Once hailed as a model of stability, Ivory Coast has slipped into the kind of internal strife that has plagued many African countries.
An armed rebellion in 2002 split the nation in two. Since then, peace deals have alternated with renewed violence as the country has slowly edged its way towards a political resolution of the conflict.
For more than three decades after independence under the leadership of its first president, Felix Houphouet-Boigny, Ivory Coast was conspicuous for its religious and ethnic harmony and its well-developed economy.
AT-A-GLANCE
All this ended when the late Robert Guei led a coup which toppled Felix Houphouet-Boigny's successor, Henri Bedie, in 1999.
Mr Bedie fled, but not before planting the seeds of ethnic discord by trying to stir up xenophobia against Muslim northerners, including his main rival, Alassane Ouattara.
This theme was also adopted by Mr Guei, who had Alassane Ouattara banned from the presidential election in 2000 because of his foreign parentage, and by the only serious contender allowed to run against Mr Guei, Laurent Gbagbo.
When Mr Gbagbo replaced Robert Guei after he was deposed in a popular uprising in 2000, violence replaced xenophobia. Scores of Mr Ouattara's supporters were killed after their leader called for new elections.
In September 2002 a troop mutiny escalated into a full-scale rebellion, voicing the ongoing discontent of northern Muslims who felt they were being discriminated against in Ivorian politics. Thousands were killed in the conflict.
Although the fighting has stopped, Ivory Coast is tense and divided. French and UN peacekeepers patrolled the buffer zone which separated the north, held by rebels known as the New Forces, and the government-controlled south.
President: Laurent Gbagbo
Veteran politician Laurent Gbagbo, who was elected president in 2000 for a five-year mandate, was given a seventh successive year in power in November 2006 under a UN plan to find lasting peace.
The opposition and New Forces rebels said they did not want him back in office but a UN Security Council resolution, proposed by the African Union, allowed him to keep his job for a final year.
Since then, presidential elections have been postponed several times, most recently in November 2009.
A historian by profession, Laurent Gbagbo is a former trade union activist who, since the 1980s, has taken a strongly nationalist stance, espousing the concept of pure Ivorian parentage.
He spent two years in prison in the early 1970s for "subversive" teaching and eight years in exile in France in the 1980s, before returning in 1988 to campaign for multi-party democracy.
Amid an uprising against his predecessor, he proclaimed himself president in October 2000, at the age of 55.
He derives much of his support from the mostly Christian south and west.
Prime minister: Guillaume Soro
The president appointed rebel leader Guillaume Soro prime minister in March 2007 weeks after the former arch rivals signed a power-sharing peace deal that guaranteed Mr Soro's New Forces a role in a transitional government.
The deal envisaged that elections would be held within 10 months and foresaw the dismantling of the buffer zone between the rebel north and the south.
Mr Soro, a former student leader, came to the fore during the 2002 rebellion that led to the country's division. He served in the reconciliation government of his predecessor, Charles Konan Banny.
Radio is Ivory Coast's most-popular medium. There is a tier of low-power, non-commercial community radio stations, including some run by the Catholic Church.
There are no private terrestrial TV stations, although pay-TV services are provided by Canal Satellite Horizons.
Rebels in the centre of the country use state radio and TV facilities in Bouake for their own broadcasts.
The Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders says Ivory Coast is "one of Africa's most dangerous countries for both local and foreign media".
In 2004, amid attacks on rebels in the north, the government used the media under its control, particularly state broadcaster Radiodiffusion Television Ivoirienne (RTI), as a powerful tool in the crisis. In 2006 members of the Young Patriots militia - loyal to President Gbagbo - invaded RTI headquarters.
In 2007 UN peacekeepers decried "the growing number of inflammatory articles in the press" as well as an increasing number of violent attacks against publications.
The peacekeepers launched their own radio station, Onuci FM, in 2005. Initially available in Abidjan, the station extended its reach to cover rebel-held towns in the north.
BBC World Service broadcasts on FM in Abidjan (94.3), Yamoussoukro (97.7) and Bouake (93.9).
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