Ivorian tax-free rebel city flourishes

[bijou]

An itinerant salesman in a baseball cap wanders the streets of Ivory Coast's second city, Bouake, touting counterfeit perfumes.

A young boy in Bouake sellsA football shirt for Chelsea striker Nicolas Anelka
Bouake is full of counterfeit and untaxed goods

"Here no-one can say to you: 'No, that's pirated' or 'You can't sell that here,'" he tells me when I ask if he ever has any trouble from the authorities.

"If we were in the south of the country, you could complain that no customs tax has been paid for example, but when you're in the New Forces-zone everything can come in and be sold," he says.

The north of Ivory Coast - an area covering 60% of the country and a zone bigger than England and Wales - remains under the authority of an ex-rebel group, the New Forces, who split the country in two after a rebellion in 2002.

Bouake is the ex-rebel capital of "Soroland", as the zone is sometimes nicknamed, after the New Forces leader, Guillaume Soro.

Mr Soro became prime minister in a power-sharing government and has played a key role in planning presidential elections scheduled for late February or March.

While he joined the unity administration after a March 2007 peace deal, the country is itself is still far from united.



Soroland may not be a breakaway zone, but for seven years the inhabitants of this zone have got used to living without government taxes, customs charges and even water and electricity bills.

Reunification - already under way - will be a challenge to complete.

Hussein Doumbia is one of many local business leaders who have learnt to profit from this vast black market zone.

"Things are a lot cheaper than in the south - we see that people from the south often come here to stock up, above all the military who come for all their electronics - mobile phones, DVDs, televisions, everything," he says. ...   When civil servants fled south, volunteer teachers, like Ali Ouattara, stepped forward to try to keep things going.

"We didn't want the kids to become child soldiers, so we tried to give them something. This is how we became teachers," says Mr Ouattara, who lost his job at the university at the start of the crisis.

Most of the volunteer teachers had limited qualifications and no experience of teaching.

At first they had almost no resources as the schools had been ransacked and the lawlessness meant they were scared to discipline their pupils, who were sometimes armed.



Gradually with contributions from parents, the ad-hoc schools helped save a generation of children, and in some years the rebel zone got better results in national exams than the government zone.

Other volunteers helped cover for the absence of the state in other ways: setting up an ad-hoc postal service; their own television stations and some basic policing.

The New Forces do collect taxes in some areas - like from cocoa and cotton producers but most areas of business are unregulated in the city. ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8446994.stm

I recommend reading the whole thing. It is interesting to see what they have achieved, and depressing to see the forces of international liberalism trying to reimpose big government.

[DefiantSix]

Amazing how readily people take to liberty when it lands in their lap.

Kinda makes me want to go find all of those racist leftist bastards who, from their ivy league ivory towers, declared that this country, or that country, or this race or the other one, weren't sufficiently developed to handle liberty, and kick 'em right in the gonads.

[DumbAss Tanker]

It would be a huge mistake to equate an absence of concern with intellectual property rights and a lack of taxation on small-time vendors with societal liberty in any Western sense of the concept.