EDITORIAL - CARICOM, too, must tell Gbagbo to go

There has been, surprisingly, no public reaction by either Jamaica or the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to developments in the West African country of Cte d'Ivoire where the president, Laurent Gbagbo, continues to cling to power after an election that everyone, but Mr Gbagbo and his cronies, insists he lost.

Jamaica and CARICOM must join in telling Mr Gbagbo that he has squatted in the presidency long enough and that it is time to go.

Indeed, the international community, including, critically, the neighbourhood organisation, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), recognises Alassane Ouattara as the winner of the poll and as the legitimate president of Cte d'Ivoire. ECOWAS has warned Mr Gbagbo that it might mount military action against him if he refuses to leave peacefully.

Whether ECOWAS' threat is credible is debatable, given the limits of the group's military capacity and the dangers of reigniting the Ivorian civil war that is now a low-intensity conflict. This newspaper, nonetheless, supports the ECOWAS position and hopes that its initiative continues to receive strong and effective backing from the United Nations, the European Union and the United States.

ECOWAS' stance represents an important point of principle. It is the latest affirmation by Africa's economic and political organs of their embrace of democracy and their intolerance of arbitrary behaviour by leaders, especially those who would deny the will of their electorates. This deserves encouragement.

Mr Gbagbo's action, in this context, carries a particularly nasty odour. The one-time university professor and political activist came to power in 2000 on the back of a popular uprising when Ivorians believed that his election victory was being stolen by Robert Guéï, then head of the junta that ran the country.

Attempted coup

In 2002, rebels mostly from the north of the country, nursing regional grievances, attempted a coup against Mr Gbagbo, igniting the civil war that formally ended in 2004. That conflict allowed the president to extend his term, which should have ended in 2005, by five years until the poll was finally held towards the end of last November.

The election authorities declared Mr Ouattara, a former senior official of the International Monetary Fund, winner of the election, with more than 54 per cent of the votes. But the result was overturned by Mr Gbagbo's allies on the Constitutional Commission, claiming irregularities in some sections of the country, mostly in the north, that voted heavily for Mr Ouattara. With those discounted votes, Mr Gbagbo ostensibly mustered a narrow 'victory', with 51 per cent of the ballots.

This outrage should not be allowed to stand and CARICOM, for which Jamaica has the lead on foreign affairs matters, has strong historic and moral reasons for helping to ensure that it doesn't.

A successful assault on democracy anywhere weakens it everywhere. This region has an interest in shoring up democracy. Moreover, the majority of people in the Caribbean have ancestral ties to West Africa and a legitimate interest in how the continent conducts its affairs.

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