LONDON — "It's not a bluff," said an adviser to Alassane Ouattara, the real winner in November's presidential election in Ivory Coast, who is now besieged in a hotel in Abidjan, the capital, under United Nations protection. "The (African Union) soldiers are coming much faster than anyone thinks." But it is a bluff, and the AU is just undermining its own credibility by threatening to use force.
The incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo, who stole the Ivory Coast election by getting the Constitutional Council (headed by a crony) to invalidate many of Ouattara's votes, still controls the capital and the army. His actions have been condemned by the U.N. the African Union (AU), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the United States and the European Union, but getting him out will not be easy.
Gbagbo, once a history professor and a prodemocracy campaigner, has latterly turned himself into the self-appointed defender of the Christian peoples in the southern half of Ivory Coast. Now he says: "I do not believe at all in a civil war. But obviously, if the pressures continue as they have, they will push towards war, confrontation."