Student Activism in the 1990s; from Clandestinity to Political Schism

A Tumultuous Birth

By the end of the 1980s, Ivorian civil society and the political opposition were at a boiling point. Frustration with years of one-party rule, together with a declining economy and decreasing job prospects for youth, led to increasingly widespread protests to pressure the government for multiparty elections. In the vanguard of the early-1990s protest movement were Laurent Gbagbo's socialist FPI party and the closely associated student group, FESCI.

FESCI was created in April 1990, and, together with trade unions and leftist political parties, was instrumental in mobilizing demonstrations throughout 1990 and 1991 against PDCI rule.[21] FESCI was supported financially and otherwise by a number of nascent leftist opposition parties, including the FPI.[22] From its inception, Houphouët-Boigny and his PDCI party viewed FESCI as an instrument of the political opposition and therefore subversive.

After months of intense pressure, Houphouët-Boigny agreed to the legalization of political parties in May 1990. Later that year, for the first time in Côte d'Ivoire's history, Ivorians witnessed presidential elections with Houphouët-Boigny facing another candidate, FPI's Gbagbo. Houphouët-Boigny won the elections with 82 percent of the vote and opposition parties criticized electoral irregularities. Dissatisfied with the reforms offered, the student demonstrations and pressure from opposition parties continued.[23]

FESCI is Driven Underground

In the early 1990s, violent clashes between FESCI members and government security forces led to an official ban on FESCI as an organization, forcing its members underground.

In May 1991, three days of tension and violent student-police clashes on the university campus took place after students claimed that they were attacked by pro-government thugs while planning a news conference on cramped conditions in the university. Security forces violently dispersed angry students who hurled stones and burned cars.[24] Later that same week, the army, led by its chief of staff Robert Gueï, conducted a brutal night raid on a student dormitory in the Abidjan neighborhood of Yopougon. Gueï was promoted to general soon after.

In June 1991, students allegedly belonging to FESCI bludgeoned to death a suspected PDCI government informant on campus, Thierry Zebié. Eight students were arrested, and Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara, in a nationally broadcast speech, announced that FESCI was being dissolved immediately. FPI leader Gbagbo, a university professor, reportedly said that FESCI had committed no crime and that Ouattara's speech was "a great mistake."[25] Pursued by the authorities, most FESCI leaders went underground.

In January 1992, a government commission established to investigate General Gueï's May 1991 raid on the Yopougon dormitory concluded that soldiers raped at least three girls and viciously beat students, and that "the sole initiative" for the savage raid lay with General Gueï. The commission recommended that Gueï be sanctioned.[26] When Houphouet-Boigny refused to follow the commission's recommendations, saying he did not wish to divide the army, students staged weeks of violent protests, clashing with police, burning tires, smashing windows and doors in campus buildings, and setting fire to vehicles, leading to hundreds of arrests.[27] Laurent Gbagbo, FESCI founder Martial Ahipeaud, and president of the Ivorian League for Human Rights (Ligue Ivoirienne des Droits de l'Homme, LIDHO) René Dégni Ségui, were arrested and sentenced to between one and three years of prison, but were freed months later.[28]

Continued Clashes in the mid-1990s

Student strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations in the years following the death of Houphouët-Boigny focused, at least at one level, on traditional student issues, including overcrowding on campus and scholarships. At the same time, for many students, such actions were nevertheless felt to be "political" or "anti-PDCI" acts taken against a corrupt and undemocratic government thought disinclined to better their lot.[29] Continuing the government's "tough" stance, in 1995, then-Minister of Security Marcel Dibonan Koné stated at a press conference that anyone claiming to be a member of FESCI would be considered an "outlaw."[30] 

FESCI's planning meetings and press conferences during this era were often broken up brutally by police raids. Hundreds of FESCI members and leaders were arrested, held incommunicado, and most often released without charge. Many endured harsh conditions including deprivation of food, beatings, and torture while detained.[31] Nearly all of FESCI's leaders in the 1990s spent time in jail,[32] and a number of its leaders, including its founder, Martial Ahipeaud, Guillaume Soro, and Charles Blé Goudé, were considered by Amnesty International to be "prisoners of conscience."[33]

By late 1997, continuing waves of student strikes, boycotts, and demonstrators resulted in the near-total paralysis of the Abidjan university campus, and made clear that FESCI could not be repressed out of existence. In September of that year, then President Henri Konan Bédié announced that, "The time has come to end a crisis that is seriously harming the whole nation," and pledged that more money would be invested in the overcrowded and dilapidated university system.[34] One week later, the ban on FESCI was lifted.

Internal Schism in the Late 1990s

Once able to function openly, and in tandem with a larger opening of the political landscape in Côte d'Ivoire as a whole, fissures along political lines began to form within FESCI's leadership. In 1998, FESCI held its first public elections, pitting outgoing Secretary General Guillaume Soro's candidate and number two in the organization's hierarchy, Karamoko Yayoro, now president of the youth wing of RDR opposition party, against Charles Blé Goudé, now head of the Young Patriots pro-government group. Some saw in these elections a fight for control of FESCI by two political parties, the RDR and the FPI.[35] Blé Goudé won those elections, and the organization has been widely viewed as being exclusively allied with the FPI party ever since.[36]

The late-1997 truce with the government was short lived. Accusing Bédié of failure to fulfill his promises for increased student aid, FESCI in 1999 led violent protests in favor of increased scholarship aid to students. During these protests, students engaged in widespread vandalism, including smashing cars and looting shops and businesses, leading to hundreds of arrests; the closing of many state-run educational institutions across the nation; the closing of university dormitories; and a "white year" for students in most disciplines (a year without exams, forcing students to repeat the school year). President Bédié and his cabinet denounced a "movement of destabilization, of a quasi-insurrectional nature" stirred up by FESCI and "its local and external manipulators," and threatened to arrest FESCI leaders, most of whom went into hiding.[37]

In response, police in May 1999 stormed the university residences as part of a brutal crackdown, leaving a trail of blood and damage as they pursued students, beating and kicking many. Several students were rushed to a nearby hospital with fractured limbs and head injuries.[38] In August, Blé Goudé was arrested, charged with disturbing public order, and placed in Abidjan's maximum-security prison, only to be rushed to the hospital in late-September with respiratory problems.[39] In October, tensions decreased when Bédié signed a decree granting amnesty to students convicted or detained for acts of violence during the year's protests and freed Blé Goudé. By the time FESCI finally lifted its strike in late November 1999, it had been a violent and tumultuous year, but the year's biggest event had yet to occur.

The Crisis Erupts, the University Shaken, 1999-2002

In December 1999, nearly 40 years of PDCI rule came to an abrupt end when the former head of Côte d'Ivoire's army, General Gueï, assumed leadership of a successful coup to oust President Bédié. The "Republican Front," an alliance of convenience created in April 1995 between opposition parties, dissolved. Mirroring national politics, the divisions that began within FESCI in 1998 soon intensified in the new political climate, and the organization began to fracture along political lines. At the same time, political parties battling for leverage in an electoral year sought to curry favor with FESCI, in part due to the coveted control of the street they could offer as well as the sheer number of youth votes they could mobilize.[40] 

In May 2000, what would become known as the "dissident wing" of FESCI, led by Doumbia Major, second in command in FESCI's hierarchy and a supporter of the RDR party, accused Blé Goudé of mismanaging funds and attempted to challenge Blé Goudé's leadership of the organization. In response, Blé Goudé accused Major and his followers of trying to take FESCI over on behalf of the RDR, claimed that Alassane Ouattara was financing the "dissidents," and warned that the RDR would try to use FESCI to help win presidential elections later that year.[41] Members of Gueï's government similarly charged that the dissidents were being manipulated by the RDR.[42]

This marked the beginning of an open and often bloody struggle for control of FESCI (often called the "war of machetes") between a "loyalist" faction led by Charles Blé Goudé (who generally supported the military junta and the FPI) and a "dissident" faction led by Major (many of whom were pro-RDR). In a loose way, the divisions within FESCI during the "war" took on the regional and ethnic character that has come to characterize the Ivorian crisis up through the preset day, with the FPI drawing its supporters from the largely Christian south and the RDR from the largely Muslim north.[43]

During the "war," loyalist and dissident FESCI factions among the student population hunted each other down with machetes and clubs resulting in at least six deaths and dozens of serious injuries, including students thrown out of windows, hacked and nearly beaten to death with machetes.[44]For members of both factions, as well as for non-aligned students, this period is remembered as a "reign of terror" on campus.[45]

Publicly, Gueï called on students to "leave politics at home" and even threatened those responsible for student violence with military conscription. The army and other security forces intervened several times in clashes between students, often arresting those involved in the fighting.However, according to former dissidents interviewed by Human Rights Watch, the arrests were often selective, targeting dissidents in particular, and the loyalists who were arrested were often released almost immediately afterwards.[46] A few dissident members who were arrested told Human Rights Watch that while in custody, they were beaten by soldiers and accused of taking money and weapons from Alassane Ouattara.[47]

Violence erupted on a national scale during the October presidential and December parliamentary elections in 2000, leading to the deaths of over 200 people. State security forces gunned down mostly pro-RDR demonstrators in Abidjan's streets; hundreds of opposition members, many of them northerners and RDR supporters targeted on the basis of ethnicity and religion, were arbitrarily arrested, detained, and tortured, and state security forces committed rape and other human rights violations in complicity with pro-FPI youth groups, including FESCI.[48] Two victims interviewed by Human Rights Watch in the wake of the elections described being beaten by members of FESCI working in collaboration with gendarmes, who themselves participated in the beatings.[49]

After the electoral violence of late 2000 subsided, the two student factions organized rival congresses to elect a new secretary general in early 2001. Foreshadowing the formal division of the country less than 18 months later,the loyalists elected Jean-Yves Dibopieu in Abidjan, while the dissidents elected Paul Gueï, in central city of Bouaké, which became the fief of the dissidence.[50]The "war" resumed and the Abidjan and Bouaké campuses were plagued with violence similar to the previous year.[51]

In May 2001, under pressure from government and civil society groups, the representatives from the two FESCI factions met in the Abidjan suburb of Bingerville for talks. Under the "Bingerville Accords" signed by the two factions, the year-long "war of machetes" came to an end, Jean-Yves Dibopieu became secretary general, and dissident leader Paul Gueï his deputy.[52]

By this time, however, many leading dissidents had already either fled Abidjan or been forced into exile in neighboring countries such as Mali in order to escape the violence. Some former dissidents had defected to the loyalist side, while others attempted to fade from political and union life and continue their studies in relative peace and anonymity.

Unable to function in or accept an FPI-led Côte d'Ivoire, a large number of former FESCI dissidents went on to join the New Forces rebellion, which led an attempted coup d'état in September 2002, and currently controls the northern half of Côte d'Ivoire.[53] The rebellion is headed by former FESCI president Guillaume Soro. Today, many members of the New Forces administration are former FESCI dissidents. In the eyes of many FESCI loyalists, the rebellion was but a continuation of the dissident insurgency they thought they had vanquished on the university campus some 18 months prior.[54]