Humpty Dumpty: Gbagbo promises Ivorian election by June; questions remain about demilitarization

So, how do you put a country back together after civil war? Does one wait for the militaries to hand in their weapons? Or, does one rush to the polls to attempt to forge out a new government that people from both sides can rally around?

As part of the peace deal signed in March 2007 in Ouagadougou, fighters on both sides of the conflict will be disarmed; a new unified national army will be created; most importantly, identity documents will be distributed, which will determine citizenship (an issue that lead to the civil war); finally, the Ouagadougou agreement stipulates that and elections will be held.

Political leaders such as President Laurent Gbagbo and former rebel Guilllame Soro, who is now the Prime Minister, would like to hold elections at the end of June, a timeline Gbagbo reiterated after meeting with South African President Thabo Mbeki, who is acting as a mediator.

However, Reuters reports, that the country’s disarmament and military demobilization process is far behind schedule and this likely to impede the country’s political reunification. Opposition politicians Henri Konan Bedie from the south and Allassane Ouattara from the north worry that the two leaders will use the delayed disarmament as an excuse to further postpone the elections (and remain in power), argues Selay M.K in the citizen journalism site Agora Vox.

Question: Isn’t it also true that the two leaders have refused to disarm their militias to keep the other side(s) honest? The issue here is that elections have been scheduled in the past and have been postponed after previous peace deals fell apart.

Earlier this year, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called the government’s election plan “very ambitious.” However, a diplomat speaking anonymously told IRIN the June election deadline may be ambitious, but leaders set it to insure elections will be held during 2008.

With northerner Guillame Soro as Prime Minister, federal authority is slowly, but surely reinstalling itself in the former rebel-zone northern part of the country. This process has been hampered because many rebels would like to keep their parallel command structures intact in case the country devolves into conflict again, IRIN reported.

Other issues remain. In an October 2007 report, the UN Secretary General admitted the population is still visibly scarred by the civil war and many issues, such as land ownership, have not been resolved. Under this backdrop, the United Nations has pressed ahead on creating identity documents so people can vote. The Secretary General will release a report regarding election preparations before April 15.

Looking to build democracy in Iraq? Look at Africa's history first

If Bush wanted to study the track record of democracy-building efforts in cultures with a long history of tribalism, he should have looked no further than the experience of Sub-Saharan Africa, where democracy’s introduction a half-century ago spelled disaster, writes Mukui Waruiru in the interesting Taki’s Top Drawer.

Most of the Black African nations that gained independence after Ghana followed its path by establishing one-party dictatorships. Observers soon began to describe the practice of democracy in Africa as ‘one-man, one-vote, one-time’. In many of the cases, the winning political party at the independence elections used its majority in the national parliament, to pass legislation outlawing the existence of opposition political parties. This left the ruling party with a monopoly of power. This trend challenged the widely held notion that pure democracy leads to more freedom. If anything, in many countries, Africans enjoyed greater personal freedom and prosperity under colonial rule, than they do today under independent governments. While opposition parties have been permitted to exist in some countries in the last few years, the oppressive habits associated with one-party dictatorial rule have been hard to break.

...

Today, if one was to argue in favor of restrictions to the right to vote, one would be labeled as an enemy of freedom. But, as we have seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela, and in much of Black Africa, democracy does not necessarily lead to freedom. With hundreds of thousands of Iraqis fleeing their country as a result of the violence that has engulfed that nation, can anyone seriously suggest that Iraqis are freer today than they were under Saddam Hussein? Are the nations of Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo freer today, than they were under colonial rule?

He also quotes, um, liberally from William F. Buckley’s book Up From Liberalism. This line sticks out: “It is more important for a community, wherever situated geographically, to affirm and live by civilized standards than to labor at the job of swelling the voting lists.”

Using the examples of the failed attempts of democracy in Nigeria, Uganda, Guinea to Ghana, of course Zimbabwe (and the soon to be failing South Africa), Waruiru then goes on to champion Christian values and the lessons learned in Ian Smith’s autobiography, the Great Betrayal, which will eventually help dismantle the disastrous “Marxist legacy that [Ghana’s Kwame] Nkruma and [Zimbabwe’s Robert] Mugabe have bequeathed on Africa.”

“Once they learn about the link between property and freedom, and how pure democracy and political independence do not necessarily translate into freedom, then they would get a true idea of what freedom is all about.”

It’s an interesting argument, all right. The problem I have with it is that intellectual warriors railing against the legitimacy of democracy in Africa (like Wariuru and the Economist) is they always point out the worse-case scenarios. Military-run Nigeria and Uganda and Sekou Toure’s Guinea were never going to be considered anyone’s democratic paradise. (In fact, today's incarnations of those three countries could only be termed "democratic" in name.)
Another popular example is the sordid history of Zaire/Congo Kinshasha? How again did Mobutu win the presidential election after the assassination of Patrice Lumumba?

My point is that don't these bad examples say more of a product of the Cold War, where one power propped up a nasty leader to carry out its aims and larger agenda, than they say about the inability of Africans to handle participatory democracy?

On the bright side, what about today’s Ghana? Or Mali? Not perfect, but they’ve come a long way since the fall of Nkruma.