The war is over – but Ouattara's struggle has barely begun

Ivory Coast's new president new faces country half destroyed by civil war and an economy starved of investment

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• Thalia Griffiths
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 April 2011 20.59 BST
• Article history
Despite the spectacular resistance that Laurent Gbagbo put up from his bunker, capturing the former Ivorian president was probably the easy part in terms of lifting Ivory Coast out of its current crisis. And now his rival Alassane Ouattara finds himself with one of the most unenviable presidential in-trays of all time, with a politically and militarily divided country half destroyed by civil war, an economy starved of investment, and donors who have stayed away for more than a decade. This matters because Ivory Coast and its neighbours have been prone to civil conflict for more than 20 years, creating a series of humanitarian disasters. In 2000, one of these led to the intervention of British troops, who helped to end the civil war in nearby Sierra Leone. So Ouattara finally gets to be president, but in the worst possible circumstances. The economy has been shattered by more than a decade of misrule. The economic capital, Abidjan, once known as the Paris of West Africa for its tree-lined boulevards and grand public buildings, has seen its streets pocked by rocket fire in the latest phase of the conflict. Ouattara will need all his old contacts at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where he worked on and off for years, to step up with help. It has long been fashionable to speculate about whether Ouattara really wanted to be president. After the death of the country's founding president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who had preached inclusion, tougher times meant the southern cocoa belt was less welcoming to migrant farmers from the north. As prime minister at the time of Houphouët's death, Ouattara drew his political support from Muslim northerners and southern intellectuals, and was excluded from the 1995 presidential elections by a law that appeared to have been drafted specifically by his opponent Henri Konan Bédié to prevent him taking part. He went off for an international career at the IMF, but his supporters founded a political party, placing him under a moral obligation to return. This cannot be the most encouraging of prospects. Many of the former elite disappeared after the 1999 coup. Tidjane Thiam, the former minister of planning and development, suffered death threats after the coup and then left the country to pursue a successful career with Aviva and Prudential. As he draws most of his support from the mainly Muslim north, Ouattara can expect to be blamed for every problem arising in the formerly rebel-held areas. Recent reports of atrocities in the west have blamed Ouattara supporters, but while conflicts over land pit northerners against southerners, it is cruel but convenient to blame Ouattara for the latest flare-up of conflicts that have existed for a generation. It is land conflict coupled with a breakdown in state security – not urban Abidjan politics – that are behind reports of killings in the west. Clashes like these are vile, but nothing new. The north has been controlled by rebels loosely allied to Ouattara since 2002. Bringing it under the control of central government will not be easy. The south distrusts the north, so initiatives to sort out the region's problems will be deeply unpopular. It is hard to see how a politician who has not been especially engaged with the Ivorian people can suddenly bring the country together. The coming months will be hard on stalwarts of Ouattara's RDR such as Henriette Diabaté, who stuck it out in Abidjan throughout the civil war and must now, in government, take the blame once again for the country's problems. While the UN endorsed Ouattara's election win, subsequent events will make his situation more difficult. To Gbagbo loyalists sceptical about his ethnicity, he is a foreign puppet. And his supporters will be looking just as hard for a transformation of their lives. Thalia Griffiths is a former Reuters correspondent in Abidjan and is now editor of African Energy (africa-energy.com).