Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court disqualified Ouattara’s candidacy for failure to meet the Article 35 criteria in light of questions expressed over personal documents, including his nationality certificate.41 In the context of widespread popular uproar regarding the October 2000 presidential elections, General Guéï declared himself President, but was forced to flee. This allowed Laurent Gbagbo to be proclaimed president as he garnered the most votes of the limited field of candidates. Côte d’Ivoire plunged into a two-year period marred by massive human rights violations and social tensions as political parties and their ethnic-based support groups vied in parliamentary and local elections in 2000 and 2001. This violence was marked by ethnic and religious stereotyping and targeting for abuse of northerners as foreigners and supporters of the RDR.42 A failed coup led by General Guéï in September 2002 spurred armed violence by a rebel movement that quickly took control of areas in northern Côte d’Ivoire, resulting in de facto division of the country into rebel-held North and Gbagbo-controlled South. In January 2003, President Gbagbo and the main political leaders of Côte d’Ivoire, and the rebel groups known collectively as the Forces Nouvelles (or New Forces), convened in France and negotiated a cease-fire accord known as the Linas-Marcoussis Agreement. Given that this was “a war of identification,”43 the Linas-Marcoussis Agreement called for a special naturalization program to facilitate the acquisition of nationality by historical migrants and their descendants; the suspension of the identification program put in place by Gbagbo’s government, and an end to violent abuse and administrative harassment of foreigners. The cease-fire did not hold. The next breakthrough came with the Ouagadougou Peace Agreement (APO)44 of March 2007. The APO called for holding mobile court hearings to provide late birth registration to those who had not declared their births to the civil registrars (a process that was suspended due to the de facto partition of the country); the reconstitution of destroyed civil registers, and an exceptional process coupling a new identification program with the drawing up of the final voter list. Each stage was marked by negotiated political compromises that departed from the formal legal requirements on how the laws governing nationality and identification are meant to interplay, as discussed further in Sections 4.2.1 and 5.6. At the end of the voter registration process for the presidential elections in October 2010, 601,322 persons who sought to register to vote could not prove their identity and nationality and were excluded from the voter roll.45 The process included a public dispute and appeal process, in 41 Cour Suprême - Chambre Constitutionnelle, Liste définitive des candidats à l’élection du Président de la République du 22 octobre 2000, Arrêt No. E 0001-2000 du 6 octobre 2000. In total, the Supreme Court Constitutional Chamber disqualified 13 candidates from running for president. 42 Human Rights Watch, The New Racism: The Political Manipulation of Ethnicity in Côte d’Ivoire¸ August 2001. 43 Young patriot, quoted in Richard Banégas and Ruth Marshall-Fratani, Côte d’Ivoire: Negotiating Identity and Citizenship, in African Guerillas: Raging against the Machine,” p. 81, Morten Boas and Kevin Dunn (Eds.), Boulder: Lynn Rienner, 2007, pp. 81-111. 44 According to its French acronym Accord Politique de Ouagadougou. An English translation by the United Nations of the APO is available at: http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/2007/144. 45 Cabinet du Premier Ministre, Ministre de l’Economie et des Finances, Fiche Technique Relative au Traitement du Cas des Pétitionnaires Restés en Suspens au Terme des Opérations d’Identification, 2013 (on file with author). 12