Why Anti-Immigrant Violence?
Whether or not a political compromise can be reached, the current crisis has unleashed simmering religious, national and ethnic chauvinism throughout the country. Intense communal violence has plagued several parts of the South, most notably the immigrant suburbs of Abidjan, the nation’s economic capital. Government forces have been an integral part of the process, displacing thousands of people in a campaign to “root out rebel forces,” which has amounted to bulldozing several shanty-towns in the Abidjan area. Immigrants, who comprise nearly thirty percent of the country’s population, remain the prime targets of both communal and state-sponsored violence — particularly natives of Burkina Faso, the largest immigrant group in the country. These cleavages stem from an increasingly unstable ethnic and religious arithmetic. Two ethnic blocks — Akan in the South and Mandé and Voltaic in the North — each comprise approximately thirty percent of the country’s population. Historically, the l
