Cote d'Ivoire, 2001 — dissident coup attempt

Event Summary

The dataset records an event coded as an attempted dissident coupi in Cote d'Ivoire on 7 January 2001 against President Laurent Gbagbo, who had come to power only months earlier, in October 2000, when a popular uprising swept aside the juntai leader Robert Guei after his attempt to rig the election. Gbagbo's new government inherited a country deeply fractured along ethnic, regional, and religious lines, with a resentful and divided army, marginalized northern Muslims, and unresolved disputes over citizenship and political exclusion, tensions that had been sharpened by the exclusion of the popular northern leader Alassane Ouattara from the presidential contest. In early January 2001 an attempted coup or armed mutiny against Gbagbo was mounted, reportedly by dissident soldiers, and it was suppressed by loyalist forces, with the government blaming plotters and cracking down.

Gbagbo survived this early challenge, but the underlying fractures only widened. In September 2002 a far larger coup attempt and army mutiny escalated into a full scale civil war that split the country between the government held south and the rebel held north, plunging Cote d'Ivoire into a decade of conflict.