Ivory Coast’s Fault Lines Run Deep

In the ghetto called Sans Fil, the raw sewage in the streets is ankle deep and flies swirl about, but the people glow with joie de vivre. Abdrahman Guindo sits in front of his tiny home in the muggy heat, watching the throbbing river of life.

He is wearing extravagant diamante baggy pants of silver and white eyelet fabric, with matching shoes specially made for the Eid festival at the end of Ramadan. Guindo watches small girls in gauzy party dresses and glowing women in long, fancy gowns picking their way delicately through the smelly black mud.

The squalor may be suffocating, but as people are fond of saying in Ivory Coast, “We stand tall.”

“Ivory Coast is paradise. Write it down,” said Guindo’s brother, Cool B, a young man from the Koumassi slum district of Abidjan, who stays up all night writing scripts and dreams of making it as a filmmaker. “People have to be proud.”

But here, perhaps more than many places, pride and identity are intertwined, and the country’s identity as the miraculously prosperous and stable leader of West Africa is no more.

There are some distinctly nasty elements to what President Laurent Gbagbo calls Ivory Coast’s final transition to democracy, including xenophobia and harassment of migrants and Muslims from the country’s north, who live in areas such as Sans Fil and Koumassi in the south.

A decade ago, ruling politicians even coined a term to justify their chauvinistic policies: Ivoirete, or “Ivorianness.”

Already, one civil war has been fought over Ivoirete, when northerners, frustrated by rampant discrimination, rebelled in 2002. Now the country, a former French colony, is poised to erupt in conflict again.

And despite a recent blaze of fury against French peacekeepers and civilians, the real battle lines are along the same divide.

Here in the predominantly Christian south, the identity of northerners or immigrants is always in question, even if they have a sheaf of certificates going back as far as grandparents’ birth registrations. Police cruise around checking IDs, harassing those with northern or foreign names, asking questions like, “What kind of name is that?”

Guindo, a car trader whose family migrated from the north, has to carry a wad of papers with him, ready to answer questions on the birth village of a grandfather he never knew. But sometimes, traveling in other West African countries, he leaves the fat envelope of documents in his hotel room and walks around without them, a private act of liberation. He hopes his son can escape too, but for good.

“Since Ivoirete is still here in the Ivorian vocabulary, our children can’t go ahead,” said Guindo, who wants his son to immigrate to Europe some day. “I’m afraid that Ivoirete is stuck fast in our society. When you talk about the war today, it’s just about Ivoirete.”

For 33 years after independence from France in 1960, Ivory Coast under President Felix Houphouet-Boigny was not total paradise -- opposition parties were banned until 1990 -- but it was prosperous and stable. The country attracted significant French investment and drew thousands of West African immigrants to work the cocoa and coffee plantations. But political instability followed his death in 1993, including a coup in 1999 and a civil war in 2002.

There’s still a touch of faded magic in Abidjan, where the lush growth of coconut palms and bougainvillea tumbles down to the shores of the lagoon. Lizards scuttle in the steaming heat; vendors sell pineapples and street cafes serve fried fish with green chili pickle and stewed onion.

But Guindo is fearful about the future.

‘I think there will be civil war. It will be the end, because we don’t know where we could go.”

In such a war, identity could be a death warrant. But for many now it is just a daily curse. Adama Sonde, 32, was denied his identity two years ago. A two-year legal struggle has not recovered all the things he lost the day the authorities took away his ID.

“I lost everything,” he said. He lost the only good job he ever had, running his own radio show. He lost Elizabeth, the one true love of his life, who broke off their engagement because he had no money. He still loves her, he said, even though she went to Italy to marry an Italian who could buy her clothes and trinkets.

Police came to the radio station in August 2002 as he was writing his script for the evening show, took him and two others away and locked them up for the weekend. A court refused to accept family birth certificates going back to his grandfather that showed he had been born in the north, and he was jailed for two months on charges that he had falsified his ID documents.

He was fired because of the conviction and, without any ID, is still unemployed. He rarely leaves his room, knowing he will be harassed by police for not having identification papers.

At first, he said, “I felt a sense of injustice and the evil of it.” Now he just feels as though he has hit bottom.

“In Africa when you lose your job, it is very hard because there are no jobs,” he said. “It’s like you collapse socially. Honestly, it is very difficult for me, very difficult.

“But you have to live. You have to stand up and struggle and fight. You have to go on in spite of all these things, hoping that tomorrow everything will change.”

He still keeps Elizabeth’s photo, and says that, in his heart, “she’s my wife.” And he is determined to clear his name in the courts so his life can begin again.

But if the war resumes, things will get much worse for northerners such as Sonde and second- or third-generation immigrants. Already, the signs are discouraging and prospects for peace seem dim.

In March, security forces attacked an opposition rally, killing at least 120 people, mostly northerners, according to the United Nations. In late September, security forces raided mosques in the capital, Yamoussoukro, arresting 250 people, according to Human Rights Watch.

Also in September, in the Adjame district of Abidjan, police raided a market and arrested 380 people, mostly immigrants and northerners. Scores were beaten, Corinne Dufka of Human Rights Watch said, and one death was reported.

And there’s the story of Jean-Marc Badolo, an immigrant from Burkina-Faso.

Badolo, 36, was not a member of the opposition Rally of the Republicans party but had worked for its exiled leader, former Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara, for eight years as a gardener.

But on Oct. 4, two days after Ouattara declared he would soon return from exile, Badolo, three caretakers and an elderly man were arrested at the leader’s house, which had been destroyed by rioting nationalists in 2002. They were taken to the gleaming white Republican Guard base on the lagoon at Treichville and beaten for hours.

One of Ouattara’s guards, Pelegnan Yeo, 50, said he was hit with a nail-studded club and slashed with a broken bottle. He said in an interview with The Times that when the soldiers for their own amusement forced them to run, he and Badolo jumped over the fence, only to find themselves waist deep in the lagoon.

Guards came after them. They broke Yeo’s arm and put a black plastic bag over his head, but he managed to pull it off.

But before he was taken back to the base, he managed to look back at Badolo, who had been caught in the shallow water.

“They took a piece of wood and gave him one big blow on the head. I saw it,” Yeo said. “He fell slowly in the water.”

Jean-Marc Badolo never came up.