In an internationally-supervised election last fall, incumbent Laurent Gbagbo lost re-election as President of Ivory Coast (Cote d'Ivoire) to Alassane Ouattara. The electoral commission certified the vote as fair. But Gbagbo's hand-picked court decided that he was the winner anyway. Nobody has taken this seriously except Gbagbo and his diehard supporters, and war has resumed. It is almost over, though, with Gbagbo holed up in his bunker as Abidjan and the rest of the country are now largely under the control of forces loyal to Ouattara.
An interesting OpEd in the NYTimes by a former Gbagbo supporter, Venance Konan, wonders how a one-time democracy leader became so corrupted once he became President, and was so willing to see people die so that he could keep power. It turns out that our old friends the Christianists have something to do with this.
It should be noted that Ivory Coast was largely divided in two by a civil war that only ended a few years ago. The north is predominantly Muslim; the south is predominantly Christian. But the war was not really about religion; it was more a war for power and wealth between the different ethnic groups. Ivory Coast is relatively wealthy, or at least should be; it is among other things a leading producer of cocoa beans. It is the Saudi Arabia of chocolate.
The winner of the recent election, Ouattara, is a northern Muslim; Gbagbo is from the south. But Ouattara's support was not limited to Muslims. Konan notes how Gbagbo has behaved since losing the election:
After last fall’s election, Mr. Gbagbo and his wife, Simone, refused to accept the results, in part because they had become evangelical Christians, and their pastors convinced them that God alone could remove them from power. Every day on state TV, fanatical clergymen called Mr. Gbagbo God’s representative on earth, and the winner of the election, Alassane Ouattara, the Devil’s. Many young Ivorians, poor, illiterate and easily brainwashed, believed this.
We see this in other parts of Africa too, of course; it's the new frontier for Christianist extremism. From the death-to-gays movement in Uganda and the Lords Resistance Army to the evangelicals fomenting violence in Kenya and even backing the ruthless torturer Mugabe in Zimbabwe.
And it's not just Africa. One might recall that in Guatemala, during its lengthy civil war, General Efrain Rios-Montt took power in 1982. He had become a member of a right-wing evangelical sect in 1978 and had no qualms about killing about 70,000 of his countrymen. (Ironically, his brother became a Catholic Bishop and human rights advocate. We see the RC church as a right-wing force in the US, but in much of Latin America, its local leaders represent the peasantry against the wealthy.)
Americans like to see Islamist agitation behind world problems. Muslims are the new commies under the bed. But the press ignores Christianist terrorists. We should not let them be ignored.