PROFILE:Alassane Ouattara is nearing the end of a long quest stymied at every turn by his political rival
ARMED WITH a good claim to legitimacy after winning last November’s polls, and backed by armed groups, Alassane Ouattara was on Tuesday on the verge of achieving his long-held ambition: to become president of Ivory Coast.
Ouattara first bid for the job when independence leader Félix Houphouët-Boigny died in 1993.
Prime minister and acting president at the time, Ouattara lost a brief power struggle with the then head of national assembly, Henri Konan Bedie.
He then retreated to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where he became deputy managing director until 1999.
He has never been far from the centre of Ivorian politics since, but his political ambitions were initially stymied by legislation that effectively excluded him from the 2000 presidential polls.
New laws decreed that anyone with a non-Ivorian parent or who had lived outside the country in the past five years could not become president.
Ouattara’s father was said to be from Burkina Faso and his IMF job had kept him in Washington.
While tailored largely to thwart one man, these laws effectively turned much of the country’s northern Muslim population into second-class citizens as their origins were questioned.
Millions of migrants from other parts of west Africa were targeted in a wave of xenophobic attacks.
The migration had tipped the demographic balance in favour of Muslims, and Christians in the south felt threatened at a time of high unemployment and economic crisis.
Ouattara became emblematic of the plight of migrants and Muslims targeted in populist anti- immigrant campaigns, first by Bedie and later by Laurent Gbagbo, who was swept to power in 2000 after flawed elections held by a military junta.
Ouattara is an urbane intellectual with a doctorate in economics and a long career as an international technocrat. He has friends in high places around the world.
He has used this to his advantage during the past four months of crisis, when Gbagbo refused to concede defeat in the elections and he was holed up in an Abidjan hotel, with UN peacekeepers and former rebels for protection.
The European Union and UN have slapped sanctions on the obdurate incumbent and the African Union has suspended Ivory Coast and recognised Ouattara’s victory.
Former colonial power France has backed him throughout.
That support, however, has played at times into the hands of his nemesis. Gbagbo has won sympathy both at home and around Africa, where he is
seen by some not as a usurper but as a latter-day Patrice Lumumba (Congo’s independence hero), facing a French-led neo- imperialist plot.– (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011)