Operation Oil Theft: Week 4. Day 3.

Yesterday (10/4/11) Muammar Qaddafi agreed to an African Union (AU) "Road Map for Peace" designed to bring an end to the conflict in Libya. Today (11/4/11) the AU delegation will present the plan to the rebels in Benghazi. Until that diplomatic visit has been completed the details of the plan will not be made public but the main points are that Qaddafi will remain in power, all sides will maintain a ceasefire, corridors will be opened to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid and there will be negotiations between the Libyan government and the rebels. So it appears that Qaddafi's agreed to do what would have happened anyway if resolution 1973(2011) hadn't been passed. Obviously the vague nature of the road map does raise concern that Qaddafi might be pulling a Gbagbo and only using negotiations as a cover to re-group his forces.

Speaking of which there is a conspiracy theory widely circulating on the Internet about the situation in the Ivory Coast (Cote D'Ivorie). Normally this wouldn't be a problem but it appears that some people are starting to take it seriously and it is fuelling pressure on the international community to call the UN peacekeepers to account for their recent actions. The theory follows that the 2010 Presidential election was rigged by the international community in order to install Alassane Ouattara as a puppet President for either France, the UN, the USA, the IMF, the Jews or the Lizard people depending on your personal preference. The only problem is that there is absolutely no truth in it.

Alassane Ouattara has always enjoyed popular support in Cote D'Ivorie and one of the triggers for the civil war that started in 2002 was Ouattara's exclusion from a Presidential election that it looked like he was going to win. By 2005 the civil war had calmed to the point where another Presidential election was going to be held but as soon as it looked as though Ouattara was going to win the violence started up again and that election had to be postponed. That election was finally held in November 2010 and was monitored by the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), the United Nations (UN), the African Union (AU) and the European Union (EU). On December 2nd 2010 all these bodies agreed that the election had been free and fair and declared Alassane Ouattara to be the winner. Then on December 3rd, with no explanation, the Constitutional Council of the Cote D'Ivore (CCDI) declared that all those international bodies were lying, there'd been a massive fraud and Laurent Gbagbo was the rightful winner. The head of the CCDI is a man called Paul Yao N'Dre who served in Gbagbo's government as interior minister and was appoint to the CCDI by Gbagbo just before the election. At the time of his appointment people warned that he'd only been given the job to help Gbagbo steal the election.

Also if you look closely at recent events in the Ivory Coast you'll see that it's Gbagbo and his supporters who feel safest with the French, the former colonial masters. When fighters supporting Ouattarra advanced into Abidjan many of Gbagbo's senior officials sought refuge in the French Embassy, the only interviews that Gbagbo has been giving from his bunker have been to French TV and it was France that led the negotiations that allowed Gbagbo's fighters to re-group and avoid certain defeat.

So I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that it's France that has been circulating this conspiracy theory in order to force the international community to stop France taking action in order to make sure that Gbagbo gets to stay in power but the French still get to look like the good guys.