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Ivory Coast is eager to vote but many may be left out


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POSTED: Sunday, February 07, 2010

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast » The pictures plastered on school walls all over the country offered a stark reminder of the divisions in this identity-obsessed nation.

On one side were the faces of people the government has deemed true members of society, the ones eligible to vote in the first election here in a decade. On the other side were snapshots of the multitudes—about a million in all—whose identities have fallen under official suspicion.

Ten years of war and riots lie behind those fateful doubts, and soon after the pictures went up the astonishment at being excluded gave way to an urgent reality. To vote in the long-postponed election, many of these 1 million excluded residents had to troop to registration offices, clutching yellowing documents in a race to prove they belonged here. Sometimes even a birth certificate was not enough.

“;I was surprised and shocked”; to be barred from voting, said Serge Bayoro, 31. Waiting at a vote center to challenge his status, Bayoro said with quiet insistence, “;I'm a pure-blood Ivorian.”;

Those are loaded words in a country where the contrary has been fatal. After years of violence and delays, Ivory Coast, once West Africa's economic star, is stumbling toward a presidential election. Peace is the hope, expressed over and over in markets and in offices: Hold the election and the country can begin to recover. Officials insist that preparations are now ending and that the million residents in dispute, in a country of 18.5 million, will either be integrated into the voter rolls or not.

The question has fueled coups, riots, an armed uprising and thousands of deaths yet still has not been settled: who is and who is not Ivorian in a country that once attracted millions of African migrants because of its prosperity. When global prices for cocoa, coffee and cotton fell in the 1990s, the economy soured, and so did Ivorians' feelings about the foreigners' place here.

That xenophobia has been exploited by the government for years. The term foreigner is often so loosely applied that political rivals, voters from the largely Muslim north and a broad array of others have been cast as outsiders simply to keep them out of the political process.

“;He who lies about his origins is a danger to the people,”; a headline in a pro-government newspaper, Notre Voie, blared recently, next to a photograph of a leading opposition candidate, Alassane Dramane Ouattara, who for years has been labeled a closet foreigner by people in the non-Muslim south.

The country split in two in the fall of 2002, as soldiers and officers in the north rebelled against the government of President Laurent Gbagbo. The revolt was the culmination of years of tension between the regions, based on sharply felt feelings of persecution among many northerners.

The war was over in a matter of weeks, but years of instability and flare-ups followed, including the bombing of rebel targets in 2004, the killing of French soldiers by Gbagbo's government, retaliation by France and violent anti-French riots.

The election will finally help resolve these issues, officials here say. “;The war was actually a welcome thing,”; said Alphonse Koffi of the electoral commission in a recent interview. “;Now, we can figure out the true identity of people. It was a necessary evil.”;

But from the streets to the seats of power, the old preoccupations with identity persist, and the election—whose date has been changing, with regularity, for years—seems to offer little chance of an easy resolution.

In late January, Gbagbo accused the national electoral commission of trying to surreptitiously add hundreds of thousands of disputed names to the list. Now some 465,000 “;contentious ones”;—as those in dispute are officially known—who have been added to the electoral list will be rechecked.

“;Candidates of the foreign power”; would be “;revealed”; by the election, Gbagbo promised in October, a veiled reference to interference by France here in its former colony.

The anger over the vote has started to boil over. On Friday, 5,000 people rioted in a western town over fears of being removed from the voter list by pro-government judges, a spokesman for the local military commander said. The courthouse was sacked, several police officers wounded and cars were destroyed, he said.

“;The people are afraid that the government is biased against them,”; said the spokesman, Lacine Mara. The authorities also reported clashes over the electoral list in a northern town.

Those who support the process offer no apologies for it. “;We must know, in the population, who are the nationals, and who are the foreigners, who don't vote,”; said Henri Konan Bedie, a former president, in an interview here.

Bedie has been blamed for—or credited with, depending on the perspective—inventing the explosive concept of Ivoirite, according to which the patriotism of those in the north is considered suspect. The ideology helped set off the crisis, but Bedie is running again, 10 years after his overthrow in a military coup.

At the elections offices, each voter's national identity is minutely scrutinized, and if a person has not been found on previous lists—an old elections list, or a list of pensioners, for example—it may make voting difficult.

“;I gave them everything, but they won't let me vote,”; said Lancina Soumahoro, a welder in Yopougon, a working-class district here. “;If you come from the north, there are big problems.”;

Though Ivory Coast still has the largest economy in the West African Economic and Monetary Union, poverty has increased to nearly 50 percent from 38 percent since the troubles began; years of deep grime coats the ghostly high-rises, once West Africa's proud symbol of modernity.

“;Nothing has happened in over 10 years,”; said Jean-Louis Eugene Billon, president of the Chamber of Commerce. “;It's a country living on past achievements.”;

Gbagbo's term officially ended in 2005. A vote has been postponed half a dozen times, by some counts, with nearly as many peace agreements, each named for the African city in which they were celebrated.

The president, a former history professor once linked to death squads by the French secret services, has clung to power. He leads a rump country in the south, bolstered by armed militants, nationalist rhetoric and profits from the cocoa-bean sector, while rejecting international impatience over the election delays, analysts say.

The warlords who control the north, financed by illicit tax schemes, also seem to have little reason to hurry. The crossings into their domain resemble border points between nations; striding about market stalls are northern soldiers toting guns.

They carry them in and out of the elections offices in a rebel stronghold, Bouake, 190 miles north of Abidjan, and not much suggests that they will lay the guns down and reunite with the south after the election.

The Abidjan government's prefects have “;no administrative power”; in these areas, according to a recent report by experts for the United Nations. The report said that the north was rearming, noting also that Gbagbo's government had “;invested heavily in riot-control equipment.”; Bedie's party recently formed its own militia, “;to counter those loyal to”; Gbagbo's party, according to the report.

Hostile sentiments are commonplace. “;All Muslims are thugs!”; a street orator, surrounded by rapt listeners, shouted at a trembling young man in a tropical downtown park.

Nonetheless, popular longing for a vote is strong. “;We want the elections to be held now, so that this state of crisis can finally be over,”; said Adou Kobenan, who runs an open-air restaurant in Yopougon.

“;For the sake of the Ivory Coast, we must proceed quickly to elections,”; said the president of the national elections commission, Robert Beugre Mambe, though he was unable to give a date.

“;They've put it off so much, we're skeptical,”; said Herve Gouamene, a lawyer who runs a local human rights group.

But “;should we have the elections as long as there is no disarmament?”; he added, referring to the plethora of armed militias in the country. “;This is a worry.”;

Loucoumane Coulibaly contributed reporting.