With the news firmly focused on the Middle East (and even the BBC now seems to have noticed there’s a bit of unrest in Syria) it’s easy to overlook the continuing crisis in Ivory Coast. Alec gives an excellent account of the complex background to that conflict here. In brief, although Alassane Ouattara was judged to have won the election back in November, the President, Laurent Gbagbo, still refuses to cede power. The Independent now reports that up to one million Ivory Coast citizens have fled fighting in the main city of Abidjan with others uprooted across the country.
In a recent article, Andy Newman draws attention to the lack of coverage of such events in the media:
The interesting question is why revolts in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have gripped the imagination of the West, but momentous events in Côte d’Ivoire, and Gabon have been almost unreported?
Stories about Israel/Palestine, in particular, draw readers in like moths to a flame, and Libya and Egypt also attract attention, partly because of their geopolitical significance. Most in the West know at least something about Colonel Gaddafi, and, even if Mubarak was a slightly less well-known figure, the simple fact that Egypt looms large in popular culture gives the casual follower of the news something to latch onto. Yet most of us (I assume) know little of Ivory Coast’s history. One thing which struck me about the coverage of the crisis on Connectionivoirienne, perhaps because I had just been reading James Bloodworth’s recent post on the ‘anti-interventionist reflex’, was the urgent wish for more decisive intervention from the international community.
About 460 people have died in the fighting so far.
Sarah AB adds: Flesh is Grass has recently written a very interesting piece on military intervention.
Alec Macph adds: A comment by Der Whigphilosophie der Geschichte is, as ever, the dog’s bollocks.
There are generally two distinct drivers for intervention, realist national interest as practiced by decision makers in national governments and humanitarian impulses shared by both policy makers and the larger public. These are in fact interdependent (e.g. Blair era arguments about humanitarian intervention serving national interests) and have the most traction when they compliment each other.
If you want to rebalance the scales to compensate for the lack of realist self-interest involved in the Ivory Coast, then that can only be done by public pressure to intervene on humanitarian grounds. Sitting back and passing the buck to governments as somehow the only agency to initiate action just guarantees the interpretation of the balance of realism and humanitarianism will be done by the decision-making elite in isolation.
Much as we might want to blame them when it all goes wrong, or bolster our own sense of moral rectitude by shifting the moral responsibility to them, the only way to change their perspective is to take responsibility ourselves.