President Barack Obama has recently placed three telephone calls to Laurent Gbagbo, the embattled president of C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire, but Gbagbo has refused to take or return any of Obama\u2019s calls.
\nIn an exclusive videotaped 90-minute interview with Glaude Productions client George E. Curry, a syndicated U.S. newspaper columnist and special correspondent for the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service (NNPA), a federation of more than 200 African-American newspapers, Gbagbo tells why.
\n\u201cI didn’t even know if Barack Obama called me because his ambassador, he has discredited himself. So, when he tells me something, I don’t believe him,\u201d Gbagbo said in the copyrighted interview with Curry. After failing to return Obama\u2019s calls, Gbagbo said the U.S. president sent him a letter asking him to step aside for Alassane Ouattara who, like Gbagbo, also claims to have won the November 28, 2010 run-off. When asked about the contents of the letter, Gbagbo, a former history professor, revealed that in exchange for leaving office \u201che’d [Obama] give me a professor\u2019s job in Boston.\u201d Gbagbo dismissed announced sanctions against him, his family, and his inner circle as futile.
\nHe told Curry in the interview: \u201cThey said they are closing all of the accounts of President Gbagbo and his staff in the foreign banks, but I laughed at it. I have no accounts outside [C\u00f4te d\u2019lvoire]. In the United States, they found a small account that\u2019s for my daughter when she was a student there. There\u2019s $400 in the account. She forgot that there was $400 left in it.\u201d Gbagbo said international calls for his removal by the U.S. and the European Union ignores the fact that the election process in his country is a two-step process. \u201cIn our constitution, the Independent Electoral Commission is just an administrative body. It organizes the election and it proclaims the provisional results,\u201d Gbagbo explained. \u201cThe only institution which by law proclaims the final results, proclaims who won the election and who receives the oath of president is the Constitutional Council [the Supreme Court].\u201d
\nGbagbo said the international community is demonstrating a double-standard when judging the election outcome in C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire. Gbagbo said: \u201cYou, in the United States, in 2000, you had an election dispute between Al Gore and George W. Bush. They did a recount of the votes. Did we go get the North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces (NATO) to come and attack America and impose democracy on America? This is a post-electoral dispute. That\u2019s why I’m [suspicious of] all those countries who are rushing in to condemn us. I don’t trust them.\u201d
\nSource: African Diplomacy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
President Barack Obama has recently placed three telephone calls to Laurent Gbagbo, the embattled president of C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire, but Gbagbo has refused to take or return any of Obama\u2019s calls. In an exclusive videotaped 90-minute interview with Glaude Productions client George E. Curry, a syndicated U.S. newspaper columnist and special correspondent for the National Newspaper […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard"],"yoast_head":"\n