STEVEN PLAUT: LESSONS FROM THE IVORY COAST
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/04/11/lessons-from-the-ivory-coast/
Lessons from the Ivory Coast
Posted By Steven Plaut
The crisis in the Ivory Coast has important lessons for Europe, Israel
and the United States. And none of these lessons is being conveyed by
the Western media.
The most important aspects of the crisis in the Ivory Coast are being
overlooked or deliberately disguised by the Western media. One can
read media report after media report without discovering the basic
fact that the Northern Ivory Coast “rebels” are Muslims. Indeed they
are Muslims who by and large entered the Ivory Coast as infiltrators,
through borders that are poorly patrolled, from neighboring countries.
A better advertisement for stronger border control cannot be found.
At least four million illegal immigrants, mostly Muslim, entered the
Ivory Coast during the past two decades, tilting the demographic
balance there.
And these Muslim infiltrators and interlopers, increasingly backed by
African, French and Western powers, are challenging the control by
Ivory Coast natives over their own country. The sufferings and
violence in the Ivory Coast may well illustrate what awaits Europe if
it continues its own demographic suicide and if it continues to flood
itself with Muslim immigrants. The conflict also illustrates the
extent to which the Western powers are willing to subvert their
commitment to Wilsonian principles. Since Woodrow Wilson and the end
of World War I, the West was nominally committed to erecting and
defending nation states. We now see that the Western powers (and
African regimes) are willing to abandon this set of principles
whenever faced with a cheap way to curry favor with Muslims. Finally,
it shows what awaits Israel if its seditious Left ever has its way and
implements a Palestinian “Right of Return” that converts Israel into a
“bi-national state.”
The Ivory Coast of today, or Côte d’Ivoire, is essentially a
bi-national state, although each “nation” is in fact a collection of
tribes. The northern “nation” is Muslim; the southern “nation”
consists of Christians and other Non-Muslims. Built upon a territory
that had once been home to several tribal statelets before the era of
colonization, it fell under French partial control in the 1840s, and
became a formal French colony in 1893. French is still the official
language spoken there, in addition to many local tribal tongues. The
French hung around until 1960, when the Ivory Coast became
independent. Once independent, the country was one of the most
prosperous in Africa, thanks to its large cocoa crop. The country has
been politically unstable since a coup in 1999 and a civil war that
began in 2002.
The background to the civil war and the current constitutional crisis
is the massive in-migration of Muslims from the countries neighboring
the Ivory Coast, mainly from Burkina Faso. The infiltrators settled
in the northern half of the country, and also in pockets in the south,
including in some neighborhoods inside the country’s largest city,
Abidjan. Today Muslims, including illegals, are almost 40% of the
population of the country (although Muslim and other sources claim
they are really considerably higher), the remainder being a mixture of
Christians (mainly Roman Catholics) and animists.
Tensions between the immigrant population and the indigenous Ivorians
goes back to the 1960s. Successive governments there have regarded
the immigrants to be “circumstantial Ivorians” (their term), as
opposed to the “pure Ivorians,” who are the natives. The illegal
“aliens” constitute more than a quarter of the current population of
the country. The alien-native dichotomy overlaps to a large extent
with the divisions between non-Muslims and Muslims, and is the most
important background factor in explaining the ongoing civil war.
The current political standoff in the Ivory Coast is largely a
Muslim-Christian confrontation. The “rebels” represent the Muslims of
the country, especially of the north, and in particular the “aliens.”
They are led by Hassan Ouattara, whose parents were evidently illegal
immigrants into the Ivory Coast from Burkina Faso. Hence he
personally illustrates and epitomizes the “alien” character of the
“rebel” forces. An economist who once worked for the IMF, he calls
his rebel militia the “New Force.” The “government” forces represent
the indigenous and traditional non-Muslim Ivorians. Their leader is
the current President (or, if you prefer, “president”) Laurent Gbagbo,
a one-time university professor, who has been the official head of
state since 2000. He claims to be a socialist and anti-imperialist.
The government claims that neighboring Muslim states have intervened
in the civil war on the side of the Muslims.
Civil war broke out in the country in 2002. The “rebels,” whose
support base is the Muslim north, challenged the “government,” whose
power base was the non-Muslim south. Atrocities were committed on
both sides. Each side accuses the other of using mercenaries. French
military forces in the country participated in some of the fighting,
increasingly on the side of the “rebels.”
The elections that were to have taken place in 2005 were postponed
repeatedly until 2010, in part at the initiative of the UN. A
power-sharing arrangement between the two main sides in the conflict
went into effect in 2007 but did not hold for long. None of the
forces in the country seemed to want new elections to be held, since
electoral forces were evenly matched between the two halves of the now
“bi-national” state. When they were eventually held in 2010, Gbagbo
lost by a thin margin. But he refused to accept those results as
conclusive and compelling. Aside from claims of widespread fraud,
Gbagbo insisted that the victory of the party of Ouattaro was entirely
thanks to the votes of the millions of illegal immigrants
participating in the election!
Other African countries, led by predominantly-Muslim Nigeria, have
been backing the “rebels.” A number of African countries have called
for armed intervention on the side of those “rebels.” After a period
of respite, violence began to escalate a few weeks ago. New Forces,
now renamed the Republican Forces of Côte d’Ivoire (RFCI) have been
beating Gbagbo’s army in the field, took the country’s capital city,
and are now holding parts of Abidjan. Gbagbo is under siege in his
headquarters and expected to fall any day now. Hundreds of thousands
of people have fled the battle zones, seeking refuge in neighboring
countries, especially Liberia.
The conflict is too complex for a simplistic assignment of forces into
categories of “good buys” and “bad guys.” There are solid bases for
skepticism about the true commitment to democratic rule by either
side.
Nevertheless, the conflict in the Ivory Coast shows what happens when
massive illegal immigration leads to the demographic eclipse of a
native population. The same Western powers so ready to strip the
Serbs of their heartland to create a second Albanian nation-state in
Kosovo have been unwilling to sustain any nation-state for indigenous
Ivorians, and indeed have backed the aliens. Evidently the Western
countries still adhere to Wilsonian principles about ethnic states and
self-determination only when it is to the liking of Muslims.
But the even more obvious lesson from all this is the instability of
“bi-national” states and the impossibility of preventing them from
morphing into killing grounds. This should have been obvious from the
experiences in Rwanda.
Yet this is precisely the fashionable “solution” to the Middle East
conflict being promoted by the Bash-Israel Lobby. The bigots and
boycotters demand that Israel agree to be demolished and enfolded into
a larger “bi-national state,” one that would be dominated by Arabs and
Muslims. Such an experiment in “bi-nationalism” would end in the
best-case scenario as a civil war resembling the one in the Ivory
Coast, and in the worst-case scenario in a Rwandan-style genocide.
Ultimately, a new genocide against Jews is exactly what the
Anti-Israel Lobby seeks. It is also the hidden agenda of the “BDS”
(or Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement of economic aggression
against Israel, and its close ally, the “Israel Apartheid Week”
Hitlerjugend.
Massive Muslim immigration is also transforming Europe
demographically, in ways strikingly similar to the influx of
immigrants into the Ivory Coast. France, Belgium, and other parts of
Western Europe may soon find themselves the European Ivorians, the
“Other,” the stranger and disenfranchised inside their own home
countries.
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