Ivory Coast general strike call portends further foreign intervention

[Hannah Bell]

Alassane Dramane Ouattara has called a general strike in an attempt to oust incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo and end the stand-off following the presidential election in the West African country of Ivory Coast.

Gbagbo has refused to relinquish office since the second round of the election November 28. He claims that Ouattara rigged the result in his northern stronghold. The United States, United Nations, European Union, France and the West African states have all recognised Ouattara as the winner.

The strike call came as violence increased on the streets of the capital Abidjan and West African leaders threatened to use military force to oust Gbagbo. It is thought that some 200 people have already been killed. Refugees are flooding across the border into neighbouring Liberia. The United Nations Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that 14,000 Ivorians are already in Liberia and is preparing for as many as twice that number to cross in the coming days.

It appears that few workers have responded to the strike call....The lack of response is not surprising, since Ouattara has a limited popular base. He is a former International Monetary Fund (IMF) economist. He was deputy managing director of the IMF from 1994 to 1999 and governor of the Bank of Central African States. He was prime minister of Ivory Coast from 1990 to 1993 and is closely identified with the free market policies introduced under an IMF structural adjustment plan that removed price subsidies and deregulated the labour market. State-owned enterprises were privatized and tariff barriers removed.

The economic and social tensions that were ultimately to break out into civil war can be traced in part to the process of economic liberalisation that began in the 1990s. President Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who ruled Ivory Coast from its independence in 1960 until his death in 1993, was able to maintain a degree of stability by sharing patronage among rival sections of the country's elite. Under his successors tensions became increasingly acute. Falling commodity prices hit Ivory Coast's chief export of cocoa, and structural adjustment reduced the amount of patronage available...

Ivorian politicians whipped up communalist sentiments as they attempted to win a greater share of the country's wealth for themselves and their supporters. This led to two years of civil war that was only brought to an end by a power-sharing agreement in 2004, which left the country divided.

France and the US are eager to see Ouattara in the presidential palace because they see him as the ideal candidate to push through economic measures that will make Ivory Coast the key to developing the entire region as a supplier of raw materials. T

heir outright backing for Ouattara represents a shift from their previous preference for a power-sharing agreement between the northern, mainly Muslim, and the southern, mainly Christian, Ivorian factions.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/ivor-d28.shtml