Ivory Coast: The Crisis in Ivory Coast

In the early 1980s, the British writer V.S. Naipaul visited Ivory Coast. The country was then one of the most stable and prosperous in Africa. As everyone knows, Naipaul is a deeply cynical and unabashed Afro-pessimist. But in the piece that he subsequently wrote about Ivory Coast, enchantingly entitled 'The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro,' Naipaul was genuinely admiring. Almost as though to fulfil the grim prophesies of Africa's doomsayers, the country today appears to be unravelling. And it all started in September 2002, when a group of about 750 retrenched soldiers - they had been hastily recruited by a former military leader - attempted to take over the government in a violent coup. As a result, Ivory Coast, has been effectively split into two. Lansana Gberie, a senior research fellow at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Accra, Ghana, analyses the crisis in this article on the Znet website.