Laurent Gbagbo
Laurent Gbagbo was president of Côte d'Ivoire from October 2000, when he was carried into office by the crowds who drove out the general who had tried to steal the election from him, to April 2011, when French helicopters and the forces of the man who had beaten him in the election of November 2010 took him out of the bunker under the presidential residence in Abidjan after four months in which he had refused to leave and some three thousand people had died. He was the first former head of state tried by the International Criminal Court, which acquitted him in 2019 of crimes against humanity after eight years in its custody, and he came home in 2021 to found a new party. He was born in 1945 near Gagnoa, a Bete from the west and a Catholic, took a doctorate in history at the Sorbonne, taught, was jailed by Houphouet-Boigny for two years in the 1970s for union activity, founded the Ivorian Popular Front in secret in 1982 and in exile in Paris, and stood against Houphouet in the first contested election of 1990, taking eighteen per cent. Houphouet died in 1993, his successor Bedie invented Ivoirite to exclude the northerner Ouattara from politics and was overthrown at Christmas 1999 by General Guei, and Guei held an election in October 2000 with Ouattara excluded that Gbagbo won and Guei tried to annul. The streets settled it. He kept Ivoirite. The rebellion of September 2002 by northern soldiers split the country in two along a French-patrolled line for five years, with the Young Patriots of his supporter Ble Goude in the streets of Abidjan against the French, whose base was bombed by his air force in 2004 and who destroyed it in reply. The Ouagadougou agreement of 2007 with the rebel Soro brought a unity government and, at last, in 2010, the election that had been due in 2005. He lost the run-off to Ouattara by eight points by the electoral commission's count, the constitutional council he controlled annulled the north's votes and declared him the winner, and he was sworn in on 4 December while Ouattara was sworn in at a hotel under UN guard. The siege of Abidjan ended on 11 April 2011 with his arrest, and he was flown to The Hague in November. The judges found the prosecution's case exceptionally weak in January 2019, the appeal failed in 2021, and he returned to Abidjan in June 2021 to a crowd. Ouattara pardoned his Ivorian conviction in 2022, and he was barred from the election of 2025 anyway.
- Lived: 1945 CE – ?
- Nationality: Ivorian
- Roles: president, politician, historian
