Ouattara and Laurent Gbagbo in Abidjan, former RSA president Thabo
Mbeki offered exile with impunity in South Africa to Gbagbo, who
turned it down and instead came up with a crazy plan of his own: an
amicable Kenyan-style arrangement, with Ouattara as Vice-president!
According to Mbeki's scenario, Gbagbo could thus be joining deposed
Haitian president Aristide in South Africa. Let's remember here that
Haitians, who were recently disenfranchised in rigged elections
monitored by the UN and the international community, still
unavailingly want Aristide--the most popular politician of Haiti--to
go back home and to take over the reins of government.
The Haitian debacle should give one pause amid the international din
for sacrosanct democracy in Côte d'Ivoire. In the ongoing universal
clamor against Gbagbo, the international community has succeeded in
putting out of the mind of global denizens the other electoral debacle
over which it presided in Afghanistan where Hamid Karzai stole both
the presidency and the legislature under its nose--and arguably with
its encouragement...
Two days ago, Kenyan PM Odinga joined the posse of Gbagbo's tormentors
by calling for military intervention in Côte d'Ivoire. Well, Odinga
should have first called in international military intervention in his
own country where the usurper Mwai Kibaki, who brazenly stole the
election, is still in power. One is indeed at a loss to understand why
ICC Prosecutor didn't include Kibaki on his list of suspects, for
without the fraudster Kibaki electoral violence would never have
happened in Kenya.
This week, the hat-donning Nigerian president-by-default Goodluck
Jonathan, acting on behalf of the regional organization ECOWAS, told
Gbagbo to step down or face financial starvation (ECOWAS is set to
give access to Ouattara into the accounts of Côte d'Ivoire at the
bloc's bank) or, worse, military action--though this latter option was
undoubtedly only implicit in the message.
Let's also recall here that Nigeria isn't a model of democratic and
transparent election and process. The presidential election that put
in power the ticket Ya'ardua-Jonathan was marred with violence and
accusations of fraud. And for months Jonathan and the ruling party
bamboozled the Nigerian nation about the medical condition of a
terminally-ill head of state. A masquerade denounced by Nobel Prize
winner Wole Soyinka and other Nigerian pro-transparency activists.
Btw, I quit taking ECOWAS seriously ever since it was (and is still)
intervening on behalf of the deposed Niger's president Mamadou Tandja,
who, though democratically elected, was fast climbing the autocratic
learning curve. Without the patriotic intervention by coup d'etat by
the military of Niger, Tandja, who was living the delusion of being
his country's Allah-sent enlightened despot, could have subverted the
Nigérien constitution to have himself elected again and again and
again and over again--until kingdom come!
Earlier in the chronicle of the Ivorian debacle, there was also the
joke of Burkinabè president Blaise Compraoré intervening on behalf of
democracy--while he was being reelected with 80-odd percent to the
presidency he'd ascended in 1987 after murdering his own companion and
friend, Thomas Sankara--an assassination masterminded by French
intelligence operatives. There's now talk of amending the Burkinabè
constitution in order to allow Compraoré to run for president ad
infinitum--thus making him president for life of Burkina Faso...
When Ali Bongo stole the election in Gabon (where the Electoral
Commission is run by the government), French president Nicolas Sarkozy
was among the first heads of state to congratulate him--thus
delegitimizing the call by Gabonese opposition to scrap that sham
election.
That's why when Sarkozy now screams blue murder and threatens
"Gbago-and-his-wife-who-have-their-fates-in-their-hands" with targeted
sanctions if they don't get out of town by Sunday, it all smacks of
the diktats of "Françafrique"--the French neocolonial rule with the
proxy of African leaders who could best be described by a paraphrase
of Franz Fanon's famous pun: "black skin, French mask"--that shackled
Francophone Africa for such a long time, even mocking the whole
continent in the eyes of the world by allowing the Ubuesque coronation
of Emperor Bokassa!...
No one would convince me that the outcry over Ggagbo is all about
democracy. If it were so, Rwanda would be facing stiff sanctions
today. As well as other anti-democracy culprits throughout the world
(consider the coup-issued so-called democratic regime in Honduras)...
Btw, Sarkozy once offered everlasting peace to the Congolese people in
these fairy-tale terms: share your natural resources with Rwandans and
you'll live in ever blissful peace thereafter...
There are therefore demonstrably double standards in the way the
international community approaches democracy and the Ivorian case.
There's a strong probability that at the end of the day Gbagbo would
yield to the international pressure and abide by the selective "law"
(Ban ki-Moon) of democracy, and go to live a grim nostalgic life in
Johannesburg, thereby abandoning the southerners under the yoke of
northerners. For the world can't fathom that Gbagbo isn't acting on
his own behalf or on behalf his wife and his extended family: Côte
d'Ivoire is a de facto halved country that should be permanently
split!
Whatever happens in Côte d'Ivoire, other African states need to draw
invaluable lessons from Gbagbo's experience.
The lessons--or the one Lesson--to be drawn are the following.
Whenever faced with internal strife, follow the Kagame model: be tough
and stubborn; don't ever allow UN peacekeepers within your territory
(or if they happen to be already in-country, kick them out pronto!)
and show utter contempt for the international community; don't ever
negotiate with rebels; don't allow credible back-stabbing opposition
leaders-- in fact, throw them in jail on trumped-up multiple charges
of terrorism or, more expediently, behead them in the back streets or
track them down in their exile and assassinate them; create a police
state where citizens would be living in an open prison (Rousseau =
"One could also live in peace in jail"); and, last and not least,
build a formidable military machine... Afterwards, sit back and enjoy
the universal admiration for your despotic regime!
***
(ERRATUM: In the previous post I mistakenly said that Abidjan is the
capital city of Côte d'Ivoire. Abidjan was downgraded to economic
capital by Houphouët-Boigny who turned Yamoussoukro into the country's
capital.)
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