Laurent Gbagbo, Ivory Coast's outgoing president, is trying to portray his fight to stay in charge as the mother of all battles with France, the former colonial power. Jacques Vergès, the maverick lawyer now defending Gbagbo, came out of the president's office in Abidjan last week claiming that if France tried to attack Ivory Coast to dislodge him, the west African state would be its "graveyard".
This war talk is nonsense, as the current crisis doesn't place France in opposition to its one-time colony, but is first and foremost a conflict of legitimacy between two sides within Ivory Coast, the sequel of a civil war whose roots go back to the void created by the death of the all-powerful first president of the independent nation from 1960 to 1993, Félix Houphouët-Boigny.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment