Tide Turning For Ivory Coast Leadership

The winner is a given, but Sunday’s presidential election still promises to be a watershed that may determine how long the ruling party can control its bogus democracy.

For the first time since independence 35 years ago, voters won’t have the lionized Felix Houphouet-Boigny on the ballot. He died two years ago, leaving Henri Konan Bedie to lead the ruling Democratic Party in the face of an increasingly fed-up opposition.

Soldiers and police were on alert nationwide after weeks of scattered clashes that have killed eight people.

Late Saturday, Bedie announced that the military chief, Gen. Robert Guei, had been replaced by his deputy. Bedie did not give a reason, but Guei in the past has questioned the use of the army to quell domestic unrest.

At least 18 people, most of them children, were massacred on a plantation in central Ivory Coast a week ago, but there was no indication the killings were related to the election. The site was near Guiberoua, a city considered an opposition stronghold located 160 miles northwest of Abidjan.

Several Democratic Party buildings and schools to be used for voting have been attacked. At some Abidjan schools Saturday, employees rushed to move out desks, books and papers in case of trouble on voting day.

Bedie’s most formidable opponents are boycotting the vote, assuring the incumbent a win over lone challenger Francis Wodie of the small Ivorian Workers’ Party.

But violence at the polls or a poor voter turnout could signal the end of the docile allegiance the Democrats have long enjoyed and mark the beginning of a new political age - just what the government does not want.

“We have always been the (African) exception - the exception that didn’t follow military-Marxist regimes, the exception that didn’t go the way of coups, the exception that didn’t change its name, its flag, or anything else,” Bedie’s campaign leader, Laurent Dona-Fologo, said in an emotional speech last week.