Henri Konan Bédié, who served as president of Ivory Coast from 1993 until being deposed in a coup in 1999, but who remained a power broker among its often violently competitive political and ethnic factions, died on Tuesday in Abidjan, the country’s largest city. He was 89.
His death, at a hospital, was announced by his party, the Democratic Party of Ivory Coast-African Democratic Rally. It did not provide a cause.
A man whose quiet confidence and back-room influence earned him the nickname “the Sphinx of Daoukro,” after his hometown, Mr. Bédié played a dominant role in Ivorian politics over six decades, since the country won independence from France in 1960.
Fresh from law school at Poitiers University, in France, he was working as a counselor at the French embassy in Washington when the first Ivorian president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, named him the country’s first ambassador to the United States and Canada.
Mr. Bédié presented his credentials to President Dwight D. Eisenhower on Jan. 18, 1961, making him one of the last foreign diplomats to meet with the outgoing president — and, at 26, one of the youngest ambassadors ever to serve in Washington.
He returned home in 1965 to take over Ivory Coast’s economic and financial affairs ministry and later serve as president of the National Assembly. Over the next three decades, he established himself as the heir apparent to Mr. Houphouët-Boigny and one of the rising stars of Sub-Saharan African politics.
In large part thanks to his economic policies, Ivory Coast became the region’s leading agricultural exporter and an island of political stability. Per capita annual income grew to $610 in 1988 from $70 in 1960.
Mr. Houphouët-Boigny died in office in 1993, and as president of the National Assembly Mr. Bédié took his place as interim president.
With elections looming in 1995, he set about solidifying his hold on power. He pushed his closest rival, Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara, out of office, then passed a law stating that only candidates with two Ivorian parents could run for president — a restriction said to be aimed at Mr. Ouattara, whose parents were rumored to have been born in neighboring Burkina Faso.
Another law, also said to be aimed at Mr. Ouattara, restricted the presidency to people who had lived in Ivory Coast for the previous five years — once more excluding Mr. Ouattara, who had recently spent time in Washington working at the World Bank.
Both these laws were rooted in Mr. Bédié’s notion of “ivoirité,” a form of nationalism that he claimed was meant to promote unity but which his critics said was intended to foment division and to marginalize people from the country’s Muslim-majority north, who tended to move across national borders in search of work.
“To achieve peacefully the formidable leap between an ethnic consciousness and a national consciousness, the reference mark of identity must be strong, and that fixed point is called ivoirité,” Mr….
2023-08-05 17:43:09
Original from www.nytimes.com
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