Violence, inaction, and a dangerous new precedent

Freetown, Sierra Leone—Twelve days ago, I rode on the back of a motorbike through the forests of Grand Gedeh County in eastern Liberia to a remote crossing point on the border with Ivory Coast. On the Liberian side were jumpy Bangladeshi peacekeepers who stood close by local security forces wearing blue fatigues and coalscuttle helmets. On the Ivorian side were the rebels of the Republican Forces, who support Alassane Ouattara, the internationally recognized winner of Ivory Coast’s disputed presidential election last year. Laurent Gbagbo, the incumbent who lost to Ouattara, has refused to step down for almost five tumultuous months. Fighting was underway nearby, and Liberian mercenaries were crossing the border to take part. In this febrile atmosphere, the men on either side of the crossing occasionally tried to ease the tension by posing for photographs with each other on the bridge that marks the line between the two countries.

After much brandishing of documentation, the Liberian guards let me through, and I crossed into Ivory Coast. In the village of Pekanhouebly, I interviewed the commander of rebel forces in the west of the country, Brigadier General Gueu Michel. The fighters in his entourage had doubled up the magazines of their Kalashnikovs with sellotape, in accordance with Hollywood tradition and in violation of first-world military training. General Michel insisted though that he and his men were professionals, operating under civilian authority. “We are an army, under the command of civil authority, the president of the republic,” he said. After their commander departed in a convoy of pickups and SUVs, the morale of those left behind to the guard the border crossing was high. They loosed the odd pot shot into the air. Victory, they said in French, was obligatoire.

Soon after my encounter with General Michel, and after months of attrition, the rebels finally made spectacular gains in Ivory Coast. Sweeping down out of their strongholds in the north on several fronts, they took the important port of San Pedro and the country’s official capital, Yamoussoukro. Late last week, they also entered the country’s commercial capital, Abidjan. Now, reports indicate that the rebels have surrounded the presidential residence, where Gbagbo, apparently, is holed up in a basement bunker, reportedly negotiating his surrender.

Such then is the situation within Ivory Coast itself. But the greater story is one of two strikingly similar crises to which the international community has reacted in profoundly different ways. While the West has intervened in oil-rich Libya, where another embattled leader refuses to step down, across the Sahara in Ivory Coast, it has largely stood back from the country’s slow descent into internecine strife. Only this week, at a very late stage in the conflict, have U.N. and French air strikes supported the rebels. ‘

Indeed, while Libya demonstrates a renewed appetite—certainly among European nations—for the concept of liberal intervention, events in Ivory Coast prove just how selective that appetite is. Abidjan is very much the foil to Benghazi, and no view of the one is complete without an appraisal of the other.