of the CDVR further reinforced the spectacle of elite’s holding court over the lesser segments of society, represented at the commission by victims and perpetrators alike. Members of the wealthiest and most influential families in Côte d’Ivoire presided like a panel of judges, with Commission President
Banny using a gavel to officiate the initial hearings. Commissioners sat on a raised platform, looking down over those giving testimony before them. The format was designed for victims to answer the questions posed by the panel, with no opportunity to challenge the commissioners’ opinions or interpretations. The display reinforced the legitimacy of the elite class by assigning them the role of compassionate rulers, devoted to the task of quelling the radicalised and unruly masses.
Printed on a wide banner and hung behind the commissioners’ stand was the slogan, “Perfecting the Construction of the Ivorian Nation.” Quite explicitly, the commission considered nation- building its core mission. The truth commission, with its many decontextualized accounts of ethnic violence, presented Ivorian ‘imperfection’ as the consequence of horizontal violence between radicalized youth. Speaking to a victim who witnessed her husband’s murder before being brutally raped, Commissioner Offoumou explained to the room that “like all the others, this is a case of intolerance!” The commissioner went on to say that the woman must pardon
133 what was done to her and “encouraged her, and all Ivorians, to strive for communal life.” When the woman responded that it is impossible to forgive such a thing, the commissioner pushed back, saying: “It isn’t easy, but pardoning is what needs to be done here.” The commissioner concluded by asking the young woman to move beyond ethnic divides, as though being intolerant of ethnic ‘others’ and refusing to forgive the horrific abuse she endured were one and the same.
Conflating an unwillingness to forgive perpetrators with the pathology of ethnic hatred was a theme repeated throughout the commission. Not only did this framing transfer the responsibility for rebuilding the nation onto victims by requiring their forgiveness, it also holds victims partially responsible by implying their victimization is a sign of their own intolerance and hence their share in culpability. In case after case, the commission interpreted victim experiences with a discourse of ethnic intolerance, and then pressured the victims to forgive for the sake of a new
Côte d’Ivoire. At the end of nearly every session the victims were asked, “Is your heart appeased?” Those who answered that they were not were gently reminded of their responsibility to do their part in “perfecting” the Ivorian nation.99
The truth commission allowed political elites to write the nation’s history in a patronizing display where some of the richest and most powerful people in the country instructed some of the
99 In another example, a victim – who happened to include in his testimony that he became an alcoholic after the war - said he cannot forgive his brother’s death. Commissioners focused in on man’s drinking as an illness that he is responsible for addressing in order to contribute to ‘perfecting’ the Ivorian nation, as though there was somehow a moral continuum between his alcoholism and the violations committed against his family. In a separate case, a woman said she cannot forgive her husband’s murder and subsequently being raped by the assassins. In response, she was told she must work on her faith to learn forgiveness. In an Ivorian context, it is a great failing to be considered disconnected from God. Again, the commission transferred blame onto the victim for her ‘weak faith’, as though her inability to forgive was a moral failing akin to being faithless. This was an especially painful accusation given she lives in a society where religion is the central moral and social glue, and a person’s worth is often measured against his or her commitment to faith (see transcript of CDVR public hearings, 2014)
134 poorest and most vulnerable in lessons of tolerance and humility. In one of his many speeches before the commission, Banny exclaimed, “This is not about forgetting, but about pardoning.
There is no pardon that does not pass through tolerance and humility. Pardon is before anything being humble.” Demanding that victims learn humility and tolerance carries an implicit message that anyone involved in the violations, whether victim or perpetrator, shared the blame due to his or her own self-centered intolerance. A victim leader who was severely tortured and left for dead by police explained this dilemma; “they think if you’re a victim, you’re a burro [perpetrator]. I don’t even tell people anymore. I can’t stand the way they look at me. We’re so stigmatized as victims in this society.” This man is making an important observation; within the script of ethnic war, everyone who experienced the horrors of the conflict first-hand, whether victim or perpetrator, can be deemed guilty, at least in part, of participating in the intolerance that destroyed the nation.
Transferring guilt for the agony of a ten-year civil war onto the victims would be absurd in a more careful reading of the conflict, but the transfer of blame is consistent with the commission’s simplistic narrative of a war fueled by ethnic hatred. Rather than taking victim resentment and anger seriously, these feelings were treated as a sign of xenophobia by the CDVR. It thus followed that victims were instructed by the commissioners of their responsibility to move beyond such thoughts and become productive contributors to a better future. This proved a powerful message. When I questioned the groups lined up outside CDVR statement-taking centers about their motivations to give testimony, the most common response I received was a statement on the duty to participate in national pardoning and rebuilding. These words mirrored the slogans communicated over the radio and on television by the CDVR leadership and from the
Ouattara administration. The truth commission, in this sense, was an opportunity for the
135 population to atone for the war before the ruling class.
Transferring Blame to Avoid Transforming Injustice
The discourse of ethnic war recharacterized legitimate grievances around social and economic injustice as the illiberal demands of an irrational crowd. This made the war narrative a useful platform for advancing neoliberal reforms in Côte d’Ivoire. By labeling the Ivorian conflict an ethnic war, the conflict-affected population lost the status of stakeholders and become illiberal masses needing to be taught ‘tolerance and humility’. Good liberal democrats are not obliged to address the anger and frustration of a xenophobic population as they build a better regime.
Indeed, these policymakers are good liberals precisely because they are not corrupted by such base motivations. In an ethnic war narrative, the goals that motivate violence are abhorrent and should be cleansed from the new nation. Were oppression and inequality the cause of violence, victims would be right to expect a structural change as the price of their forgiveness. Under the specter of ethnic hatred, however, the population at large is to blame for the terrible past. Perhaps the state is expected to fund social cohesion and civic education programs but, in the wake of ethnic conflict, the responsibility to do justice for the past is not connected to structural reforms or wealth redistribution. Correcting the past is a burden shared by the entire community to atone of their intolerance and learn liberal values going forward.
Retelling the civil war as an eruption of ethnic hatred at the CDVR ensured that reforms envisioned by the transitional justice process would not touch long-standing structural injustice and thus posed no challenge to the economic or political status quo, nor the neoliberal reform agenda Ouattara implemented once in power. There are five hundred thousand registered
136 conflict victims in Côte d’Ivoire, most of them living in economic, emotional and physical circumstances that condemn them to ongoing and severe suffering. Until interventions addressing larger social justice concerns are put in place, this will continue to be the reality for half a million Ivorians, with consequences that may extend for generations. In contrast, within the CDVR narrative, ethnic hatred is the root of their suffering, therefore their salvation will only come from taking personal responsibility for rebuilding a more harmonious society and learning to forgive their neighbors.
Conclusion.
As part of the larger neoliberal vision guiding post-conflict reconstruction in Côte d’Ivoire, the truth commission served as a form of nationwide moral intervention that shut down discussion of structural injustice and replaced it with a general instruction to the population to take responsibility for their role in destroying the country and do their part in rebuilding. The commission pathologized the population, presenting them as irrational people needing to learn
‘tolerance and humility’. In the CDVR’s account, the grievances that motivated violence were intolerance and, at moments, even genocidal ambition. To rebuild a good government, in a decent nation, this kind of intolerance needed to be suppressed and its advocates silenced.
Erased from the account was a nearly century long struggle over land disputes, labour rights, exploitation and poverty. The elite-led truth commission wrote a narrative blind to these aspects of the war and, in doing so, excluded them from consideration as core components of a just resolution to the conflict. This gave the ruling class the freedom to rebuild Côte d’Ivoire
137 according to their own interests while also winning moral legitimacy as devoted peacebuilders in the face of xenophobic masses.
The CDVR’s characterization of heroic elites and intolerant masses has ideological underpinnings. It is no coincidence that the rise of global neoliberalism saw transitional justice become a central part of the peacebuilding community’s response to civil conflict. With its focus on individual physical and political rights violations, transitional justice is poorly suited to addressing longstanding structural injustice, but well-adapted to chronicling accounts of ethnic hatred. Transitional justice, I claim, ‘neoliberalises’ a post-conflict context by establishing a new moral order compatible with the interests of national and global elites. I further claim that transitional justice builds that new ‘moral order’ by establishing a parameter between suffering that is morally intolerable and thus requires justice, and other forms of suffering that are unfortunate but effectively tolerated. The clearest way transitional justice builds that parameter is by repeating and reinforcing ethnic conflict narratives. Keeping the irrational hatred of Ivorian lower classes at the centre of the CDVR’s story pushed the more complex accounts of grievance and deprivation into the background. As we saw in this chapter, blaming ethnic hatred rather than acknowledging structural injustice was a strategy of the Ivorian elite on both sides of the political spectrum. Accusing Ivoirians of ethnic hatred allowed political elites to preserve an exploitative land and labour system, justify the social and economic exclusion of younger generations, and sacrifice their supporters in a self-serving battle of succession. By reinforcing this ethnic narrative, transitional justice not only legitimized elite behaviour in the past, it also advanced their claim to continued authority going forward. Ivorian transitional justice presented violations stemming from ethnic hatred as abhorrent and meriting justice, while simultaneously
138 excluding suffering caused by oppression, exploitation and grave inequality from the justice and reform agenda.
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4. Permissible and Punishable War Crimes: Selecting the Heroes and the Villains of Neoliberal Peace
Introduction
Signatory states to the International Criminal Court grant the court jurisdiction over their nationals and within their borders to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Although the ICC mandate declares that the humanitarian norms it upholds are universal, in practice the court has applied different standards across cases. The international court is increasingly criticised for the seemingly politicised nature of decisions around whether to indict or overlook war criminals. Current Ivorian president, Alassane Ouattara, and the former president, Laurent Gbagbo, are both responsible for incidents potentially tantamount to war crimes during the civil war. Yet the ICC only opened proceedings against Laurent Gbagbo and his Minister of Youth, Blé Goudé. The difference between the two leaders is not a matter of their respective adherence to universal humanitarian laws and norms. As we saw in the previous chapter, the Ivorian civil war was not a simple story in which the heroes of democracy were victorious over the scourge of ethnic violence and dictatorship. Both men commanded units who committed grave atrocities, with the largest documented civilian massacres actually perpetrated
140 by Ouattara’s rebel forces. Rather than their moral comportment, the difference between the two men is their respective visions for governing Côte d’Ivoire and, relatedly, the international community’s support for ADO’s vision and abhorrence for Gbagbo’s.
The President of the Ivorian Coalition for the ICC (ICICC) defended the Court’s one-sided process by insisting that, regardless of potential flaws, the international trial was crucial for Côte d’Ivoire’s ‘Emergence 2020’. This was a reference to Ouattara’s much-cited plan to become a fully industrialized state in just eight years after taking power. By way of explanation, ICICC
President spoke of the country’s judicial sphere being fully integrated with and reinforcing of promised economic progress. Initially the speech seemed to muddle unrelated matters yet his understanding of the ICC prosecutions was remarkably consistent with the actual impact of those trials on post-conflict Côte d’Ivoire. The one-sided trial helped secure international commendation as a World Bank and IMF approved ‘good government’ while denouncing those who blocked this vision of progress. More than that, the ICC indictment ensured that Gbagbo was not merely expelled by military defeat; it expelled him and his vision for Côte d’Ivoire from the realm of moral admissibility. In this sense, the ICC was indeed fundamental to the economic
‘emergence’ planned in ADO’s neoliberal restructuring program because it drew a clear parameter between the permissible and punishable visions of Côte d’Ivoire’s future. The ICC trial proved that, on the international stage, the difference between Ouattara’s permissible war crimes and Gbagbo’s’ punishable crimes was not the matter of those acts in and of themselves.
The difference was ideological: President Ouattara promised a neoliberal overhaul of governance in Côte d’Ivoire and Gbagbo’s rule was an obstacle to that vision.
This is not, however, merely a story of the international community cynically accepting victor’s justice for the sake of economic interests. The Ivorian case is interesting because of the huge
141 amount of work – intellectual, political, and technical – done by the foreign intervention and their partners in the Ouattara government. That heavy investment was not made just for the sake of letting Ouattara and his clan go free: a cynical guarantee of impunity for an uncontested victor with powerful foreign backers does not require so much fanfare. The ICC trial served a more important purpose by signaling on the international stage that neoliberal peace in Côte d’Ivoire was a moral project, undertaken in accordance with the highest standards of international humanitarian laws and norms. More important that distributing punishment or pardon to specific war criminals, that moral project defines the scope and limits of the moral obligation to right past wrongs. The ICC trial, in that sense, set the terms of a new moral order in Côte d’Ivoire according to which war criminals remained permissible state actors so long as they are ideologically aligned with the neoliberal reform project.
Neoliberal Peacebuilding
In contrast to many similar conflicts on the African continent, the Ivorian case attracted a major international response. The joint UN and French peacebuilding mission were central players at every stage of the ten-year protracted civil war.
“The Ivorian situation is unusual in that international actors took an interest in the
situation, backing up their words with actions… this is not often the case…Indeed, if one
calculates the ratio of the number of peacekeepers deployed to war casualties, concern
about events in Côte d’Ivoire would appear to have far outstripped that in any African
conflict in which the UN has mounted a peacekeeping operation” (M. McGovern 2010).
142
This quotation highlights the draw of the Ivorian civil war on the international community. The common explanation for this unprecedented attention is that the Ivorian war broke out soon after the catastrophic failure of the international community to act during the genocide in Rwanda.
Leaders from the global North, particularly in France, voiced their determination to never again abandon Africans to slaughter (Notin 2013). In practice, however, were a commitment to protect the lives and dignity of civilians the core motivation behind the foreign military intervention, the focus and priorities of those international actors would have been quite different. As we will see, during the ten-year military intervention and the peacebuilding mission that followed, restoring peace and good governance in Côte d’Ivoire did not primarily mean preventing or ending suffering amongst the civilian population.
Authors critical of contemporary peacebuilding refer to missions like the one deployed in Côte d’Ivoire as ‘liberal peace’ or ‘western peace’.100 Roland Paris writes that liberal peacebuilding is characterized by the “belief that one model of domestic governance – liberal market democracy – is superior to all others” (Paris 1997). Peacebuilding proponents, Rawls also contends, present liberal governance as not merely the best available course towards state-building, but as the only viable option (Rawls 1999). Fanthorpe extends the argument, observing that liberal peace tends to regard non-western democratic visions of rebuilding as obstacles to peace rather than potential partner approaches. As he observes, if there is only one road to true peace, anyone seeking a different vision becomes, by definition, the enemy of peace (Fanthorpe 2005).
Once liberal democracy is established as the only viable vision of a peaceful and well-governed
100 For examples see Fanthorpe 2005; MacGinty 2008; Laffey 1999; Paris 2002; Chandler 2004; D. Chandler, 2006; Duffield, 2001.
143 society, it is a short step to accepting military intervention in the name of liberalism as a necessary, if not benevolent, course of action. In liberal peacebuilding, a war of intervention is therefore no longer a matter of weighing difficult and deadly options, but a technical project on the one viable road to peace and good governance. Roger MacGinty and Pamina Firchow consider liberal peacebuilding part of a general trend towards sanitizing war by redefining it as a larger human security and development operation (MacGinty and Firchow 2016). As Whyte writes, “today, when those who wage war themselves trade in the language of moral anti-politics, this serves to depoliticize wars and neutralize dissent.” In this vision, conduct during war is a technical problem, and war itself is an instrument leveraged in the moral pursuit of preventing even more excessive abuses on the way to a better – and, specifically, a more liberal – future.
The trend towards humanizing military intervention implicitly legitimizes civilian causalities
(ibid). As David Chandler contends, the idea of a humanitarian military operation “would have been an oxymoron before the 1990s, today it has become a tautology” (Chandler 2001).
Mamdani further captures this dynamic in his controversial book Saviours and Survivors (2009).
He recounts the Save Darfur campaign purchasing a full-page advertisement in the New York
Times, demanding a peacebuilding intervention with a mandate to shoot to kill. As Mamdani exclaims, “these are humanitarian demands!” (Mamdani 2009).
The term neoliberal peacebuilding is used in critical literature to describe the disappearing divide between war makers, humanitarians and a globally connected business community. Tadjbakhsh describes neoliberal peacebuilding as a “marriage of Immanuel Kant and Adam Smith” in which contemporary peacebuilders “transpose Western liberal values, political institutions and capitalist markets” onto war-torn countries (Tadjbakhsh, 2010). Neoliberal peacebuilding efforts undermine liberal values while simultaneously relying on the wide appeal of liberalism to justify
144 military operations. Neoliberalism invokes liberal ideals such as human rights and freedoms, however, its core characteristic is conflating those ideals with a governance project that ensures elite economic interests dominate over all other priorities in the public sphere. This project includes deregulating markets, empowering a ruling coalition of global and national elites, privatizing resources and industries, and the insolation of elites and their financial interests from public scrutiny or the threat of economic reforms.
A neoliberal peacebuilding mission, as per Tadjbaksh’s definition, was deployed in Côte d’Ivoire within the first days of the conflict in September, 2002. An initial unilateral French military intervention entitled Opération Licorne was soon joined by ECOWAS forces. The United
Nations MINUCI (Mission des Nations unies en Côte d’Ivoire) mission was established a few months later in May 2003 and succeeded the following year by the ONUCI mission (Opérations des Nations unies en Côte d’Ivoire). A coalition of Western military forces, led by the French and operated in tandem with the United Nations, monitored the civil war and ultimately secured regime change in Côte d’Ivoire. By the final stages of the war, the coalition forces made no distinction in their demands before the UN Security Council between humanitarian appeals and the necessity of regime change through military force. The deadly practical reality of deploying combat forces in a protracted civil war was forgotten in light of the belief that foreign troops were needed to restore peace and democracy. Unquestioning belief in the effectiveness of their peacebuilding model blinded decision-makers in the international community to the realities before them, with terrible consequences for the Ivorian population. As we will see, the ONUCI’s uncritical adherence to the idea of humanitarian regime change ultimately facilitated an ethnic cleansing campaign perpetrated by their own ‘liberal democratic’ allies. Even as that slaughter was unfolding, the international community still failed to see the reality happening right before
145 their eyes.
The French Intervention
Contrary to popular narratives about the early stages of the war, the rebellion was not an insignificant group of home-ground freedom fighters who triumphed against the odds.101 Abidjan would have certainly fallen to the insurgents during the first week of fighting had the French forces not secretly intervened on the road from Bouaké to halt their advance.102 IB’s rebel forces were well-trained, well-armed and well-funded. The full details of the early funding remain unknown though sources allege the money came from Blaise Compaoré’s Burkina Faso, as well as from Quaddhafi’s Libya, the UAE and Lebanon (Pigeaud 2015, 32).103 Burkina Faso further assisted by providing weapons and training for the initial assault.
Decades before, at the time of independence, Côte d’Ivoire and France signed an accord of mutual protection that would ensure French military support to the Ivorians in the event of an external armed threat. In exchange, the accord secured French economic interests in the former colony. Knowing this, Blaise Compaoré required IB to stay in Burkina Faso and command the
101 On the rebels being well armed and numerous, see the testimony of Jerome Tarlue Junior before the ICC (Dubruelh 2016b) 102 Interview with Ruth Marshall, October 2016. Western journalists like Jean-Christophe Notin (2013) helped the political heads of the rebellion build the image of home-ground freedom fighters whose primary aim was to prevent an ‘inevitable genocide’ of Northern Ivorians. 103 One possible scenario is a result of the ‘chocolate finger plot’ in which Ouattara’s son in law, African President of the cocoa company Armajoro, assisted the cocoa multinational in acquiring nearly a tenth of the world’s cocoa just weeks prior to the attack. The price of cocoa skyrocketed, earning the company a profit of 60 million euros on the purchase. This theory suggests that the money was then used to fund the early phase of the rebellion (Onana 2011).
146 rebellion from across the border. His absence on the battlefield was intended to mask the role of external forces driving the rebellion. Ergo, under the claim that the war was a domestic affair,
Chirac refused to honour the accords of mutual defense and crush the rebellion. Instead, the
French Licorne mission stepped in just long enough to push the FRCI forces back to the central trading town of Bouaké. This became the partition line that divided Côte d’Ivoire for nearly a decade into the rebel-held North and state-controlled South.104
As the crisis mounted, the French Bimé military base in Abidjan, found itself increasingly at odds with Gbagbo. Though technically their ally and host, the president built his legitimacy through populist and anti-colonial discourse. Every time the French responded to the mounting crisis with incoherent actions or disproportionate force, Gbagbo was emboldened. He and his supporters easily construed the disorganized French response as an imperialist plan to hold power in the former colony (Smith 2003). Thus, from the first days of the rebellion, France was characterised by the President’s clan as a greedy Empire proxied on the ground by the rebel insurgency.
The most plausible explanation of France’s strategic intentions with this limited intervention is that the former colonial power simply had no clear strategy for managing a pending Ivorian war.
At this point, the French executive was merely focused on getting their own expatriates out of danger as quickly as possible.105 France Afrique had ended a decade before, and France simply
104 In the international media, the French stepped in to push the ComZone back, thus saving Côte d’Ivoire from outright war and protecting the regime from a coup in light of French obligations to the Ivorian state (Notin 2013). For Gbagbo and his anti-colonial clan, the real intention of the Licornes was to assist the rebels in securing their position at the partisan line, exploiting their presence as an international force to inhibit Gbagbo from retaking the north (Onana 2011). 105 Ruth Marshall in discussion with author, Toronto, Canada, October 2015.
147 did not have the personnel or military resources needed to respond effectively to a mounting crisis in Côte d’Ivoire (Smith 2003). Although the French administration continued to address then-president Gbagbo with the language and paternalism of a colonial power, their actions no longer matched the force of their words (Onana 2011). As Marshall explains, the French response to the Ivorian crisis was “a series of knee jerk reactions by an Empire that had disappeared and had not yet come to terms with that reality”. Indeed, if the French were still the formidable colonial force Gbagboists accused them of being, the Ivorian crisis would have ended within days rather than drawing out over the next decade.
The Waga Accord
In 2006, following seven failed internationally brokered peace deals, Gbagbo asked for direct dialogue with the force nouvelle rather than continuing to work through international mediation.106 To achieve that end, he sent FPI Youth Leader Navigué Frank to Ouagadougou
(‘Waga’) to negotiate a peace agreement with his RDR counterparts. Navigué explained to me that his mandate, direct from Gbagbo, was to come back with a peace agreement and nothing less. “Everything was on the table,” recalls Navigué of his final instructions before leaving for the negotiations.107 In March 2007, the Waga Accord was signed, dissolving the partition zone de confidence and creating a new joint armed unit under a shared central command. The terms of
Waga also made Guillaume Soro the new Prime Minister by presidential decree. On Thabo
106 Direct discussions were initially entered with Compoaré, bringing Soro onboard later (Navigé, FPI National Youth President in interview with author, Côte d’Ivoire June, 2015) 107 It took four years to reach a final agreement, with Soro himself coming for difficult negotiations. As Navigé explains, “at first we were in separate rooms with negotiators going back and forth, but by the end we could talk in the same room and with respect.” (Navigé, FPI National Youth President in interview with author, Côte d’Ivoire June, 2015)
148
Mbeki’s advice, the agreement entrusted the organization of new presidential elections directly to Prime Minister Soro. As Navigué explained, “every time we tried to find a peace agreement or call elections, Soro and the rebels would find a problem, so Gbagbo just said, ‘Fine, put them in charge! Make them organize elections themselves.’”108 With the implementation of the Waga
Accord, Côte d’Ivoire appeared to be taking the first significant steps towards peace since the rebels attacked five years before. In the transitional period that followed, Gbagbo praised Soro as the best prime minister he ever worked with.109
Waga was a homemade solution that came after seven failed internationally brokered peace agreements.110 With the success of the new accord, the UN began losing credibility and influence in Côte d’Ivoire, and Gbagbo leveraged that loss of standing. He unceremoniously downgraded the UN mission’s mandate from orchestrating the peace process to the task of ‘certifying’ steps that his men and the rebels had negotiated directly amongst themselves.111 Even before Waga took effect in March 2007, Gbagbo fired the internationally appointed Prime Minister – and
108 A. Diabete, a former Director at the Ministry of the Interior under Gbagbo, in interview with the author Abidjan Côte d’Ivoire April 2015 109 Polé Joele, Jeune Patriot political leader at the time of writing, in interview with author, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire July 2015.
110 Thabo Mbeki played a key role resolving the civil war. Before Waga, Thabo Mbeki organized the negotiations at Pretoria 1 (April 2005) and Pretoria 2 (June 2005). Unlike the French brokered Linas-Marcoussis Accord and Accra I, II and III Accords, these negotiations where exclusively open to Gbagbo, Soro, Bedié and ADO. Thabo Mbeki also made a public show of declaring that the continued presence of French soldiers on Ivorian territory was shocking and was increasing tensions on the ground rather than helping. He further aggravated the Sarkozy regime by sending a group of South African experts to investigate the protesters massacre by French forces at Hotel Ivoire in 2004. To add insult to injury, the report this group issued demanded an international arrest mandate against French General Poncet and Colonel Destremau, although no actions followed (Pigeaud 2015, 69). Despite provoking the French, Mbeki achieved the main breakthrough needed to move beyond the rebellion: he convinced Gbagbo to use an executive decree that would permit Ouattara to run in upcoming elections. He also convinced Gbagbo to make a presidential decree that banned all protests in the weeks after Ouattara’s candidature was secured as a precautionary measure for keeping the Jeune Patriots out of the streets. These actions went forward without incident, setting the way for the Waga negotiations and inclusive elections. 111 For details on Gbagbo reducing the presence of the UN during this period, see the US Secretary of State in Côte d'Ivoire, 2007 released by wikileaks.
149 future CDVR President – Charles Konan Banny.
Côte d’Ivoire Votes
Côte d’Ivoire’s 2010 election received a special commendation from the UN Secretary General
Ban Ki-Moon as ‘open, free and fair’. This high distinction was never before granted on the
African continent (Choi 2010). Despite unprecedented praise from such a respected authority, the election dissolved into the bloodiest episode in Côte d’Ivoire’s modern history. The remarkable thing about the 2010 presidential election is not the fact that an electoral process, so applauded by the international community, suddenly turned deadly. Rather, the striking thing is that the violence was clearly foreseeable given events leading up to it, and yet the United Nations continued on its singular path to elections, as though the process was preceding in an orderly fashion. As scholar Foluke Ipinoymi observed, the welfare of Ivorians was forgotten in favour of an abstract promise made in the name of democratization (Ipinyomi 2012, 73). The UN mission exhibited a kind of cognitive dissonance, imagining they were leading a successful and sequential liberal peacebuilding mission when, in truth, their actions triggered a rapid descent into total war.
“Free and Fair”
The electoral process was flawed long before the elections were called. Amongst the controversial demands made some years before in the French brokered Linas-Marcoussis Peace
Accords (2003), the Independent Electoral Commission (CIE) became an institution with a
150 majority RDR leadership. Only four of 31 members were pro-Gbagboist and its president was a vocal RDR supporter. At the time of the Linas-Marcoussis negotiations, handing the CIE to the
RDR may have seemed a necessary concession to keep peace talks moving. By the time elections were finally taking shape in 2010, the mistake was obvious. The institution responsible for organizing and overseeing elections was visibly partisan, thus ensuring Gbagbo supporters would never accept any unfavorable results announced by the CIE as credible.112
At the beginning of October 2009, The Institute National de la Statistique (INS) and a private
French company called Sagem Securité handed a new electoral list to the CIE. The provisional list had 6 384 816 names on it, 2 752 181 of which had never featured on any other pervious voting register. On one hand, an increase in eligible voters was expected as the Waga Accord ensured a large number of descendants of migrants from the Sahel region would be included as first-time voters. That said, an increase of nearly fifty percent was impossible.113 In a 2009
112 The CIE was charged with preparing Côte d’Ivoire’s electoral list, a task they completed by outsourcing the technical work to the French company Sagem Securité. In 2007, without any public call for the contract, Sagem signed a contract for 66 billion CFA (approximately 135 million USD): 48 billion for their own use, and the rest for sub-contractors. The election ultimately cost 200 billion CFA (approximately 400 million USD) making it the world’s most expensive internationally brokered national vote to date. Through French backing, the contract with Sagem Security was honoured in 2010 despite the discovery that Mohamaed Sisi Kagnassi represented the company in Côte d’Ivoire. This rich Malian businessman was a close friend and advisor to chief rebel commander Soro Guilluame (Pigeaud, 2015, 27). Moreover, the same Mr. Adama Bitogo who channelled cocoa wealth out of CDI into Burkina Faso was the founder of the Ivorian branch of Sagem. During the same period that his company was designing a questionable electoral list, Bitogo was also serving as Soro’s diplomatic counsellor and the director of ADO’s electoral campaign in the Agnéby region (Onana, 2012, 86; Varenne 2012, 69).
113 The number of new voters is impossibly large given the demographics of Côte d’Ivoire. More than 50% of the population are of Akan, Gru or Krou descent, and would be little affected by new voter laws (CIA World Factbook 2007). Approximately 20% of the total population are from Mandes (so-called northerner) descent, many of whom became enfranchised under the Waga Accord. Not everyone from this ethnic background were previously excluded; Ouattara and the RDR had a significant voting base in prior elections. An increase in voter numbers was thus expected, but unless the demographics recorded in the national census are hugely inaccurate, it would be impossible to nearly double the total number of voters by including those previously excluded. Gbagbo’s supporters claimed that the new names were both invented voters and were the names of people living in Burkina, Mali and Guinea who would cross the border to vote. Additionally, there are five million non-citizen Africans living in Côte d’Ivoire, with approximately half of them coming from Burkina Faso (ibid). Gbagboist argued that many of these names were also added to the list. It is, as one might imagine, very difficult to draw the lines of citizenship within the Ivorian
151 email published by Wikileaks, a consultant for UNDP explained to his colleagues that the validly of these names was “very unlikely” (Salseth 2009). In response to wide criticism of the registrar, the electoral commission put one million of the new names on a ‘grey list’, requiring these potential voters to prove their identity to a registration office before the election date. Although the CIE later admitted almost no one from the ‘grey list’ presented themselves to the commission, the final voter registration list inexplicably included the majority of removed names
(Pigeaud 2015, 100). Despite clear reason to doubt the validity of the registry, UN Country
Representative Choi proclaimed the voter list “solid, balanced and credible” (Security Council
2010).
Election Day
On November 28th, 2010, Ivorians turned out in high numbers to vote in the country’s first presidential election in a decade.114 The incumbent Laurent Gbagbo was the ten-year president, purportedly a socialist and thoroughly anti-French. He was strategically religious, professing to be a born-again Evangelical when it proved convenient, but also retaining a notorious genie consort who supplied him with supernatural powers. More importantly, Gbagbo was a symbol of
population. Although birthright is not granted to those born to foreign parents, citizenship can be obtained with proof of 5 continuous years in Côte d’Ivoire. That said, few people have official identity papers or a registered long- term address needed to claim citizenship, even if eligible. Given this picture, discrepancies were expected in the new electoral list however an increase of over two and a half million people was a massive shift. The new electoral list therefore raised suspicion that the RDR-led CIE had included a large number of fake names or non-eligible migrant workers, thus greatly increasing Ouattara’s potential voting base.
114 In a strange and largely forgotten episode that casts still more doubt on the process, the first round results put Bedié in the lead, with Gbagbo second. Ouattara found himself in third place and therefore out of the race. A few hours later, the electoral commission released new numbers reversing the results: now Gbagbo was in the lead with 35.5%, Alassane Ouattara was in second at 32% and Bedié would be cut from round two with only 23%. This bizarre incident has never been explained. Though, perhaps the silence that followed is not so surprising. Gbagbo felt much more confident going to heads against ADO rather than Bedié, heir to the Houphouet legacy. The new status quo also suited the interests of international onlookers given their open backing for Ouattara. With the most powerful players satisfied, no furthers actions were taken.
152 the rags-to-riches Ivorian dream, a quality that ensured the admiration of his western support base. The incumbent faced Alassane Ouattara; former IMF Director, father of austerity in Côte d’Ivoire, American educated economist, long-time friend of French president Nicholas Sarkozy, millionaire, symbol of northern ascendency and heir to the mystic power of the Malinke Empire.
In the lead up to the second-round vote, the major worry of both candidates was how Henri
Konan Bédié’s Akan support base would cast their ballots. The Akan refers to all the population groups who migrated centuries ago from what is now Ghana. It includes the entire Boualé nation and most of the Eastern and lagoon groups. Together, the Akan account for a third of the Ivorian population. In a pledge to remove Laurent Gbagbo from power, Ouattara’s RDR and Bédié’s
Boualé dominated-PDCI formed a coalition known as the RHDP (Le Rassemblement des
Houphouetists pour la democratie et la paix, or The Assembly of Houphouetists for Democracy and Peace). The coalition leaders vowed to support whichever candidate made it to the second round against Gbagbo. Few believed that decades of mistrust between Ouattara and Bédié would be forgiven once all cards were on the table yet these misgivings proved unfounded. One week after losing in the first round, Bédié called on his supporters to vote ‘massively’ for Ouattara. In exchange, Ouattara promised to appoint a PDCI prime minister if elected. On one hand, the
Baoulé/Akans are stereotypically proud and hierarchical people, deeply respecting of authority.
ADO thus counted on this major voting base to follow Bédié’s instructions and cast their ballots in his favour. On the other hand, under Houphouet, the Akan were prosperous farmers and landowners, and they filled the core of his expansive civil service. The Akan were thus especially hurt by the country’s economic decline in the 1990s and the IMF-imposed austerity that followed. Many lost their former privileges and their once bright futures. Because of that, a significant portion of the Akan population felt drawn to Gbagbo’s rhetoric, especially amongst
153 the younger generation.115 The result was a divided Akan vote that translated into a narrow election and immediate fraud allegations.
Although the second round of elections were declared free and fair by the ONUCI mission, witnesses on the ground recall extensive electoral fraud.116 Gbagbo supporters had a significant advantage to manipulate the vote in the South. National election monitors were paid 10,000 CFA per day to represent each political party at the polling station. International funding standards required that these positions be filled by people with some formal education, meaning the role was de facto reserved for Gbagbo supporters who tended to be middle class youth from urban areas. In the urban South, the FPI youth took all the election monitoring jobs and simply represented both political parties in many of the polling stations. The tactic was adopted for a very particular reason. In the lead up to the election it was discovered that Sils Technology, the company hired to coordinate the electronic vote, was headed by a Gbagbo ally (a man named Mr.
Ahou Don Mello). To reduce the risk of fraud, the parties agreed to count votes by hand and physically transmit them to ONUCI for safe keeping. As one former electoral observer recounted to me, the pro-Gbagbo ‘monitors’ kept track of who voted in their locale. If it was clear ADO was winning a large majority in a given polling station, the supposedly neutral monitors coordinated with friends to ensure the voting boxes were stolen or tampered with before they could be collected (ibid).
The situation was no better in the North. The African Union observer mission declared rampant
115 Interview with Boualé youth leader from the NGO Action justice et paix, May 2014 116 Interview with election monitoring NGO Office Head, Abidjan March, 2015.
154 electoral fraud took place in the Sahel region and refused to validate the process.117 As the AU team stated:
"After sharing information with other national and international election observers, we
hereby state that the second round of the presidential elections in Côte d'Ivoire was held
amidst major problems in various northern regions... These problems were stealing of
ballot boxes, arresting of candidates' representatives, multiple voting, refusal to admit
international observers to witness counting of ballots, and the murder of representatives
of candidates. To that effect, we hereby declare that the second round of voting was not
free, fair and transparent in these localities” (Mbeki 2011).
Moreover, the national election monitors sent from the South did not reach their northern polling stations. One former monitor laughed as he explained the situation, “When our friends told us they were planning to go across the ‘zone de confidence’ [border] to the north, we teased them.
We laughed at them saying, ‘How much is 10,000 CFA a day actually worth to you?! You’ll come back beaten half to death, if at all’. Of course, we were right, none of them actually made it passed Bouake, they all came back swollen and beaten from just trying to cross the border.”118
117 The AU was led by Joseph Kokou Kofigoh, former Prime Minister of Togo. Also present on the ground was the independent civil society Société Civile Africaine pour la Démocratie et l'Assistance Electoral, led by Seynabou Indieguene of Senegal, and the Coordination of African Election Experts (CAEE) from Cameroon, Senegal, Benin, Mali, Morocco, Gabon, and Togo led by Jean-Marie Ongjibangte of Cameroon. Their conclusions matched those of the AU delegation (Pigeaud 2015). 118 Interview with former election monitor, Abidjan March, 2015.
155
Counting the Costs
Once the polling stations closed, hand-counting votes and numerous fraud investigations delayed the announcement of the results beyond the constitutionally mandated three-day deadline. Paul
Yao N’Dré, President of the Constitutional Council and an ally of Laurent Gbagbo, declared that the CIE had failed to present its results within the requisite timeframe and that it was now up to the court to declare a winner.119 Appearing on national television, N’Dré explained that the electoral code gave the court seven days to carry out its investigations, after which the task of validating the election transferred directly to the Constitutional Council. Per the electoral code, if the court investigations did not meet a one-week deadline, the Council would then have the power to either valid a winner or cancel the election and declare another within 45 days. With over 20,000 polling stations to review in a week, the courts predictably missed the deadline and the Constitutional Council assumed responsibility for either declaring a president or calling a new election (ibid).
Citing fraud, Constitutional Council President N’Dré cancelled the vote in thirteen northern departments and declared Laurent Gbagbo the winner. On one hand, the 13 northern districts accused of fraud had submitted visibly tampered results. Each polling station was required by law to have at least one representative from all major parties yet the results from the 13 sectors in the North showed not a single FPI vote. Manufacturing of identity cards was a problem documented by African Union observers throughout the electoral process and, as previously
119 Note that depending on how one reads the electoral code, N’Dré’s declaration was inaccurate. The electoral code only states that a signed tally sheet from each polling station be transmitted to the Constitutional Council within three days after the election. That condition that was fulfilled, even if the Council had not completed its counting and investigations (Basset 2011).
156 explained, most ‘grey names’ of unconfirmed voters ultimately stayed on the electoral list. These combined factors gave legitimate reason for concern about voter results in the cancelled northern regions. That said, N’Dré largely overlooked the fraud and intimidation that also plagued polling stations in FPI controlled areas. Although some Southern constituencies were also cancelled, there was no doubt that Gbagbo’s camp manipulated the electoral code thanks to their dominance in the Constitutional Council.
The Constitutional Council’s maneuvers had all the characteristics of Gbagbo’s diplomatic style.
He had a knack for coming out on top that had earned him the pseudonym Le Boulanger (The
Baker) in reference to his ability to ‘roll his political adversaries in the flour, without getting stuck himself’. Recognising Gbagbo’s classic touch in the Constitutional Council declaration, the
ONUCI refused to investigate the results of the second round. After all the trouble they went through to hold the most expensive elections in the organization’s history to that date, the UN and its diplomatic partners were not going to be outmaneuvered once again by the Bêté Baker
(C. Baniafouna 2012). Instead, the ONUCI stationed itself within ADO’s headquarters at the
Golf Hotel and called the President of the Electoral Council to a private meeting. On January 8,
2010 the Electoral Council President Bakayoko went alone to the Golf Hotel and made his famous appearance on France 24, broadcasting live from the hotel with a panel of diplomats seated behind him.120
Bakayoko declared President Alassane Ouattara the official winner of the presidency by a
120 Thabo Mbeki was vocal in his disapproval: “The President of the CEI does not have to power to speak unilaterally on behave of the CEI itself”, he wrote “despite this he went alone to the Golf on the request of American and French diplomats, as well as ONUCI Special Representative Choi” (Onana, 2011, p.328). Whether Bakayako acted out of greed, fear or conviction, Mbeki is correct that Bakayako’s action violated the electoral code, adding to a long list of irregularities that characterized the 2010 presidential vote.
157 margin of 376,109 votes. Following the announcement, UN Representative Choi gave the following statement:
“I certified the election in a neutral and objective fashion. We have worked with the
Ivorian people for a long time, we know how they voted. Therefore it is objective, it is an
irrefutable certification of the vote” (Varenne 2012).
Despite Choi’s strong statement, the UN mission did not have the power or authority to validate electoral results in its Resolution 1765 (2007) mandate.121 The ONUCI mandate only allowed him to verify whether the elections had proceeded in an “open, free, fair and transparent” manner
(Onana 2011). This was also strange choice of words for other reasons. It showed deep hubris on the part of the ONUCI to claim that a UN Special Representative knew the true convictions of a foreign population clear enough to overrule all accusations of fraud in a problematic national election.
Was There Ever a Democratic Option?
Who truly won? Given the amount of irregularities and fraud that occurred, there was never a
‘true’ winner to be declared. What is more, even if that number had somehow arrived in Choi’s hand, it would not have changed the events that followed. The population was evenly divided
121 Thabo Mbeki accused Choi of overstepping the ONUCI mandate by violating impartiality. In his statements, he adds the cutting remark: “the very people who insist on the sanctity of the rule of law as fundamental to all democratic practice, elected illegally to recognise the provisional result announced by the chairperson of the CEI on his own”. Choi responded that there was a difference between announcing the presidency and his actual words: he did not technically announce the winner, he merely stated the fact that president Ouattara had a margin of 8% more votes than former President Gbagbo. In support of Choi’s statements, Ban Ki-Moon wrote to Mbeki explaining that the impartiality of the United Nations does not necessarily signify neutrality. Though simply boardroom semantics when first exchanged, these words immediately translated into six months of violence far more extreme than anything seen up to that point (Onana 2011).
158 between the two candidates and neither side had confidence in the elections. Fraud was extensive enough on both sides to shift results in either direction, and no amount of investigations or cancelled ballots could undo that or restore public trust in the process.
Whatever the result, the losing side would never have believed it valid and that was assured long before the votes were ever cast. The more essential point is that there was never a real possibility of free and fair elections to begin with.
Regardless of who was declared winner, a large segment of the Ivorian population was not going to accept the outcome and would challenge it with military force. Just as Gbagbo refused to renege on his power, it is equally safe to assume that the force nouvelles would not have accepted a Gbagbo win, had the tally gone the other way. Despite multiple peace accords committing the rebels to disarm as a condition for elections, the force nouvelles refused to put down their weapons prior to the vote. Soro Guillaume was clear in his statements that he would not jeopardize military victories gained to that point until the elections were concluded.122 The international community’s blind commitment to a sequential democratization process in Côte d’Ivoire meant citizens were sent to the polls at a moment when both sides were actively reinforcing their military capacity. Leslie Varenne is a journalist who chronicled the electoral crisis from her home in Abobo, a neighborhood so notorious for street violence that Abidjanais simply call it ‘La guerre’. Describing the climate of the country just before the 2010 vote, she wrote: “ONUCI failed [to prepare for elections], and knew it failed at its mission. Anywhere in the country an AK47 could be bought for 45 euros” (2012).
122 This forced UN Special Representative Choi to renegotiate the terms concluded in Waga with Gbagbo. The incumbent President eventually agreed that elections could go ahead even without the rebel’s disarmament, on the condition that disarmament would happen immediately after, under a guarantee of security from the UN.
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It is unsurprising that a winner-takes-all presidential election could not peacefully resolve a ten- year civil war in a country equally divided into two opposing camps. Yet even as the post- electoral crisis was exploding, the ONUCI mission continued to operate as though the election was a pathway to peace – and the only acceptable path, at that. As Choi and his colleagues in the
ONUCI mission submitted their reports on the success of a fair and ‘widely recognised’ election, renewed violence, more horrific than any experienced during the conflict thus far, erupted across
Abidjan (Basset, 2011).
Immediately following the Golf Hotel declaration of Ouattara’s win, waves of violence began to sweep the capital city. ‘Barrages’ were erected dividing the neighbourhoods of Abidjan into a grid of self-imposed siege zones with the aim of keeping real and imagined enemies cloistered in their own quarters (Panaite 2016b). As tensions grew, a new phenomenon arose in which neighbourhood militias began ‘sentencing trespassers’ to the infamous ‘Article 125’. A
Dominican Priest explained the harrowing term: “the petrol costs 100 francs and matches are 25 francs. The tires are free. There are always tires lying around.” Youth gangs mockingly termed the practice ‘braising’ those who found themselves on the wrong side of the barricades.
Rather than speculating over who truly won and lost the vote, the more important point is that there was never a democratic option. Long before the polls opened, it was clear the winner of the election would to be determined by violence. In the words of an election monitoring NGO
Director:
“Everyone debates over who committed fraud; over who really won the elections. This is
not the point! The real issue is that neither Gbagbo or Ouattara were going to accept
defeat, it never actually mattered what the results were. It was clear before we started that
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regardless of who won, the other side were going take power with violence.”123
Both camps are accused of more than enough fraud to change the electoral result in either direction. In the end, it was the international peacebuilding community who declared the
President of Côte d’Ivoire. As a former election monitor explained to me: “The international community decided one president had won and the population had decided the other, it turned out what mattered was the first thing over the second.”124
The Winners and the Losers of Neoliberal Peace
After the election, with the country on the brink of violent collapse, South African President
Thabo Mbeki acted as mediator, communicating Gbagbo’s willingness to negotiate a new peace settlement. Gbagbo’s head was on the chopping block, making his suddenly conciliatory attitude hardly magnanimous. ADO, on the other hand, had the full support of the international community behind him and the legitimacy of an election declared in his favour by the UN. It is easy to appreciate why he had no interest in resuming negotiations with the Boulanger. That said, the military invasion by ADO’s forces of Western Côte d’Ivoire and Abidjan that soon followed this failed attempt at diplomacy are the most horrific episodes of the war. A negotiated accord would have required concessions from the RDR leadership, but it also would have prevented the terrible suffering that soon befell the Ivorian population. In this moment, Ouattara had the opportunity to seek a solution other than the brutality that came next. After decades of
123 National election monitoring NGO, Head of Office in interview with author, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire May 2015. 124 Ibid.
161 being outmaneuvered in his bid for president, he was not going to give in now that he finally held the upper hand.
Dissenting from his colleagues on the global stage, Thabo Mbeki wrote a furious denouncement of the international community for intervening on Ouattara’s side (Mbeki 2011). As Joseph Koru
Koofigoh, former Prime Minister of Togo and chief of the AU mission of observers in the election recalled:
“Thabo Mbeki and I have spoken about this when he arrived in Abidjan {to help
facilitate a resolution to the crisis}. Mbeki explained that Mr. Gbagbo was ready
for discussions but that Alassane Ouattara was intransigent because he was
supported by the international community. Voila, there’s the problem. Instead of
the situation we saw, if pressure was on both parties, dialogue would be possible
and could have produced an exit from this crisis. I’m not interested in these
theories about the radicals taken over in their entourages. It was the international
community that aggravate the crisis” (Onana, 2011, 393).
In Mbeki and Koofigoh’s view, unequivocal support for ADO from the French military and the
UN mission ensured that Ouattara had no incentive to accept any resolution short of an unconditional surrender from Gbagbo’s camp. Gbagbo, however, marshalled a devoted support base that represented more than a third of the country, meaning his forced removal guaranteed widespread and deadly violence.
The Golf Republic
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In preparation for the military campaign to dislodge Gbagbo from the presidential palace,
Alassane Ouattara, Soro Guillaume, Henri Bédié and their respective entourages moved into the
Golf Hotel where they lived for the next five months surrounded by French and UN troops.125
One night in an average room at the Golf Hotel costs approximately 300 USD. There are more than 500 rooms and suites at the hotel, all of which were occupied for a five-month period by the
RDR leadership and bankrolled by the ONUCI mission. Each day, the 1200 hotel residents were served three meals at the luxury restaurant. As one ONUCI staffer explained, “when the helicopters couldn’t fly, sometimes we didn’t get appetizers or dessert. Or sometimes we were required to eat African food.”126 Less than one third of the money donors contributed to the UN for humanitarian assistance actually made it to service delivery NGOs on the ground (Varenne
2012).127 The cost of maintaining the Republic of the Golf may help explain why the humanitarian funds were so inefficiently spent.
Gbagbo and his clan took refugee just a few blocks away from the Golf in the Presidential
125 At the Golf Hotel in Abidjan, RDR politicians and other high-ranking personnel came and went from the tiny Republic thanks to multiple daily UN helicopter flights. To compete with Gbagbo’s state-controlled radio and television, the ONUCI brought three tons of radio equipment by helicopter to create a pro-ADO radio station direct from the Golf via French satellite (Onana 2011). Only marabouts and the Red Cross could cross through the security line surrounding the hotel. Sex workers were also permitted to enter, as explained by a former pro-Gbagbo security director who relied heavily on these women to bring back insider information about happenings inside the Golf (Interview with anonymous ex-security official, June 2015) 126 The UN paid for the rental of the entire Golf over the full five-month period. These and other war costs were in part covered with loans from the French, now being repaid by taxes and customs on exports (Interview with anonymous ONUCI staff, August 2015). It is further rumored however unconfirmed that Côte d’Ivoire is also repaying the UN for the cost of the hotel during the Republic of the Golf.
127 The three men in charge - Soro, ADO and Bédié - are wealthy businessmen and political elites. The city could not get food, medications or petrol during this period while the three RDR leaders were using UN humanitarian aid to pay for their luxury hotel rooms and dinners. Moreover, as a political leader, Soro financially benefited from the violence. During the war, Soro made 15 billion CFA for his own use and worked with a budget of 50 billion CFA from the central bank of the rebellion (the following chapter has further details on the rebellion’s financial structure) (Varenne 2012).
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Palace. As self-proclaimed President, Gbagbo still enjoyed wide support within the security forces. He ordered the troops stationed across Côte d’Ivoire to pull back to Abidjan and defend his residence. This left civilians in rural areas and in poorer Abidjan neighbourhoods at the mercy of the invading force nouvelles. With the Republic of the Golf and the Presidential Palace both heavily militarized, the chicest corner of Abidjan entered an armed stalemate.
4.5.1. Breaking Gbagbo
The international community put their faith in Ouattara’s leadership. As journalist Leslie
Varenne wrote, “the image of ADO abroad is that of a brilliant technocrat, humane and concerned for the well-being of his people” (Varenne 2012). Alassane Ouattara had a “black book full of all the important numbers” and called on his wide network for both military and diplomatic assistance in unseating Gbagbo.128 President Sarkozy leveraged France’s seat on the
Security Council to push through a series of resolutions that allowed the French Licorne battalion to orchestrate military operations against Gbagbo’s stronghold. Also amongst Ouattara’s associates in the diplomatic community, he was close friends with the Director General of the
IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and with Robert Zoellick of the World Bank.129 The Golf was thus able to use its network of influential international allies to attempt breaking Gbagbo by both military means and by cutting off the flow of finances and goods to Côte d’Ivoire. Though still president in the eyes of much of the Ivorian population, Gbagbo soon found himself without
128 Former Director at Ministry of the Interior in interview with author, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, April 2015 129 From 2004-2008 the World Bank blocked Côte d’Ivoire from external funding, putting the condition that no further loans would be made available until a resolution to the civil war and occupation was reached (Piguead, 2015, 65).
164 allies in the international community and with dwindling support on the African continent.
In January 2011, the EU imposed sanctions on eleven economic entities including the Port of
Abidjan and San Pédro, the national oil company (PETROCI), the national energy provider
(SIR), the electricity company (CIE), the National Bank and Agricultural Bank (the BIN and
BFA), the cacao and rubber producers’ associations, and the national broadcasting station (RTI).
Although these actions limited Gbagbo’s governing capacity, they failed to dislodge him from the Presidential Residence. The tactic instead punished average Ivorians for the belligerence of their political leaders. In particular, blocking Ivorian ports meant no medication could be delivered to a country caught in a protracted civil war.130 When the blockade failed to budge
Gbagbo, the French and US diplomatic community mobilized their allies in Western governments and major international companies in an attempt to financially squeeze Gbagbo out of power. Together, the coalition of international finance groups closed all banks in Côte d’Ivoire.131 The bank closures severed the population from their savings, deepening chaos and misery in the streets, but again doing little to dislodge Gbagbo. Once again, it was the average
Ivorian who suffered while both leaderships remained locked away in their palaces.
130 Nearly every Ivorian I have spoken with about living through this period can name at least one close friend or relative who died or suffered debilitating illness during this period due to the blockade on medical supplies. Amongst my close work associates, one colleague lost two sisters, both from easily treated tropical diseases and another lost his older brother, a man who suffered from polio as a child and depended on regular medication to survive. 131 To overcome the financial conundrum, Gbagbo allowed most banks to remain closed but nationalized the BCICI and used it as the new national treasury. Just like the rebellion did a decade before, Gbagbo also emptied the BCEAO (Banque centrale des etats de l’Afrique de ouest) and used the funds to pay government salaries and other state bills. Presumably, he also topped up his military capacity by whatever means possible. Although the blockade made it difficult to import weapons, Gbagbo likely brought weapons over land thanks to allies in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
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Gbagbo’s Crimes Against Humanity132
The RTI Radio Protest
In December 2010, Ouattara was officially president but Gbagbo still controlled the national broadcasting stations (RTI) that serviced the public airwaves and the state TV station. Gbagbo’s control over public discourse left the Golf at a major disadvantage. Up against a master demagogue with exclusive access to the national media, the Golf Republic’s first priority was breaking Gbagbo’s propaganda machine. To complete this task, Guillaume Soro planned a march of thousands of supporters who would together descend on the radio station and take control of the RTI.
The December 16, 2010 march was never intended as a peaceful affair. The marchers were instructed to assemble at the Golf Hotel. From there, accessing the RTI radio station meant passing the Presidential Palace and thus crossing the heavily armed FDS defense line. Moreover, the RTI was itself defended by military personnel who would not simply abandon the broadcasting station to protestors.133 Neither Ouattara nor Soro, nor any other member of the high command at the Golf joined the marchers.134 Testimony before the ICC from a former police
132 Note that the ICC charges against Gbagbo were associated with four incidents however I have included details on only three. The fourth incident was a case of collective rape of Dioula women by FDS security forces. This final charge is not included here because I could not find information on the event or any informants with knowledge of the incident. This should not, however, cast doubt the veracity of the victims’ claims. 133 To reduce the risk of confrontation, the French, American and Japanese ambassadors offered to participate in the march with ADO and Soro, under the assumption that the FDS forces would not risk the potential consequences of firing on prominent members of the international community. Ouattara refused their participation.
134 ADO abandoned the hotel to stay in the ONUCI headquarters for the duration of the march, only returning afterwards for a photo session in the hotel gardens with Soro (Varenne, 2012).
166 commander confirms that force nouvelle members were interspersed throughout the protestors, ostensibly for protection, since the planned march would confront a fully equipped army.135
Although accounts disagree regarding on who fired first, before the march even began, the Golf defenses exchanged fire from their heavy weapons with the FDS army.136 Regardless of who initiated the shots, sending protestors into enemy lines immediately following rocket fire between two fully armed militaries produced predictable results. 137
Although there was never a real possibility that the marchers would take the national radio station from the FDS forces, the plan guaranteed a high civilian casualty rate. At the international level, this spoke much louder than any broadcast ever could. ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno
Ocampo, a long-time friend of Ouattara, reacted immediately to the event. Within hours of the confrontation, Ocampo released an indictment against Gbagbo for war crimes. A response so rapid gives the impression he was informed prior to the march that ‘crimes against humanity’ were about to happen. Years later, standing before the ICC, Gbagbo and his defense team
135 As witness before the ICC, an ex-commander of the FDS Commando in Abobo (a man of northern origins who later deserted Gbagbo’s forces to change sides) says he received no instructions regarding the march on the RTI. He heard there were ‘disruptions’ happening and was informed that there was total confusion and a human barrage made by the military to stop the march. In his version of events, the military took fire from amongst the civilian protesters and then responded in kind (Dubruelh 2016e). In a contrasting account, a witness from amongst the marchers told the ICC that the police arrived on the scene and fired on the marchers with automatic weapons. He presents a video taken from his iphone as evidence however the court affirms that it impossible to tell from the video who is shooting at whom (Dubruelh 2016g).
136 Radio France already reported the firing of heavy weapons on protesters before the RTI march had started (Colibasanu 2010).
137 A further witness for the prosecution at the ICC surprisingly claimed that the provocations had indeed come from within the marcher and were fired by FDS militants who were planted there by the Gbagbo regime. The statement was the first to claim that there were shots fired from within ADO’s ranks, let alone state that those shots preempted fire from the FDS. That witness later retracted the statement, claiming he misremembered and there was in fact no sign of provocation from amongst the protesters (Dubruelh 2016c).
167 maintain that the march was a deployed as human shield, intentionally sending civilians into enemy fire with the goal of stirring outrage amongst international onlookers (Panaite 2016).
The Abobo Women’s March
On March 3, 2011, between two to three thousand Abobo mothers took to the street crying
“Gbagbo Dégage” (‘Gbagbo Get Out!’). The crowd of women met at the Banco roundabout, an intersection that serves as a gateway into the notorious neighbourhood of Abobo ‘la guerre’.
This assembly point ensured their path would cross the FDS tanks leaving the commando camp on their daily tour to the gendarme base at Agban (Varenne 2012). The marchers circled the roundabout in the opposite direction from the tanks, meeting the FDS forces head-on. As the women came face-to-face with the tank column, shots were fired and panic ensued. Seven women were found dead in the aftermath of the attack and at least two others died from injuries.138
A witness explained the details as follows,
“At first we did not want to join. Abobo was in an open war at that point and marching
would clearly be dangerous. But the Golf reassured us saying Fognons (the ‘Commando
Invisible’) would secure the march, and we had complete confidence in them. The Golf
also told us that ONUCI would be there. That’s why we went in all confidence, dressed in
our boubous. We felt so secure that one woman marched with her baby on her back. She
138 A cellphone video was widely circulated after the attack showing women lying in the street, supposedly dead, then getting up and speaking with a cameraman. ADO supporters insist the footage is a propaganda piece created by Gbagboist. Regardless of the veracity of the video, its existence remains a source of deep resentment for Gbagbo supporters who consider it clear proof that the Abobo women’s march was staged for foreign media.
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died, but no one ever mentioned the child.” (Varenne 2012)
The leaders of the Commando Invisible later claimed they had no idea the march would take place. When they got word that a protest was forming near the route of the FDS tanks, they hurried to the site and tried to send the women home. The roundabout was not under their control and was a guaranteed site of confrontation (ibid). Testifying before the ICC, the former commander of the FDS insists that his elements responded to shots sent from around the women and did not fire on the protestors themselves.139
Marchers allege that young men from the RDR collected six bodies and took them from the scene (Varenne 2012). The bodies were buried in unmarked graves in a location unknown to their relatives. The seventh woman’s body was taken immediately by her family and buried the next day.140 Refusing to take responsibility for firing on the women, Gbagbo demanded an international inquiry to exhume the bodies and conduct autopsies, which ONUCI denied.141 The following year, when ICC representatives arrived to investigate Gbagbo’s war crimes, they did not meet with the families of the dead even though the Abobo Mother’s March was one of only four accusations made by the court against the former President.142
139 Speaking as a witness at the ICC, an ex-FDS reported his elements fired only after receiving fire from hidden element around the group of women (Dubruelh 2016f). 140 Witnesses further contend that the women who were shot took bullets in their backs yet the marchers were facing the FDS forces head on when the shots were fired. According to protesters and Commando members present, the shots came from the Mobil gas station, about 400 meters from the roundabout. Moreover, the cartridges collected by the Commando Invisible were 12,7 millimeters while Gbagbo’s army is equipped with Russian guns that use 14 millimeters. The smaller caliber bullets were issued by the French military. While all of this is questionable evidence based on witness testimony, the details do raise questions about what really took place (Varenne 2011). 141 Despite the chaos of this period, ONUCI was still enforcing procedures for the transport and autopsy of assassinated persons. 142 Director of PK18 victim association in interview with author Abobo, Côte d’Ivoire, May 2015.
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The Market Shelling
A week later, on March 17, three missiles were fired on a busy market in Abobo. During the attack twenty people lost their lives and 60 others suffered severe injuries. At the ICC, Gbagbo’s defense lawyer noted that a court in Côte d’Ivoire had already acquitted Gbagbo of the bombardment on the market for lack of evidence (Panaite 2016c). Gbagbo’s lawyers further requested the UN Secretary General launch an independent inquiry into the market shelling in
Abobo, insisting the information presented before the ICC was inaccurate (Stratfor 2011).
In the period of chaos following the election, most civilian deaths took place in the context of urban guerrilla warfare, making it is difficult to demonstrate the direct responsibility of high- level military and government officials for civilian death. In contrast, the Abobo market shelling was an attack on a crowded civilian area with no strategic value beyond causing suffering in a pro-Ouattara neighbourhood. In international law, this has much more weight than murder committed under the shroud of guerrilla warfare. Both Gbagbo’s galaxie patriotique and
Ouattara’s rebellion committed many attacks on civilians.143 In comparison to widespread and horrific executions by ‘braising’ and machetes, the market shelling was a relatively less traumatic event than many everyday occurrences during the period. The number of dead or nature of death are not the pertinent point, however. The Abobo market attack was significant to the ICC because the use of heavy weapons required approval from the État major, meaning
Gbagbo or a high-ranking member of his leadership team must have ordered the strike. As such,
143 For example, Human Rights Watch documented the killing of 37 West African immigrants by a pro-Gbagbo militia in a village in the West on March 22, 2011 (Papic 2011).
170 the market shelling was potential evidence of Gbagbo’s direct responsibility for civilian deaths.144
Gbagbo’s lawyers insist that during the attack on the market, his FDS forces were engaged in urban warfare against the Commando Invisible, a guerrilla militia led by none-other than the notorious Commander IB. 145 Colonel Edouard Kouaho Amichia, as witness before the ICC, explained that numerous armed groups were attacking the FDS Republican Guard in March
2011, including the RHDP youth, Commando Invisibles and the joint rebels forces (Ivoire
Justice 2016b). During these confrontations, the Commando Invisible were armed with kalashnikovs and anti-tank weaponry, and operated from within crowded urban areas in Abobo
(ibid). The FDS forces, therefore, insist the market was bombed because they were engaged in an urban guerilla war with unclear targets, and not as a direct attack civilians.
Whatever the motivations, the Abobo market attack was indeed an assault on civilians and, as such, was a war crime committed by the Gbagbo leadership. In acknowledging that, it is important to note a double standard applied by the ICC given the actions of the pro-ADO forces and international peacekeepers during the same period. The comportment of force nouvelles and
144 A defected officer from the FDS explained to the ICC that using mortar required permission from the ‘état major’ (Ivoire Justice 2016c). The attack on the market was done with obustier cannons, as was made clear by the multiple bullet like wounds seen in victims’ bodies. According to military personnel interviewed by the author, these cannons can be operated either from long distances or short (ranging from 30kms to a few meters) and are operated by 7 to 10 people, however fewer people can operate them with less accuracy. More significantly, although these weapons require a high level of approval, in an active threat environment, “authorization to fire a cannon can come from below the general officer level, potentially brigade or battalion level”. While the prosecution argues that the weapons were fired from the camp command center with Gbagbo’s knowledge, these details on potential firing distance and chain of command suggest that many possible military scenarios could have resulted in the attack on the market. 145 As a military strategy, the Commando Invisible would create barricades and burn tires to attract the FDS then hide in the urban squalor of Abobo. When the FDS arrived, they would attack from their hiding places. By January 2011, Abobo was in the hands of the rebels from all corners, excepting only the state held military camp (Ivoire Justice 2016c). Gbagbo aligned Colonel Edouard Kouaho Amichia explained to the ICC that they were simultaneously facing unnamed armed groups, RHDP youth, Commando Invisibles and FRCI rebels in March, 2011 (Dubruelh 2016a).
171 its various militia units is discussed at length in the following section. As regards the joint foreign mission, witnesses report that the UN and French also used heavy weapons against civilian targets. Notably the foreign forces launched an attack on the university residences where segments of Gbagbo’s galaxie patriotique were based.146 Although many students had fled at this point, the residences were still home to those with no safer place to go or who were unable to flee the city centre before the barrages went up. Interviewees who were in the residences during the attack allege that, following the air strikes, French forces shot and killed civilians trying to escape the buildings.
Like the other charges listed above, the Abobo market attack was a crucial moment in the campaign to overthrown Gbagbo. The use of heavy weaponry against civilians was a prerequisite to securing Security Council approval for direct military intervention. Until these criteria were met, the joint foreign mission’s mandate did not allow direct military support to Ouattara. In
March 2011, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt were on the brink of revolutions later characterized as the
Arab Spring. In comparison, the woes of 21 million Ivorians were all but forgotten at the
Security Council. After months of relative obscurity, the market bombardment refocused the attention of the world’s top diplomats back on the Ivorian crisis. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-
Moon invoked the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), stating that the Ivorian crisis triggered an international responsibility to intervene in Côte d’Ivoire for the protection of civilians (Ipinyomi
2012). China and Russia agreed to change their stance and vote at the Security Council in favour
of a ‘humanitarian intervention’ aimed at ousting Gbagbo. 147 The resulting UN Resolution 1975
146 FESCI leadership in hiding, in interview with author Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, December 2015. 147 India and China expressed their discomfort, stating for the record, “… United Nations peacekeepers… cannot be made instruments of regime change. Accordingly, the United Nations Operation in Côte d’Ivoire (UNOCI) should not become a party to the Ivorian political stalemate. UNOCI should also not get involved in a civil war, but carry
172 henceforth granted the ONUCI and the French supporting mission permission to destroy
Gbagbo’s heavy weapons and take control of the Presidential Palace (Ipinyomi 2012). With that new mandate, ONUCI transformed from a peacekeeping mission into a regime change operation
(Bellamy and Williams 2012).
Taking the West
By mid-March 2011, Ouattara could boast support from all major international institutions, but he presided over a territory roughly the size of a golf course. Months after the contested election,
Gbagbo still controlled the media, the army, the main urban centers and retained a significant civilian support base. ADO announced to the international media that he would end the stalemate by calling “a million people into the streets”. Yet the mass uprising never followed. Even the neighbourhoods most devoted to Ouattara did not come out in his defense. Presumably exhausted from years of war, the civilians of Abidjan were unwilling to once again see friends and relatives die ‘cadeau’ (for nothing) in the endless and bloody power struggles of their leaders. To make matters worse, Ouattara was a technocrat by training and did not demonstrate the zeal and decisiveness of the revolutionary leader his international supporters and rebel allies had presumed him to be.148 It was becoming clear this stalemate would not resolve itself. The coalition of foreign diplomats and RDR leaders who together comprised The Republic of the
Golf needed a new solution.
Following the shelling of the Abobo market, the ONUCI and French joint military mission now
out its mandate with impartiality and while ensuring the safety and security of peace- keepers and civilians” (Bellamy and Williams 2012).
173 had a mandate to support regime change. It did not, however, have the authority nor the troops needed to mount this operation on ADO’s behalf. The Golf Republic needed to greatly expand its army if it was going to take the country from Gbagbo and his supporters by force. Initially, the Golf put out a call for additional recruits in Abobo and the occupied northern areas where the rebellion had originally built their ranks. This time the response was tepid, especially from the northern communities. Over the last ten years these areas had suffered under the ComZone rule and gained little in return from their self-styled liberators.
A new recruitment call was sent to the West. As seen in the previous chapter, land and labour are an endemic source of conflict in this region and have been for nearly a century. In most of the country Ivorians experienced the civil war in short periods of intense conflict punctuated by long lulls where citizens suffered from deprivation more than overt violence. 149 The Western region, in contrast, experienced ten years of sustained and escalating conflict.150 Over the years of conflict, the chaos of civil war had turned long-standing land feuds into violent cycles of
149 In part, the extreme violence bled over from a decade before when Houphouet-Boigny, motivated by personal investments in heava (brut rubber), equipped and backed Charles Taylor in his civil war against Samuel Doe. As my contact in the Ministry of Solidarity explained: “The Guere [Doe’s ethnic group and the traditional residents of the centre-West pro-Gbagboist region] in Liberia were not going to tolerate seeing a Yacouba [Taylor’s ethnic group and the traditional residents of the ADO allied Northwestern region] come kill their brothers and sisters once again. Many of them went to join as mercenaries. When the war started in Côte d’Ivoire a lot of Liberians came to avenge the destruction – to them, they saw the same war still continuing”. In interview with Director, Ministry for Solidary, Abidjan Côte d’Ivoire April 2015. 150 Attributing the most extreme acts of violence in Côte d’Ivoire as the excesses of Liberian mercenaries was a common refrain amongst former combatants on both sides. For example, an ICC witness admitted that killing Dioula and RHDP linked residents in Youpougon did occur, but claimed this was done only by mercenaries and by Liberians. He blames the extremes on the Liberians saying it was impossible for the leadership to control their excesses (Dubruelh 2016d). Having collected a significant number of victim testimony through work with the CDVR, I believe this is a slogan used to mask the shame and fear ex-combatants feel for their role in destroying the once thick social fabric of the region. Although the Liberian mercenary armies were without question an important element of the conflict, it is not the full story behind the extreme forms of violence seen in the West during the months of March through June 2011. Victim testimony makes it clear that the role of a spill over war is often overstated. In my view, the claim that Liberians were responsible for atrocities in the West is used to hide more than it explains about the Western campaign.
174 revenge, with the autochthone and migrant populations expelling and killing one another in turns. Eleven thousand young men were recruited from Western Dioula and Malinke communities, only to be sent back into the West to invade the territories where they had grown up alongside Krou villagers.151 In this recruitment campaign, the Golf Republic and its international supporters formed an explicitly ethnic army, and then sent these poorly trained recruits to attack villages in the country’s most unstable region.
The expanded army was renamed the Force Republican du Côte d’Ivoire (FRCI) and was founded under the direct command of Alassane Ouattara in April, 2011. Declaring the FRCI a national army under an elected president meant the international coalition backing the military were officially supporting a state organ rather than a rebel movement.152 The UN as well as the
US and French diplomatic corps were party to plans for the Western campaign from its first conception. In his book Scorpion et Crocodile, French military historian Notin describes Soro
Guillaume presenting the assembled members of the international community his strategy for invading the West within the first 24 hours of their arrival at the Golf in December 2010 (Notin
2013). These international representatives had full knowledge of the Golf’s plan to attack the country’s most volatile region and helped recruit an ethnic army from that region to carry out the operation.153 As Varenne put it, an “ethnically formed army was sent into the “powder keg” …
151 The new force nouvelle army also included an additional 12,000 recruits committed by Burkina Faso, Mali and Senegal. 152 Soro stepped aside to allow the amalgamation of the force nouvelles with defected FDS forces. The act gave the impression to outside onlookers that Ouattara was now commander of a coalition military, fighting against an isolated dictator and his few remaining supporters. My sources in the security services contend that the new FRCI army contained few defectors, and those who did switch sides, did so in secrecy (Interview by author with anonymous former security personnel, May 2015, Abidjan) 153 These villages included Tabou, Duékoué, Petit Duékoué and Bloquein.
175 the ONUCI knew, it was present and it did nothing” (2012).
A wave of civilian massacres spread across the West as the FRCI army took over the region. As an international consultant working with the CDVR, my primary role was to help organize child statement-taking sessions at the national truth commission. The most shocking thing that emerged from this testimony was a large body of evidence demonstrating systematic efforts to eradicate the Guéré communities in Western Côte d’Ivoire.154 In the region surrounding Duékoué and Bangolo, we collected accounts of FRCI and traditional hunters (known as Dozos) systematically raping children and burning families alive as collective punishment.155 Child testimonies described the FRCI actively seeking out men and boys for mass execution. Their testimonies included descriptions of their fathers, uncles and brothers being lined up and killed by Dozos and men in FRCI uniforms. Survivors and NGO staff described the massacre sites as
“littered with personal identity cards”, a detail supporting the claim that the FRCI were systematically targeting ethnic Guéré men and boys.156 These statements are part of a significant body of evidence pointing to an ethnic cleansing campaign of the Guéré by the FRCI forces.
154 In some cases, Guéré families were burned alive in local churches, a death presumably chosen for its symbolic meaning in a war that – by this point in time – had taken on a religious dimension. It should be noted that leaders of the religious community on both sides, Muslims and Christians, were for large part vocal advocates of peaceful resolution during the Ivorian war. On numerous occasions, members of both sides took significant risks to help and protect civilians of all faiths. Interview with Human Rights NGO staff, Duékoué, Côte d’Ivoire, August 2015. 155 As one social worker explained to me “there’s something sick left over here from the war. Duékoué has a problem with violence and especially with rape. We don’t understand. When I speak with the kids who come in, I’ve found that three quarters of them have been raped.” Director of a state-run social services center, Duékoué Côte d’Ivoire in interview with author August 2015.
156 There are equally Dioula or Burkinabe witnesses who recall being forced to show their identity cards before a massacre perpetrated by Gbagboist during the ‘Crise’. The following testimony is a case in point: CDVR Affair N°79 – ‘On April 9 2011 people came asking for identity cards. After that, six women went towards my older son, they too also killed. My son’s life was saved by some money one of my daughters had with her. The seventh day of the ceremonies for my dead son. While I was with my daughter-in-law, two other girls where killed as was my daughter-in-law and co-wife. My own daughter came to hide in my room with me, they threw tear gas and began firing on us. My daughter has been blind since that day” (See transcript of CDVR public hearings).
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Towards that end, the FRCI burned down villages and massacred an unknown number of civilians in all but five Guéré communities.157 This detail is significant. Given it appears this was an ethnic cleansing campaign targeting the full population and territory of the Guéré ethnic group, there is a strong case to be made that the FRCI committed an act of genocide.
The attack on Duékoué’s ‘Coca Cola Carrefour’ is the best-known episode in what appears to be an ethnic cleansing campaign perpetrated by the FRCI forces. As civilians fled their villages and sought shelter in the Catholic Mission, those fleeing were intercepted by FRCI forces and executed en masse at this now infamous intersection. The Red Cross recorded 816 victims in a single day, most of them men.158 An exact death toll from the massacre is unknown as mass grave sites in the area were never exhumed. The figure is likely significantly higher than the Red
Cross estimate, however, given testimony from survivors indicates most executions took place in the ‘bush’ where NGO workers could not go.159 In Duékoué, 27 000 people took refuge in the
Catholic Mission as their homes were pillaged and burned. Attacks of a similar nature followed in the villages of Moyen Cavally and Dix-Huit Montagnes.160 The presence of Michel Gueu, the
157 A witness before the ICC described this scene in his Guéré village (Ivoire Justice 2014) 158 On 12 May 2011, journalist Jean-Paul Mari reported to the ‘Nouvel Observateur’ that the massacre at the Carrefour and subsequent hunting down of civilian in the ‘brousse’ resulted in a minimum of 1000 deaths, and more likely 2000 dead in the single instant. The number would quickly drop to the Red Cross count of approximately 800, and remain so in official records to date. 159 In three separate interviews with former Red Cross volunteers stationed in the area during this period, they confirmed that – based on what they witnessed and learned afterwards - the massacres primarily took place in the surrounding forested areas where it was impossible to search for wounded and dead. In their shared opinion, the majority of deaths were never recorded.
160 Testimony and evidence collected by Red Cross volunteers prove that the execution of Guéré men and boys at Duékué Carrefour was not a unique event during April and May 2011. The following statement is from a conflict victim in Bangolo, a Yacouba town in the Northwest: “When they attacked Bangolo…the Dozos helped the Malinke take the land… There were 600 people dead in that attack, you see, they would never tell you these kinds of numbers. When we ran, they took over our lands and we can’t go back, everything is blocked off. I had three wives over my life and 24 children, I have nothing to leave them. There are at least 7 mass graves in Bangolo – we really
177 commander of FRCI ‘Operation Restore Peace and Democracy’, is an important detail in the claim that the campaign was one of calculated ethnic cleansing and not simply a group of deranged combatants acting on their own accord.161 On the 28th of March, just hours before the massacre began, Gueu was stationed in the outskirts of Duékoué. That presence indicates that a commander, operating under the auspices of an internationally coordinated mission, was in direct proximity of his forces as they massacred hundreds of civilians.
Two hundred ONUCI peacekeepers were also stationed less than one kilometer from the
Carrefour. These peacekeepers were within earshot of the massacre, much of it committed by machete and burning victims to death. The peacekeepers likely heard screaming and certainly saw smoke, yet they did not leave their base during the entire day of March 29 while the massacre took place. The following day, the ONUCI again did not leave their base to help civilians hiding in the bush and being hunted by Dozos. Soon after, a further massacre took place at Niably UN refugee camp where the citizens of Duékoué and its surrounding region lived in an overcrowded tent city after their villages and neighbourhoods were destroyed. Survivors of the attack explain that Dozos burned the camp and chased them into the forest. It is unknown how many people died, but the UN estimate is approximately 800. The camp was guarded by
UN peacekeepers who, once again, did not intervene.
In the official UN report on the Duékoué massacre, the peacebuilding mission congratulated
have no idea how many bodies are inside them, we know it must be somewhere between 1000 and 2000.” Conflict victim association leader in Bangolo, Côte d’Ivoire, August 2015. A key thing to note in this testimony is the fact that massacres in the Bangolo region led to reoccupation of contested lands by the same communities who supplied young fighters to the FRCI army. 161 Months before, he bragged on international news that the USA had personally assigned him the mission of taking the West (Varenne 2012).
178 itself for its work protecting civilians, stating, “thousands of lives were saved as a result of [the
ONUCI] strategy’. The report notably failed to describe who committed the killings or the nature of the deaths at the Carrefour, suggesting that a battle had ensued and the ONUCI honorably intervened (ONUCI 2011). Before releasing this official account, ONUCI also published an initial response to criticism for its failure to protect civilians in Duékoué. The statement read,
“Recognising that the ONUCI provides protection to civilians against
immediate threats of physical violence, within the limits of its capacity, the
first responsibility for protecting civilians falls on the national authorities of
Côte d’Ivoire” (UN Security Council 2011).
This statement is a confused, if not criminal, retreat from responsibility. In March 2011, the
ONUCI declared the FRCI the national army of Côte d’Ivoire and its RDR leaders the official government. In coordination with the French peacekeeping mission, the ONUCI provided military and tactical support to the FRCI throughout the Western mission during which time these and other massacres were committed by those very soldiers (Ivoire Justice 2014).
Declaring civilian protection ‘the first responsibility of the national authorities’ insidiously skirts the fact that ONUCI was, itself, the guarantor and military partner of the authority who committed these war crimes.
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The Abidjan Campaign
On April 4th, 2011, the French Licorne mission began bombings the Presidential Palace.162
Because UN Resolution 1975 did not authorise French military involvement as ground troops, the official record shows that Licorne provided air cover while the FRCI entered the palace and arrested Gbagbo (Notin 2013). In fact, the French forces cleared the corridor leading to the palace three times to allow the FRCI to enter and take the residence. After a third failure, the
French officers decided to complete the mission themselves. On April 11th Licorne officers took the palace, politely parking their tanks in the residence parking lot.163 As they handed presidential couple over to the ComZones, the international media captured images of Laurent Gbagbo, dishevelled and wearing a backward bulletproof vest, with his wife, Simone Gbagbo, in a torn sundress.
The week before, under Gbagbo’s orders, the FDS retreated to the presidential palace leaving
Abidjan’s civilian population unguarded against waves of FRCI fighters arriving from the North and West. On April 12th and 13th, the FRCI began pillaging Abidjan of everything that could be carried away. Cars were stolen from their owners, loaded with loot from raided homes and
162 The bombings were supported by UN forces. Former FRCI combatants and UN staff alleged that ONUCI actually fired on the Golf Hotel because an attack on the international community stationed there ensured that their role in the attack on the palace was in line with the terms of their Security Council assigned mandate. This account is confirmed by a ONUCI Sebroko staff member: “In truth, it was ONUCI in camouflage uniforms who fired on the Hotel. And no, the guys in charge of defending the Golf were not informed” (Varenne 2012). The claim is further supported by the fact that Gbagbo’s heavy weaponry was Russian made: powerful and not very precise, had it been their weapons firing on the ONUCI station, carnage would have followed rather than the minimal damage actually sustained. 163 Many pro-Gbagbo supporters believe that around 2000 people in the human belt were killed, but Gbagbo had ordered them all to go home by this point meaning the causalities sustained were only those people hiding inside the building (Interview with Charlie Watta, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, May 2015)
180 driven north. Vehicles that could not be moved were dismantled into parts and taken away in pieces. One witness at the CDVR public hearings described his car dealership, once containing
300 cars, completely emptied by FRCI forces (CDVR 2014b). Government ministries were emptied of computers, electronics, table and chairs. Only big businesses able to purchase private security or pay off the FRCI were left untouched.
Beyond looting, the invasion of Abidjan was marked by carnage on both sides. Many of the
FRCI were new recruits from villages who were visiting an urban hub for the first time. They were easily lost in the sprawling city and had no experience of urban warfare. As journalist
Leslie Varenne described, “the [FDS] slaughtered the kids like rabbits” (Varenne 2012). She recalls seeing a convoy of pickup trucks, loaded with the bodies of young recruits, being sent back north, but notes there is no official record of these trucks arriving at their supposed destination, or of their existence at all (ibid). Her observation is consistent with a pattern of remarkably low or simply absent casualty rates in official documentation of this period produced by the UN and the Ivorian government.
Official estimates are especially puzzling when contrasted with the incredible violence and carnage described in witness testimonies. “The number of dead in Côte d’Ivoire is very, very low,” said UN Special Representative Choi, as he quoted official UN statistics documenting
3000 dead throughout the course of the ten-year war. That figure supposedly also includes military deaths (ONUCI 2011). In contrast, the CDVR identified approximately 12 000 civilians killed or disappeared based on testimony collected over just three months of statement-taking.
Even within the ONUCI, every person I discussed casualty rates with recognized that the UN number is a major underestimate. This is because the official tally, I was told, only included bodies a UN operative personally observed and recorded. Without extensive investigations and
181 exhumations, it is impossible to accurately determine the death toll in Côte d’Ivoire’s civil war.
It is possible, however, to piece together an estimate from available evidence. On the FDS side, approximately 14,000 soldiers disappeared (Varenne 2012). Many FDS fled into exile when
Ouattara took power, however it is unlikely such a high number of ex-combatants made it to the refugee camps in Liberia and Ghana that housed Gbagbo militants.164 If one quarter of the combatants who disappeared from Gbagbo’s side were in fact killed, the death rate is already significantly higher than the official UN estimate.
That number does not yet include the unknown number of FRCI who never made it home. The death rate within FRCI was likely much higher than amongst the national security forces. That much can be gleaned from the testimony of surviving combatants who describe battles that turned into one-sided slaughter as young recruits faced Gbagbo’s professional army and war- weathered Liberian mercenaries.165 Although there are no official numbers for the FRCI death toll, there is some evidence. The UN funded demobilization program (DDR) for former combatants is widely understood by Ivorians as a form of payment to the FRCI recruits for their service to Ouattara.166 At the time Waga was signed, 110 000 fighters were destined to benefit
164 UNHCR gave 300,000 as an estimated total number of refugees who fled Côte d’Ivoire during the final months of the conflict. Approximately 30,000 refugees registered in Ghana and 240,000 registered at camps in Liberia. UNHCR facilitated the return of 40,000 refugees from Liberia and an additional 160,000 returned on their own (UNMIL 2015). In 2018, a total of 8,662 people still refused to return from Liberia. UNHCR assisted the return of 28,934 refugees from Ghana, leaving a total of 1,562 refugees and 379 asylum seekers still in the country in 2018 (UNHCR 2018). There are no publicly available numbers listing which asylum seekers or refugees were ex- combatants, however former combatants and their families are likely amongst those who refuse repatriation. Note that ADO’s amnesty law applied only to a specific list individuals. Former combatants who fled rather than changing sides at the end of the conflict would likely be arrested – or worst - if they returned to Côte d’Ivoire.
166 Recall that Gbagbo’s FDS forces were a trained military. After Gbagbo’s arrest, some willingly changed sides while others were arrested or went into exile, notably to refugee camps in Liberia and Ghana. As pro-Gbagbo street
182 from the UN demobilization program. The number shrank to 74 000 by the end of the post- electoral crisis, with 69 506 actually participating (ONUCI 2017). State authorities claim the number dropped so dramatically because most FRCI recruits simply wished to return to their pervious jobs. Knowing the realities of youth employment in Côte d’Ivoire, especially in rural areas, it is hard to imagine that two thirds of demilitarized combatants had jobs awaiting them at home or would turn down employment assistance when it was made freely available. Moreover, the DRR program was not exclusively a job placement project. Ex-combatants could also receive a lump sum payment; something very few young Ivorians would reject were they indeed alive to collect those benefits.
After adding the available evidence of military and civilian deaths, thirty thousand killed is a conservative estimate. Moreover, this number does not include the unknown thousands who died during the embargo on Côte d’Ivoire’s ports that cut medical supplies to a country at war. It also excludes non-violent deaths in communities cut from medical and other social services by the forces nouvelles occupation from September 2002 until April 2011. While acknowledging that the official number is an underestimate, the ONUCI claims it cannot revise the figure without forensic evidence and therefore must continue to use the admittedly low tally.167 There is another plausible explanation for the UN refusal to revise its misleading official records. The international military intervention was justified as support to a virtuous rebellion that brought the
gangs from the galaxie patriotique and ‘barragists’ were never recognised as commandants, they were not eligible for the DDR program. 167 Interview with ONUCI staff member, April 2014. Note there are other contexts where the UN does issue estimate numbers based on field reports. For example, the United Nations until recently provided frequent estimates on the death toll in Syria where UN operations have less access to information and battle sites due to the nature and intensity of fighting (Official updates on estimated deaths are available on UN News and the website of OHCHR, see: https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/12/1028511)
183 country from a xenophobic dictatorship to a liberal democracy. That mission would seem much less justifiable, however, were the real human costs of the regime change is taken into account.
The ICC in Côte d’Ivoire
The ICC formally launched investigations in Côte d’Ivoire on November 28, 2010. Laurent
Gbagbo and Blé Goudé jointly faced trial at the ICC for crimes against humanity, including the
Abobo market attack, the protest at the RTI radio station, the Women’s March in Abobo and a case of collective rape committed by the FDS forces (Malu 2016). Initially the ICC judges refused to confirm charges against Gbagbo, citing insufficient evidence. Rather than annulling the trial, however, the judges agree to postpone proceedings and gave the prosecutors additional time to prepare a case (ibid).
Côte d’Ivoire was not an original signatory to the Rome Statute. As the constituting document of the International Criminal Court, a country must join the Statute for the international court to exercise jurisdiction within its borders. In 2003, in what Mike McGovern refers to as an ‘act of spectacular brinkmanship’, then-President Gbagbo requested a referral from the UN Security
Council that would allow the ICC to open a preliminary dossier on crimes against humanity under his own rule (M. McGovern 2011). Presumably Gbagbo expected the investigations to be inconclusive and believed these findings would defuse allegations from human rights organizations and the French executive that he operated death squads in Abidjan. A decade later, this same ordinance opened the door for the ICC to claim jurisdiction in post-war Côte d’Ivoire.
Upon taking office, President Ouattara confirmed the earlier declaration and ratified the Rome
Statute.
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As the founding document of the ICC, the Rome Statute is the source of the international court’s legitimacy and jurisdiction. In the words of legal scholar J. Steffek, the statute gives the court
‘the prestige of being considered binding’ (2003). The Statute specifies that the court will only prosecute crimes against humanity, war crimes, the crime of genocide and, at some future point, also the crime of aggression. These crimes are established in international treaties and related legal instruments as systemic and gross violations of human rights and, as such, are deemed universally abhorrent to all members of humanity. Said in other terms, abhorrence of these crimes is considered a universal principle, making the wrongness of these atrocities a norm that does not change regardless of historical, cultural or political context (Goodale and Clarke 2010).
This is a positivist argument made by legal theorists like Judith Shklar who consider international criminal law to be an “annunciation of norms… that are already ‘there’” (Moyn
2012). In this positivist school, the ICC is the highest representative body of a “shared moral community that includes all of humanity” (Koskenniemi 2001).
Declaring crimes against humanity abhorrent to all peoples, in every context, is a declaration of the universal applicability of the ICC. Yet to actually grant an institution the authority to universally prosecute is a more complex matter, and one that depends on building and maintaining multiple sources of legitimacy (Steffek 2003). As stated, the court only has jurisdiction where sovereign states voluntarily recognize its authority. Its legitimacy is further dependent on the proper procedural operations of the court. One of the strongest criticisms facing the ICC today regards its inconsistent commitment to upholding the purportedly universal principles codified in its mandate. The seemingly political nature of decisions around who is and who is not put on trial undermines the legitimacy of the international justice system as a whole and the ICC in particular.
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This criticism is particularly strong amongst scholars and political leaders in Africa who note that, with the single exception of Georgia, no other continent is represented amongst indicted war criminals (Kiyani 2015). African legal theorist Edwin Bikundo recharacterizes the noble claim that “the ICC puts humanity in judgment over inhumanity”, writing “it would rather more accurately be put as one segment of humanity sits in judgment over another” (Bikundo 2012).
The objection from African legal theorists such as Bikundo is not a question of whether or not accused perpetrators ought to be held accountable. Their concern is with an apparent double standard in international justice. Mahmood Mamdani warns that the ICC has become a Western court that is used to try African crimes against humanity. He describes the ICC as the foundation of a bifurcated global system wherein “sovereignty is sacrosanct in the developed parts of the world but suspended in Africa and the Middle East”.
In Côte d’Ivoire, for example, France ignored a South African investigative team’s demands that perpetrators of the Hôtel Ivoire massacre be indicted to a French or international court. Yet, within the same period, French Prime Minister Villipin threatened Gbagbo with ICC indictment if he did not conform to the terms of the French dictated Linas-Marcoussis 2003 peace accord.
Globally, the ICC has targeted governments that are adversaries of the US and other key Security
Council members, while ignoring the actions of allies such as the former regime in Uganda and the present Rwandan government (Okafor and Ngwaba 2015). A pattern has emerged of Western powers, posing as human rights defenders, using the ICC as a tool to target leaders unpopular in the West while turning a blind eye to allies.
Selective accountability in Côte d’Ivoire undermined the claim that the ICC exists to enforce universal human rights laws and norms. The ICC opened proceedings against former President
Gbagbo and his Youth Minister when the crisis was still ongoing yet no member of the rebellion
186 has faced similar charges. In April 2015, President Ouattara took a clear position on the prospect of his own supporters going to trial. “I am hearing here and there that this is a victor’s justice”, he said, “but has there ever been such thing as a justice for the vanquished?” (Ivoire
Justice 2017). The statement sat uncomfortably with his counterparts at the ICC by unapologetically acknowledging that their judicial process was, clearly, one-sided.168 Although this was a fact anyone could observe, the integrity of the court required the semblance of impartiality.
Having secured an international trial for his rival, Ouattara unilaterally declared the limits of ICC jurisdiction in Côte d’Ivoire, announcing “henceforth we will judge everyone here, no one else is going to the ICC.” In response to this statement, the ICC Prosecutor’s Office simply told the international press, “[they did] not know what Alassane Ouattara meant by those words”. Rather than confronting him for a clear breech of legal principle, the Court simply feigned ignorance and suggested critics, “ask him about it” (Ivoire Justice 2017). Despite this vague response from the ICC, the chief legal team at the world’s highest court was undoubtedly aware of the implications of Ouattara’s statement. Even before Ouattara made the statement, he had shown to the world that the ICC was unwilling to exercise its authority against his wishes. In an embarrassing public confrontation between the prosecutors’ office and President Ouattara, the court had requested the transfer of former First Lady Simone Gbagbo to the ICC, citing the questionable legality of her trial process in Abidjan. 169 Ouattara refused and, after a short-lived
168Interview with President for Coalition for the ICC in Côte d’Ivoire by author, June 2014
169 For instance, the Ivorian court refused to subpoena key witnesses (i.e. General Mangou and Rebel Commander Soro). Without the witnesses, the defense refused to participate in the trial, yet the process continued without the defense or defendant, by order of the Court President.
187 dispute, the ICC retracted its demands.
Allowing Simone Gbagbo to face trial in Côte d’Ivoire set a precedent that blocked any further transfers to the international court, effectively protecting perpetrators in Ouattara’s camp from indictment. This is because the ICC concession on the permissibility of Simone Gbagbo being tried domestically was also a tacit concession that Côte d’Ivoire was henceforth considered capable of prosecuting war crimes at home. In accordance with the Rome Statute, that acknowledgement ended the jurisdiction of the ICC in Côte d’Ivoire. With this precedent in place, it is now very difficult to issue an international indictment against Soro or the ComZones responsible for ethnic cleansing in the West and massacres in Bouaké. Relying on the principle of complementarity enshrined in the Rome Statute, President Ouattara claims that the legal system of his nation is now sufficiently reformed to effectively try those most responsible for crimes against humanity committed during the civil war. To add some credence to his words, the
Ivorian Chief Justice launched investigations into eight key members of Ouattara’s military apparatus. That said, while pro-Gbagbo defendants wait in jail - some for years before even hearing the charges against them - the eight FRCI in question continue to hold high-ranking positions in business, politics and the military years after these investigations purportedly began.
The aim of ICC trial was not primarily a matter of delivering justice to the victims of grave atrocity. Were victims’ right the primary consideration of the international court, it would not have overlooked the gravest and most extensive documented civilian massacres. More than addressing victim needs, the ICC process sent a globally resounding message about acceptable and intolerable forms of governance in the international community. The one-sided trial of
Gbagbo before the ICC was a denunciation of not only him, but of those who supported him and their vision for the future of Côte d’Ivoire. The trial communicated to Ivorians and to
188 international onlookers that Gbagbo and what he stands for are abhorrent to universal humanitarian norms. The trial equally gave international sanction to the de facto amnesty
President Ouattara and his clan enjoy, leaving their crimes outside the scope of accountability and legitimizing the practical reality that the new regime is simply beyond judicial scrutiny.
Moreover, the message of Gbagbo’s criminality and Ouattara’s permissibility that the ICC communicated to the world was shaped by the direct intervention of President Ouattara. Of the approximately 500,000 registered victims, only 729 were chosen by the ICC prosecutors office to be represented at the court. Focusing on a small number of individuals as representative of the entire victims’ community placed significant power in the hands of the office responsible for making those selections. The ICC victim representative in Abidjan was a senior member of the war-era rebel government in the occupied north, personally appointed to this role by Ouattara.170
All other victim associations could only communicate with the ICC by applying through this office, which had the authority to accept or deny applications from victims wishing to give their account to the court. According to members of the victims’ community, this office succeeded for four years in carefully curating all communication between victims and the ICC.171 The fact that it took years from the ICC to discover the manipulations happening at their victim affairs office, demonstrates the profound disconnect between the court’s understanding of post-conflict Côte d’Ivoire and realities on the ground.
170 The ICC requested the director’s removal once his role in the civil war was discovered, but only years after the investigations and court proceedings were underway (Director of Adjamé victim’s association in interview with author March 2015). 171 Interview by author with victim’s association director, Adajmé Côte d’Ivoire, April 2015
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Navigating Legal Principle and Procedure
When accused of inconsistency and bias in the Ivorian case, the ICC prosecutor’s office cites correct legal procedure as the source of its legitimacy in the Gbagbo-Goudé trial. In a telling moment, Chief Prosecutor Bensouda was speaking to a victims’ association in Abidjan when an audience member accused the ICC of destabilizing the country and jeopardizing their chance at reconciliation with its one-sided trial. She acknowledged this as true but countered that the ICC
“had their procedure and it must be respected.”172 Similarly, when lawyer for the prosecution,
Paolina Massidda, was asked in an interview about justice for the victims of the Duékoué
Carrefour massacre, she simply answered “it is the primary responsibility of Côte d’Ivoire to inquire into these incidents” (Ivoire Justice 2016a). 173 As matters of pure legal procedure, both lawyers made true statements, however their words imply that procedural correctness can supersede all other factors including national stability, fair application of the law and a victim right to be treated equality before the law.
By retreating into a language of legalism, the prosecutor’s office shielded itself from responsibility for the political consequences of its operations. 174 Citing an unwavering
172 President of PK18 victims’ association in interview with author, Abobo Côte d’Ivoire May 2015. 173 As legal experts with experience working in Côte d’Ivoire, both Mrs. Massidda and Mrs. Bensouda were aware that the victims of atrocities committed by Ouattara’s forces would not find justice at an Ivorian court. Indeed, Massidda’s recourse to procedural legitimacy is a strange response, at best, given she started the same interview with a moving statement that her priority is to understand the daily life and realities facing Ivorian conflict victims.
174 It is a not a new observation that international criminal trials are politicized endeavors. As Odero explains, international criminal justice cannot operate outside the realm of political realities. Likewise, Sarah Nouwen and Wouter Werner have conducted empirical work demonstrating that international criminal trials are an irreducibly political process (Nouwen and Werner 2010). Shklars explains, ‘the deliberate isolation of the legal system—the treatment of law as a neutral social entity—is itself a refined political ideology, the expression of a preference.’’ Indeed, this is a position shared by legal scholars at the foundation of international criminal justice, Kelsen and Hart, both legal positivists, who theorize that the ‘age-old conviction’ that law does something other than politics is an ideology that is itself a political position.
190 commitment to procedural correctness permits the ICC to distance itself from the real-life resentment and conflict that one-sided justice is fermenting in postwar Côte d’Ivoire. When asked to comment on the political impacts of the Gbagbo trial, then ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis
Moreno-Ocampo excused himself from responsibility for the political blowback by stating, “I have a judicial mandate; I cannot be involved in other aspects of politics, it’s not my domain, not my area” (Sagan 2010). These words insinuate that the court is somehow insulated from criticism by the sacrosanct nature of its legal procedures, as though its actions and their consequences exist somewhere beyond the lived reality of victims and their communities. The problem with this stance is even more pronounced when we consider that that legalistic appeal is inconsistently applied to the work of the court.
The ICC operates according to contradicting claims about its jurisdiction and admissibility. On one hand, the court claims borderless jurisdiction by appealing to the universal humanitarian norms. Judith Shklar’s idiom that the moral principles operationalized by the ICC are ‘already out there’ in the fabric of humanity captures this point. On the other hand, the court purports that its operations happen in the technical realm of legal proceedings and cannot be bound by principles such as fairness and equity, or by ethical demands like preserving peace and stability, when those concerns interfere with its proper legal procedure. The Ivorian example demonstrates how these contradicting claims are deployed to justify a one-sided justice process, beholden to the interests of powerful global and national stakeholders. On one side, Gbagbo and Goudé were put on trial in an appeal to the universal ethical standard that justice must be done for their crimes against the people of Côte d’Ivoire. On the other, when the question of criminality in
Ouattara’s camp is raised, ICC representatives invoke the sanctity of procedure and the importance of respecting slow and seemingly unfair legal practices, even when it threatens peace
191 and undermines victims’ rights.
Without explicitly deeming them innocent, the ICC implicitly agreed to impunity for the
Ouattara regime and the ComZones. The court also maintained the effective immunity in place for members of the international peacebuilding mission and the French military, themselves allegedly responsible for bombing civilian locations and other assaults resulting in civilian
175 deaths: acts similar to the crimes for which Gbagbo stood trial. The ICC deemed one camp abhorrent to humanity while the actions of the other were perhaps wrong, but were nonetheless permissible enough to be overlooked. Ouattara, his supporters and the internationals forces backing him are outside the reach of justice, and not because they are innocent. When challenged on its selectivity, the ICC never denied potential war crimes committed by Ouattara’s forces.
Instead it references the limits of the international court procedures, essentially saying certain criminality is not justiciable in the international community. In the Côte d’Ivoire example, we see that the moral imperative enshrined in universal humanitarian law that war criminals must face accountability is, in practice, relative to the standing of those criminals in the global order.
The ICC upheld a set of liberal principles fundamental to contemporary global governance that ensure some war criminals are punished while others are tolerated. That said, the line drawn by
175 A massive anti-French protest responding to the French bombardment of the Ivorian air forces formed on November 9, 2004 outside the chic Hôtel Ivoire where the French Ambassador was seeking cover. In response to the escalating situation, French troops in helicopters and stationed on the hotel roof fired on the crowd of protesters, killing sixty-three and injuring an unknown number (estimates range from ‘several dozen’ to more than four hundred) (Mas 2004). President Thabo Mbeki sent a team of South African investigators whose report recommended the indictment of French General Henri Poncet for crimes against humanity. No domestic or international court has acted, however. Accounts of the French involvement in attacks on Abidjan University are contested. FHB University was attacked in the chaos at the end of the war and thus was not followed by an official an investigation. My knowledge of French involvement in that attack comes from interviews with two eye- witnesses, one with the FESCI National Office who was living in the university at the time and a second with a human rights NGO worker.
192 the ICC between punishable and permissible war crimes does not reflect liberal values as they are classically understood in principles such as the equality of all people and respect for human rights. A one-sided trial in which some victims have an inalienable right to justice while other victims go unacknowledged is untenable in a classical understanding of liberalism. The Ivorian transitional justice process, with the ICC serving as its primary accountability institution, instead aligned justice-seeking with the moral standards of a neoliberal global order. Under neoliberal governance, liberal democratic values are moral imperatives until they interfere with market principles and the sacrosanct status of elite interests. From this perspective, Ouattara’s effective exoneration is unrelated to questions of his guilt or innocence. He was committed to rebuilding
Côte d’Ivoire according to an aggressive neoliberal reform agenda whereas Gbagbo’s continued rule was demonstrably bad for trade and business. The trial demonstrated that the international community was devoted to post-conflict justice, but that justice has certain limits in the contemporary global order. By invoking the legitimacy of universal humanitarian norms and principles to enforce those limits, the ICC helped establish a new moral order in post-conflict
Côte d’Ivoire under which the court’s distinction between punishable and permissible war criminals as not only functionally enforceable but also morally defensible.
4.1. Conclusion,
Many Gbagbo supporters argue his indictment, indeed the entire foreign military intervention in
Côte d’Ivoire, was a global plot to halt and punish his efforts to bring socialism to West Africa.
Although there are reasons to feel some sympathy for this Gbagboist view, this is not my meaning when pointing to the two presidents’ respective governing agendas as key to
193 understanding their different treatment by the international criminal justice system. The possible existence of a global plot against Gbagbo is a separate matter from his culpability for war crimes.
Gbagbo was indicted on evidence pointing to his involvement in grave human rights violations.
As we saw in the last pages, there are grounds to debate whether that evidence was credible and sufficient enough to justify an ICC indictment. Nevertheless, terrible violence was committed in his name, if not by his direct orders. Given those facts, judicial action against him was consistent with the ICC’s mandate.
The more pertinent point is that the ICC overlooked significant evidence implicating Ouattara and his ComZones in war crimes that were much graver than those for which Gbagbo stood trial.
The ICC is an international judicial institution built on liberal principles such as the inalienability of human rights and equality before the law. How did this institution determine that one side committed punishable war crimes yet deem the crimes of the other permissible enough to overlook? As an IMF economist committed to neoliberal restructuring, Ouattara had influential allies in powerful countries, and he rebuilt Côte d’Ivoire in the interests of the global trade and finance community. We are now nearing the end of his two terms in office. During this period, the country far exceeded all projections made at the time of his inauguration for economic growth, expanding industry and attracting foreign investments (Diawara 2017). Simply put, the benefits of Ouattara’s presidency to a global political and business elite trumped the ostensible universality of humanitarian law. That observation alone is not so enlightening; it is a widely observed reality of the global justice system that the ‘universalism’ of international humanitarian law slips away when the interests of powerful countries or stakeholders are at risk (Mamdani
2009; Bikundo 2012; Okafor and Ngwaba 2015).
The question then becomes, why did the ICC pursue trials at all? An international criminal trial
194 at the Hague is highly visible and exceedingly expensive. In the Ivorian case, the court used that platform to undermine its own stated principles of universality of human rights and equality before the law. The ICC risked its already jeopardized reputation, threatened stability in post- conflict Côte d’Ivoire, and invested huge financial and human resources in the ultimately futile pursuit of one-sided justice. Considering those high stakes, influential members of the international community must have deemed it profoundly important to both shield Ouattara and his clan from accountability, and also to see Gbagbo and his supporters denounced on the international stage. But what could make those aims crucial enough to justify the significant cost? International justice mattered greatly to the Ouattara regime and its global partners for reasons that had little to do with accountability. Gbagbo’s ICC trial saw the highest body in international justice declare before the world, in the language of universal humanitarian norms and principles, who was right and who was wrong in the Ivorian conflict.
Putting a former head of state on trial at the ICC for crimes against humanity sent a powerful message to Ivorians and to onlookers everywhere about acceptable and criminal leadership. That message declared some leaders can permissibly commit war crimes, but other leaders must be punished for these heinous acts. Drawing this parameter between permissible and punishable war criminals limited the moral obligation to right past wrongs in postwar Côte d’Ivoire, and it did so in the name of universal humanitarian law. That work – limiting the scope of moral obligation – is the means by which transitional justice establishes neoliberal moral order in post-conflict contexts. Under neoliberal moral order, good governance ascribes to liberal democratic values, but it is a vision of liberal democracy that prioritizes market-oriented and business-friendly governance, even at the cost of citizen wellbeing and core liberal principles like equality and rule of law. Establishing that new moral order in the Ivorian context meant the Ouattara regime
195 would qualify as a good and just government, regardless of the inequalities it sows or the immunity it grants powerful elites, even when those elites are directly implicated in war crimes.
Chandra Sriram writes that, as a central component of peacebuilding, the institutions of transitional justice play an important role instilling liberal governance in the wake of atrocities
(Sriram 2007). As predicted by Sriram, the new Ivorian regime and its partners in the international community called upon the ICC to lay the ideological foundations for a new governance era in Côte d’Ivoire. In doing so, the ICC established that justice matters, but that there is a hierarchy amongst victims’ rights and that there are other priorities, more important than being rights-respecting and just, in the version of liberal governance that the international community wants for post-conflict states. Selective justice in Côte d’Ivoire reflected a version of liberalism in which human rights and freedoms matter, but only to the extent those principles do not impinge on the interests and privileges of the ruling elite and its international allies.
196
5. The Profits of Pardon
Introduction
Transitional justice offers few solutions when it comes to addressing economic and social injustice. This much is documented in critical works by Mamdani, Mani, McEvoy, Nesiah, and others (Mamdani, 2002; Mani, 2005; McAdams 2011; McEvoy 2008; McGovern and Lundy
2008; Miller 2008; Nesiah 2016). Chandra Leka Sriram takes the argument further, recognising a connection between transitional justice and the central role of neoliberalism in contemporary peacebuilding efforts (2007). She warns that advancing neoliberalisation in post-conflict states undermines transitional justice efforts because free market reforms tend to destabilise a recovering state and thus risk perpetuating further conflict. Her concern is with the timeline of market liberalisation within peacebuilding, noting it coincides with transitional justice and thus may undermine the processes (Sriram 2007). I make a different contention in this dissertation, instead claiming there is a close alignment between the aims and impacts of transitional justice and neoliberal reforms in post-conflict states. Transitional justice institutions do not merely parallel neoliberal reforms, these processes actively advance elite-led and market-oriented governance.
197
In Côte d’Ivoire, President Ouattara’s regime and their partners in the global governance community pursued post-conflict justice and reconciliation as auxiliary outcomes to economic growth and business success. On the surface these aims may seem unrelated, however, in practice, transitional justice supported postwar neoliberalisation by aligning renewed standards of moral and just governance with neoliberal principles. Transitional justice thus gave legitimacy to aggressive post-conflict restructuring as rights-respecting and democratic policies, even as those policies advanced business interests and elite dominance at the cost of neglecting victims’ needs and citizen wellbeing. This chapter follows the postwar neoliberalisation of Côte d’Ivoire, illustrating the dynamics that connected neoliberal restructuring to profiteering during the conflict and to peacebuilding efforts in the aftermath.
First Wave Neoliberalism in Côte d’Ivoire
Côte d’Ivoire first adopted a neoliberal development model in the 1990s. Prior to this shift, the first three decades after independence were shaped by a political and economic policy often referred to as Houphouetisme after the first Ivorian President, Félix Houphouet-Boigny.
Houphouetisme was a style of governance based on national integration and state-led development schemes seen in many newly independent African countries in the 1960s and 1970s
(Boone 2007). FHB’s rule was further characterised by a close relationship to France.
Considered a model of France Afrique, Côte d’Ivoire actively deepened ties to Paris (Ipinyomi
198
2012).176 European and, particularly, French business dominated the Ivorian cocoa and coffee industry, preserving an economic relationship that offered considerable benefits to elites from the former colonial power as well as the emergent ruling class in Côte d’Ivoire.
Côte d’Ivoire prospered under this model for a period. Just before rapid economic decline began in the 1980s, Côte d’Ivoire had the highest GDP amongst non-oil-producing African countries
(Hecht 1983).177 As supplier of more than 40% of the world’s cocoa, Houphouet-Boigny’s Côte d’Ivoire enjoyed a constant influx of wealth. This fortune was collected and managed by a central marketing board known as the Caisse de stabilisation or simply, the Caisse. The Caisse set a fixed price for purchasing cocoa from local farmers. When global demand favoured profit, the Caisse sold at a higher price on foreign markets but maintained a stable buying price at home.
Although this meant farmers lost out in boom times, they received advance pay from the Caisse when global prices lulled or harvests waned, thus ensuring a consistent, if modest, income. When global prices rose, the state retained the surplus gained from cocoa exports. These profits were not insignificant: during one price boom in the late 1970s, market surpluses and export levies flowing into the Caisse amounted to 16% of the country’s total GDP (Ibid). Thus, well beyond merely compensating farmers in poor harvest years, the Caisse served Côte d’Ivoire as a national bank account. The Houphouet regime used its revenue for infrastructure and social services, notably making major investments in education (Ibid). Houphouet and his extensive political
176 In Houphouet’s own words, “Côte d’Ivoire would not be seduced by the lure of independence….” Indeed, the independence era President was known for his weekly phone calls to Jacques Foccard of the notorious ‘Bureau d’Afrique’ and for the subterranean tunnel connecting his basement to the French Embassy, a precaution against his population attempting to rise against either pillar of authority.
177 Côte d’Ivoire in the 1970s had a GDP of $1,110 USD per capita (Hecht 1983).
199 class also became exceedingly wealthy thanks to vast private fortunes skimmed off the Caisse during surplus years (Okereke, Racheotes and Linstrum 2012).178
As lifetime President of a one-party state, FHB tightly controlled all spheres of governance through a combination of reward and intimidation. He alone held authority over appointments to government posts and personally controlled the distribution of contracts for any major business venture (Boone 2007). In addition to distributing direct monetary perks to his allies in the ruling class, Houphouet also controlled all national industries and exports in an extensive patrimonial network. Houphouetisme relied on vast syndicates that linked labourers to local leaders, and those leaders to agribusiness bosses. The industry bosses, in turn, were directly managed by
Houphouet and high-ranking members of his one-party state. Thus, in essence, Houphouetisme was a vast system of personal ties linking each migrant labourer straight up to President
Houphouet-Boigny himself (ibid).
During the 1970s, cocoa and coffee together accounted for 69% of Côte d’Ivoire’s national revenue, generating a profitable but ultimately precarious national income. When the global price of cocoa began dropping in 1978, the Ivorian economy fell rapidly into crisis (Hecht 1983).
Houphouet-Boigny attempted to reverse the price decline by blocking Ivorian exports and thus severing half the world supply of chocolate. Rather than reviving the price, stockpiling Ivorian cocoa allowed the nascent industry in Asian to thrive. Two years later, Côte d’Ivoire was forced back into the global market, much weakened in its bargaining power and facing new competition. Compounding the nation’s financial struggles, Côte d’Ivoire lost 75% of its public
200 investments with the hike in oil prices from 1975 to 1990 (Glossman 1981). By 1990, the
Houphouet regime was in desperate need of an international bail-out. As a condition of IMF funding, Alassane Ouattara was appointed to the post of Prime Minister. In this capacity, the US educated economist and IMF Director was tasked with implementing an extensive structural adjustment program (SAP).
Neoliberalism first became pervasive in global governance circles through the deployment of
SAPs programs by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). SAPs were policy tools developed to enforce aid conditionality in the decades following the global debt crisis.179 The loans required recipient states to adopt a broad list of reforms based on
Washington Consensus principles. Recipients were required to dismantle and sell off state industries, to privatize the public sectors and banks, to strengthen private property laws and attract foreign investment by dismantling trade barriers and setting market-determined exchange rates. Structural Adjustment Programs also demanded tax reforms that would reduce the burden on high-income earners. The IMF and WB blamed corrupt and overreaching governments for the global debt crisis and thus required governments to slash public spending in sectors deemed extraneous to growth: a policy that especially targeted education, healthcare and welfare institutions (Williamson 2002). Under the slogan of protecting developing economies from
179 This group of US-based global finance regulation firms gained their immense influence over the national policy of foreign states during a period known as the global debt crisis. In 1971, US President Richard Nixon put an end to the ‘gold standard’ with the announcement that foreign-held US dollars would no longer be convertible into gold. The result was a dramatic increase in the value of US gold reserves while the value of the US dollar, in relation to gold, plummeted. A colossal gap in wealth formed between countries like the United States and Great Britain who keep their reserves in gold, and poorer states whose reserves were kept in US dollars. The effect was a massive net transfer of wealth to the North, mirrored by the collapse of national reserves in the South (Graeber 2012). Much of the world was saddled with debts vastly beyond national income and with interest alone threatening perpetual bankruptcy. Survival of the states shaken by the debt crisis would depend on the availability of foreign financial assistance. That assistance came from the IMF and WB, but with strings attached.
201 crooked politicians and extravagant centralized states, indebted states were required to dismantle government control, resulting in a transfer across the developing world of state authority into the hands of foreign institutions and private enterprise (Ayers 2008).
In Côte d’Ivoire, Prime Minister Ouattara implemented an SAP program aimed at promoting export-led growth by eliminating protective trade barriers and forcing privatization of nationally owned industries (Mahieu 1995 ). In an attempt to increase ‘comparative advantage,’ he and his partners at the IMF reaffirmed the country’s national dependence on cocoa exports. The IMF further demanded extensive cuts to the ‘inefficient allocations of resources, primarily in social spending” (Klass 2008). In compliance, Prime Minister Ouattara reduced the state budget by three quarters in his first year in office. Almost overnight the former IMF technocrat dismantled
Houphouet’s elaborate patrimonial state, resulting in thousands of state or state-subsidized employees losing their jobs and benefits.
Economists critical of structural adjustment programs cite IMF restructuring in Côte d’Ivoire as an emblematic case of the model’s failure (Rodrick 2016; Lambert, Schneider and Suwa 1991).
Agribusiness initially did well in the newly unregulated and export-driven economy, but overproduction of coffee and cocoa soon led to a further collapse of export prices. The national debt crisis once again deepened and by the mid-1990s IMF borrowing placed Côte d’Ivoire’s foreign debt at 231% of its GDP. In 1994, France unilaterally devalued the CFA: a common
African currency shared by fourteen former French colonies. Currency devaluation made Ivorian cocoa again attractive for trade, but it doubled the price of imported commodities and halved the value of the average Ivorian’s personal savings (Ipinyomi 2012). Austerity and market-oriented growth thus restored wealth to industry tycoons and their foreign investors, but it pushed much of the emerging middle class back into poverty and rendered the poor unable to afford even basic
202 necessities (ibid). Structural readjustment did not merely fail to resolve the economic crisis, it ultimately compounded the country’s many troubles by launching a new era of political unrest.
Laurent Gbagbo rose to power on a platform of nationalization, socialism and pan-Africanism in the economic and political turmoil unleashed by harsh austerity measures. Starting his career as a young trade unionist, Gbagbo was a Sorbonne educated socialist and well-connected in Parisian leftist circles. Gbagbo criticized the 1990s neoliberal reforms, calling them ‘mystificatory pageantry’ deployed to hide the fact that the vast majority of the country’s wealth still ended up in the hands of a small number of Ivorian elites and their French associates (Ipinyomi 2012). As a demagogue with a knack for manipulating his audience, he glorified his background as a poor farmer from a Krou village, lamenting the disenfranchisement of noble autochthones by Boualé elites and Dioula ‘strangers’. At the time of his emergence on the Ivorian political scene, this image gained Gbagbo a fiercely dedicated following among both rural farmers and Abidjan’s left-wing youth.
Once in power, Gbagbo did not prove the community-minded socialist democratic he claimed to be. His economic agenda nevertheless nationalized key sectors and threatened French trade interests. President Gbagbo diversified foreign investment in Côte d’Ivoire and sought new trade partners (Frindéthié 2016). His government also designed and began implementing a universal healthcare system and reversed austerity measures by reinvesting in basic education (Ibid). In the Western agricultural belt, farmers once again felt secure thanks to the promised return of price controls.180 At the same time, Gbagbo let infrastructure fall into disrepair and displayed open favouritism to his home region when distributing state funds. Gbagbo also personally
180 Focus group interview of cocoa cooperative members with author, Grand Beriby, Côte d’Ivoire August 2015.
203 accumulated huge private wealth from skimming cocoa industry profits and was known to use public cash to fund the lavish personal indulgences of his family and friends.
While Gbagbo cultivated an image as a ‘man of the people,’ Ouattara, his greatest political rival, presented himself as a cosmopolitan gentleman with fine manners and good taste. Gbagbo’s supporters celebrated their President’s reputation for cracking jokes, dancing at public events, and stopping his motorcade to urinate on the side of the road (“just like any man would do!”)181
Gbagbo calls his wife ‘comrade’ and, while in power, both husband and wife openly had affairs.
Gbagbo even married one mistress as a second wife, claiming her Muslim faith allowed the bigamous marriage (and ignoring his own professed devotion to Evangelicalism). In contrast,
Ouattara lived the majority of his life as a jet-setting technocrat and member of Africa’s top elite.
He is married to a high society French woman who, in her own right, is one of the wealthiest business owners in Côte d’Ivoire. It is hard to imagine two more differing political figures than
Ouattara and Gbagbo; the latter, a gregarious demagogue and the former, a well-groomed cosmopolitan.
Correspondingly, Ouattara and Gbagbo held vastly different visions of Côte d’Ivoire’s future.
Gbagbo was preparing to withdraw from the French controlled common West African currency
(CFA), he began nationalizing industry and sought to weaken France’s hold on the Ivorian economy. Ouattara, in contrast, imagined Côte d’Ivoire as regional economic powerhouse: a market-oriented haven for business and investment, closely aligned to French geopolitical
181 This anecdote about stopping the presidential motorcade to urinate was so frequency explained to me that it seems important to add. One older woman had tears in her eyes when she recounted seeing one such scene on TV. The story is silly, but it also speaks to an important dynamic of Gbagbo’s popularity. His supporters were attracted to him because he was not the snobby elite, beholden to France, many Ivorians associated with governance: he seemed an average Ivorian and, as such, appeared to represent average Ivorian interests.
204 interests in the region. Beneath the political landscape detailed in previous chapters, these competing visions for the economic future of Côte d’Ivoire were strong undercurrents of the conflict, driving the course of the ten-year civil war and shaping its aftermath.
ComZone Inc.
Just months into the rebellion, the rebel commander Ibrahim Coulibaly (IB) was sent urgently to
Paris by Burkina President Blaise Compoaré. He was arrested immediately upon arrival under charges of attempting to overthrow the Ivorian state. It was a strange charge given high levels of the French Ministry of Defense met regularly with both IB and Compaoré during the months before. Later that day Guillaume Soro was declared the new head of the rebellion.182 Following the change in leadership, ComZones who refused to switch allegiances were massacred with their men. Most notably, Fofié and his éléments arrested the IB-aligned ComZone of Korhogo and sixty of his men, locking them in a shipping container under the desert sun. All but one suffocated to death, prompting the first – and only – UN sanctions against a rebel leader for war crimes (Varenne 2012).183
The rebellion was no longer simply a military operation once Soro assumed full leadership. It soon became a complex political and financial machine ready to dig in for a long fight. On
182 The announcement was made by ADO himself, even though Ouattara officially had no connection with the rebellion until after the 2010 elections. The replacement bewildered the ComZones, all trained military men who had always considered Soro a bookish student leader. Moreover, it was IB himself who had introduced Soro to Compoaré years before. It was also IB who convinced the ComZones to accept Soro’s leadership as the political head of the rebellion despite the misgivings of the military men he commanded (Pigeaud 2015). 183 During the transition to Soro’s leadership, IBs closest allies were also assassinated: Félix Doh, Zaga Zaga and the notorious Liberian warlord, Sam Bockarie. Today, Fofana leads the Ivorian national army’s Western Battalion of the restructured military.
205
September 24th, 2003, the rebels broke into the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO) in
Bouake and stole approximately 30 million euros. This money was used to create the ‘Central’: the financial engine of the rebellion that allowed them to purchase weaponry in the short term and – in preparation for a long struggle – to begin exploiting the natural resources of more than
60% of the national territory. With that capital, Soro secured the long-term financial viability of the rebellion by establishing an industry network that channeled the North’s resource wealth directly to his rebel commanders.184
The occupied north was divided into operational areas and placed under the command of eight rebel leaders, called Commandents du Zone or simply ComZones. Each ComZone controlled resource extraction in their territory, sending 30% of revenues to the central and keeping the rest for operations and personal profits.185 The rebellion contracted buyers for cotton, cocoa, minerals, lumber, mines and land. Burkina Faso, an arid Sahel country, became a world leader in cocoa export, with 500 tons of cocoa processed each day at the border facilities in Bobo-
Dioullaso.186 The rebels also granted vast expanses of land to Burkinabe migrants to clear and cultivate. The scheme had the advantage of winning supporters while further profiting the rebels thanks to a booming forestry industry (Varenne 2012). Despite large revenues and a functioning administration, the rebellion did not provide public services to the population in the occupied
North. Under Soro’s authority, the Central funded the war and lined the pockets of ComZones, leaving the region with no schools, infrastructure maintenance or medical facilities. Throughout
184 Interview with ComZone, Abidjan May 2014. 185 Soro Alphonse, President of RDR Youth League in interview with the author, May 2015. 186 Mr. Adama Bitogo, a close ally of Alassane Ouattara, was in charge of transporting Ivorian cocoa through the rebel zone and out of Côte d’Ivoire through the Burkina Faso border to a facility in the town of Bobo-Dioullasso where 500 tons of cocoa were processed a day. The cocoa was then sold to SOEXIMEX, a Luxembourg holding, with banking coordinated by Credit Lyonnais in Paris (Onana 2011).
206 the ten-years of partition, Gbagbo’s government paid for electricity, water and state salaries in the northern region.187
Once the rebellion’s military power was consolidated in the northern half of country, the rebel leaders turned their attention to accruing personal profits. The rebellion fostered good relations with the French by respecting expatriates and their businesses in the occupied North. Small acts of restraint early in the war, such as compensating damages and electing not to loot French businesses in Bouaké, won over the French and international media. Sparing French businesses seems less generous, however, in light of the fortunes amassed by the ComZones and their men from pillaging towns and racketeering long stretches of highway. Pillaged war bounty was further subsidized by millions accrued smuggling cocoa, cotton, lumber, diamonds, gold and other minerals out of the country.188 The rebels used the chaos of partition to circumvent standard regulations and establish a plethora of ComZone owned and operated industries. In the post-conflict period, businesses launched or seized during the partition are some of country’s most successful. As war victors seemingly impervious to calls for accountability, these warlords
187 Even Christopher Notin, a staunch Gbagbo critique and French military historian, admits this. In his account, he declares one of Gbagbo’s greatest crimes against the North was to shut off the electricity during Ramadan. In a moment foreshadowing the years to come, when ADO finally assumed power, his government sent Northern citizens their bills for unpaid water and electricity used in the region during the ‘crisis’ months after Ouattara was declared President but before Gbagbo stepped down.
188 The UN estimated that Wattao alone earned 640 million CFA (975,000 euros) annually from illegal cocoa exports passing through his comzone (Malo 2010 ). A separate UN report estimated he made a total of 1,45 million euros annually once the additional money earned from smuggled lumber, coffee, diamonds and luxury cars was included (BBC 2020). Wattao’s Bouaké base was strategically central on trade routes and he enjoyed high standing in the forces nouvelles, meaning he likely profited more than most other Comzone. Even still, these estimates give a sense of the war bounty extracted by the FN leadership. Overall, the UN estimated that 10% of all cocoa produced during the war years was expropriated and smuggled by the ComZones (Ibid). In a 2014 UN expert report on the Ivorian diamond trade, the researchers found that Wattao – at that time still a high-ranking member of the military – and his former soldiers were still collecting payments from diamond smugglers in exchange for allowing illegal exports of rough diamonds (A. S. Konan 2020).
207 are now business tycoons, running industries in the North and using the profits to buy up newly privatized sectors in the South (Jeune Afrique 2016).
Since the conflict ended, the rewards of war-era profiteering and expropriation were transformed by the postwar national development strategy into core sectors of the Ivorian economy.
ComZones have since accrued massive personal fortunes by refashioning themselves as successful business leaders and rebranding their war bounty as productive sectors of a fast- growing economy. The former rebel leadership has transformed into a new class of industry chiefs, growing massive fortunes from resource wealth in the North while doing little for the selfsame population they ostensibly fought a ten-year civil war to rescue from the oppression of the South.
Developing the North
Today’s profits are a direct inheritance from yesterday’s war economy. The most lucrative example of this are so-called ‘artisanal’ mines. First opened by the ComZones during the war, and today a major source of foreign investment and a cornerstone of the restructured national economy.189 ComZone Wattao, for example, built an ‘artisanal’ gold mine during the war that he
189 Artisanal mines refer to ad hoc mining operations done by hand on a small, local scale. Although they perhaps started this way during the civil war, these mines are now sophisticated operations, owned by the ComZones and other high-ranking members of the Ouattara regime, and run with significant foreign investment from European, US and Canadian mining companies. The operations and in some cases even the whereabouts are highly classified information. Some limited details of war era mining operations were described to me during an interview with ComZone Vechto, June 2014. Further details were described in an interview with a group of sex workers who were trafficked in 2014 as part of a larger operation run by the former ComZones to bring young Dioula sex workers from urban areas as detained ‘wives’ for mine workers.
208 still owns and operates, generating upwards of 80 million euros in revenue each year (Duhem
2016).
Côte d’Ivoire is home to a geological feature believed to hold the world’s largest untapped gold and diamond reserves (Jeune Afrique 2014). The mineral rich band is the same geological reserve that made Ghana the continent’s top gold exporter and plunged Sierra Leone into a civil war fueled by conflict diamonds. An estimated 30% of the Ivorian territory is covered by this mineral-rich geological band. If prospector estimates are correct, its size dwarfs the sections in bordering countries (Cote d’Ivoire Economie 2014). A new Mining Code written in 2014 created hundreds of exploration and exploitation permits, and opened massive new mining projects by
Canadian, Australian and French investors (Jeune Afrique 2016). 190 At that time, mining precious metals comprised less than 1% of GDP, however the sector expanded by 25% the following year, to generate 730 million euros in 2015. The expedited sale of exploitation contracts to foreign companies and significant investment in infrastructure for the northern Sahel region are part of a long-term strategy to grow the mining sector into one of the country’s largest industries (ibid).
The international development community and foreign businesses are working closely with the
Ouattara government to increase investment in the fast-growing Sahel mining industry (Jeune
Afrique 2014). The operations are celebrated in IFI and government reports for bringing new wealth to a historically disenfranchised region (World Bank 2015). Hundreds of kilometres of new power lines now provide electricity to remote towns that never before had such a luxury.
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Communities once isolated by crumbling dirt roads, impassable during downpours, are now connected by vast stretches of fresh asphalt. Villages once completely outside the national economy are buzzing with rumors of new job possibilities in a nearby industrial project. That said, while there is undeniably massive public and private investment funding infrastructure in the North, new paved roads, hotels and power stations primarily service barely inhabited mining areas. More than anything, the development boom is oriented towards resource extraction and creating a good business environment for foreign enterprise.
The mining sector returns significant profits to investors, but has had little impact on the more immediate local problems of unemployment and rural poverty (Jeune Afrique 2014). At the time of writing, the total national mining industry directly employed 6,000 Ivorians as fulltime workers (Jeune Afrique 2016).191 This is because the mines create few job opportunities appropriate for a region with little access to basic education, let alone the technical skill needed for employment in a modern mine. As a traditionally marginalized region, the North suffers from food shortages, has few schools and little access to health services. The public monies spent on infrastructure with the aim of attracting foreign investors and facilitating resource extraction are funds diverted away from the basic needs of the population. In the end, the individuals who most benefit from development schemes in the North are those who did well out of the conflict and now find themselves in a privileged position to make use of new infrastructure and job opportunities. This was clearly the case for the ComZones, as previously mentioned. It is also true on a smaller scale for the soldiers who operated under their command. This dynamic was revealed to me when visiting the remote northern village of Kafolo.
191 According to the same Jeune Afrique article (2016), an estimated 18,000 indirect employees are also working in the sector.
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Tucked in the country’s Northeast corner, Kafolo is a community of a few dozen families. It borders the Comoé nature reserve and is located five hours drive on dirt tracks from the nearest main road. The only locally owned business in the village is a small cement restaurant with a mural of Che Guevara on the outside wall and a hand painted sign reading ‘The Returned
Commandant’. The restaurant is owned by the wife of a former rebel solider and named in honor of her husband. Her husband and six other FRCI fighters returned to their village after the war with UN funded disarmament, demobilisation and rehabilitation (DDR) packages. The restaurateur’s husband financed her small business with a portion of his DDR funds, an investment that would otherwise be an impossible dream for a villager in the area.
DDR programs are a standard part of any peacebuilding mission however in Côte d’Ivoire the packages are widely understood as bonus payments from the Ouattara government and international allies to the former rebel fighters. This impression is reinforced by the fact that virtually no Gbagbo aligned forces met the program criteria, meaning the demobilisation funds were, in practice, reserved for former FRCI fighters.192 The returned FRCI fighters in Kafolo used their DDR packages to build solid brick homes, invest in small businesses for family members and send their children to town for education. As per the terms of the DDR program, the six former combatants were also eligible for work as police, park rangers and gendarmes in nearby towns. Thanks to their new official posts, the men sent salary money home. Though modest in absolute terms, these six families amassed significant wealth relative to their neighbours.
192 Many of Gbagbo’s forces were foreign mercenaries or members of unofficial youth militias and were therefore not allegeable for DDR. Amongst his trained soldiers from the official FDS forces, most changed allegiances after the war in order keep their jobs. Those who refused to change sides, or who risked arrest if they tried, went into exile or hiding (Interview with GIZ consultant on DDR in Côte d’Ivoire, May 2015).
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During my visit to Kafolo I met a young man who had refused to join when warlords came to recruit in the village. He felt deep anger at the irony that those who took arms against fellow
Ivorians were, today, the region’s sole beneficiaries of the economic émergence Ouattara had promised would bring peace and prosperity to all.193 As we walked through the village, he showed me how the relatives of those who joined the rebellion now lived in solid houses that hooked up to the new electricity lines while the rest of the residents lived in small smoke-filled huts. Their children went to schools in town where they had daily access to computers and the internet. With an education, they might one day find well-paid jobs in the nascent mining industry. He then explained how those privileges contrasted to his own circumstances. With the small income he made from fishing in the river, it took him a full month’s savings just to pay transport to the nearest town with an internet café where he could send a job application.
Although he saved what he could for these trips, with no schooling and only basic literacy, he had little hope anything would ever come from the effort. His account illustrates how little the new regime has done for the citizens of the North when contrasted with the relative privileges granted to former rebel combatants and their families. The account also puts into perspective the enormous wealth extracted from the region by the ComZones and their associates in the Ouattara government.
Building Neoliberal Peace in Côte d’Ivoire
193 Anonymous unemployed youth in interview with author, Kafolo, Côte d’Ivoire, August 2015.
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Peace returned to Côte d’Ivoire in April, 2012 with the arrest of Gbagbo and the consolidation of
Ouattara’s presidency. To celebrate his victory, Ouattara held an inauguration ceremony of impressive grandeur in Yamoussoukro, the birthplace of Félix Houphouet-Boigny and Côte d’Ivoire’s official capital. Ouattara’s militant support base were surprised to discover few of their ranks were invited yet wealthy elites who until recently had supported Gbagbo, turned out in numbers. Suddenly, the ‘long march towards reconciliation’ was the top priority of the new regime and the old guard alike (Fofana 2009). In a conspicuously easy show of reconciliation, the attendees formed a new alliance of wealthy businessmen and landowners from across party lines. The celebration sent a widely resounding message of bi-partisan camaraderie, telling the world that the political and business elite of Côte d’Ivoire agree they have more interests in common than dividing them. When asked about this scene, an Ivorian human rights activist candidly explained his thoughts to me: ‘never doubt that these are all friends from the same club…we bleed in the streets, and they just pass power back and forth.”194
Also present at the inauguration celebration were Alassane Ouattara’s friends and colleagues from a lifetime of service in international financial institutions.195 Thousands of VIP guests were flown into Côte d’Ivoire, with the bill sent to Ivorian taxpayers. In a show of confidence only seen once before by a UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon personally attended the inauguration.
At the table of honour sat President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy. ADO’s inaugural speech addressed the French President personally with the words, “Mr. President Sarkozy, the Ivorian
194 Human rights worker, in interview with author March 2015, Abidjan Côte d’Ivoire. 195 The former director of the IMF, Michel Camdessus attended, though his colleague Dominique Strauss Kahn was forced to cancel his travel due to an unsavory incident in New York (Varenne 2012).
213 people say to you a huge thank you!” (Varenne 2012). The crowd celebrated Sarkozy and his contributions in ‘the battle for Côte d’Ivoire’ with a standing ovation.
France’s contributions to Ivorian reconstruction had only just begun at the time of Ouattara’s inauguration. Côte d’Ivoire signed an IMF Development Plan that included a $6 billion debt forgiveness accord, offered as a commendation of the country’s “pursuit of an ambitious reform agenda key to harnessing growth potential” (IMF 2016). More than 75% of the debt bailout came from France and was negotiated in a bilateral ‘forgiveness’ plan worth over 3,76 billion euros (Le Point France 2012). Officially titled a “Contrat de désendettement et de développement’ (‘The Development and Indebtedness Contract’), this debt forgiveness scheme requires the Ivorian national reserve to repay its foreign debts to France by purchasing French technical assistance, granting French enterprises development contracts and seconding
196 government administrators (Europe 1 2012). Said otherwise, the agreement promises to transfer Ivorian state revenue to the former colonial state in exchange for French personnel and development projects. Although it is titled ‘debt forgiveness,’ the contract functions much like the former colonial relationship, with administers and industry heads coming South and revenue and high-skill employment opportunities moving North (Jeune Afrique 2014). That said, the renewed Franco-Ivorian relationship would be mischaracterized as simply one of neo-imperial control (Naimi 2017). More accurately, it is an economic alliance that benefits elite interests in both states, spurring rapid economic growth in Côte d’Ivoire and granting lucrative contracts and privileged market access to allies in the French business and administrative elite. With Ouattara
196 M. Vincent, NGO Director in interview with author Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire March 2015
214 in office, France soon reclaimed its place as the primary investor and top business partner of
Côte d’Ivoire, securing a 22% share of all foreign investment in 2016.
France had good reason to reclaim this influence over the former colony. As a source of raw materials, Côte d’Ivoire is an attractive trading partner. In a recent ranking of ‘Export
Complexity’, Côte d’Ivoire was listed 98th out of 124 countries (International Monetary Fund
2016). This surprisingly low ranking for a country of its economic performance reflects Côte d’Ivoire’s continued dependence on exporting raw materials. Keeping the country low on the global value chain allows its more industrialized trading partners to profit by manufacturing high value goods from Ivorian exports (Ipinyomi 2012). What is more, in the country’s new economic model, those raw exports are diversifying away from Côte d’Ivoire’s iconic image as the world’s premier cocoa economy to offer foreign investors new, and much more lucrative opportunities, in high-value low-labour natural resource extraction.
The Bélier and Éspoir offshore oil deposits, the most lucrative of those natural resource reserves, remain largely untouched. 197 In 2017, the nascent oil sector prompted a global business report to label Côte d’Ivoire ‘Africa’s most promising site for investment’ (Diawara 2017).198 Off-shore oil is only recently being tapped because the technology needed to make drilling economical in the dangerous deep-sea conditions was not available pre-war. Within the first few years of
197 Untapped oil reserves are impressive for a country the size of Côte d’Ivoire. Reserve Belier is estimated to have 25 million tons and Reserve Espoir to have 500 million tons of high-quality oil (Jeune Afrique 2016). By comparison, Canada holds 10% of the world’s total oil deposits and produces approximately 250 million tons of crude oil a year.
198 US interest in the country has grown with the oil sector. With his first executive order as president, George Bush launched the Cheney report on energy security. The report lists West African oil as a top priority petroleum reserve to secure for possible US exploitation (Al Jazeera 2017).
215 drilling, petroleum already accounted for 12.3% of the country’s export economy. When crude petrol is included in the total, oil comprised 19.5% of all exports. That 2017 figure already outpaced cocoa as Côte d’Ivoire’s primary source of revenue, and the Ouattara administration plans to double production levels by 2020 (Ibid).
In 1960, agriculture primarily comprising of the cocoa sector accounted for 90% of the state revenue and 70% of the GDP. Compared to the emerging petrol sector, agriculture has dropped to 10% of current revenue and 28% of GDP (Jeune Afrique 2016). For the country’s business and political community, oil is a much more efficient and profitable source of wealth compared to labour, land and infrastructure intensive agriculture. On the other hand, cocoa farming provided average Ivorians with a modest but steady living. A booming agricultural sector also required the government to invest, at least minimally, in infrastructure and services for the large labour force needed to farm. In contrast, in an economy driven by lower-labour, higher-profit industries like petrol, gold and diamond mining, business success is largely independent of the health and wellbeing of the majority population (Frynas 2005). This has had foreseeable implications for wealth redistribution, with Côte d’Ivoire becoming richer quicker than ever before, but with the benefits of the wealth increasingly restricted to the small upper class.
Post-Conflict Neoliberalisation
Alassane Ouattara built his career overseeing neoliberal reform programs in SAP recipient countries. As president, building the private sector and increasing foreign investment are the central drivers of his economic agenda. In the first year of his presidency, foreign direct
216 investment tripled and has continued along this annual growth path each year since (Ananou
2015). In 2015, the American company Nielsen named Côte d’Ivoire the best place in Africa for prospective foreign investors in its annual Africa Prospect Indicators report. By 2017, the
‘economic intelligence’ firm Knowdys Consulting Group declared “never before has an African country been so well sold to international investors as Côte d’Ivoire in the last five years”
(Gweth 2017).
This high praise of Côte d’Ivoire as an attractive site for foreign investment is the result of an extensive economic restructuring program designed and implemented by the Ouattara government, in partnership with the IMF and World Bank. The preface to the IMF National
Development Program (PND) was written by President Ouattara himself and promises that the
2016-2020 PND platform will pay “particular heed to ensuring an attractive business environment and good governance.” The IMF praised Ivorian reforms in its 2016 country assessment, calling the country a testament “to the role of the private sector as a driver of economic growth” and noting private sector investment had exceeded forecasted levels by nearly twenty percent (International Monetary Fund African Department 2016).199 In recognition of these reforms, the World Bank moved Côte d’Ivoire up its “Doing Business Index” from 177th
(out of 189) in 2014 to 142th in 2016: a jump that won Côte d’Ivoire a spot on the IMF ‘World’s
Ten Best Reformers’ list (International Monetary Fund 2016).200
199 Private sector investment amounted to CFA 4,699 billion, compared with the predicted level of CFA 3,946 billion, translating to 118.3 percent implementation rate. 200 Côte d’Ivoire has gained 40 positions in the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI) since the 2012–13 report. It has also advanced nine positions between 2013 and 2014 in the World Economic Forum’s Enabling Trade index.
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Émergence vingt-mille-vingt !
President Ouattara personally joined forces with the IMF and World Bank to co-create a plan for rapid economic growth and industrialization in Côte d’Ivoire. The ambitious development strategy promised the country would ‘emerge’ into a First World economy by 2020.201 The plan includes an extensive package of reforms and governance programs, to be jointly implemented by the IMF and the Ouattara administration, and spanning the next three decades. As an IMF strategic analysis of the 2016-2020 plan explains,
“Côte d’Ivoire needs to base its emergence on a structural transformation brought about
by expediting its industrialization… that emergence is a dynamic economy driven by
rapid industrialization, which will bring about a structural transformation and many more
opportunities for decent jobs. It is also a Côte d’Ivoire that will gain from its integration
into the global economy and which cooperates with its neighbors to strengthen regional
integration.”
Emergence, in this account, is the result of rapid industrialization with the goal of securing entry into global value chains. The report dubs this projected endpoint the ‘elephant triumphant’, in reference to Côte d’Ivoire’s regionally extinct mascot (International Monetary Fund African
Department 2016).
201 Although it was never fully clear what “Emergence 2020” meant in practice, at the time of research (2013- 2015), it was an unofficial national slogan in Côte d’Ivoire. It seemed impossible to attend any event whether a beauty pageant, a soccer game, a conference, a political rally or a formal government meeting without mention that all our work was in pursuit of this much sought after ‘Emergence 2020’.
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Poverty reduction is frequently mentioned in the IMF National Development Strategy (NDS).
For instance, the NDS reads, “…it will be crucial to finance the envisaged significant scaling up of investment that should help to raise economic growth, fulfill the country’s potential, and create jobs and thus help reduce poverty” (International Monetary Fund Debt Relief for Africa
2012). As the quote illustrates, the authors view the goal of poverty reduction as a natural consequence of increasing foreign investments and diversifying international trade. The stated assumption behind this poverty reduction plan is that a rapidly growing economy will benefit poorer citizens downstream by creating jobs and expanding markets. In practice, the IMF-
Ouattara development strategy has indeed massively increased revenue and grown the economy, however the benefits have not stretched beyond a small national and foreign elite. New investments are primarily in telecommunications, mining, petroleum, and financial services; all sectors that generate growth, but create few new jobs. New jobs entering the economy are primarily positions for highly qualified nationals and international experts, and thus do little to address widespread unemployment amongst the majority population (Faujas 2017).
The most famous symbol of the new Côte d’Ivoire is Abidjan’s long anticipated ‘troisième pont’
(the colloquial name of the Henri Konan Bédié Bridge, completed in 2015). The bridge connects the main road from the airport – a facility used by approximately two percent of the population— to an area across the city’s picturesque lagoon where the presidential residence, the chicest hotels, the golf course, and the villas of the country’s business and political elites are located
(Institut national de la Statistique Cote d'Ivoire 2013). Though its construction was publicly funded, the bridge is privately operated, with drivers paying more to cross than the average
Ivorian earns in a day (World Bank 2015). This massive construction project saddled the country with a debt that will hang over Ivorians for the next 30 years. Repaying that debt competes in the
219 national budget with programs needed to meet basic health and food needs for a rising portion of the population.202 Disillusioned with neoliberal reforms, “We can’t eat bridges!” has become a common slogan overheard in bars and marketplaces. For the exasperated Abidjanais making this comment, the bridge is a perfect symbol of the Ouattara regime: it was paid for by all Ivorians – now and in future generations – yet it is only accessible to and only meant to serve Abidjan’s small elite and their foreign business partners. It is also a source of hefty private profits for the businessmen who bought the contract for its operation (Jeune Afrique 2016a).
As Côte d’Ivoire Program Leader at the World Bank, Jacques Morisset, acknowledged, “rapid growth posted in recent years has not yet translated into a significant decline in poverty” (World
Bank 2015). His words understate the data collected by his office on the subject. Côte d’Ivoire’s growth rate topped 9% in 2014, and stayed between 8.5% and 9% through 2017. In 2015, the country boasted the second largest economy in West Africa, only outpaced by the regional powerhouse Nigeria. Yet, that same year, poverty rates topped those at the height of the 1980s economic crash. In 2015, approximately half the Ivorian population were living on less than 450
CFA francs a day, a sum just less than one US dollar (Le Monde Afrique 2017; Ananou 2015).
This translates to a lower mean household income than the continental average, despite Côte d’Ivoire being among Africa’s largest and fastest growing economies (World Bank 2015).
Moreover, while half the population lived on less than a dollar a day during the entire year of
202 Constructing the bridge cost 308 million euros, and was paid for in a public-private partnership (PPP) (ADBG 2015). The GDP of Côte d’Ivoire was 32.7 billion euros in 2014, the year the bridge was completed. The bridge cost approximately 1% of the total GDP. Though that percentage seems low, in comparison, in that same year total spending on national education was 4.5% of GDP. That includes funding to education institutions at all levels, all administration costs and all assistance or subsidies given to students or employees (World Bank / Trading Economics 2020).
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2016, the GDP per person was reported at $2000 USD and was projected to rise to $ 4500 USD by 2020 (ibid). A per capita GDP that is five and a half times higher than the amount half the population see in a year is a sign that inequality is grave and growing.
Côte d’Ivoire’s twenty-four million people feel the consequences of that inequality in their daily lives. 203 During its boom year in 2014, Côte d’Ivoire was ranked 171th out of 187 countries on human development indicators, largely due to its weak health care and education systems
(Kambou 2014). Life expectancy for an average Ivorian is 52 years, making it one of the lowest in the ECOWAS group (Faujas 2017). Forty-six percent of the Ivorian population have never attended school, 20% suffer from chronic malnutrition, and only 5% of the population can access social protections such as old age assistance or employment insurance (Clémencot 2016). Forty percent of the population are without drinking water, electricity and toilet facilities, and 80% are without sewage systems (Institut national de la Statistique Cote d'Ivoire 2013). Even Ousmane
Diagana, the World Bank Representative in Côte d’Ivoire, agreed poverty is “troublingly high, especially in contrast to the enormous economic potential available to the country” (Kambou
203 Côte d’Ivoire’s Gini coefficient rose by about four percentage points (from 39 to 43) between 1998 and 2008, although the trend has since reversed with a Gini coefficient at 41.3 in 2015 (International Monetary Fund 2016). When Ouattara took power in 2001, there were 4 million poor totaling around 23% of the population. In 2015, that number rose to 6.5 million or around 28,2 % of the population. In its 2015 Equity Brief on Côte d’Ivoire, the World Bank emphasizes important gains for poverty reduction, noting that although the percentage of population who are poor increased since the end of the civil war, the GINI index stayed approximately the same. That said, the World Bank report is using a timeline that compares the height of active conflict to a stabilized country with one of the fastest growing economies in the world. More than showing an achievement in poverty reduction, the World Bank data illustrates that poverty has not decreased nor is wealth more fairly distributed than it was during the final years of a decade long civil war, despite a vast increase of wealth, investment, donor support and industry. Consider education as a practical example of what these statistics mean for average Ivorians. Nearly 90% of children today attend primary school, but the number drops off to approximately 35% at secondary school, with even lower rates for girls. Approximately 10% of people attend university (World Bank 2017). These rates are indeed an improvement from the wartime era when schooling essentially stopped, but it is 25% lower than education level of countries with a similar economic portfolio and performance potential, for example, Morocco and Tunisia (IMF 2016).
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2014).
Reconciliation is Good Business
There is a close relationship between Côte d’Ivoire’s economic success today and violations committed during the war. Profiting-seeking and expropriating resources for personal gain was a core strategy of the rebellion. At the end of the conflict, warlords used that expropriated wealth to transform into wealthy business owners and launch new industries that form the basis of Côte d’Ivoire’s restructured economy. Despite this context, Ivorian transitional justice did not challenge the economic order of the new regime as a necessary part of doing justice for the past.
Quite the opposite: the Ivorian peace and reconstruction agenda approached post-conflict justice as an auxiliary outcome of economic growth.
A decade ago, Uprenda Baxi warned that the original concept of universal human rights was
“steadily, but surely, supplanted by that of a trade-related, market-friendly human rights” (Baxi
2008). This warning rings true in a peacebuilding approach that advances pro-business reforms as necessary components of just and sustainable conflict resolution. For example, the good governance reforms defined by the UN Worldwide Governance Indicators include compliance with free markets amongst the primary tools of statebuilding (Demmers, Fernández Jilberto and
Hogenboom 2004). 204 Relatedly, World Bank polity scores measure a country’s relative
204 Worldwide Governance Indicators are tools developed by the World Bank and used by international organizations to measure good governance in a given country. The indicators capture six dimensions: voice & accountability, political stability and lack of violence, effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and corruption. They measure nearly all states and draw sources from forty global databases. Compiling the dimensions into one overall measure of good governance links together characteristics like access to justice or rights and civil liberties with ‘regulatory quality’ of growth and trade. The World Bank defines effective regulation as “the ability of the government to formulate and implement sound policies and regulations that permit and promote private sector
222 performance on a spectrum ranging from a ‘fully open democracy’ to a ‘fully closed autocracy’.
The recently revised indicators, known as “polity2” scores, now include economic freedoms as a core measure of a successful transition to peace and democracy (Center for Systemic Peace
2016).
As predicted by Baxi, these global governance tools reflect a tendency in the contemporary peacebuilding model to supplant the concept of just and democratic peace with the goal of economic growth and recovery. This tendency is well-documented by critical observers (Klein
2008; Mani, 2005; Miller 2008; Bell, 2009). As Stillwell explains,
“International organizations such as the IMF and World Bank routinely operate in a neo-
imperialist framework in crisis situations by providing financial incentives for the
wholesale restructuring of economies along neoliberal lines. This form of ‘development’
seeks to both mirror and benefit the western world, through providing greater access to
markets and resources.” (Stillwell 271)
Global financial institutions push privatization and market deregulation on post-conflict states, insisting such policies are necessary for conflict recovery. In practice, marketisation in a recent conflict zone means largescale, cheap and often closed sales of state industries to foreign elites and their national allies (Pugh 2005). Moreover, post-conflict markets are fragile and largely
development”. The regulatory quality indictor is measured by compiling a list approximately 50 factors that emphasize the removal of discriminatory tariffs and taxes; the ease of setting up a subsidiary of a foreign firm; the price and availability of state subsidies for petrol; and ‘the degree of harm protectionism causes businesses.’ The list also includes questions like “how problematic are labor regulations for the growth of your business?” (World Bank Group 2019). or an overview of the use of governance indicators by peacebuilding institutions see the DESA 2007 Report “Public Governance Indicators: A Literature Review” (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2007).
223 unregulated by national government left weak by war. Neoliberalising post-war economies allows foreign investors to cheaply buy up national resources and industry contracts, and operate with few constraints from taxes or government regulations (Barbara 2008; Klein 2008). 205
Transitional justice, as we have seen, fits that contemporary market-friendly peacebuilding model. It is deployed post-conflict in the name of justice and reconciliation, yet it pursues these aims without interfering in economic interests and in ways that protect the elite class. The
Revised UN Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 are a notable example of transitional justice being deployed as a market-friendly peacebuilding tool in high level global governance circles. Goal sixteen of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals discusses post- conflict justice and rule law, determining that transitional justice promotes development by increasing stability and restoring public trust in institutions (Working Group on Transitional
Justice and SDG+, 2019). In other words, SDG 16 advocates for transitional justice as a measure that promotes development by helping remove conflict as an obstacle to growth. As a UN
SDG+, transitional justice is deployed to advance a vision of peace and recovery that is increasingly indistinguishable from market-friendly and business-aligned liberalism.
That same dynamic is also observable on a much smaller scale in a reconciliation initiative adopted by the Ivorian transitional justice process. Though launched with the stated aim of fostering reconciliation through resolving land disputes, in practice, the initiative was a
205 NGOs Eye on Aceh and Aidwatch report that social inequality worsened. Some in the community seized the business opportunities provided by the presence of foreign aid bodies and the massive infrastructure effort, while others were forced to bear the negative effects of the ensuing inflation (Stilwell 2008).
224 neoliberal restructuring of the agricultural sector that forced privatization of communal land and nulled customary land ownership.
Land Privatization for Reconciliation: A Case Study
Soon after taking office, the Ouattara regime legislated a nation scale land privatization scheme ostensibly aimed at finding just and permanent solutions to entrenched land disputes in the West.
Over a ten-year period, the Rural Land Law aimed to bring a land tenure system that was more than ninety percent governed by customary ownership into the free market. To achieve that aim, the government passed a revision of the 1998 land law, transforming all agricultural land into private property and requiring all customary land occupants to officiate their claim by applying for deeds as private owners. The project was deployed in the name of transitional justice and framed as an effort to promote community reconciliation in the region most divided by war.206
As previously established, land disputes and customary land ownership are both concentrated in the Western region, meaning the reforms primarily targeted Gbagbo’s support base and their claim to vast tracts of farmland and the surrounding forests. The Ouattara administration maintained that the new land law would facilitate reconciliation in the region by simplifying and
206 Human Rights Watch has reported on the land reform policies. The report notes that in public speeches and policy documents, President Alassane Ouattara lists resolving land conflict is a major priority for his government. He has stated that the issue will determine whether the Western region moves forward in reconciliation or renewed cycles of violence (Human Rights Watch 2015). In a separate report exclusively on land conflict, HRW reported that the regime deemed successful mediation of land conflicts through local level initiatives one of the key improvements implemented in its first term (Human Rights Watch 2015a). Since 2017, land reform is coordinated under the World Bank Land Policy Improvement and Implementation Project. In its work plan, the World Bank highlights land is a state priority as a measure towards securing stability as well as building “increased social cohesion and a business environment more conducive to investment” (The World Bank 2017). The WB and Ivorian government partnership agreement on land reform also notes that regularizing land tenure is a “prerequisite to modernization” in the agriculture sector. The project fits within the wider WB-Côte d’Ivoire partnership framework “Focus Area One: Accelerating Sustainable Private Sector-Led Growth”, as a key step towards the goal of “formalizing and enhancing access to land for business and agriculture” (Ibid).
225 clarifying land tenure. Upon closer inspection, the land reforms are an especially aggressive element of Ouattara’s wider push to privatize industries, masked under the slogan of transitional justice.
The new legislation leaves peasant farmers responsible for the nearly impossible logistical task of privatizing landholdings in a region where 98 percent of rural land was managed under customary law at the time the bill was passed (McCallin and Montemurro 2009). The Rural Land
Law requires all customary landholders to obtain an individual or collective tenure certificate and register this ownership claim with the state. Certificates must be acquired within ten years of the legislation coming into effect, with the cost of certification paid by the applicant. Any customary lands that are not certified by the ten-year deadline will be deemed unowned and transferred to the state to be sold at market value. Occupants who fail to certify their holdings during the ten-year window or who do not register within three-years of certification will also have their lands transferred to state ownership (Mitchell 2014).
The rigorous written terms of the legislation contrast considerably with the actual implementation of the law. In a field study conducted by Matthew Mitchell, his research team found eighty-three per cent of rural land occupants interviewed had never heard of the land law
(ibid). The seventeen per cent who did know about the law only had basic information, and showed no knowledge of the requirements or costs of securing and registering a deed. Most importantly, they did not know the consequences for their current standing as customary owners should they fail to obtain a deed before the ten-year cut-off date. This lack of information also extended to the local administrators responsible for implementing the land certification and registration process, some of whom complained they received no training on this complicated
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new task.207 Rather than a resolution to entrenched land conflict, the land privatization scheme threatens to expropriate more than ninety percent of rural farmlands without even informing the current occupants of that eventuality.
Even amongst better-informed rural farmers, the certification process is prohibitively costly and nearly impossible to navigate. Certification requires extensive knowledge of the law itself and of local bureaucracy, as well as privileged access to state administrators. The process is also bureaucratically complex and unclear even to the administrators responsible for implementing it.
Moreover, local officials are rarely neutral in land disputes and thus have an interest in advancing some claims while slowing other. During an interview with a state prosecutor responsible for the mid-western region, the prosecutor openly admitted to using his office to interfere in land claims. As an appointee of the Ouattara regime, he felt it was his duty to ensure land disputes stemming from the tutorat system were henceforth resolved in favour of Dioula and Burkinabes claimants given, he argued, these groups were wronged for so many decades by the traditional Krou occupants. 208
Registering a holding also requires a significant amount of money to secure required documentation, for various application fees and to cover the cost of travel from rural areas to municipal government offices at each step of the process. Most rural families have few savings and minimal income, making these extra expenses simply beyond their means. The cost and complexity of certification and registration, combined with illiteracy and a lack of required
207 When Mitchell conducted his research in 2014, the Government of Côte d’Ivoire needed to register over 20 million hectares of rural land before 2019 having only approved 300 certificates and 1 title between 1998 and 2013.
208 Interview by author, Gagnoa July 2015
227 identity documents amongst many rural farmers, make for insurmountable obstacles to officiating land ownership, regardless of the individual’s legal right to the land.
Agribusiness owners, in contrast, share none of the troubles experienced by local farmers when certifying their claims to landownership. The industry leaders can afford professional legal services and enjoy privileged access to state officials should any setbacks arise. Agribusiness heads and largescale landowners are also in a good position to acquire vast new holdings thanks to the land reform bill. When the ten-year registration deadline approaches, many communities will likely feel pressure to sell traditional lands to big business. Without funds, access to officials or legal know-how needed for certification, local farmers may feel their only choice is to secure some capital through a sale rather than risk simply losing the land under a state pronouncement that it remained ‘unclaimed’ despite a generous decade long certification window.
Under the banner of reconciliation for the country’s most volatile region, the regime is forcing land privatization on low income rural communities. Moreover, these are communities that depend on communal lands for basic sustenance and as a cornerstone of cultural life. As such, the Land Law exemplifies neoliberal transitional justice. First, because it transfers the state’s responsibility to find a just resolution to conflict onto people least able bear that burden. Second, because it invokes the honourable aim of ‘reconciliation’ as a justification for transferring vast amounts of public wealth – the land currently benefiting the country’s poorest citizens – into the hands of private industry.
Conclusion
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The authors of the IMF’s Economic Development Report on Côte d’Ivoire (2016) classified reconciliation as a function of economic performance, explaining that consolidating peace would largely depend on economic improvements. Challenging that claim, we have seen that structural injustice and an exploitative ruling elite were root causes of the civil war, and that post-conflict neoliberal reforms have only exacerbated those tensions. The country’s much-celebrated economic success has translated into increased poverty rates and worsened inequality, with most
Ivorians still excluded from employment, affordable housing, education and medical services.
That said, in one regard, the IMF delegation collaborating with Ouattara on economic restructuring were correct in predicting growth would facilitate reconciliation. Political and industry leaders from both sides of the civil war rapidly reconciled after Gbagbo’s arrest and
Ouattara’s ascendency to the presidency. This uniting of elite interests was first demonstrated by bi-partisan attendance at Ouattara’s inauguration banquet and has since become a cornerstone of the profitable peace that characterizes the country today.
A logical jump remains, however, in the IMF prescription of market liberalisation as a means of consolidating peace and fostering reconciliation. Neoliberal governance depends on the legitimacy of liberal values, such as human rights and democracy, in order to claim rightful authority for the elites championing this governance model. Yet, at the same time, neoliberal reforms secure elite privileges and hurt public interests, which, in turn, undermine the very same liberal values invoked to justify their leadership. In a post-conflict regime, this logical gap needs to be bridged for neoliberal peace to appear coherent and acceptable to both citizens and international onlookers. Said otherwise, in order to build a neoliberal state in a post-conflict setting, the new regime must find a way to advance elite and business interests while also demonstrating that citizen needs and demands matter, and that justice is being done for the past.
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That moral legitimacy is particularly necessary given the population will find it much harder to recover from conflict in the face of growing inequality and dismantled public services.
Launching a transitional justice process sends a strong message that liberal values are guiding reconstruction, while simultaneously excluding economic inequality and social injustice from the post-conflict reform agenda. In this way, transitional justice gave the Ivorian elite both the means and the moral legitimacy to shape the liberal democratic era in ways that protected the standing of elites and justified a post-conflict reform agenda aligned with Ouattara and the IMF’s neoliberal restructuring.
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6. Conclusion
Transitional justice is neoliberalising in that it narrows justice to exclude structural violence and economic oppression as forms of wrongdoing that demand accountability and reform during a political transition. It does this by establishing a moral order for governance and social relations that delineates between tolerable and intolerable forms of suffering, laying out which abuses must be addressed by a law-abiding society and which are beyond moral scrutiny. On one hand, deploying transitional justice institutions sets a moral standard that include strong protections for political rights and abhor the most heinous forms of violation. On the other hand, it establishes a moral order that discredits a more substantive vision of justice – one that addresses the very real threat to survival and dignity a large portion of citizens face when neoliberal governance encroaches on post-conflict contexts. Transitional justice provides a new regime with the means to communicate to its citizens and to foreign onlookers that a postwar country is becoming just and democratic. Yet, in the same moment these institutions promise a more just future, transitional justice also narrows what justice means by re-establishing a moral order aligned to elite interests and free market principles. Consequently, the new moral order defines a good and
231 just government as one that protects the economic sphere and elite authority, and ignores demands for wealth redistribution or other more radical social justice reforms.
New Kind of Impunity for a New Governance Era
Transitional justice offers a way forward in situations of entrenched conflict or dictatorships: contexts where resolution seems otherwise impossible. In most cases, however, that opportunity to renew and rebuild comes with the painful cost of letting many of the worst perpetrators go free. This exchange of impunity for a new beginning is a cornerstone of the transitional justice model. The field grew in the wake of dictatorships where impunity for the former regime’s crimes was the price of it leaving power. Transitional justice institutions developed as an innovative way to fill the accountability deficit left by these terrible yet often inescapable trade- offs. Today amnesty is no longer common in transitional justice processes and, in the rare instances when amnesties are still applied, the deals can be overruled if brought before a regional or international court. Criminal accountability is nevertheless still relatively uncommon in transitional justice contexts. This is a consequence of the sheer number of victims needing redress, particularly when combined with weak or insufficient institutional capacity and given justice competes with other urgent priorities during political transitions. Thus, though the field has moved beyond a crude trade-off of peace for justice, the exchange of impunity for a new beginning remains a core part of the transitional justice approach.
A new version of the trade-off between elite impunity and a national rebirth has emerged in transitional justice, even as amnesty deals disappear from the field. This is because today the
232 actors most responsible in creating and benefiting from war or repression are rarely directly involved in human rights violations. Furthermore, the human rights lens is poorly suited to assessing the full picture of victim experiences during contemporary conflict. The victims that appear before transitional justice institutions today endure suffering that is indivisible from wider forms of structural and economic injustice. Relying on a human rights framework to understand that suffering hides as much as it reveals about those experiences. By failing to recognize the nature of harms suffered and by failing to identify those most responsible for causing that harm, transitional justice shields culpable elites and depoliticizes their abuses of power.
In its original form, transitional justice exposed and shamed a ruling elite for their role in human rights violations, even while shielding them from accountability through amnesty deals.
Exposing elite wrongdoing allowed transitional justice institutions to achieve some meaningful steps towards justice, even if impunity remained the order of the day. This is because public acknowledgment of wrongdoing comes with the moral obligation to ensure such harms can never happen again. Though injustice remained, the cost of sacrificing accountability was, at least in part, balanced by the possibility of overthrowing repressive governing institutions and renewing social values. In contrast, today’s neoliberal elites are distant from the frontlines of human rights violations. As such, they can leverage the benefits of transitional justice without accepting the consequences that once befell authorities seeking impunity within these institutions. This new, consequence free, elite impunity is illustrative of the neoliberalising effects contemporary transitional justice has on post-conflict contexts. Though a certain acceptance of impunity is inbuilt to the field, elite protection was formerly accompanied by a public process that exposed their crimes and promised to correct harms inflicted. The dynamics of contemporary conflict no longer fit that model. We are left with a top-down and sanitized version of transitional justice,
233 where elites legitimatize their return to authority by demonstrating a commitment to do justice but are not held responsible for their role in harms inflicted on the population.
An Elite Exchange
Managing a political transition from conflict or repressive rule requires new leaders to perform a careful balancing act between conflicting priorities: How much can be done for victims without becoming caught forever in the endless demands of the past? What other priorities must be sacrificed in order to devote the time and resources required to found a truly just society? In what moments do stability and reconstruction take precedence over the demands of the past?
Transitional justice holds a central place in global governance circles as a set of ad hoc and flexible institutions that offer a new regime and its citizens the means to negotiate these complex dilemmas. At its most essential, transitional justice is a political process that allows a community to balance the moral responsibility to do justice for the past with the practical imperative to move on and rebuild.
When the field first developed, transitional justice found that balance between the demands of justice and the need for peace through negotiated trade-offs with perpetrator elites. The truth commissions established after ousting dictatorships in Argentina and Chile were conceived as a step towards justice in a moment when criminal accountability for the still powerful junta leaders was impossible. In these first examples, immunity for grave and systematic human rights violations was the price of a peaceful transition to democracy. Since criminal accountability was impossible, public acknowledgement of the crimes of the last regime served as a replacement
234 form of justice. The approach was reproduced during the South African democratic transition as an addendum to a political agreement that exchanged amnesties for democracy. Although this exchange was more direct than that seen in the Latin American examples, the South African truth commission was, similarly, adopted as a response to a prior amnesty agreement. It did not create impunity, rather, it was a means of reducing injustice already signed onto as the cost of peace. In contrast, Timor Leste, Sierra Leone and Liberia inserted transitional justice directly into peace accords. Here belligerents sat together at the negotiating table, actively exchanging amnesty and continued positions of authority for truth-seeking and an end to the conflict (Snyder and
Vinjamuri 2003). These examples show the transitional justice model shifting over the first three decades of the field, yet they all share the common feature of offering protection from prosecution to powerful elites in exchange for a new beginning. Whether we consider it a legitimate practice or not, this mechanism allowed transitional justice to promote peace while still delivering some form of justice in contexts where neither had seemed possible. Without offering elites protection, these institutions do not have the political traction needed to achieve breakthrough peace agreements. The injustice of that exchange is morally unbearable to many onlookers, but it nevertheless meant transitional justice institutions brought an end to dictatorship and civil war in contexts where continued violence was equally unthinkable.
Today a warlord who recruited children or a police chief who tortured activists can no longer depend on a negotiated amnesty after handing over power. International and regional courts removed amnesty from the transitional justice repertoire by establishing a clear precedent that such deals will be overturned if brought before an international court. Amnesties are thus rarely applied today and, when they are, they do not hold weight beyond the borders or lifetime of the regime that issued them. Ending the use of amnesty for grave human rights violations was an
235 achievement for the field. Having said that, we should also consider whether the very possibility of denying a perpetrator amnesty is a sign that she or he is no longer amongst the most powerful actors instigating and directing conflict or repressive rule (P. Clark 2018).
Although, as a field, transitional justice no longer accepts the crude trade-off of justice for peace, a new version of that exchange has emerged reflecting the rise of a new ruling elite in the neoliberal era. Whereas junta members and warlords leveraged the threat of violence for their authority, neoliberal elites control lucrative economic interests, hold key government posts and are well-connected in global governance institutions and business communities. In the current global order, economic elites are often synonymous with political leaders (Harvey 2005). In cases where the business community does not directly overlap with government, heads of industry and financial institutions are often as influential in public policy as elected officials
(Brown 2015). These dynamics are amplified in conflict zones, where a pattern has emerged in recent decades of postwar contexts becoming greenfield sites for neoliberal restructuring as national and foreign elites leverage weakened institutions and social breakdown to push market- friendly reforms and buy-up industries and reconstruction contracts (Klein 2008; Bell, Campbell and Aolain 2007; Barbara 2008).
The civil war in Côte d’Ivoire erupted as a consequence of the longstanding and exploitive governing policies of a small ruling elite and its foreign backers. Over the span of fifty years, the
Ivorian ruling class shaped institutions and policies to ensure a wealthy few enjoyed incredible luxury while the remaining population endured worsening inequality and social injustice, eventually pushing the country to violent and total collapse. That same leadership then sent tens-of-thousands of youth to fight as their proxies and reestablish their authority, while simultaneously exploiting the chaos they had created for war profits. In the aftermath, the same
236 ruling class – now remerged as a barely reshuffled new regime – leveraged the transition to push through policies that have worsened socio-economic conditions for most Ivorians while, once again, winning windfall profits for the wealthy elite. Regardless of whether this elite class was directly responsible for human rights violations, they are nonetheless responsible for grave wrongdoing by creating the conditions for social breakdown, fueling civil war with their rhetoric, then profiting from that chaos and its aftermath.
The Ivorian elite are too powerful at home and too influential abroad to be held to account, yet that claim does not fully explain of their apparent untouchability. In the case of Alassane
Ouattara, Soro Guillaume and the ComZones, backing from powerful foreign interests did indeed help them seamlessly transition from alleged war criminals into heroes of peace and democracy.
Laurent Gbagbo and Blé Goudé, in contrast, were isolated members of the old guard. Yet even in their case, the ICC failed to secure a conviction despite devoting years to investigations and investing massive financial resources. There must, therefore, be a difference more pertinent than their respective international allies that separates the protection transitional justice once offered juntas and warlords through amnesty deals, and the way it now shields powerful ruling elites from accountability. Put simply, transitional justice is not designed to view the elites most responsible for the harms inflicted in contemporary war as perpetrators.
Human rights violations are the basic units from which a transitional justice process is built. That framework is an effective means of exposing the direct perpetrators of political and physical rights violations, but it also limits the scope of justice-seeking. That framework gives a truncated analysis of how and why civilians suffer during conflict, and correspondingly offers a limited vision of what it means to correct the past and prevent similar harms in the future. This much was established in Mamdani’s critique of the South African TRC. By focusing on direct
237 human rights violations perpetrated by the regime’s henchmen, the South African truth commission failed to meaningfully address the larger crime of Apartheid and the daily deprivation, humiliation and structural violence it caused (Mamdani 2002). In doing so, it largely overlooked the guilt of those who created and benefited from the regime (Miller 2008).
In the daily lives of conflict victims, the harm caused by structural violence and economic deprivation is no less painful than overt human rights violations. This was clear when interviewing an Ivorian victims’ leader just returned from the funeral of a young group member who had committed suicide. The deceased stepped on a landmine during the war and, with no access to medical care, he eventually lost both feet and an arm to gangrene. I was shown a photo of the man in the year before he died, laying on a thin mattress on the floor of a windowless one- room home. With no medical care, no assistance and a family barely able to feed themselves, let alone care for him, he barely moved from that place for three years. I expressed shock at these circumstances and this show of surprise made my interviewee so angry, tears formed in his eyes.
‘Of course, he committed suicide”, he responded “We suicide all the time. What else can victims do here?’ His outrage was justified. The CDVR was ongoing at that time, meaning justice for the civil war was purportedly being delivered nationwide, yet the primary victims were denied basic life necessities and human dignities. I recorded accounts across the country of victims dying from treatable conditions, losing limbs or suffering from debilitating illnesses without medical care.209 For many victims, being unable to care for one’s family or becoming a burden on loved ones was more painful than any violence endured. I also found a pattern of female
209 Over the course of two years, I interviewed victims’ group leaders and NGO staff in Duekoué, Guiglo, Gagnoa, Daloa, Abobo, Adajme, Man, San-Pédro, Toulépleu, Youpougon, Treichville and Korhogo.
238 victims being forced into sex work in order to stay alive and feed their children.210 When victims speak about their experiences, there is no distinction between the pain of a direct human rights violations and that of watching one’s children go hungry. That suffering cannot be pulled apart to deal with only the ‘most serious acts’ such as torture and murder, as though that violence happens independent of its causes and consequences. Moreover, just as the suffering victims endure cannot be separated into categories of more or less tolerable pain, the harms inflicted by direct perpetrators and those committed by a more distant yet culpable ruling elite cannot be separated into more or less permissible wrongs.
Governing elites in a neoliberal state are not the same as agents of a military dictatorship or warlords. Torture, forced disappearance, massacres and pillaging are different acts from systematic discrimination, exploitation and extortion. It is not my intention to equate these things or diminish the gravity of more overt human rights violations. My point is rather that these perpetrators need not be equal or even similar for the abuses inflicted by both groups to be intolerable. The perpetrators identified in the Ivorian transitional justice process were primarily young men, recruited by the political elite and promised small rewards for committing violence in the streets. Punishing direct perpetrators is important to victims and should be pursued when possible. Yet these men were not the primary instigators or beneficiaries of the war.
Apprehending and publicly condemning every young recruit who picked up a machete or burned a village would change little about the root causes of the war and it would not prevent its reoccurrence. Their actions responded to chaos, terror and desperation created and exploited by a ruling class that crosscut the leadership on both sides of the partition line. With minimal
210 Interview by author with Community Abel NGO Director, Grand Bassam, Côte d’Ivoire July 2014
239 reshuffling, those leaders still occupy the highest offices of government and industry. That same elite and its international partners reestablished economic and political dominance in the aftermath of conflict, and leveraged postwar chaos to push through even more aggressively anti- poor policies than those that led to the country’s collapse. We do not know what happened to the people who tortured the widow known as ‘Affair 27.’ If these men survived the war, they are likely recipients of a demobilisation (DDR) package and thus live comparably well. Yet, even if these men – and every other FRCI recruit or Jeune Patriot who attacked civilians – could be brought to trial or forced to stand before the truth commission, it would not change the relationship between the hundreds of thousands of victims and the individuals who created the civil war and benefited from the suffering it caused.
The tendency to look for the perpetrators of another time in contemporary contexts is a key reason why transitional justice fails to respond to victims’ lived realities in the neoliberal era.
Pinochet’s victims also suffered economic consequences of the violations against them, and
Chileans struggled with lowered living conditions and social inequities created by his regime’s aggressive austerity (Valdés 1995). The Chilean transitional justice process did not correct these structural injustices when Pinochet he left power, but that transition process did put an end to his authority and to the legitimacy of his rule. That alone is a significant difference from the way transitional justice operates today. In those early examples, the exchange of peace for justice was very painful, but that trade-off achieved a kind of redress by fundamentally changing the social and, perhaps more importantly, moral order. Today we no longer expect transitional justice to meaningfully change in the relationship between victims and those most responsible for their suffering. This is because the transitional justice approach was designed to address power arrangements that no longer reflect the dynamics of conflict or repressive rule.
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The ‘justice’ of transitional justice depends on delegitimizing abusive governance and making a commitment in a national, public forum that such rule will no longer be tolerated. Truth commissions are designed as public performances of pain, meant to convey solemn recognition of harms suffered. As witnesses to that forum, all citizens enter a national dialogue about the tradeoffs being made in their name between the opportunity to build peace and the need for justice. These public acts acknowledging wrongdoing give a political community the means to point to abusive authorities and declare, “though we cannot jail or even unseat you, we recognise you wronged us and will never again accept your rule.’ Although a justice deficit invariably remains, public acknowledgement of wrongdoing eases that injustice by serving as a promise that the political community will never allow such things to be repeated.
That interaction falls apart if those most responsible for the harms suffered are an economic and political elite, only indirectly involved in human rights violations. Unlike the juntas and warlords who were publicly confronted with the truth of their crimes, today’s perpetrator elites hide in plain sight within the transitional justice model. Seen through a human rights lens, the primary creators and beneficiaries of the Ivorian civil war do not even qualify as perpetrators.
This means transitional justice protects elites without exposing their culpability or generating public outrage at their continued authority. Today, as in earlier examples, transitional justice requires victims to endure impunity for the sake of a better future. Although amnesties are now rare, impunity remains the standard response after mass atrocity. There are simply too many perpetrators in contemporary war for judicial institutions to address more than a handful of
‘illustrative’ cases. In contrast to the earlier examples, however, today’s injustice comes without a national dialogue that acknowledges wrongdoing; or, more accurately, that dialogue acknowledges only the most overt aspects of harms suffered and, in doing so, fails to recognise
241 what those harms mean in lived reality for victims and wider society. The result is a new transitional justice model that retains the procedural shell of justice-seeking, but has lost the interaction that once made these institutions an opportunity for meaningful change in a social and political order.
Furthermore, privileging a ruling elite with the opportunity to lead a transitional justice process, but without also exposing their role in wrongdoing, legitimizes their authority and allows them to frame their return to power as a sign of democratic and good governance. As a long-established feature of transitional justice, these processes empower national elites and foreign experts to control key decisions about postwar accountability and institutional reforms (Baranyi 2008).
That characteristic renders the institutions able to bring powerful belligerents to the negotiating table (McAdams 2011). As architects of a national transitional justice process, elites can control narratives about the past and write the agenda for future governance according to their own interests (Snyder and Vinjamuri 2003). That privilege was formerly balanced against a national process that also exposed and shamed abusive leadership. In the absence of that balance, transitional justice creates a positive feedback loop that empowers culpable elites with the authority to set the terms of future governance, while legitimatizing that authority as just and good, which in turn further reaffirms those elites as worthy of power. Thus, rather than establishing the culpability of elites who benefit from social injustice, contemporary transitional justice hands them the authority to define what justice and good governance will mean in the new era.
Through such messaging, the national transitional justice process solved the logical jump in the postwar peacebuilding agenda advanced by the Ouattara regime and its international backers.
The peacebuilding community promised Ivorians liberal democracy and a rights-respecting new
242 era, while simultaneously restructuring governance to benefit a wealthy globalized elite and deepen already dire poverty affecting approximately half the population. Transitional justice advanced this self-contradictory reform agenda by realigning moral standards for governance and social order with neoliberal governance principles. That effect was illustrated in this dissertation by a case study of Ivorian transitional justice. The case study showed transitional justice institutions give legitimacy to the regime as liberal and democratic while, at the same time, delineating between citizens’ suffering that merits redress and suffering that would be tolerated in the postwar era. That delineation reflects a moral reordering of governance and social norms that transitional justice advances in postwar contexts. In that moral order, structural violence and grave inequality are not signs of wrongdoing or illegitimate rule. Also, economic interests are granted a sanctified place beyond the reach of citizen demands for justice.
In Côte d’Ivoire, this meant dire poverty was kept outside the new regime’s obligations to its citizens. Thus, by deploying transitional justice, the Ouattara regime designated itself as democratic and liberal, even as it passed reforms denying a significant portion of the population the basic means to survive.
Tolerable and Intolerable Suffering
The popularity of transitional justice as a post-conflict recovery tool is connected to the ideological shift in global governance that happened at end of the Cold War. The salience of structural and economic critiques was supplanted during this time by the more limited promise in liberalism to protect citizens from the worst forms of political and physical human rights violations (Harvey 2005). Correspondingly, specific human rights violations are the primary
243 unit of analysis in transitional justice, making a collection of the most graphic moments in a violent past the basis for reform and reconstruction efforts. Mamdani first articulated the problem with this approach by illustrating that the sum of testimony detailing torture in police custody or car bombings did not add up to the story of Apartheid (Mamdani 2003). In the same way, the sum of machete attacks and ‘Article 125’ executions tell a narrow and depoliticized account of the Ivorian civil war. The context around that violence disappears, leaving a picture of irrational hatred against an ethnic other and exposing only perpetrators of overt violence. The
CDVR allowed the architects of that violence to hide behind dramatic scenes of radicalized youths. Although there is mention in the truth commission report that political leaders manipulated young fighters to advance their electoral campaigns, bands of xenophobic youth setting the country ablaze, remain the defining image of the conflict presented by the CDVR.
Contrasting from that official narrative, this dissertation describes the civil war in Côte d’Ivoire as a conflict between elites competing to control national wealth and power, and fought at the cost of the younger generation. The conflict erupted from a series of political and economic crises, compounded by the kleptocratic rule of a small elite who maintained control by preserving colonial era social hierarchies. As such, it was an escalation of violence within a long history of structural and economic oppression. As the country reached crisis point in the late
1990s, political leaders on both sides blamed ethnic hatred for rising tensions. That discourse allowed elites to avoid addressing the structural injustices responsible for the pending collapse and, at the same time, divide a population that was uniting against them on two key fronts: the land disputes in the western agricultural region and a powerful youth movement mobilizing in the urban centre. A decade later, in the aftermath of war, attributing the conflict to ethnic hatred allowed the Ouattara regime to again avoid addressing the social and economic roots of the
244 conflict. Instead, his government undertook largescale neoliberal restructuring of the economy, securing unprecedented economic growth and profiting the same elites who created the war while deepening poverty for the majority population.
Ethnic conflict narratives tend to silence structural critiques by reframing legitimate grievances as hatred and intolerance. Hatred invariably merits condemnation, making the motivations driving a group to join an ethnic war always illegitimate. In the aftermath, a new regime has no obligation to address their calls for justice and reform, indeed a good democratic leader would stand firmly against the demands of xenophobes. As discussed in the last chapter, the Gagnoa state prosecutor expressed this attitude. He proudly divulged that he interfered in land claim applications from Bêté farmers, referencing their assumed xenophobia as justification enough for using his office to punish enemies of the new regime. On a larger scale, we also saw that each victim giving testimony to the CDVR was reminded by the commissioners of her duty to contribute to ‘perfecting the nation’ by learning to pardon. Implicit in those speeches, victims were taught that refusing to forgive was choosing to be the enemy of peace and democracy.
Claiming conflict is caused by the irrational hatred of an ethnic other blames a population at large for its own suffering. It also turns peacemaking into a project of correcting moral failing in the political community, and thus renders conflict resolution a project of changing hateful ‘hearts and minds.’ As an example, the CDVR focused its efforts on teaching tolerance to the nation and encouraging victims to take responsibility for their own recovery by learning forgiveness.
Focusing conflict recovery efforts on measures to defend the citizenry from its own xenophobia allowed the new regime to avoid addressing economic or structural injustice. The new regime also gained an important source of legitimacy by assigning themselves the role of compassionate rulers, quelling the irrational masses. Of course, the commitment to reconciliation amongst the
245 elite class demonstrated at Ouattara’s inauguration was hardly a generous act of peacemaking.
For a ruling class at war with one another just weeks before, a quick postwar reconciliation mutually guaranteed their shared interests would be safe in the aftermath.
It is not a coincidence that the rise of ethnic wars in the 1990s and early 2000s paralleled the global spread of transitional justice. With its focus on individual perpetrators and victims, these processes are well-suited to writing compelling accounts that detail hatred, intolerance and fear.
Truth commissions wrote the postwar rebuilding agenda in Sierra Leone and Liberia – both archetypal case studies of post-Cold War ethnic conflict (Horowitz 2000; Bøås 2001). Post- genocide Rwanda similarly adopted Gacaca courts as a locally adapted version of a truth commission. On one hand, the human rights lens gives transitional justice the ability to focus-in on the specifics of a violent incident, overtime exposing patterns of violence that might otherwise be hidden. During more than three decades of civil war in Guatemala, for example, succeeding right-wing dictatorships justified horrific violence against civilian populations by claiming to defend the country from communist guerrillas. The Commission for Historical
Clarification wholly disproved that narrative, exposing a coordinated and sustained genocide targeting Mayan communities and committed by General Montt’s forces (CEH 1999). The truth commission exposed the racism driving state violence and, in doing so, exposed a long enduring ethnic cleansing campaign.
On the other hand, transitional justice is poorly suited to writing conflict narratives that expose deep-seated structural violence or inequalities. These motivations disappear into the background behind testimony focused on personalized and emotive experiences of violence. Maoist rebels in
Nepal, for example, clearly communicated their motivations for the rebellion were rooted in centuries of state oppression and extreme inequality. After winning the civil war, the Maoist
246 victors promised radical economic reforms and land redistribution would be at the core of the national reconstruction agenda. A decade into the country’s ongoing transitional justice process, land and wealth redistribution were replaced on the reform agenda by the politics of minority representation. 211 Transitional justice offered a new platform for advancing the rights of Nepal’s one hundred and twenty-six ethnic minorities, but it also contributed to fracturing a united peasant moment and ending the push for radical reforms. 212
Transitional justice has not only grown apace with a post-Cold War shift to global neoliberalism, its popularity has contributed to spreading neoliberal governance into countries underdoing major political transitions. In this dissertation, I describe parameters that transitional justice sets around the types of suffering which matter to justice and those that can be overlooked. That parameter defines which harms citizens can expect to be protected against in the post-conflict era, and establishes other harms committed against civilian as implicitly permissible. As we have seen, that delineation promises to protect citizens from the worst forms of human rights violation – killing or maiming due to irrational ethnic hatred, for example - but it leaves structural injustice outside the moral responsibility of the state. Stated in these terms, this may seem a relatively innocuous, if narrow, moral standard for governance. It is true that in a long established and industrialized liberal democracy, most citizens can live relatively well under a government guided by such a moral standard. In the wake of civil war in a low-income country,
211 Economic and social justice were at the centre of the peace agreement. Social, economic and cultural rights were also given special attention in the interim constitution. The first Constitutional Assembly failed to draft a new constitution and was dissolved in 2011, resulting in new elections and a change in political climate away from the initial focus on addressing structural injustice. See Pasipanodya for these details on the peace process and interim constitution (Pasipanodya 2008 ). 212 Robins makes a similar argument about the role of transitional justice empowering Kathmandu based elites through imposing a human rights framework on the peace process, thus replacing rural and peasant groups and their demands (Robins, Transitional Justice as an Elite Discourse 2012). This point was also stated interview with ICTJ reparations expert, Ruben Carranza, March 2019.
247 however, this same standard means a denial of the basic right to life and livelihood for many conflict victims.
Permissible and Punishable War Criminals
The International Criminal Court trial of Laurent Gbagbo and Blé Goudé illustrates how transitional justice shapes governance to advance neoliberalism in postwar contexts. The one- sided nature of that trial showed the world that some war criminals are acceptable in the global governance community. Moreover, it conveyed this message in the highest body of international justice, using the language of universal humanitarian norms. The one-sided ICC trial demonstrated that some regimes are simply beyond justice – but, notably, not because justice is unimportant in the current global order. Côte d’Ivoire did not suffer from cynical impunity or the disregard of the international community. The Ouattara regime and its foreign partners went to incredible lengths to demonstrate that justice was foundational to Côte d’Ivoire’s postwar recovery. The ICC case, itself, is proof enough of that: it monopolized seven years of court proceedings at the Hague and cost hundreds-of-millions of dollars.213 Postwar justice was an important means of demonstrating that liberal and democratic governance had returned to Côte d’Ivoire. That said, in the Ouattara regime’s version of liberalism, purportedly core values like equality before the law and the equal rights of citizens are superseded by economic interests.
Accordingly, the ICC considered Ivorian war crimes punishable or permissible based on the culpable elite’s demonstrated commitment to neoliberal governance.
213 By 2012, the ICC cost contributing states one billion US dollars in its first decade, and had a $140 million USD annual budget. During that period, the funds covered the cost three trials and led to one verdict (Silverman 2012). In contrast, that same year, the ICC Trust fund covering all reparations and assistance for victims had a reserve of about 3.5 million dollar and received on average $500,000 to 1 million dollars a year from donors. UN Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture received $10 million dollars per year from donors (McCarthy 2012)
248
As a follow up to the foreign military intervention in Côte d’Ivoire, the ICC offered sanction to internationally backed regime change in a resource rich African state. That foreign intervention secured regime change by removing the enemies of free market capitalism. Following that victory, the international coalition then punished the former regime in an international court while ignoring the war crimes of its successor; a regime that, incidentally, promised to free markets and promote massive foreign investment in one of Africa’s largest economies.214 Yet this was not, as Gbagboists claim, a story of neocolonial France reclaiming a former colony.
Were the rebellion merely a local proxy for renewed colonial power, the French intervention would have easily defeated Gbagbo’s military in the early days of the war (Smith 2003). The regime change operation was part of a wider global governance project whose leaders are difficult to pinpoint. These actors cross the political and business sphere, and include alliances between foreign and national elites from industry, international organizations and elected-office.
At the ICC trial, the world’s highest court declared this global coalition of elites to be in the right in the Ivorian civil war and the isolated Gbagbo regime to be in the wrong.
The implications of that support go beyond determining who should be punished and who could go free: it is a matter of defining legitimate authority and re-establishing moral standards in a post-conflict zone. Invoking the ICC and its groundings in universal humanitarian law legitimatized the new regime as a rights-respecting government, committed to justice for its citizens. This, by extension, communicated to citizens and to foreign onlookers that Ouattara’s postwar economic restructuring was a sign that good and democratic leadership had returned to
Côte d’Ivoire. As seen, in lived reality, Ouattara’s aggressively anti-poor restructuring hurts
214 Côte d’Ivoire was the 12th largest economy in Africa in 2019, measured by GDP (IMF 2019). See Chapter Four for a detailed discussion of resource reserves in the country.
249 much of the population and is especially damaging to conflict victims – the championed cause of the ICC.
The selective accountability pursued at the ICC trial reflected a standard of international justice in which some governments can commit atrocities with impunity while others are subject to the
‘universalism’ of humanitarian law. That delineation between punishable and permissible war crimes reflects a vision of liberal democracy in which there is a sacrosanct moral imperative to hold war criminals to account, but only until that principle interferes with important economic interests. By invoking universal humanitarian norms and the authority of the international court, the new Ivorian government and its global partners established the delineation between punishable enemies of capitalism and permissible neoliberal war criminals as not just legally enforceable but also, and more importantly, as morally defensible.
Where do we go from here?
The dynamics of the war in Côte d’Ivoire were such that a decision to address the past through the lens of overt human rights violations is a decision to overlook the lived consequences of the conflict on those affected. The civil war in Côte d’Ivoire erupted after decades of exploitative rule and vast inequalities, created and maintained by a small ruling elite. Looking at that history as a collection of specific incidents of human rights violations gives a distorted picture of the wrongs committed and the suffering it inflicted. Likewise, the justice achieved by putting direct perpetrators behind bars or hearing testimony about grave violations misaligns with the harm victims actually endured. To be meaningful, doing justice for the past needs to include a change
250 in the power relationship between those who created and benefited from the war, and those who suffer the consequences.
In an ideal world, justice would mean every victim’s life is transformed and the social injustices that led to that victimization are corrected. Such recommendations are not based in practical reality, however. This is the inevitable response when critics voice the need for a more substantive vision of post-conflict justice than that currently available in the transitional justice approach. There are five-hundred-thousand registered victims in Côte d’Ivoire, after all. No plausible reform and reparation package could change so many lives, let alone restructure economic realities and transform social inequalities. At best, transitional justice can offer reparations to victims of the gravest human rights violations and contribute to wider structural change by recommending institutional reforms. Even then, reparations are never sufficient to fundamentally change lives, particularly given the sheer number of victims and the degree of economic deprivation many experience. Recent efforts to develop transitional justice beyond a standard political and physical rights framework resulted in overburdened and nonfunctioning institutions, with results even more disappointing than those available in a more limited but realistic process.215 Moreover, victims cannot be the sole focus of postwar recovery. Their right to justice and repair must balance against other urgent reconstruction priorities. These are compelling reasons to stick with what we know transitional justice can achieve: at very least, it can identify perpetrators of the most serious human rights violations, while offering victims public acknowledgement and some, albeit largely symbolic, reparatory measures.
215 See discussion of Kenyan Truth, Reconciliation and Justice Commission in Chapter One.
251
On the other hand, although transitional justice institutions are not powerful enough to redistribute national wealth or dismantle a ruling elite, declaring those measures impossible does not mean the only other option is a retreat to the standard model of restricting our efforts to addressing the most overt political and physical rights violations. We have seen the effects of that model in contemporary contexts. This standard approach shields those most responsible for civil war and it undermines victim demands for more substantive assistance and reforms. It is indeed impossible to change every victim’s life, let alone transform structural injustices that may be rooted in century old struggles. These are, nevertheless, the correct goals for transitional justice and aiming for less means accepting a moral order where desperate suffering is somehow tolerable and terrible wrongdoing is somehow permissible.
It should not be problematic to both acknowledge that a fully transformative justice is unachievable in practical reality, but equally insist that nothing less meets the requirements of a just response to contemporary conflict. After all, transitional justice was invented for moments like these – to offer a meaningful response where justice is impossible, but accepting continued injustice is unthinkable. The field developed as an innovative approach to doing justice in contexts where it seemed immunity would never end. It was impossible to put the junta leaders behind bars in Chile or to punish every combatant who maimed civilians in Sierra Leone.
Adopting transitional justice did not change those realities, but it did provide a means for the political community to solemnly and publicly contest that injustice. At very least, transitional justice offered victims a public forum acknowledging their suffering and shaming those responsible. The challenge for transitional justice in the current era is innovating a response to new kind of impunity granted a neoliberal national and global elite: a response that solemnly and meaningfully acknowledges the hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed and stripped of dignity
252 in a conflict rooted in exploitative rule and grave inequality. Transitional justice cannot change these realities, but it could be a powerful means of declaring the status quo intolerable and establishing that it is morally unacceptable for such injustice to continue.
This would then put the prerogative on a new regime and the international community backing it to defend why such wrongs go unaddressed and why those who profit from injustice remain in positions of authority. I emphasized above that elite accommodation is necessary in any transitional justice process; without offering elites some protections or preserved authority, transitional justice institutions cannot get off the ground. Does that fact not render it untenable to recommend shaming those same elites? In its original form, transitional justice accommodated elites while balancing that compliance with a national process exposing them and the harms they inflicted. This was never an easy balance and it made transitional justice a contentious, if not dangerous, political activity. With some reimagining of the transitional justice approach and with a renewed willingness to take risks in this field, contemporary efforts could seek a new balance adapted to our current realities.
A bolder, more contentious transitional justice approach would not only expose the culpability of national elites, it would also work against powerful interests within the global governance community. This, perhaps, is the bigger obstacle to adopting that more radical approach.
Launching a national transitional justice process resolves the logical jump in contemporary peacebuilding operations between promoting liberal humanitarianism while simultaneously pushing free market capitalism onto post-conflict zone. Transitional justice institutions permit this dual agenda by establishing a new moral order that protects citizens from the worst forms of political and physical human rights violation, but it also grants precedence to elite interests and economic success over demands for social justice. The humanitarian promise to citizens to do
253 justice for a terrible past has thus become a means of legitimizing reforms that hurt the most vulnerable sectors of society and orient governance in the interests of national and foreign elites.
Transitional justice betrays victims with that false promise, and not because it is fails to resolve every economic or social injustice they face in difficult times. It betrays victims because it is no longer on their side in this struggle. Transitional justice is deployed in moments of major political upheaval: moments that come at a heavy price and represent rare opportunities to transform a society and its values. In its current applications, a new regime and its international partners can use transitional justice to leverage such a moment to advance neoliberal reforms.
Transitional justice is a means for powerful elites to communicate that the new regime is good and democratic, even while it deepens social injustice for a population struggling in the aftermath of war. For transitional justice to be on the side of victims and their communities, that messaging needs to reverse directions: transitional justice needs to once more provide victims with the means to define justice on their own terms and to amplify their voices when they speak back to power.
254
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Appendices
Appendix 1: Research Methods
Participant Recruitment
Interview participants were identified through the network of victim leaders, NGO workers and youth leaders I established during the year and a half I worked for an international organization as a consultant for the CDVR and civil society groups. I recruited participants by calling members of this network and explaining my research project. These contacts also assisted in identifying other individuals interested in participating.
Informed Consent Process
Before meeting for an interview, I first explained the research on the phone, particularly emphasizing it was not related to my former work and that participation had no foreseen benefits and brought no compensation. At the interview itself, I obtained consent verbally through a pre- scripted conversation, which I adapted as needed to ensure clarity. This script included asking permission to record, details on privacy protections, the purpose of the research, and the intended uses of the research (i.e. for my dissertation and potentially to publish). I also informed interviewees that they could stop the interview at any point or retract any or all information shared, and gave them (and in some cases a social worker known to them) my telephone number. It was also very important to re-emphasis that there were no foreseeable benefits to giving an interview and to clarify that this research had no connection with my former work. In situations where these details seemed unclear, I checked for clarity by asking follow up questions and rephrased if needed. Interviewees were invited to ask questions before beginning.
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I obtained verbal rather than written consent because I felt, in the context, the legalism of a signed form gave a negative impression of wielding authority over the interviewees, particularly since I did not always know their level of literacy. I was also concerned that the perceptions of a ‘signed contract’ would give the impression I was conducting an official investigation and thus create expectations of some follow up or put pressure on interviewees to ‘tell the whole truth’.
The verbal consent process was recorded at the beginning of each interview. With only a few exceptions, the first step in each interview was asking permission to record and take handwritten notes (all interviewees agreed to both). The exceptions were the few cases where I felt there was a risk that an audio recording, if confiscated by the authorities, could put the individual in danger. In these cases, I did not bring a recorder and asked permission to take notes by hand only, explaining that the notes included no identifying information. I therefore did not audio record interviews with persons who were minors at the time they were involved in human rights violations, with persons accused of serious crimes (i.e. former combatants or prisoners) and with direct victims who were not public figures.
Though everyone interviewed consented to written notes, I did not always take notes for the full interview. In some cases, it felt more respectful to just listen. Some individuals signaled they wanted their accounts to be recorded closely and thus seemed to appreciate that I wrote notes, however others gave the impression my writing was distracting or uncomfortable. In these cases, I paid close attention and wrote my notes immediately afterwards in my car.
Measures to ensure confidentially
Only known public figures who consented to being interviewed in that capacity are identified by their names and job titles. In three instances interviewees participated in their capacity as public figures, but disclosed information that could put themselves or others at risk. I therefore also changed names and identifying information in these cases.
Although the victims’ leaders and NGO or government staff who participated are known figures in their communities, I have also changed their names and identifying information. In most cases these individuals are identified by their locale (i.e. town or neighbourhood) and general job title.
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Former combatants, former members of FESCI, direct victims, individuals accused of grave crimes, sex workers or individuals who were minors at the time they were involved in human rights violations are especially vulnerable groups. I have therefore changed all potentially identifying information related to these individuals.
Special considerations for interviewing more vulnerable groups
In the cases I interviewed more vulnerable individuals (i.e. members rather than leaders of a victims’ association, former child combatants and sex workers), I did not recruit these participants directly. Instead, these participants were identified by a social worker or other psychosocial support worker with whom the interviewee had a prior relationship. These individuals were residents or regular attendees at a community center or NGO, and were identified by support workers as people would might enjoy participating in my research and who were in a good mental state. These interviews were conducted as informal focus group discussions and accompanied by a support worker who worked regularly with the participants. Given I was seeking information about their experiences with TJ institutions and not personal information about specific violations (though some individuals disclosed personal accounts), the presence of a support worker and of other peers did not inhibit the interview process. Moreover, in my impression, these informal group discussions were more comfortable for the participants than speaking with me one-on-one.
Involving support workers also helped ensure the consent process was voluntary and fully informed. Support workers discussed the possibility of an interview in my absence, where there was less pressure to say ‘yes’ to a foreign researcher. The presence of support workers also ensured interviewees had a trusted person nearby to follow up with should any negative impacts come from the process (i.e. feelings of trauma, feelings of regret about something said, or disappointment that benefits did not follow). Note that I did not provide any financial compensation to support workers, meaning there was no incentive for them to pressure participants in my absence. I had prior relationships with them and asked for their assistance in that capacity.
When interviewing all victims, my research was about their experiences with the transitional justice process and the kind of support available to them. I was not looking for highly personal
291 or sensitive information and did not ask questions pertaining to specific violations. There is, of course, cross over between experiences with TJ and this sensitive information, and some individuals volunteered highly personal accounts. I did not, however, actively seek such information and generally avoided topics that might cause discomfort or embarrassment.
Managing expectations
Since I primarily interviewed victims’ association leaders, NGO staff and public figures, all these actors had prior experience working with foreign actors, if not foreign researchers. As professionals in the human rights sector, these participants were in a good position to understand my explanation that my dissertation research was not related to my previous job and would bring no foreseeable benefits. On only one occasion did an individual express disappointment that I did not provide compensation, insisting ‘that is how this normally works.’ All other interviewees seemed to understand the principle that no compensation or benefits would follow. In the case of more vulnerable groups, working through support workers made it much easier to manage expectations of compensation. It also meant interviewees had someone nearby who could address any confusion or disappointment in the follow up.
Language
All one-on-one interviews were conducted in French, which I speak fluently. Having lived in Abidjan and worked with the communities interviewed prior to conducting field research, I was also familiar with local slang. Focus group interviews in rural areas required a translator.
Location of interviews
Interviews with direct victims and other more vulnerable groups were conducted in community centres or victims’ association offices where the interviewee commonly went and where a foreign woman was not a conspicuous visitor.
When interviewing public officials or NGO staff, I went to their offices. Even in cases where an interview posed no foreseeable risk to the participant, I still considered it important that I go to them both out of respect and in order to avoid expectations of ‘transport money’ as compensation for the interview.
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Focus group interviews with local chief councils and with youth organizations were conducted in public locations of the participants’ choosing.
In a small number of cases, I had reason to believe the person being interviewed could potentially pose some threat to me. In these cases, interviews were conducted in a private but open-air location (i.e. in a park where help was nearby, but no one would overhear our conversation).
Focus groups
I held focus groups instead of one-on-one interviews in cases where either the participants or my colleagues (i.e. support workers) voiced a preference for this format. For instance, at one point during an inland mission, I organised an interview with a local chief in a Western community affected by land grabs. When I arrived in the village and, in accordance with local propriety, introduced myself to the chief’s council, the council explained it was inappropriate for one individual from their group to speak to me alone. I therefore did this and other similar interviews as focus groups with the full community leadership invited. Similarly, when interviewing youth leaders, some expressed a preference for meeting as a group with their colleagues.
The support workers I worked with felt group discussions were a less intimidating setting for more vulnerable groups than private interviews. Since I had an existing relationship with these support workers and had good reason to trust their judgement, I deferred to their advice.
Although speaking in a group of peers may have inhibited some individuals from sharing certain information, I do not feel this inhibited my research. This is particularly the case as I was not seeking highly sensitive information or details that would be dangerous to share. The group setting also meant I learned various perspectives on the same issues and could identify important points of disagreements. Furthermore, it was my impression that many Ivorians found a private interview setting formal and uncomfortable, whereas speaking in a focus group tended to be a fun experience where the participants took control of the conversation.
Access to documents
All documentation quoted in this dissertation are from officially public sources. Some sources are, however, very difficult to access. Most notably, an earlier, much more detailed version of
293 the CDVR report as well as select transcripts from the public hearings were made public but quickly disappeared from government sites (note the ‘public’ hearings, in reality, were invitation-only. An edited film of some sessions was aired on state television some months later).
In my capacity as a consultant working with the CDVR, I had access to confidential information about violations that took place. This information is not used or quoted in the dissertation, however knowledge of it did inform my thinking and my approach to fieldwork. For example, I reference victim testimony about the Duékeué massacre but I provide no details from that testimony beyond what is available in the public domain or what was told to me directly in an interview.
List of interviews
1. Victim’s Affair Office, Director, Cocody (state-run) 2. Victim’s association leader, Koumassi (state-run) 3. Victim’s association leader, Bouaké 4. Victim’s association leader, Adjamé 5. Victim’s association leader, Abobo (PK 18 area) 6. Victim’s association leader, Abobo (Carrefour area) 7. Victim’s association leader, Gagnoa 8. Victim’s association leader, Dalao 9. Victim’s association leader, Bangolo 10. Victim’s association leader, Toutelepleu 11. Former national radio host (target of state repression under Gbagbo) 12. FRCI former combatant from Cocody / perpetrator 13. FRCI former combatant from Man 14. FRCI former combatant from Youpougon 15. FRCI ComZone 16. FRCI/Dozo former combatant, Korhogo 17. FDS/ Liberian mercenary, Youpougon 18. ‘Therese’ former FESCI National Office, officer 19. Former FESCI National Office, officer (in prison) 20. Charlie Watta, former Head of Security for FESCI 21. Jole Poele, Jeune Patriots national leader at time of writing 22. Soro Alphonse, RDR youth national leader at time of writing 23. Frank Navigué former FPI negotiator / FPI politician at time of writing 24. Former election monitor / youth activist, Cocody 25. Election monitoring NGO, Head of Office 26. Human Rights NGO ICTJ, senior staff 27. Human Rights NGO Lidho, senior staff 28. Human Rights NGO Midh, senior staff 29. Coalition for the ICC, Head of Office
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30. Ministry of Women’s Affairs, Director 31. Ministry of Solidarity, Director 32. Former Ministry of Interior, ‘Alain Diabété’, Director (Gbagbo appointed) 33. Ministry of Education, senior staff 34. State Prosecutor, Gagnoa 35. Social services, local office, social worker, Trenchville 36. Social services, local office, Director, Duékuoé 37. Social services, local office, social worker, Adjamé 38. CDVR senior staff / Human Rights NGO, Director 39. CDVR Commissioner 40. CDVR Communications, senior staff 41. Head statement taker Man 42. Head statement taker Daloa 43. Head statement taker Gagnoa 44. Head statement taker Toutlepleu 45. Head statement taker Duékoué 46. Head statement taker Guiglo 47. Head statement taker Tabu 48. Head statement taker San-Pedro 49. Head statement taker Boueké 50. Red cross staff, Gagnoa, 51. Red cross staff, Duékoué 52. Red cross staff Koumassi 53. Red cross staff, San Pedro 54. Human rights International NGO, Director Youpougon, 55. Human rights International NGO, Director Grand Bassam 56. Human rights International NGO, Director Koumassi 57. GIZ International Consultant, DRR Expert 58. UNOCI mission, junior official 59. UNOCI mission, senior official 60. Local youth, Kofolo 61. Ziguehi / Community Leader, Adjamé 62. Researcher on youth movements in Côte d’Ivoire, FHB University 63. Researcher on SGBV targeting children in Côte d’Ivoire, FHB University 64. Investigator, Sierra Leone TRC 65. L. Bickford, Director International NGO Memoria
List of Focus Group Interviews
1. Village youth leaders, Divo 2. Chief and council, Divo 3. Chiefs and council, Grand Beriby 4. Chief and council, Mama (Gbagbo’s hometown) 5. Youth leaders, Mama (Gbagbo’s hometown) 6. FESCI National Office leadership (in hiding) 7. NGO Réseau action justice et paix, youth leaders 8. Abobo victims’ association members
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9. Former child combatants / youth in conflict with the law, youth center in Youpougon 10. Youth sex workers, community centre in Koumassi 11. Youth sex workers, community centre in Grand Bassam 12. Ziguehi leaders (Ziguehi were unofficial security personnel of Houphouet-Boigny the low-income communities. They are seen as both community leaders and as a network of gangsters)
Copyright Acknowledgements
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