By Owei Lakemfa
IN the old Western  movies, there were usually the ‘good men’ who were on the side of the law or justice. On the other hand were the ‘bad men’ who were usually outlaws.

In the mainly linear plot, the bad men cause a lot of havoc  but at the end of the film, they are taken out , usually in a shootout.

In the script  by the West, Laurent Gbagbo is a bad man. It therefore seems that the best option for  humanity is to go in, pick the bad man and his collaborators, kick them out and let Ivorians live happily thereafter.

This is what should happen in the movies, but reality is different.

I am not a fan of Gbagbo, but I have at the back of my mind the fact that Cote  d’Ivoire is quite rich and that Gbagbo is an obstacle to the fleecing of the country by France and the West. So our motives as Africans are  not the same as those of the West and the United Nations it controls.

Secondly, Gbagbo’s Pan Africanist antecedents contrasts with those of the Pro-IMF/World Bank  background of his rival, Alassane Ouatarra, obviously America and the West will prefer to do business with the latter.  Using the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) as executors of the military gambit would save a country like France men and materials and would also guarantee  its much needed military bases in that country.

Although the Gbagbo group should be condemned  for tearing up the election results, but ECOWAS and the African Union ought to give more ear to Gbagbo’s demand for a recount of the ballot.

I do not have any doubt that a military intervention will result in a dreadful bloodbath of Africans. This is why Nigeria with over two million citizens living in Cote d’Ivoire should be more cautious. Another danger is that the military option is likely to result in the dissolution  of the Ivorian armed forces and the police; the security implications for the country will be quite  immense. If this happens, the core of the new armed forces is likely to be made up of the rebel army  .

This means that there will be serious ethnic and religious schism in the new military whose officer corps will be northern and Muslim.

It is also not unlikely that civil war may result  from a military intervention. For a country that has barely survived a civil war, a second one  may be more devastating and may lead to a breakup of the country. Also, the army rather than surrender, may resort to guerrilla warfare which can be quite problematic and last a generation.

If a super power like the United States (US) and its allies, have been unable to defeat the guerrilla struggle in Afghanistan, it might not be easy defeating an armed insurgency by a defeated Ivorian military. The US might have had better results pressurising  and negotiating with the Taliban government than a direct invasion in which it won the strike but not the peace. Part of the problem was that a rebel army was backed to make a sweep of Afghanistan,  and  the war degenerated into a tribal one.

The same can be said of Iraq; during the 1990 Gulf War, President Bush Snr got to the gates of the country after crippling the Iraqi army, but rather than go for the kill, he turned back. Thirteen years later, his son went in for the kill and US has since then got sucked into a war it would not accept failure, but cannot win.

It might have made more sense to dialogue even with a defeated Saddam Hussein in prison, than to murder him and his colleagues and turn historic Iraq into a huge centre of anarchy where massacres no longer make news.

It is not that the sack of a country’s  entire armed forces and the police should not be carried out if necessary, but it should be in revolutionary circumstances such as in 1917 Russia, 1949 China and 1959 Cuba. But if it is a mere leadership change as in Cote d’Ivoire, it becomes far more complex.

When rebels of the  Somali National Movement (SNM)pressed southwards against Mohammed Siad Barre intent on a military victory, peace moves were rejected  and the Somalia armed forces and police were utterly destroyed in January 1991. Today, two decades later, that country remains synonymous with anarchy and what a failed state looks like.

Mengistu Haile  Mariam the Ethiopian strongman fled on May 21, 1991 and the rest of his Amharas-dominated cabinet sought a political settlement with the advancing Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary  Democratic Front, a coalition led by the Tigre Peoples Liberation Front. The latter refused and overran Addis Ababa.

Today 20 years later, that victorious coalition still employs force  to dominate its opponents. To me, a negotiated political settlement might have been better , than an outright military solution. This is what the government in Sri Lanka would come to learn after rejecting peace negotiations with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Tamil Tigers)

Uganda can be said to be one of the luckiest countries in the world; it survived two civil wars which led twice to the dissolution of the armed forces. The first was in 1979 when the human butcher, Idi Amin was removed and the second was the ascendancy of Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Movement.

Unfortunately, partly due to the complete insistence on military victory and domination, the country has not been free from armed conflicts since  the Amin era.

In contrast, even when it was clear that the rebels in the Nigerian civil war had been defeated, the Yakubu Gowon regime pursued a reconciliatory, reintegration and participatory programme which guaranteed peace.

We must not lose sight of the fact that  the primary  reason for the Ivorian elections was to re-unify the south and the north; employing a military option to complete the electoral process will be a defeat of the reunification goal.