ABIDJAN: Even if a military victor emerges, a rebellion in Ivory Coast has already mutilated the country’s image as a haven of peace and polarized ethnic groups as never before.

“Peace is not a word, it’s a way of life,” the country’s founding father Felix Houphouet-Boigny was fond of saying throughout his 33 years in charge.

Nine years after his death, those words ring frighteningly hollow to a population brought up to believe that Ivory Coast was a safer, better place than the rest of West Africa.

Since the rebels narrowly failed to pull off a lightning putsch on September 19, the world’s number one cocoa producer has had to bear comparisons, for the first time in its history, with war-scarred Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Scenes that Ivorians used to watch on television, as they shook their heads over the futile conflicts elsewhere in Africa, are being played out at home.

The shrinking number of foreign investors who have stuck it out since the country’s first coup d’etat in 1999 are thinking harder than ever about the future.

If President Laurent Gbagbo’s government survives he will need to mend fences with key West African states, regional diplomatic sources say.

Gbagbo was elected in 2000, but passions in the mainly-Muslim north were inflamed because its candidate, Alassane Ouattara, was excluded on nationality grounds.

Rightly or wrongly, many southerners accuse rich northern traders, Ouattara and President Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso of financing and organizing the insurrection.

Crude references to tribe and religion have become staple fare on national television.

Gbagbo and his key ministers effectively rejected West African mediation at the weekend, declining to sign a ceasefire which the rebels of the freshly named Patriotic Movement of Cote d’Ivoire had accepted.

Most of the mediators — six regional foreign ministers — were exasperated with the government, saying it had wrongly chosen to fight it out with the rebels to try to recapture northern and central areas.—Reuters