The French Embassy in Ivory Coast announced on Monday that Ivory Coast security forces had arrested incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo, after major fighting that had torn apart the city of Abidjan since March 31. TIME reporter Monica Mark was caught up in the chaos. This is her report of a week of surviving the siege.
I should really have known better. But I’d lived in Ivory Coast for two years, working as a journalist out of Abidjan, as has my boyfriend Tim Cocks, a reporter for Reuters, and we were comfortable and perhaps too complacent. We certainly knew there was trouble ahead but we thought the war would be over quickly. But now, after one of the longest weeks of my life, I should have realized the reckoning was going to be bloody. The signs were everywhere.
It should have been evident from the stubbornness of Laurent Gbagbo. After delaying elections for five year delays, the incumbent president lost a United Nations certified run-off in November 2010 to his challenger, Alassane Ouattara. Gbagbo refused to relinquish power and, simultaneously, the killings began. In Abidjan, the commercial capital of the country and the fount of political power, hundreds of Ouattara supporters were targeted by the pro-Gbagbo army and police forces. In response, sleeper rebel cells who backed Ouattara emerged to counter the regime forces in the city, creating a low level conflict that had the civilian population trapped in the middle.
But it wasn’t quite full blown war and life didn’t seem dramatically altered. We got used to the sound of gunfire and heavy weapons booming across town. We avoided the parts of the city that had become deserted ghost towns. The curfews, the economic meltdown and the army’s increasing violence were so stealthy that we simply adapted to each shift in routine and carried on. Ivorians who could afford to get away from all the inconvenience had long since gone to Europe. Besides, for Tim and I, it was a story to cover.
We knew enough to figure that fighting would inevitably reach the street where we lived. It did not take much to foresee that: practically next to us was the state broadcaster, a potent propaganda weapon in Gbagbo’s arsenal and one that Ouattara backers would certainly want to take from the incumbent. Our contingency was to wait out the violence in a hotel in the city’s center once it reached us. We could go on working from there.
But on March 19, I realized that the trouble could well be overwhelming. On that day, Gbagbo called his youthful backers to a mass enlistment at the army barracks. Some 30,000 of them turned up, baying for the blood of anyone who didn’t back their President. Empowered by a new-felt immunity as members of Gbagbo’s military, the young people, toting Kalashnikovs, set up hundreds of roadblocks overnight. The state propaganda machine also got nastier, inciting violence against Ivorians who dared question Gbagbo. The government simply labeled such offenders “foreigners.” Meanwhile, we journalists were branded “terrorists.” The rest of the world — as envisaged in the U.N. peacekeepers, who were augmented by the French — was regarded as an “occupation force.” Taking pictures in the country suddenly required written consent from Gbagbo’s wife, Simone, a woman with no formal executive power.
