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UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs |
COTE D'IVOIRE: 12 opposition activists arrested for planning assassinations
ABIDJAN, 21 October 2003 (IRIN) - Twelve opposition activists were arrested in Cote d'Ivoire last week on suspiscion of planning the assassination of several leading figures in the government, including Mamadou Coulibaly, the speaker of parliament, government sources said on Tuesday.
The alleged plot was not directly linked to an earlier conspiracy to assassinate President Laurent Gbagbo, which led to the arrest of 18 people in Cote d'Ivoire in August, the sources told IRIN.
A communique issued by the Ministry of Internal Security on Monday night acknowledged the arrest last Friday of 11 people in Abidjan. All were detained in the working class suburb of Abobo, which is mainly populated by people from the north of Cote d'Ivoire and immigrants from neighbouring Burkina Faso.
The communique said the detainees were being questioned about "a plan to assassinate political, administrative and and military personalities." It did not name their alleged targets, but a police source told IRIN that one of them was Coulibaly, an outspoken critic of the rebels and one of the senior figures in Gbagbo's Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) party.
The police source said the plot had been discovered following an armed robbery attack on presidential adviser Benjamin Djedje on 14 October, during which Djedje was injured.
Cisse Bacongo, the acting leader of the Rally of Republicans (RDR) party of exiled former prime minister Alassanne Ouattara, said all those detained were all activists of the party, which is sympathetic to rebel forces occupying the north of the country. He accused Gbagbo of trying to dismantle the grass roots organisation of his party.
Alphonse Dejedej Mady, secretary general of the Democratic Party of Cote d'Ivoire (PDCI), which ruled Cote d'Ivoire from independence in 1960 until a coup in 1999, said an activist of his party was abducted by unidentified men in plain clothes last Thursday and was now being held by the paramilitary gendarmerie. His arrest has not so far been officially acknowledged by the government.
News of the arrests broke shortly after the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) launched a diplomatic initiative to break a month-old deadlock in the peace process in Cote d'Ivoire which threatens to send the country drifting back to a resumption of civil war.
Diplomats said Ghanaian John Kufuor, the current chairman of ECOWAS, was leading efforts to bring Gbagbo and the rebels together for a reconciliation summit in Accra later this month or in early November. Gbagbo flew to Ghana for talks with Kufuor on Sunday and went on to Abuja for a meeting with Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo.
The secretive manner of the latest arrests were condemned by human rights activists. A spokesman for the Ivorian League of Human Rights (LIDHO) told IRIN "This is worrying for us because the arrest procedure seems rather bizarre and appears to be a flagrant crime."
Luc Aguie, one of Cote d'Ivoires's most senior judges, also expressed concern. "Given the very tense situation, the authorities could have proceded in a rather less brutal manner," he told IRIN.
Ralph Uwechue, the ECOWAS special representative in Cote d'Ivoire, declined to comment specifically on the arrests and the government's allegations of a fresh plot to assassinate key personalities. But he remarked that broadly speaking "It is dialogue and not confrontation that is the way out of the crisis."
On 23 September, the rebels suspended their participation in the peace process and ordered their nine ministers to withdraw from a broad-based government of national reconciliation. They also put on ice plans to disarm and allow government administrators to return to the north of the country, which has been in rebel hands since civil war broke out on 19 September last year.
Themes: (IRIN) Conflict
[ENDS]
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