As soon as one leaves the airport of Côte d'Ivoire to drive to the administrative capital, Abidjan, one is greeted by a huge monumental sculpture: four elephants on their hind legs, their trunks joined at the top, high above, forming an archway.

As a national monument, the elephants represent the aspiration to normality: a symbol of the unity of a West African country that has the second largest regional economy. Would one guess, by looking at them, that the normality of the national monument is putting behind it some extraordinary years of economic disaster and brutal civil wars, which divided the country between north and south and which have not, strictly speaking, even come to an end?

I was in Côte d'Ivoire (or the Ivory Coast, to cite the English name that is now less used) at the end of October, on a flying visit between official MEP visits to Burkina Faso and Bangladesh.

My first impression of Abidjan was that of a pleasant surprise. Following the civil wars I did not expect a country that appeared to be one of the smartest in West Africa.

The airport was good. The road from the airport was equally good. There were many cars, indicating economic growth. My driver, however, told me life was hard: there was not enough work. That is why everyone had an orange taxi.

I decided to take a quick tour of the popular areas. In the middle of the roads youngsters, boys and girls, tried to sell whatever they had. Wherever we went, I could see a young population.

I saw little evidence of amputees, survivors of the atrocities in the past wars when amputation of limbs was the order of the day to terrorise people and to make sure they did not fight again.

Côte d'Ivoire was also notorious for the forced recruitment of children to become fighters in the region. There was plenty of fighting to keep demand for recruits high, when countries like Sierra Leone, Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire itself were in a state of chaos comparable to that in Somalia today.

I wanted to see the shops, the market area where the people go about their daily lives. And I was not disappointed. It was vibrant, colourful. Women carried fruit on their heads. They did not like their photo taken. And they made this known.

The car swivelled in and out of the multicoloured crowds. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people were there, trying to make a living. Everyone seemed to be standing about, many selling, others ambling. The city was alive, there was no doubt about that.

I told the driver to take me to where the administrative area was. He called it the plateau. It was a different area overlooking a large space of water. The buildings were high-risers, modern constructions. They were set in a park with neat patches of green. An oasis, a different world.

I do not know which I preferred. For personal comfort, obviously, the plateau. For an insight into Africa, the swarming space of human vibrancy, which occupies most of Abidjan.

However, the vibrancy has still not cancelled the past. One can gauge that the country is a rough one from sight. The statistics support the impression.

Imagine Malta had only 50 doctors. That would give you some idea of the health sector in Côte d'Ivoire, where there are only 12 doctors per 100,000 people and where the average life-expectancy in 2004 was 41 years for males and 47 for females.

In a country like this, can a young man learn how to be a responsible middle-aged and elderly man? There cannot be many available living models to follow.

The fighting past, which began to recede in 2004, also deprived many of their childhood, seeing many children pressed into the army or slave labour in cocoa production.

The horrors of the years of fighting live on in memory and in society. A generation deprived of childhood and old age will find it difficult to raise the young and take care of the old. It needs to learn afresh.

It needs also to remember traditional skills that were never taught to children who spent their formative years in an army. A place in the economy must be found for the maimed.

Such a situation ought to remind us of two things in particular. First, the terrible background we must keep in mind when we learn that Ivoirian migrants, very likely either Muslim or Roman Catholic, constitute the second largest foreign group within the Maltese prison population, after Nigerians.

Second, there is the urgency of Europe tackling the troubles of such a country at source. Côte d'Ivoire today attracts many migrants from among its neighbours. More should be done to enable it to stimulate regional growth and stability.

It is only then that the elephants can begin to remember with serenity.

Dr Attard Montalto is a Labour member of the European Parliament.