First Ivorian Civil War

First Ivorian Civil War
Part of the Ivorian Civil Wars
Date 19 September 2002 – 4 March 2007 (4 years, 5 months, 1 week and 6 days) Location Ivory Coast Result Tentative peace agreement, followed by renewed conflict
Belligerents
Ivory Coast COJEP Supported by:  Belarus	FNCI Alleged support:  Burkina Faso  Liberia	France UNOCI
Commanders and leaders
Laurent Gbagbo Charles Blé Goudé	Guillaume Soro	Jacques Chirac Kofi Annan
Casualties and losses
200+ government soldiers 100+ militias 1,200+ civilians [citation needed]	300+ rebels [citation needed]	15 French soldiers[citation needed] 36 UN personnel
900–1,700 casualties overall (UCDP) 750,000 people displaced (UNHCR)

The First Ivorian Civil War was a civil conflict in the Ivory Coast (also known as Côte d'Ivoire) that began with a military rebellion on 19 September 2002 and ended with a peace agreement on 4 March 2007. The conflict pitted the government of Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo against a domestic insurgency led by the New Forces of Ivory Coast (Forces nouvelles de Côte d'Ivoire). Following the war, a second civil war (2010–2011) would begin over the results of the 2010 Ivorian presidential election.

The war was preceded by a tumultuous decade in the Ivory Coast, marked by an economic downturn and, following the death of long-time Ivorian President Félix Houphouët-Boigny in 1993, a leadership succession crisis. The succession crisis manifested in a 1999 military coup d'état and a violent dispute over the result of the 2000 presidential election. Three successive Ivorian leaders – Henri Konan Bédié from 1993, Robert Guéï from 1999, and Gbagbo from 2000 – exploited the ideology of Ivoirité to repress and marginalise political opposition, notably by disqualifying Alassane Ouattara from contesting elections on the basis of his putative Burkinabé nationality; in the process, these leaders stoked ethnic tensions and xenophobic sentiment in the country. The rebellion which ignited the war was driven by forces which sought a re-run of the 2000 election and reform of exclusionary citizenship policies.

War broke out on 19 September 2002 when troops opposed to President Gbagbo – and under the political leadership of the Patriotic Movement of Ivory Coast (MPCI, Mouvement patriotique de Côte d'Ivoire) – attacked three Ivorian cities, including Abidjan. Though they failed to take Abidjan, the rebels quickly established control over much of the north of the country. Two new rebel groups along the Liberian border, the Movement for Justice and Peace (Mouvement pour la justice et la paix) and the Ivorian Popular Movement of the Great West (Mouvement populaire ivoirien du Grand Ouest), battled government forces for western territory, before uniting with MPCI as the New Forces in December 2002. Across the country, opposition supporters clashed with the Young Patriots (Congrès panafricain des jeunes et des patriotes) and other pro-government militias.

The conflict attracted an extraordinary amount of international attention.^[1] Ivory Coast's former colonial power, France, launched a military intervention soon after the initial rebellion. Though Opération Licorne had a protection mandate and pleaded its neutrality in the conflict, the French intervention was attacked by Ivorian nationalists as a manifestation of neocolonialism, leading to sustained public demonstrations and in 2004, fatal clashes between Ivorian and French forces. The United Nations (UN) was involved in the conflict first through a political mission, the UN Mission in Côte d'Ivoire, and then through an ambitious peacekeeping mission, the UN Operation in Côte d'Ivoire, which deployed in April 2004 and absorbed the smaller contingent of peacekeepers that had been deployed earlier by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

The violence had largely subsided by the end of 2004, but the country remained under de facto partition – with a rebel-held north and a government-held south – while the political crisis continued. Though the multi-party Linas-Marcoussis Accord established a power-sharing Government of National Reconciliation in early 2003, its provisions regarding disarmament and political reform were not implemented. A comprehensive political settlement was finally reached in 2007, when Gbagbo and the New Forces signed the Ouagadougou Peace Agreement in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. However, when the Ivory Coast held its presidential elections in 2010, the first since 2000, Gbagbo refused to accept the result, sparking a renewed political crisis and the beginning of the Second Ivorian Civil War.