I've got family with some history of travel to West Africa. One of the rituals of leaving any such country as Cote D'Ivoire is having enough change in your pockets to bribe their equivalent of TSA agents to let you on the plane. I imagine that the price may be going up now because the government seems to be on the verge of collapse. How many does that make in the past 6 months? Funny, I thought Greece would be first.
As many as one million people have fled their homes in Ivory Coast’s main city, Abidjan, to escape the increasing violence and collapsing economy stemming from the nation’s political crisis, the United Nations said Friday.
Daily gunfire spurred by Laurent Gbagbo’s efforts to stay in power after losing a presidential election in November has pushed thousands of residents out of neighborhoods surrounding the city’s central districts, while the closing of banks and businesses have led to widespread unemployment.
I wonder if we'll get any YouTubery on this collapse. Hard to guess. But the whole formula is the same as anywhere else. All peasants gotta eat. The more you depend on the government and not your neighbors, the less you eat. Somehow I get the notion that these poor blighters aren't even going to bother protesting in any squares. They're heading to the border, where any government is better than no government.
They're split equally Muslim, Christian and Other. Most everyone speaks French. They're just 8 years past a civil war and the now disputed President, Laurent Gbagbo strongarmed his way through that. Like Kadafi, he ordered airstrikes against the population. Back in 2004 I was saying that Americans should go in and calm things down - they were begging for American help then, hating the French as only Ivoirians can. But you know how certain fatheads can be about 'colonialism', as if America can do no right in fatigues. Clearly the UN troops haven't changed a thing.
So here goes another population into the streets. It's a sad, sad, mad, mad world. But hey, what do we care, so long as our teams advance? Go Kentucky!
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