Can 2000 more UN peacekeepers, and a few attack helicopters, bring down Laurent Gbagbo?

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Wednesday to reinforce the U.N. mission in Ivory Coast with 2,000 additional peacekeepers, escalating an international campaign to pressure the country’s longtime ruler to step down from power. The council’s action came as another round of African Union mediation failed to dislodge President Laurent Gbagbo, who was defeated ...

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The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Wednesday to reinforce the U.N. mission in Ivory Coast with 2,000 additional peacekeepers, escalating an international campaign to pressure the country's longtime ruler to step down from power.

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Wednesday to reinforce the U.N. mission in Ivory Coast with 2,000 additional peacekeepers, escalating an international campaign to pressure the country’s longtime ruler to step down from power.

The council’s action came as another round of African Union mediation failed to dislodge President Laurent Gbagbo, who was defeated in a U.N.-certified Nov. 28 presidential runoff election by opposition leader Alassane Ouattara.

U.N. officials warned that the ethnically divided West African country – which emerged only seven years ago from a bloody civil war between Gbagbo’s army and rebel forces – could return to war."We remain gravely concerned about the possibility of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing in Cote d’Ivoire," the U.N. secretary general’s special advisers on the prevention of genocide, Francis Deng and Edward Luck, said in a joint statement. Please read the rest of my story in the Washington Post.

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Colum Lynch was a staff writer at Foreign Policy between 2010 and 2022. Twitter: @columlynch

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