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Ivory Coast
Index
The Council of the Entente was established on May 29,
1959, by
the heads of state of Côte d'Ivoire, Upper Volta
(present-day
Burkina Faso), Dahomey (present-day Benin), and Niger.
(Togo became
a member in 1966.) Ostensibly, the Council of the Entente
coordinated the regulations and statutes of member states
governing
finance, justice, labor, public service, health, and
communications. The Council of the Entente also initiated
steps
toward forming a customs union, integrating development
plans and
creating a development fund, the Solidarity Fund (later
known as
the Loan Guaranty Fund). Each member state was to
contribute 10
percent of government revenues to the fund. Côte d'Ivoire,
the
leader of the Council of the Entente and by far the
wealthiest
member state, was to receive only a small portion of the
redistributed funds; other members were entitled to larger
shares.
In fact, by 1988 Côte d'Ivoire had never touched its
share.
The Council of the Entente helped Houphouët-Boigny
achieve his
long-term regional foreign policy objectives. First, by
allying
himself with three desperately poor countries that could
be
expected to maintain close ties with France for years to
come, he
built a broader base to counter Senegal's attempts to
isolate Côte
d'Ivoire and reestablish some sort of federation of West
African
francophone states that would presumably be centered at
Dakar. The
demise of the Mali Federation in 1960 appeared to
vindicate
Houphouët-Boigny's strategy
(see Reform and the French Community
, ch. 1). He subsequently enlisted the Council of the
Entente states
to isolate the government of Ghana, which had supported a
massive
antigovernment protest in the Sanwi area of Côte d'Ivoire
and was
linked to a plot to overthrow Niger's President Hamani
Diori. After
Ghana's President Kwame Nkrumah was ousted in a 1966 coup,
Houphouët-Boigny sought diplomatic support from the
Council of the
Entente states in his feud with President Ahmed Sekou
Touré of
Guinea. Sekou Touré routinely accused Houphouët-Boigny of
harboring
Guinean exiles; he also threatened to send troops across
Côte
d'Ivoire to Ghana to restore Nkrumah, by then a refugee in
Guinea,
to power.
By the mid-1980s, populist and nationalist sentiments
surging
within the Council of the Entente member states threatened
Côte
d'Ivoire's staid leadership of the alliance. Togo, which
was
surrounded by radical states, remained a staunch ally;
however,
Burkina Faso and Benin increasingly criticized
Houphouët-Boigny's
conservativism and strengthened their ties with Libya and
Ghana. As
a result, the Council of the Entente's value as an
instrument of
Ivoirian foreign policy diminished.
Data as of November 1988
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