DAKAR, 10 November 2004 — On a continent that absorbs 75 percent of the world’s UN peacekeeping forces and budgets, and 75 percent of the UN Security Council’s time, Ivory Coast’s violent downward spiral threatens hard-won gains achieved after West Africa’s devastating civil wars of the 1990s.

If Ivory Coast, West Africa’s economic powerhouse and the world’s top cocoa producer, returns to civil war, everyone from the nation’s newly peaceful neighbors to the world’s chocolate lovers will feel the pain.

Many hold one man responsible — President Laurent Gbagbo. His fate after the unparalleled violence this week stands to determine his nation’s fate as well. The deadly rampages in Ivory Coast erupted when France destroyed Ivory Coast’s tiny air force in response to an Ivory Coast airstrike that killed nine French peacekeepers and an American aid worker. At least 20 people have been killed and 700 hundred wounded in four days of mob and government confrontations with French troops.

On Tuesday, South African President Thabo Mbeki flew on an urgent international peace mission to meet with Gbagbo in skyscraper-lined Abidjan. An Abidjan hospital reported late Tuesday that seven people were killed and more than 200 wounded when French forces opened fire on loyalist crowds in renewed fighting.

If the turmoil continues, chocolate lovers will probably feel the effect on prices by Christmas. The violence has shut down cocoa exports in the world’s top producer since Saturday, closing ports that ship 40 percent of the world’s raw material for chocolate. Ivory Coast’s neighbors felt the effect immediately — with more than 1,000 Ivory Coast refugees fleeing into neighboring Liberia, and Guinea massing troops at its border for fear of cross-border unrest.

As Ivory Coast appeared poised on the brink of full-scale war, however, fellow West Africans just across the border were enjoying the fruits of peace. The first 500 of 300,000 displaced Liberians still living in camps for war-displaced people in Liberia boarded buses, heading home this week after 14 years of vicious civil conflicts in their country. “When I get back home, I will start to make gardens to survive, and then make blocks to rebuild what once was my small but decent house,” said one refugee, 62-year-old Momo Perry.

It took an unprecedented commitment by the international community, and the world’s largest deployments of peacekeepers, to get refugees like Perry home.

In 2002, British, UN and West African armies crushed a vicious Liberia-backed insurgency in Sierra Leone. The next year, US, UN and West African forces and Liberian rebels routed the chief promulgator of West Africa’s wars, warlord Charles Taylor in Liberia. Today, 75 percent of the world’s 62,000 UN peacekeeping troops are trying to secure recent peace deals across Africa, and $2.9 billion of the UN’s $3.9 billion peacekeeping budgets are spent here.

With up to 10 percent of the world’s oil reserves in West Africa, the United States and others increasingly are saying they have a strategic interest in Africa. More than half the world’s total of peacekeepers, 32,402 of them, are based in Taylor’s old stomping grounds — Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Ivory Coast itself, divided by civil war since September 2002. With Taylor pushed into exile in Nigeria, Gbagbo is looking like the biggest current challenge to peace. The risk: War that again would mobilize idled fighters and arms traffickers across West Africa.

The airstrike on the French was part of three days of government attacks on the rebel-held north that broke a more than year-old cease-fire. Similar street protests to those seen this week’s brought Gbagbo to power in 2000, during an aborted vote count following presidential elections that were meant to restore civilian rule after a 1999 coup — the country’s first-ever.

Although muggy and malarial, Ivory Coast since independence from France in 1960 has stood as the most prosperous country in West Africa. Abidjan won the title “The Paris of Africa” for its nightlife and its boutiques — with one of sub-Saharan Africa’s only two ice-skating rink at the Hotel Ivoire.

France kept it peaceful by backing Felix Houphouet-Boigny as Ivory Coast’s sole post-independence leader. Africa “wasn’t ready for democracy,” Jacques Chirac, now France’s president, famously declared at the start of the 1990s.

It was that very attitude that helped ensure that Ivory Coast wouldn’t be ready for democracy when Houphouet-Boigny died in 1993. With no tradition of democracy and no clear successor, Ivory Coast slid, then plunged into chaos by 1999 — shattering the nation’s reputation for stability.