Rant About the Ivory Coast

Not a cheerful subject, but I'm becoming very angry about the role the UN has played in the Ivory Coast. It has given Alassane Ouattara and everyone fighting under him a carte blanche — simply because he won the elections by whichever margin — which will have to be revoked soon, and it has not acted as an impartial arbiter in any sense.

It is fanatical to believe that the outward form of democracy is the highest good, above the wellbeing of Ivorian citizens whom it is supposed to represent. In fact in this case the election seems to have resulted in a UN-approved hegemony, and now the parties are fighting over who is the hegemon over whom.

Even the rebels in Libya have been criticized far more for deciding to take up arms against a state which has been run by Muammar Gaddafi for 42 years — not by firing missiles into markets, assassinating statesmen, setting car bombs, or slaughtering civilian opponents, as far as I have heard, but by openly attacking military vehicles and installations — than Ouattara's supporters in Côte d'Ivoire. Now that (inevitably, given this course of action) several massacres have been ascribed to fighters on Ouattara's side it is quite clear that it almost never was about the people of Côte d'Ivoire.

I think the UN has allowed itself to be unduly influenced by the fact that Alassane Ouattara has cooperated with it whereas Laurent Gbagbo hasn't. That circumstance is too unrepresentative and insignificant to be the foundation of such wholesale approval and persistent benefit of the doubt when it comes to allegations of massacring, and I am guessing there will have to be a change of official position.