Solving conflict on a smaller scale

As Cote d’Ivoire’s political leaders struggle with the conflict that has divided their country for the past four years, Ivorians at the grass-roots level have managed to resolve festering, deadly battles over land rights.

Authorities this year completed a pilot programme to record rights to land after lengthy consultations with villagers, elders, chiefs and local officials. The consultations include reviewing existing territorial agreements between individuals, families and communities.

Competition for land and the lack of official identity documents are partly behind the political impasse that has divided Cote d’Ivoire since a failed coup in September 2002 triggered a brief civil war. The conflict resulted in the exodus of millions of West Africans who for years had considered Cote d’Ivoire their home after they or their parents immigrated to work the country’s fertile land.

The government effort has aimed to clarify land tenure and safeguard it through formal registration. The boundaries of 105 villages in the southwestern cocoa belt and the southeast were mapped out and at least 20 land disputes have been resolved since 2004, analysts said.

"People were very happy. All the operations went well," said one analyst, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of land issues in Cote d’Ivoire. "Villagers and farmers are hungry for official documents and contracts. They need concrete and visible marks accepted by everyone because sometimes they simply don't know that this is not their parcel of land but the neighbour's one."

Door closes

Founding president Felix Houphouet-Boigny, who ruled Cote d’Ivoire for 33 years after independence from France, had decreed that "land belongs to the person who cultivates it" and encouraged West Africans from Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and other neighbouring countries to farm in the fertile west and southwest of Cote d’Ivoire to help develop the country’s economy.

As the population grew, swathes of virgin rainforest were slashed and burned to create more land to grow coffee, fruit and cocoa. The immigrants helped transform Cote d’Ivoire into the world's largest cocoa exporter and the most successful economy in West Africa.

But falling world prices for cocoa led to an economic downturn in the 1980s. Many Ivorian youths left the economic hub of Abidjan on the coast and returned to their villages only to find there was not enough farmland to go around.

Politicians, including former president Henri Konan Bedie, began talking of “Ivoirite” or “Ivorianness” after Houphouet-Boigny’s death in 1993. Then a 1998 law recognising customary land rights in Cote d’Ivoire effectively ended the country's open-door immigration policy by preventing migrants and their offspring from having land rights.

The introduction of nationalism, coupled with the country’s economic problems and competition for land, triggered attacks on West African migrants. "The Ivorian political context favours the explosion of [land] conflicts, feeds them and prevents their resolution," one Abidjan-based analyst said.

Intense competition

Since civil war erupted in 2002 land ownership has become a hot-button issue and there have been several deadly clashes.

A 54-year-old conflict in the area of Nougoussi, about 85 km east of Abidjan, between the Aboure and Gwa groups claimed its latest life in September when a group of Aboure attacked and killed a young Gwa man, bringing the death toll between the two communities to three this year. Dozens of people have been killed, many of them beheaded by machetes, in the five-decade-old conflict.

The rich agricultural region of 15,000 hectares is heavily planted with pineapples, cocoa and banana trees.

"Tensions start because the land is more valuable” in one area compared with another, said one government official. “Now there are a lot of economic interests at stake and villagers just say: I have planted pineapples here, so here it's my land. But that's wrong."

Last month, young Gwa demonstrated in the Nougoussi area against a peace agreement signed between local village chiefs and First Lady Simone Gbagbo, who belongs to the Aboure clan and was born in a village that became involved in the dispute.

The Ivorian Movement of Human Rights filed a complaint to the African Union’s Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, saying the 1998 land law trampled on the rights of migrants. The law was amended a few years ago and now allows title-holders to land, regardless of their origin, to hold rights to it.

The failure to fully implement the land law is partly to blame for the continuation of territorial conflicts such as the one in Nougoussi, said magistrate Leon Desire Zalo, director of the rural land and land registry department of the Agriculture Ministry.

"Today, we don't know the delimitation of the villages,” he said. “The crisis that Cote d'Ivoire is going through has worked a lot against the implementation of the law: the country is cut in two, [the law] cannot be applied in the north [held by rebels] and the funds allocated to the delimitation project have certainly been used for other ends."

Applying the law

This first phase of the pilot programme only covered a small percentage of Ivorian territory, estimated to total some 23 million hectares, or 11,000 villages, Zalo said. He said a lack of funding prevented authorities from continuing the project.

The programme was initially estimated to cost 30 billion CFA (US $58.5 million). To get the project running again, the European Union Commission has released US $4 million since last June to fund land demarcation and establish proof of property in 334 villages in the troubled southeast and southwest.

"It's an innovative and alternative way to resolve and prevent crises, a particularly good approach compared to what other countries have experienced in Africa," said one Western analyst.

Officials estimated that it would take 10 years to mark the boundaries of all Ivorian villages and land parcels. At Nougoussi and surrounding areas, peace might be in reach within four years, the officials said.

"The conflict is not resolved yet, but it is well under way,” said one official. “The in-depth method is new but promising."

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