The imperialist military intervention is part of the French rulers’ efforts to salvage their sphere of influence in their former colonial empire on the African continent. They face both popular opposition to their exploitation of African mineral wealth and labor, and fierce competition by their U.S. rivals encroaching on their domination of former French possessions. Washington has expanded intervention in West Africa and its coastal regions, eying oil deposits in the Gulf of Guinea.

The deployment of 5,000 French troops to Ivory Coast is Paris’s largest military intervention today. The French government has more than 33,000 troops stationed in at least 20 countries around the world—most of them former or current French colonial possessions. More than one-third of those forces are stationed in 11 African countries.

Ivory Coast is the largest producer of cocoa beans—some 40 percent of the world’s crop. French imperialism’s domination of the country is based on in its control of key sectors of its economy and infrastructure, including electricity, water, and telecommunications. According to the French embassy in Abidjan, 60 percent of the country’s tax revenue comes from French-owned companies.

A year-long cease-fire was broken November 4 when the Gbagbo government ordered bombing raids against Bouaké and Korhogo, northern towns under the control of the New Forces opposition group. Two days later Ivorian war planes carried out an air raid against a French army camp near Bouaké, killing nine French soldiers and one U.S. citizen. Ivory Coast officials later said this had been done by mistake.

French president Jacques Chirac jumped on the bombing of its military center as a pretext to order French fighter planes to destroy most of Ivory Coast’s military aircraft. They destroyed two jets and at least three helicopters on the ground. While announcing, “France is the friend of Ivory Coast,” Chirac also increased the French military presence there to 5,000 troops.

In addition, the United Nations has 6,240 so-called peacekeepers in Ivory Coast to help Paris enforce its will. On November 6 the UN Security Council met in emergency session and condemned the bombing of the French military camp. It opposed the Ivorian government’s air strikes against opposition forces as violations of the cease-fire, and said the “peacekeepers” and French military “are authorized to use all necessary means to carry out fully” their mandates from the Security Council. A day earlier UN forces had moved to block two convoys of government troops moving north against rebel positions, the BBC reported. The African Union also condemned Ivorian government’s raids on the north.

The French ambassador to the United Nations said after the emergency session that Paris “thinks that the time has come now to adopt an arms embargo in Ivory Coast.”

At the center of the conflict is Washington’s push to gain greater influence in the region. U.S. corporations have been among the heaviest investors in the growing African oil industry. U.S. president George Bush’s “AIDS initiative” announced in his January 2003 State of the Union address was aimed at increasing Washington’s influence among African countries.

At the beginning of 2003, large demonstrations took place in Ivory Coast opposing intervention by Paris and asking Washington to send in troops to help expel the French.

A failed coup attempt against the Ivorian government by soldiers from the north of the country in September 2002 touched off a civil war that has killed thousands and driven more than 1 million people from their homes. At the time, Paris expanded its military presence there to 2,500 soldiers to shore up the government, and Washington sent in 200 Special Forces troops.

The anti-government forces, which have recently named themselves the New Forces, accuse the Gbagbo government of repression and discrimination against Muslims and immigrants in the north. In the face of the regime’s inability to put down the revolt and establish conditions for stable exploitation of Ivory Coast’s resources, Paris shifted its stance and has tried to broker a power-sharing arrangement.

After a government crackdown on a rally in March in Abidjan left 120 protesters dead, opposition parties withdrew from the “government of national unity” that had been formed.

A January 2003 accord required the government to introduce electoral reforms demanded by New Forces. These included the repeal of a law requiring presidential candidates to be born in Ivory Coast, and for their parents also to be natives of the country. The government had used this law to bar opposition leader Alassane Ouattara, a northern Muslim, from running for president in the 2000 election. The parliament failed to revoke this and other discriminatory laws by September 29, as the accord demanded. In response, anti-government forces ignored an October 15 deadline for disarming their militias.

Gbagbo used the passing of the October 15 deadline to justify his order to bomb opposition forces three weeks later. In a November 7 television address, the Ivory Coast president said “the political leaders of the rebellion decided to quit the disarmament process, thus compromising any hope of a negotiated peace.”

To shore up its support the Gbagbo government has tapped into workers’ and peasants’ hatred of French colonial rule and mobilized anti-French protests. As French armored vehicles patrolled Abidjan, national television broadcasts called mass protests to prevent the occupiers from removing Gbagbo from office. The BBC reported “tens of thousands…heeded the call” November 6, “flooding towards the international airport which had been seized by the French.”

Although in his speech the next day Gbagbo asked “all demonstrators to go back home,” on November 8 thousands more protesters turned out to form a “human shield” around his house, the New York Times reported. One demonstrator said of the French forces, “they are trying to stage a coup d’etat against Ivory Coast. We are opposed. We are all going to the head of state’s residence to form a barricade.”

French troops fired into a rally in Abidjan November 9, killing 7 protesters, according to an AP dispatch. This brings the death toll to 27 over the initial days of the conflict. The Red Cross estimates at least 1,000 have been injured.

Meanwhile, Paris has begun the evacuation of thousands of the 14,000 French citizens in Ivory Coast. The governments of Belgium, Canada, Italy, Spain, and the United States have also begun evacuating their citizens.

While pro-government protesters rally in the south of Ivory Coast against French military moves, opposition forces in the north are also a thorn in the side of Paris. In the northwestern Ivorian town of Man, around 1,000 protesters hurled Molotov cocktails at French forces, angered by the failure of French troops to block the government’s air raids on opposition-held cities, according to the Reuters news agency. In October, 1,000 protesters tried to storm a UN military base in the north after reports that UN forces would try to forcibly disarm anti-government militias.  
 
 
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