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11/21/2004:

"France Is Cast as the Villain in Ivory Coast"

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast, Nov. 15 - When the chanting mob descended on the strip mall that Jean Bobue Nguessam is paid to guard, he stood his ground, though not out of courage.

"If the French all leave, I will have no job," Mr. Nguessam said as he stood a lonely watch over the pillaged remains last week, in the wake of riots that followed an airstrike on French peacekeepers and brought this country to the brink of war.

Nightstick in hand, he had tried to reason with the crowd, but he was easily outnumbered. The mob made its way down the row of shops, stripping the shelves of a liquor store, then a video rental shop, a cellphone store and finally a hair salon.

"People can shout about the French," said Mr. Nguessam, 29, who works for the French owner of the strip mall. "But many people are unemployed, and it will only be worse when they go."

For decades, Ivory Coast was a sturdy patch on the fraying postcolonial quilt of West Africa, its peace and prosperity woven by the laissez-faire economic and immigration policies of its longtime dictator, Félix Houphouët-Boigny. Those policies attracted heavy investment from France, its former colonizer, with whom Ivory Coast maintained a friendly relationship, and millions of migrants from nearby countries to fill menial jobs unwanted by prosperous, educated Ivoirians.

But in the past two years, the ties that bound have frayed as the country's fortunes have faded. Many Ivoirians have turned on the French businessmen, immigrant workers and one another.

The latest violence began Nov. 5, after the government broke a cease-fire with the rebels. Government aircraft attacked a French camp, killing nine peacekeepers and an American aid worker, and the French retaliated by destroying much of the tiny Ivoirian Air Force.

The events seemed destined to deepen a crisis that had already pitted Muslim against Christian, northerner against southerner, and Ivoirians with deep roots here against those whose parents and grandparents came here seeking work. But France is being made into the bogeyman.
Full Article: nytimes.com

"Bogeyman" yeah right. Europeans and Americans are in such deep denial about their imperialism. They expect subject peoples to be grateful and are shocked when they're not.