The Gabonese players can breathe easy. If the Panthers selection was suspended by the government after its premature elimination, from the first round of the 2025 African Cup of Nations, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and his teammates can rejoice in not having experienced a worse mishap. The Ivory Coast players present during CAN 2000 will not be able to say the same.
Present in the “group of death” of the competition with the host country Ghana, the future winning country Cameroon, and Togo, the Elephants finished third with 4 points and are already saying goodbye to the competition, the status of best third not yet existing. Enough to send President Robert Gueï into a rage.
Enthroned a few weeks earlier after a coup d’état, the general took a radical decision. He decides to send the players to a military camp in Yamoussoukro, even though they were thinking of boarding a plane that would take them to Abidjan, the capital. “We couldn’t believe it because we had never experienced that,” explained the Parisian Lassina Diabaté, Bordeaux player (1997-2001). In a country that supposedly tends towards democracy, this really shocked us. We wondered what was going to happen. I was scared. »
No connection with the outside world
Deprived of telephone and passport, Ivorian internationals, forced to march in step, are cut off from the world and obliged to follow a program intended to instill in them “discipline” and “the honor of defending the colors” of their country. “At 7:30 in the morning, we had to salute the colors. Then, we had to take civics courses…” explained the midfielder, then 26 years old.
“But we rebelled,” Diabaté continued. Everyone did what they wanted, and I refused to take these courses. We asked the guards who were armed what they would do if we refused to comply with what they asked of us. Were they going to shoot us? They didn’t answer us, but we still felt threatened. It was madness, we don’t understand why we were interned. In high-level sport, you have to know how to accept defeat. »
The threat of full military service
Released after two days and two nights in hell, the Elephants face Robert Gueï, who does not fail, in front of the camera, to give them a critical speech. “When you love your country, the feet must play, but the heart too. The performances that we have just seen on the screen are really not the performances that we had the right to expect from you. If you soon leave to shame the country as you did, you will stay for the duration of your military service (18 months),” said the general.
A threat taken seriously by Lassina Diabaté “Now we will all think twice before returning to the selection…” he whispered. But nothing to prevent the Elephants from repeating this poor performance: they missed the 2002 World Cup and ended up being eliminated the same year during the CAN… in the first round. The fate was no better for Robert Gueï, who lost the presidential elections of 2000 and was found murdered, he and his entire family, two years later.
