In 1999, over 20,000 Burkinabés fled from de Tabou region after a dispute
over land ownership
Côte d’Ivoire
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Key
data, Côte d’Ivoire
Population
(millions): 16
Surface area (thousand sq. km): 322
Gross national income
per capita ($): 1,654
Life expectancy at birth (years): 48
Adult literacy rate (%): 46
Population below 15 years of age (% of total): 43
Source:
World Bank, UNDP. All data 1999.
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All
the pots have been fired in the same way and in the same kiln, yet they are different,
for the pigment takes on some better than others. . . and the colour varies in beauty.
Proverb
from the Mongo tribe, Congo
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Massive
expulsions in Africa
1958
Côte d’Ivoire: Expulsion of 10,000 natives of Dahomey (present-day Benin).
1969 Ghana: Flight of nearly one million
people.
1983 Nigeria: Flight of 1.5 million citizens from West African countries.
1985 Nigeria: Expulsion of 700,000 citizens from Ghana, Niger and other countries.
1985 Côte d’Ivoire: 10,000 Ghanaians expelled.
1993 South Africa: Expulsion of some 80,000 Mozambicans.
1994 South Africa: Expulsion of 90,000 citizens from other African countries.
1995 Gabon: Forced flight of 55,000 foreigners.
1998 Ethiopia: Expulsion of 50,000 Eritreans.
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Xenophobia
has gained a foothold in Côte d’Ivoire: overcrowded land, common law and economic
crisis have spawned a “pro-Ivorian” movement hostile to immigrants from neighbouring
Mali and Burkina Faso
Things aren’t the same
any more between Mamadou Ouedraogo and his old school friends and former football
chums in the village of Asse, in the fertile black-soiled countryside of eastern
Côte d’Ivoire.
“I’m on my guard now,” he says bitterly. Mamadou, 37, was born in Côte d’Ivoire
but his parents were immigrants from Burkina Faso. The turning-point for him came
earlier this year when a strong wave of xenophobia swept the Abouré people,
who belong to the Akan, the country’s largest ethnic group.
It all started with an argument between a young Abouré and a Burkinabé
night watchman at the market in the town of Bonoua. Rumours spread that the “foreigner”
had killed “the local man,” which set off public fury and attacks on the property
of “aliens.”
Ousmane Sawadogo, the elderly chieftain of the region’s large Burkinabé community,
can’t forget what happened. “They attacked the Burkinabé district, smashed
up and set fire to our shops and broke open our barrels of cooking oil,” he says.
Several hundred shocked foreigners—mainly Burkinabés and Malians—returned
to their countries or moved to friendlier parts of Côte d’Ivoire. Those who
decided to stay were abused.
The king of Bonoua warned the immigrants to stop growing pineapples, the province’s
main resource. “Several young Abouré then went round the farms to check which
foreigners were still growing them,” says Sawadogo’s son Boukari. “If they were,
the Abouré marked the fields with stakes and red cloth and then returned to
destroy the crops.”
Envy
and the soil
Bonoua
is not the only place in Côte d’Ivoire where this happens. Land disputes, once
the norm between local people and Ivorians from other parts of the country, are now
the commonest form of violence between Ivorians and foreigners. At the end of 1999,
more than 20,000 Burkinabés fled by the busload from the southwestern region
of Tabou after a dispute over land ownership between an immigrant and a local farmer
degenerated into bloodshed.
At Blolequin, in the westernmost part of the country, six people, including a policeman,
were killed early this year. But the local authorities managed to keep the foreigners
on their land, against the advice of local elected officials and despite public protests.
Why this upsurge of xenophobia in what the Ivorian national anthem calls “the land
of hospitality”?
Until the end of colonial rule in 1960, French authorities encouraged the immigration
of workers from the Sahel to help develop agriculture. This continued during the
long rule of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the “father of the nation,” who
liked to say that “the land belongs to those who make use of it.” The “president-farmer,”
who entered politics through rural trade unions, had mainly economic ambitions. “Côte
d’Ivoire could never have become the world’s biggest cocoa producer if it had just
used Ivorian labour,” says Jean-Paul Chausse, an expert with the World Bank.
Today, Côte d’Ivoire has a very high proportion of resident foreigners—26 percent
of the total population, according to officials, and more than 35 percent according
to other estimates. Their presence caused no problem during Houphouët-Boigny’s
rule, a time of prosperity that lasted until the end of the Cold War for this faithful
ally of the West. But as economic recession set in, relations with immigrants deteriorated.
Their success irritates the locals. “They say we’ve got rich, have big cars and that
we don’t respect them any more,” says Boukari. “They say they don’t want to see us
with their women any more and if a foreigner’s caught with an Abouré woman,
he gets fined about $200.”
“Before,” grumbles Niamkey Eloi, an Ivorian farmer from Asse, “the Burkinabé
didn’t ask for anything, they simply worked for us.”
With the economic crisis and the austerity imposed by international financial institutions,
many Ivorians can no longer get work in the towns, either as government employees
or in the private sector, so they fall back on the soil. “We’re seeing competition
for land now as a result of land overcrowding,” says Chausse. “These days, many fathers
don’t leave more than a hectare or two of land to their children because they’ve
already sold most of what they had.” Deforestation and the expansion of towns have
speeded up this process.
At Bonoua, in the Akan country, the tradition of matriarchy exacerbates the problem.
“Young uneducated people return to the village to find their parents’ lands controlled
by their maternal uncles, who are the rightful heirs under common law,” says deputy
prefect Julie Aka Sonoh. “They don’t agree with that but they can’t challenge their
own uncles. So they divert their aggression and target the foreigners these lands
have been rented to.”
In this explosive situation, Houphouët-Boigny’s successor, Henri Konan Bédié,
who was overthrown by the army in December 1999, introduced the notion of “Ivoirité,”
a reference to native-born Ivorians. The goal: to force out of the electoral race
his old rival in the shadow of the “father of the nation,” the economist and former
prime minister Alassane Ouattara, on the grounds that one of his parents came from
neighbouring Burkina Faso, where he had been educated.
A
new legal solution?
To some, the aim was to forge a common identity for the country’s 60 or so ethnic
groups, to others it was a nationalist ploy. Either way it stirred up a strong brew
of intercommunal bitterness. In Abidjan, the political debate revolved around foreigners,
who were accused of being the secret weapon of Ouattara’s Republican Rally party
and became the scapegoat for the turbulent election campaign.
Laurent Gbagbo, leader of the social-democratic Ivorian Popular Front, was elected
president in October 2000 and made the land question his top priority. To solve the
problem, the government decided to enact the rural land law, passed unanimously by
parliament in 1998, which said Ivorians owned all the land but could rent it to foreigners.
The law is broadly based on various common law systems, under which “land belonged
to the ancestors,” explains Chausse.
“The right to use it could be sold but not the land itself. In the southwest, for
example, access to land is easier. Foreigners were able to negotiate a deal which
was nearly as good as ownership.”
Henceforth, foreigners who have acquired land can keep it until they die, after which
their children can rent it from the state. Burkinabé President Blaise Compaoré
recently expressed concern that it could deprive Burkinabé in Côte d’Ivoire
of “their” land.
“The law has its good sides but it’s also dangerous,” says Chausse. “It wants to
clarify things and encourage settlement of disputes. If it’s properly applied, it
can settle many things. But if it’s abused, it will exacerbate tension between local
people and foreigners.”
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Driss
El Yazami*:
Black Africa: “ethnic hatred” is not inevitable
In the early
1970s, there were approximately 700,000 refugees in black Africa; 20 years later,
that figure had soared to over six million1. Today nearly one in every three Africans
is a refugee on the African continent. Forced displacements and the destabilization
of populations have rocked Africa more than any other part of the world in recent
years. Around seven million Africans are internally displaced (within their own country),
while traditional or new economic immigration flows have further swollen the number
of refugees.
Waves of xenophobia in several black African countries must be understood in this
context (see
box).
Periodic droughts drive hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, but geopolitical
changes within and between states do even more to bring about these population transfers
and the human rights violations underpinning them.
Obviously, the sudden, massive arrival of hundreds of thousands of foreigners in
a neighbouring African country already struggling to feed its own population can
be source of tension and rejection. However, the generosity of the African countries
that offer first asylum is striking. For example, in the 1990s, Guinea and Côte
d’Ivoire welcomed over a million people fleeing the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra
Leone. Ten years later, most of them have still neither gone back home nor found
a permanent place to live.
The wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone were emblematic in many ways. They have often
been portrayed as having an “ethnic” component, but the desire to control economic
resources—wood smuggling in Liberia and diamond trafficking in Sierra Leone, with
the active complicity of multinational corporations—is also a cause of these conflicts
and a means to finance them.
In both cases, the protagonists, backed by foreign parties and neighbouring or even
geographically distant countries, took the war outside national borders: refugee
camps were used as bases for revenge. The climate of insecurity that often prevails
in them, the remote prospects of settling permanently in a wealthier country, the
international community’s indifference and even disengagement, in contrast, for example,
to what happened in Kosovo and East Timor, fuel the flames of revenge. Recruits are
easier to enlist for the next round of violence, sparking a new exodus.
The widespread destabilization of populations is more to blame for African xenophobia
than “ethnic hatred.” States that have been frail since their creation, because their
national borders seldom match historical and cultural realities, are further weakened
by corruption and their inability to ensure development. The Cold War’s “conflicts
by proxy” have been replaced by new conflicts, used by the more powerful African
states, that play the ethnic card and give that dimension a charge of hatred and
rejection that is far from spontaneous. In the final analysis, the “struggle for
power” over which “groups, movements and clans fight, often ruthlessly,” is the driving
force behind ethnic conflict.
Cast as “tribal wars,” these conflicts and their attendant human rights violations
and hatred might last unless the world’s conscience feels moved or responsible. The
genocide in Rwanda was the cruellest proof of this.
* Secretary
general of the International Federation for Human Rights (IFHR).
1. Refugees
by numbers 2000 edition, UNHCR, 2000
2. Gildas Simon, Géodynamique des migrations internationales, PUF,
Paris, 1995
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