Summary

• Recently, the Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara has been criticized for failing to ensure impartial justice for crimes committed during the 2010/2011 post-election crisis.
• During the crisis, both forces supportive of ex-president Laurent Gbagbo as well as those forces who brought Ouattara to power were responsible for war crimes, but so far only former Gbagbo loyalists have been tried for the atrocities they carried out.
• The international community is right in criticizing Ouattara for his failure to bring his own supporters to court, which constitutes a major stumbling block for the political reconciliation process that remains stalled since Gbagbo’s party, the Front Populaire Ivoirien (FPI), boycotted the December 2011 parliamentary elections.
• However, pressure on Ouattara has to be exerted with care because the Ivorian president is facing the difficult challenge of bringing the influential zone commanders (Com’zones) to justice; they were responsible for most of the crimes committed by pro-Ouattara forces during the post-election crisis but continue to hold key positions in the Ivorian security forces.

About This Brief

Tobias Koepf was a Transatlantic post-doc fellow for International Relations and Security (TAPIR) at the U.S. Institute of Peace from June 2012 through January 2013. He is now a TAPIR fellow at the EU Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) in Paris. This brief is based on research he is conducting on the post-conflict reconciliation process in Côte d’Ivoire.