The First Ivorian Civil War was a civil conflict in the Ivory Coast (Côte d'Ivoire) that began with a military rebellion on 19 September 2002 and ended with a peace agreement on 4 March 2007. The conflict pitted the government of Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo against a domestic insurgency led by the New Forces of Ivory Coast (Forces nouvelles de Côte d'Ivoire). A second civil war (2010–2011) would break out over the results of the 2010 Ivorian presidential election.
The war was preceded by a tumultuous decade in the Ivory Coast, marked by an economic downturn and, following the death of long-time Ivorian President Félix Houphouët-Boigny in 1993, a leadership succession crisis. The succession crisis manifested in a 1999 military coup d'état and a violent dispute over the result of the 2000 presidential election. Three successive Ivorian leaders – Henri Konan Bédié from 1993, Robert Guéï from 1999, and Gbagbo from 2000 – exploited the ideology of Ivoirité to repress and marginalise political opposition, notably by disqualifying Alassane Ouattara from contesting elections on the basis of his Burkinabé nationality; in the process, these leaders stoked ethnic tensions and xenophobic sentiment in the country. The rebellion which ignited the war was driven by forces which sought a re-run of the 2000 election and reform of exclusionary citizenship policies.
War broke out on 19 September 2002 when troops opposed to President Gbagbo – and under the political leadership of the Patriotic Movement of Ivory Coast (MPCI, Mouvement patriotique de Côte d'Ivoire) – attacked three Ivorian cities, including Abidjan. Though they failed to take Abidjan, the rebels quickly established control over much of the north of the country. Two new rebel groups along the Liberian border, the Movement for Justice and Peace (Mouvement pour la justice et la paix) and the Ivorian Popular Movement of the Great West (Mouvement populaire ivoirien du Grand Ouest), battled government forces for western territory, before uniting with MPCI as the New Forces in December 2002. Across the country, opposition supporters clashed with the Young Patriots (Congrès panafricain des jeunes et des patriotes) and other pro-government militias.
The conflict attracted international attention. Ivory Coast's former colonial power, France, launched a military intervention soon after the initial rebellion. Though Opération Licorne had a protection mandate and pleaded its neutrality in the conflict, the French intervention was attacked by Ivorian nationalists as an example of neocolonialism, leading to sustained public demonstrations and in 2004, fatal clashes between Ivorian and French forces. The United Nations (UN) was involved in the conflict first through a political mission, the UN Mission in Côte d'Ivoire, and then through an ambitious peacekeeping mission, the UN Operation in Côte d'Ivoire, which deployed in April 2004 and absorbed the smaller contingent of peacekeepers that had been deployed earlier by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
The violence largely subsided by the end of 2004, but the country remained under de facto partition – with a rebel-held north and a government-held south – while the political crisis continued. Though the multi-party Linas-Marcoussis Accord established a power-sharing Government of National Reconciliation in early 2003, its provisions regarding disarmament and political reform were not implemented. A comprehensive political settlement was finally reached in 2007, when Gbagbo and the New Forces signed the Ouagadougou Peace Agreement in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. However, when the Ivory Coast held its presidential elections in 2010, the first since 2000, Gbagbo refused to accept the result, sparking a renewed political crisis and the beginning of the Second Ivorian Civil War.
Origins and context
Leadership succession
When Ivorian President Félix Houphouët-Boigny died in 1993, the end of his thirty-three-year presidency inaugurated a prolonged "crisis of succession", which destabilised Ivorian politics for the remainder of the 1990s. Since the Ivory Coast's independence from France in 1960, Houphouët-Boigny had maintained Ivorian political and economic stability using mechanisms largely dependent on his own personal charisma, networks, and so-called Françafrique connections; the country lacked established mechanisms to regulate democratic competition. As required by the constitution following his death, Houphouët-Boigny was succeeded by Henri Konan Bédié, the President of the National Assembly, who also replaced Houphouët-Boigny at the head of the ruling Democratic Party of Ivory Coast (PDCI, Parti démocratique de la Côte d'Ivoire). However, ahead of the 1995 presidential election, opposition politicians began to organise for democratic regime change in open and competitive elections.
One powerful opposition leader was Laurent Gbagbo, whose Ivorian Popular Front (FPI, Front populaire ivoirien) had long agitated for democratisation under Houphouët-Boigny. Another was Alassane Ouattara, Houphouët-Boigny's Prime Minister, who had launched an abortive challenge to Bédié's leadership in the weeks after Houphouët-Boigny's death, and who in 1994 split from PDCI to establish his own party, Rally of the Republicans (RDR, Rassemblement des républicains). Both opposition groups boycotted the 1995 election in protest of changes to the electoral code : Bédié's PDCI retained power, but at the cost of harming its popular legitimacy. After 1995, the opposition continued to gain political ground. This political change coincided, from the late 1990s, with renewed economic downturn in Ivory Coast, exacerbated by the liberalisation of key agricultural sectors, notably coffee and cocoa, under an International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural adjustment programme.
Ivoirité
Ivory Coast has historically received large numbers of immigrants from neighbouring West African countries, especially Burkina Faso, and the flow of immigration was sustained after independence, both due to Ivory Coast's relative prosperity and due to the favourable policies of Houphouët-Boigny's government: for example, between 1960 and 1972, any person born in Ivory Coast could receive Ivorian citizenship, regardless of their parents' nationality. A majority of immigrants were Muslim: the share of Muslims in the Ivorian population increased from approximately six per cent in 1922 to 38.6 per cent in 1998. By then, they outnumbered the country's Christians, and were particularly numerous in the north of the country. Although immigration slowed from the 1990s, the Muslim population continued to grow in demographic importance due to a widening fertility gap.
Academic analyses agree that a key root cause of the Ivorian civil war was the spread of nativist and xenophobic discourse, its mobilisation by opportunistic politicians, and the resulting ethnic tensions. Central in this regard was the rise of Ivoirité as an ideology and state policy under President Bédié, and its use to marginalise and exclude immigrants, their descendants, and certain groups of Ivorian citizens. Ethnic tensions, xenophobic sentiment, and related communal disputes in Ivory Coast predated Bédié's rule, but Houphouët-Boigny had been able to accommodate, manage, and suppress them. Under Bédié, however, the rise of Ivoirité politicised such disputes, making origin and religious affiliation "the prime markers of identity" in Ivory Coast. Land disputes were increasingly framed in ethnic terms, and became increasingly common in the late 1990s: Houphouët-Boigny's liberal land policies had extended access to land to both internal and foreign migrants, and rising urban unemployment in the 1990s – resulting in back-migration to rural areas – led to intensified competition over fertile land.
Sociologist Francis Akindès notes that Ivoirité under Bédié had undertones which valorised Akan identity (the ethnic group of both Bédié and Houphouët-Boigny) and Christian identity; but the central variant of Ivoirité was framed as a form of patriotism and used national origin as the measure of "Ivorianness". Yet adjudicating residents' claims to Ivorian nationality was a complicated task, resting on a controversial distinction between "indigenous" Ivorians and Ivorians "of immigrant ancestry". Groups perceived as foreign had long histories of migration to Ivory Coast, both before and during colonialism – Burkinabés, for example, had been represented among Ivorian residents since before states existed in either Burkina Faso or Ivory Coast – and many of their members had been citizens for multiple generations. In this context, even the more inclusive nationality-based variant of Ivoirité had a marked tendency to denigrate and exclude groups of Ivorian citizens, notably the Dioula population of northern Ivory Coast.
Ouattara was himself Dioula – though he insisted he was an Ivorian national – and drew much of his support base from the predominantly Muslim north, particularly poor immigrants and their descendants on northern agricultural plantations. In November 1994, ahead of the 1995 presidential election, Bédié had the National Assembly amend the electoral code to require that presidential candidates should be Ivorian-born with two Ivorian-born parents (where previously only one such parent had been required). This was viewed as a strategic move to avert a leadership challenge from Ouattara, who at that point remained Bédié's rival inside PDCI.
Coup and election violence
Former army commander Robert Guéï assumed power in December 1999, in a coup d'état which overthrew Bédié. The coup originated in a mutiny, itself occasioned by Bédié's refusal to release detained RDR members or to meet other demands of the relevant faction of the military. Guéï had been fired by Bédié in 1995, reportedly because he declined to deploy the military during pre-election public demonstrations, and, once in office, he said that the new military government would seek to reverse Bédié's changes to the electoral code. However, it did the opposite: in July 2000, the Ivory Coast adopted by referendum a constitutional amendment which, under article 35 of the constitution, would permanently restrict eligibility for the presidency to those "of Ivorian origin, born of a father and mother who are also Ivorian by birth". This provision was used to maintain Ouattara's disqualification, and the candidacy of other opposition leaders was also blocked. As a result, Gbagbo was the only major opposition figure allowed to challenge Guéï in the 2000 presidential election. Gbagbo won the election, although Guéï refused to cede power to him until forced to do so by violent public protests in which 206 people were killed and 1,207 injured. In the violence, FPI supporters reportedly targeted not only Guéï's forces but also supporters of Ouattara's RDR, as well as northerners and immigrants who they assumed supported RDR.
President Gbagbo took up the mantle of Ivoirité and further entrenched it in state institutions. According to Human Rights Watch, Gbagbo's security forces committed abuses against civilians, targeting – on the basis of their nationality, ethnicity, or religion – immigrants, their descendants, and Ivorians from the north. Moreover, in 2001, the FPI government introduced a new national identification system, under which residents applying for official identity documents were required to prove their nationality, including the locality of their place of birth, to a new National Identification Office (ONI, Office national d'identification). This policy affected the voting rights not only of immigrants but also of many northern Ivorians. Thus the political transition to Gbago's government did little to ease ethnic tensions. For related reasons, and as throughout Guéï's rule, the mood in the military remained generally mutinous, and Gbagbo faced opposition from both Guéï loyalists and Ouattara sympathisers within the army. An attempted coup in January 2001, which Gbagbo blamed on the interference of Burkina Faso, led to renewed attacks on Burkinabé residents by FPI supporters.
Belligerents
Rebel forces
The primary rebel force in the civil war was the New Forces of Ivory Coast (FNCI, Forces nouvelles de Côte d'Ivoire), created in December 2002 as a coalition between the Patriotic Movement of Ivory Coast (MPCI, Mouvement patriotique de Côte d'Ivoire), the Ivorian Popular Movement of the Great West (MPIGO, Mouvement populaire ivoirien du Grand Ouest), and the Movement for Justice and Peace (MJP, Mouvement pour la justice et la paix). Guillaume Soro led the MPCI, whose insurgency began the war, and he became the general secretary of FNCI. At least a significant portion of MPCI was aligned or sympathetic to the Rally of the Republicans (RDR, Rassemblement des républicains), Alassane Ouattara's opposition party, while MPIGO and MJP claimed allegiance to Ivory Coast's former military leader, Robert Guéï, who died at the beginning of the war.
The Ivorian government claimed that MPCI was supported by Burkina Faso, an allegation which Burkinabé President Blaise Compaore repeatedly denied. The International Crisis Group, however, regarded the allegation as plausible: sources in the Burkinabé government reported that arms had been delivered to the rebels by air, and Western intelligence proved that some of the arms used in the rebels' initial attacks had come from the Burkinabé Presidential Guard stocks. However, both International Crisis Group and Western intelligence reports gave less credence to Gbagbo's further accusation that Burkinabé troops had participated directly in the initial attacks. MPIGO and MJP were reported to have received assistance from the Liberian government, reflecting a partial spillover of the Liberian Civil War, and, according to a March 2003 report by Global Witness, 90% of MJP and MPIGO forces were Liberian or Sierra Leonean mercenaries, many of them ex-members of Charles Taylor's Revolutionary United Front.
Government forces
President Laurent Gbagbo was supported by loyalists in the state security services and National Armed Forces (FANCI, Forces armées nationales de Côte d'Ivoire). In addition, he reportedly recruited foreign mercenaries, some of whom had previously been affiliated with the South Africa-based Executive Outcomes, and including a number of Belarusian pilots. Various civilian militias supported Gbagbo and his political party, the Ivorian Popular Front (FPI, Front populaire ivoirien) – the most important among them was the Young Patriots' Pan-African Congress (COJEP, Congrès panafricain des jeunes et des patriotes). In 2005, Human Rights Watch reported that the Ivorian government had also recruited foreign combatants, primarily from Liberia, and including child soldiers. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, between 2002 and 2004, the Ivorian government purchased arms from Angola, Belarus, Bulgaria, Israel, Romania, and Ukraine.
International forces
The French military launched its intervention in Ivory Coast, Opération Licorne, on 22 September 2002, three days after the start of the war, with an initial focus on protecting French and other foreign nationals. Originally a contingent of 700, Opération Licorne comprised 4,000 troops by July 2003. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) deployed its own peace force on 18 January 2003.