In a vote available for the first time in a decade, eligibility to vote in national elections in Ivory Coast is based on which list your picture is on: the list deeming you a part of society, or the list marking you as suspicious. According to the New York Times, ten years of war and violence has impeded the election process, and the only way to win the chance to cast one is by proving that you are a “true Ivorian.”

Those are loaded words in a country where the contrary has been fatal. After years of violence and delays, Ivory Coast, once West Africa’s economic star, is stumbling toward a presidential election. Peace is the hope, expressed over and over in markets and in offices: hold the election and the country can begin to recover. Officials insist that preparations are now ending and that the million residents in dispute, in a country of 18.5 million, will either be integrated into the voter rolls or not. The question has fueled coups, riots, an armed uprising and thousands of deaths yet still has not been settled: who is and who is not Ivorian in a country that once attracted millions of African migrants because of its prosperity. When global prices for the country’s cocoa, coffee and cotton fell in the 1990s, the economy soured and so did Ivorians’ feelings about the foreigners’ place here. That xenophobia has been exploited by the government for years. The term foreigner is often so loosely applied that political rivals, voters from the largely Muslim north and a broad array of others have been cast as outsiders simply to keep them out of the political process.

After President Laurent Gbagbo blamed national electoral commission of adding names to the list of true citizens of Ivory Coast, the list will be re-checked and many re-evaluated.