Me parece una coincidencia maravillosa que hoy, 11 de abril, por fin cae Laurent Gbagbo, dictador de Costa de Marfil, que fue obligado a ir a elecciones por la comunidad internacional, que las perdió y que trató de atrincherarse. Después de traer aun mas miseria a ese infortunado país con su negativa a jugar a la democracia lo único que logró es terminar siendo arrestado y probablemente en vías de le La Haya, lo que hubiese podido evitar si hubiese aceptado el resultado electoral y pactado con Ouattara, el legítimo vencedor.Que esto sirva de lección a otros en los trópicos que se la pasan hablando pendejadas, de milicias y de que "no volverán". Quienes volverán o no se puede discutir, pero todo tiene su final y todos son sustituidos algún día, incluso por comilitones si es necesario. Si quieren pasar a la historia por la puerta grande, no hay nada mejor que el buen gobierno y la vocación democrática. Milicias, violencia y corrupción solo los llevarán la despeñadero, y muchas veces al país también.
Aquí a la derecha una foto de Gbagbo en camiseta que me recuerda a otra joya tropical que también poso en camiseta algún día de un mes de abril no tan lejano.....
This is part of what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said: "U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Gbagbo's capture "sends a strong signal to dictators and tyrants. ... They may not disregard the voice of their own people.
ReplyDelete"There will be consequences for those who cling to power," Clinton warned."
Wake up, little Hugo, wake up!!!
“It’s not a bluff,” said an adviser to Alassane Ouattara, the real winner in November’s presidential election in Ivory Coast, who is now besieged in a hotel in Abidjan, the capital, under United Nations protection. “The (African Union) soldiers are coming much faster than anyone thinks.” But it is a bluff, and the AU is just undermining its own credibility by threatening to use force.
ReplyDeleteThe incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo, who stole the Ivory Coast election by getting the Constitutional Council (headed by a crony) to invalidate many of Ouattara’s votes, still controls the capital and the army. His actions have been condemned by the United Nations, the African Union, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the United States and the European Union, but getting him out will not be easy.
Gbagbo, once a history professor and a prodemocracy campaigner, has latterly turned himself into the self-appointed defender of the Christian peoples in the southern half of Ivory Coast. Now he says: “I do not believe at all in a civil war. But obviously, if the pressures continue as they have, they will push toward war, confrontation.”
He knows about civil war, because one broke out two years after he was elected president in 2000. Military mutineers, mostly Muslim troops from the north who didn’t want to be demobilized and lose their jobs, attempted to seize power in Abidjan.
They were quickly defeated in the capital, but other Muslim troops took control all across the north. French troops blocked them from moving south, and after a couple of months the divided country settled into the sullen ceasefire that has lasted for the past eight years. The civil war that Gbagbo is warning about would be the second round, not the first.
Then why doesn’t he just accept his electoral defeat and quit? Partly because he just wants to stay in power, of course, but it’s not as simple as that. He has real support among the Christians of the south, because many of them see Ouattara as the democratic facade of a Muslim takeover bid that began with the military mutiny in 2002.
The north-south division in Ivory Coast is real. The country has shifted from a narrow Christian majority 25 years ago to a Muslim majority today — and it has done so largely through illegal immigration from the much poorer, entirely Muslim countries to the north: Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea.
About four million of the 21 million people now living in Ivory Coast are illegal immigrants, and almost all of those immigrants are Muslims. It has changed the electoral balance, because many of them register to vote, especially in the north of the country where they speak the same languages as the local citizens. Southerners are afraid that they will lose control, and so they back Gbagbo.
It’s really a rich-poor problem, not a Christian-Muslim problem. The country’s agricultural resources, particularly the cocoa plantations that make Ivory Coast the wealthiest country in West Africa, are mainly in the south. Southerners think that a northern-led government would divert a lot of that income to the north, and they are probably right.
http://www.thespec.com/opinion/article/308603--stalemate-in-ivory-coast-likely-to-continue