Standoff Set Up With 2 Ivory Coast Presidents
by Adam Nossiter, The New York Times
3 December 2010
An assertion that the president had won elections set off protests in Abidjan a day after a panel named his rival the winner. (Issouf Sanogo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)
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ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — Defying international observers and the country’s own electoral commission, officials tied to President Laurent Gbagbo on Friday declared him the winner of a landmark election in this troubled West African nation, potentially setting the stage for the kind of violence and division that the long-awaited voting was supposed to prevent.
Protesters took to the streets after news spread that Thursday’s election results had been reversed. (Schalk Van Zuydam/Associated Press)
The announcement, made by the Constitutional Council, came only a day after the country’s top election official said Mr. Gbagbo’s challenger had won the election by a solid margin, 54.1 to 45.9 percent — a result the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, also endorsed on Friday. The United Nations has a role in certifying the elections, and both Mr. Ban and his longtime special representative here made it clear there was only one winner of last Sunday’s vote: the opposition candidate, Alassane Ouattara.
The conflicting declarations left the country in a strange limbo, with two men declared president, and on Friday Mr. Gbagbo’s government found itself under increasing isolation, some of it self-imposed. It has ordered the country’s borders sealed, blocked all foreign television and radio broadcasts — much of the population gets its news from French broadcasters — and imposed a strict dusk-to-dawn curfew.
President Obama issued a statement congratulating Mr. Ouattara. He urged “all parties, including incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo, to acknowledge and respect this result, and to allow Côte d’Ivoire to move forward toward a peaceful, democratic future, leaving long years of conflict and missed opportunities in the past.”
The streets of this economic capital were largely deserted except for troops, police officers and occasional bands of chanting youth, some of them Gbagbo supporters. Shops were shut tight, anticipating the street violence — often mobilized by Mr. Gbagbo’s camp, political scientists say — that sometimes accompanies political tension here.
Calls from Washington and other foreign capitals to respect last Sunday’s vote, which was characterized as largely fair by the European Union and the United Nations, have multiplied. But Mr. Gbagbo showed no signs of backing down. State television announced that he would be sworn in Saturday as president.
For years, he ignored calls from abroad to hold elections, staying in office five years after his legal term expired by postponing the vote. On Friday, Mr. Gbagbo, a former professor and historian, appeared set to continue in that vein, with legal justifications for his continued tenure fully mobilized.
Paul Yao N’Dre, the head of the Constitutional Council and a close ally of the president, announced Friday afternoon on national television that he was throwing out vote totals from the nine departments in the country’s northern tier — the stronghold of Mr. Ouattara — because of what Mr. N’Dre called “flagrant irregularities.” At the end of it, Mr. N’Dre said, “Laurent Gbagbo is declared president of the republic.”
Earlier, Mr. Ouattara’s camp had drawn its own line in the sand. “Maybe Laurent Gbagbo thinks he can stage a new putsch in 2010,” a spokesman for Mr. Ouattara, Amadou Gon Coulibaly, told a roomful of reporters here at the fading luxury hotel that is their headquarters. “But this doesn’t change anything. The people of Côte d’Ivoire have spoken. Laurent Gbagbo is beaten.”
Later, Mr. Ouattara declared himself the “elected president.”
Years of political confrontation here, with its coups and countercoups, civil war, street violence and postponed elections, seemed poised to repeat itself. The country has been divided between north and south since a 2002 civil war, and it had been hoped that the election would unify it.
A front-page headline in a newspaper close to Mr. Gbagbo translated as “France’s Coup d’État Has Once Again Failed,” singling out the former colonial power that has been the target of the president’s crowd-stirring orations in the past.
Late Friday, the few pedestrians out as curfew approached spoke anxiously, and sometimes angrily, about the standoff that was repeating itself in a country that was once a magnet for the region’s immigrants but that now has steadily rising rates of poverty and unemployment.
The announcement that Mr. Gbagbo was the winner “is going to bring on lots of bad things in this country,” said Charles Adou, 36 and unemployed. “Mr. Gbagbo doesn’t want us to go forward.
Referring to Mr. N’Dre, who declared Mr. Gbagbo’s victory, Michel Koffi, 28 and unemployed, said, “You put your friend at the head of an institution, you know what the result is going to be.”
Analysts foresaw no quick resolution to the standoff. One unknown factor is which way the army, currently under Mr. Gbagbo’s control, will turn.
“He’s playing his all,” said Richard Banegas, a political scientist at the Sorbonne in Paris. “He is extremely pugnacious, and he controls a lot of the street forces. He’s gone into a Plan B, a strategy of tension, a kind of Mugabe plan.”
A version of this article appeared in print on December 4, 2010, on page A10 of the New York edition.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company.