The death of eight French soldiers in an air attack by government forces in Ivory Coast yesterday underlines the risks involved in sending peacekeepers to conflict zones without proper rules of engagement and adequate logistical support. The Ivorian Air Force’s attack came after French troops prevented an Ivorian ground unit from using a road for an assault on Bouake, a city held by Muslim rebels in the north. By barring the route, however, the French were only doing their job as mandated by the United Nations. They were enforcing a cease-fire signed between the Ivorian government and the rebels last July.
Last week the Ivorian government claimed that the rebels had not met an Oct. 15 deadline that the UN had fixed for them to disarm. Ivory Coast military commanders have vowed to retake the North, held by Muslim rebels since the September 2002 start of the war in the world’s top cocoa producer. Rather than using the mechanism in place for arbitration by the UN, the Ivorian government decided to launch an air and land attack on Bouake. This started with an air raid last Thursday amid a massive propaganda campaign designed to inflame anti-Muslim sentiments. The Ivorian regime’s next move was to dispatch an armored column to attack Bouake on land. When the French stopped that column, the Ivorians sent their Sukhoi bombers to raid the UN positions, killing eight French soldiers and wounding 23 others.
France and the United Nations were supposed to have about 10,000 peacekeepers in Ivory Coast, a former French colony. In reality, however, the UN has not been able to bring in more than 6,000 men, most of them French. This means that the UN force is too small to discourage either the government or the rebels to respect its writ while being large enough to provoke both sides.
According to Philippe Moreux, a spokesman for the French forces, the UN presence has been reduced to controlling the main South-North road, which can always be attacked from the air. To make matters worse, the UN force is not allowed to initiate any “hostile action” unless attacked. This means that some French soldiers must die before the others present can riposte.
This hare-brained scheme, negotiated in 2002 by France’s then Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin was presented as a model of multilateral action under the UN flag as opposed to American “unilateral” action in Iraq. Keen to score an anti-American point, Villepin put France’s soldiers in harm’s way with their hands tied behind their back.
As the Ivory Coast skids toward another civil war, it would be the height of folly for France to leave its soldiers exposed to attacks from both sides, and in the position of a sitting duck. During the past two decades the Ivory Coast, once a peaceful and tolerant society, has been transformed into a fiefdom for a narrow-minded political and military elite linked to its former colonial masters. This elite tries to deny the fact that nearly half of the country’s population are Muslims who demand a fair share in the decision-making process. The least that one can say is that the UN has made a mess of things in Ivory Coast.
