First of all, I am a Canadian citizen, which you would know if you had taken 30 seconds to look at my profile.
Second, I grew up in Liberia, and lived a year in Cote d'Ivoire. I still have friends there, and got my information from them, not from any newspapers or the BBC.
I'm afraid that you are the one to have the fact wrong. Laurent Gbagbo won a democratic election that had been fixed by a military dictator, Robert Guei. The French didn't like Gbagbo because he wished to reduce the French economic stranglehold on his country -- thus leading to the French "Mugabeizing" smear.
And the civil war was between the Muslim north and Gbagbo's government in the south. It came about because Gbagbo was _anti-Muslim_, you twit! He riled up the Christian south against the large Muslim immigrant population from Burkina, etc.
You have a strange idea of democracy if you think that a democratically-elected president who came to power through a popular (and peaceful) protest against a military dictatorship is not "legitimate".
And you do not recall correctly about the protests in Abidjan. There was violence against French citizens and business, whose armed forces, after all, were engaged in systematically destroying their legitimate government's combat power. But the crowd in front of the Hotel Ivoire (in whose bowling lanes and ice-cream parlour I spent many a delightful hour) was entirely peaceful and non-threatening. There was an hour-long home video distributed on the net of the incident. The crowd was not threatening the French, who had drawn a cordon of armoured vehicles around the hotel. There was chanting, and singing, and then shots. People's heads really shouldn't be split open like that. It makes their brains spill out all over the pavement.
no subject
Second, I grew up in Liberia, and lived a year in Cote d'Ivoire. I still have friends there, and got my information from them, not from any newspapers or the BBC.
I'm afraid that you are the one to have the fact wrong. Laurent Gbagbo won a democratic election that had been fixed by a military dictator, Robert Guei. The French didn't like Gbagbo because he wished to reduce the French economic stranglehold on his country -- thus leading to the French "Mugabeizing" smear.
And the civil war was between the Muslim north and Gbagbo's government in the south. It came about because Gbagbo was _anti-Muslim_, you twit! He riled up the Christian south against the large Muslim immigrant population from Burkina, etc.
You have a strange idea of democracy if you think that a democratically-elected president who came to power through a popular (and peaceful) protest against a military dictatorship is not "legitimate".
And you do not recall correctly about the protests in Abidjan. There was violence against French citizens and business, whose armed forces, after all, were engaged in systematically destroying their legitimate government's combat power. But the crowd in front of the Hotel Ivoire (in whose bowling lanes and ice-cream parlour I spent many a delightful hour) was entirely peaceful and non-threatening. There was an hour-long home video distributed on the net of the incident. The crowd was not threatening the French, who had drawn a cordon of armoured vehicles around the hotel. There was chanting, and singing, and then shots. People's heads really shouldn't be split open like that. It makes their brains spill out all over the pavement.