News — Military

The Second Ivorian Civil War was a five-month conflict in the west African country of the Ivory Coast (also known as Côte d’Ivoire) between 2010 and 2011. The main belligerents of the conflict were the military of the Ivory Coast, led by President Laurent Gbagbo who also recruited Liberian mercenaries and had as his allies the Young Patriots of Abidjan; and the Ivorian Popular Front. The opposition New Forces were led by Gbagbo political rival, Alassane Ouattara, who also recruited Liberian mercenaries and had militia support from Rally of the Republicans (RDR).  The United Nations (UN) maintained a small peace-keeping force in the country and France had special forces members there as well. Their presence was critical when France decided to support Ouattara.  An estimated three thousand soldiers, members of various security forces, and civilians were killed in the conflict in a nation of 24 million people.

The conflict was initiated by the disputed 2010 Ivorian presidential election. Presidential candidate Alassane Ouattara was declared the winner of the contest but President Gbagbo immediately disputed the results claiming that there was extensive voter fraud. The international community, which included the United States, the European Union, the African Union, and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), all supported Ouattara and urged Gbagbo to step down. He refused and his followers soon initiated violence initially in Abidjan, the nation’s largest city.

On March 17, 2011, about thirty people were killed by central government-initiated rocket attack on a pro-Ouattara suburb of Abidjan. In the following days between March 21 and March 26 more violence occurred when fifty-two people were killed in Abidjan by supporters of Gbagbo. On March 28, 2011, the New Forces launched a military offensive across the country to drive Gbagbo from power.  They quickly captured a number of small towns and cities around the nation and on March 30, they took the capital, Yamoussoukro.

The following day, March 31, heavy fighting occurred in Abidjan as pro-Ouattara forces advanced through the city. At that point United Nations peacekeepers took control of Abidjan airport after pro-Gbagbo forces abandoned it. The fighting continued with claims of massacres by both sides.  The largest occurred in the town of Duekoue where an estimated 1,000 civilians were killed by both pro-Gbagbo and pro-Ouattara forces. Another massacre was reported on April 7, 2011 in the towns of Blolequin and Guiglo where an estimated 100 bodies were found.

The brief war took an abrupt turn on April 11, 2011 when pro-Ouattara forces captured Gbagbo and placed him, his wife, and 50 supporters under arrest.  The capture was assisted by French special forces who now were ordered by their government to openly support Ouattara. After Gbagbo’s arrest, the fighting ended and Ouattara was sworn in as the new president of the Ivory Coast.

Mohamed Siad Barre (Maxamed Siad Barre) was a military general in Somalia and the country’s third president. He came into power in October of 1969, leading a coup d’état against the elected government. Barre ruled over Somalia until 1991 when he was overthrown by militias, leading the country into a bloody civil war.

Barre was born in Shilabo, Ethiopia, in 1910 to a nomadic family from the Marehan clan. He spent his formative years attending school in Luuq, Italian Somaliland, and Mogadishu for his secondary education. He later joined the colonial police force. After Somalia gained independence in July of 1960, Barre became the Vice Commander of the Somali National Army.

In 1969, Somalia’s President Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke was assassinated, and a military group, the Supreme Revolutionary Council (SRC), staged a coup d’état, allowing Barre to assume power. Barre dissolved the constitution, parliament, and arrested politicians from the previous regime. The SRC renamed the country The Somali Democratic Republic and declared it a Marxist-Leninist one-party state. Barre adopted scientific socialism based on the teachings of the Quran and Marxism. He tried to rapidly industrialize and modernize the country by creating a new writing system, promoting cooperative farming, and leading an anti-tribal campaign. During Barre’s regime, all of Somalia’s major industries, from farming and oil to banking, were nationalized.

Barre pushed the idea of a Greater Somalia which refers to joining areas that Somalis are indigenous to, which includes Djibouti, the Ogaden in Ethiopia, and Kenya’s North Eastern Province. In July 1977, the Ogaden War broke out after the Barre’s administration tried to unite all these regions into Greater Somalia, starting with the Ogaden. The Somali National Army attacked Ethiopia, which was then under the socialist regime governing the nation. Somali armies were able to capture a significant part of Ogaden, but the war led the Soviet Union to shift their support from Somalia to Ethiopia. After the Soviets’ decision, the socialist world turned its back on Somalia. With the help of 15,000 Cuban troops, the Ethiopians pushed the Somali soldiers out of Ogaden in 1978. Somalia in turn cut its ties with the Soviet Union and switched its allegiance to the United States.

Discontent against the Barre regime grew after Somalia’s defeat in the Ogaden War. With the country’s economic sector crumbling, the entire nation faced a financial crisis, intensified by growing corruption among government officials. Although Barre led an “anti-tribalism” movement early in his regime, he now singled out the Isaaq tribe and subjected them to arbitrary arrests, rape, and torture. He also formed the Red Berets, a paramilitary unit to brutalize other clans. Consequently, many of them formed militia groups often supported by Ethiopia.

By the end of the 1990s the rebel group, Somali National Movement and other armed militias stormed the capital at Mogadishu forcing Barre to flee to Gedo, Somalia in January 1991. Unable to regain control of Mogadishu which was now under the control of the warlord Mohamed Farrah Aideed. Barre fled Somalia for Nairobi, Kenya and then Lagos, Nigeria. He died in Lagos on January 2, 1995 at the age of 85 and was buried in Gedo, Somalia.

How often does the hero in the story of one of Africa‘s most celebrated sons become the villain in the story of another? Joseph Arthur Ankrah is in a league of his own, and it is all strange that some consider him an ideological classmate of the two men.

Ankrah was Ghana‘s first military leader post-independence. But he held other firsts too, including becoming the first African camp commandant at the Army Headquarters, the first African officer of the Gold Coast Army (Ghana Army) as well as the first African soldier to command an all-African company in a former British colony.

He was born in Accra in 1915 to what could be described as a respectable middle-class family. His father, Samuel Paul Ankrah, was a Christian Missionary Society overseer. His mother Beatrice was a successful trader.

Ankrah would later join the colonial civil service having attained the Senior Cambridge School Certificate, a pre-collegiate qualification in the British education system, in the late 1930s. In 1939, he enrolled in the Gold Coast Regiment of the British Army.

Like many Africans across the colonized continent, Ankrah’s commitment to the army was in service of the colonizer. He would be inducted into the Royal West African Frontier Force in the early 1940s, trained in the UK after World War II and commissioned a lieutenant in 1947. By the time Ghana became a republic in 1960, Ankrah had become a colonel.

For the infant nation, Ankrah was one of the most accomplished people in leadership, possessing an impeccable understanding of politics and carrying the reputation of a principled man. Ghana, an early supporter of the United Nations, pushed its best soldier forward to the global peace body which had moved to calm the tensions in another new country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1961.

It was in DR Congo that the paths of Ankrah and independence leader Patrice Lumumba would cross. Ankrah was the Brigadier Commander of the UN operations in Kananga, formerly Luluaboug, in central Congo. Congo’s warfare had been prompted by the lack of clarity on what happens the day after the revolution.

Independence had been secured but teething problems, including the shadowy fomentations of former colonizer Belgium, reigned. Lumumba recognized the need to win the trust of factions and it was in line with this ambition that his life came under threat in Kananga. Many sources have not been preserved on this matter better than the citation handed out to Ankrah after his service in DR Congo.

Ankrah’s bravery was well-received in Ghana. When he returned to the country, he was promoted the the rank of Major General and promoted to the deputy Chief of Defense Staff by Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah. But this amity with Nkrumah would not last long as in 1965, Ankrah was dismissed from the Ghana Army on suspicion that he planned to overthrow the president.

Nkrumah became an authoritarian autocrat, in truth. The reasons believed to have caused his descent from democratic heights continue to be debated both in Ghana and abroad. But in 1966, his enemies within the army seized on the opportunity of his absence and staged the first-ever coup in Ghana.

The National Liberation Council (NLC), as the military government called itself, installed Ankrah as its chairman. Ankrah himself had not been part of the group that seized power but there is very little reason to reject any suggestion that he was aware of the president’s coming fate.

His installation as chairman can also be interpreted that the security personnel, police and soldiers, who had overthrown the government found in Ankrah, the most politically astute soldier in the country. Well-spoken and having well-educated opinions and mannerisms came in handy for the son of a lay preacher.

There is another theory that gives credence to the suspicions Nkrumah had in 1965 about Ankrah’s coup ambitions. This theory holds that Ankrah was rewarded with the chairmanship of the NLC simply because he was regarded as the tragic visionary in the pursuit of Nkrumah’s fall.

Between 1966 and 1969, Ankrah was Ghana’s head of state. In 1967, he served as the chairperson of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), now the African Union (AU). His views on Pan-Africanism surprisingly did not depart from that of the two more illustrious men in whose stories he was involved.

He was forced to resign in 1969 over accusations of corruption and bribery.