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UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs |
COTE D'IVOIRE: Hopes of peace deal at Accra summit fade
ABIDJAN, 10 November 2003 (IRIN) - West African leaders were due to meet in Ghana on Tuesday to discuss the deadlocked peace process in Cote d'Ivoire, but diplomats and government officials played down earlier hopes of a dramatic breakthrough to prevent the country drifting back to civil war.
They said a previously mooted reconciliation meeting between Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo, leaders of the rebel movement that controls the north of Cote d'Ivoire and the leaders of the country's main opposition parties, was unlikely to take place.
Instead, the sources said, Gbagbo would meet with the presidents of Ghana, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Togo and Benin. They would press him to implement in full a French-brokered peace agreement which he signed with the rebels in January.
"The accord already signed provides the best way forward for the Cote d'Ivoire peace process," a senior aide to Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo told IRIN in Lagos on Monday. "If they can get Gbagbo to move on the key issues, then it might be possible that an acceptable proposal can be made to the rebels."
But a government source in Burkina Faso, whose government is sympathetic to the Ivorian rebels, said he saw little chance of progress being made at the Accra summit.
He said Gbagbo had insisted that it be a meeting of heads of state only, with the various factional leaders of Cote d'Ivoire excluded, but Burkina Faso would not agree to any deal that saw them kept away from the negotiating table.
A spokesman for the Ivorian rebels, who are officially known as "The New Forces," told IRIN in the rebel capital Bouake on Monday that their leader, Guillaume Soro, would nevertheless be present in Accra on Tuesday.
Soro and the heads of the two main opposition parties in Cote d'Ivoire, former president Henri Konan Bedie of the Democratic Party of Cote d'Ivoire (PDCI) and former prime minister Alassane Ouattara of the Rally of Republicans (RDR), have been touring West African capitals over the past three weeks to explain their position to regional leaders.
However, the rebels, the PDCI and the RDR said on Monday they had so far not received formal invitation to the Accra summit.
A senior Ghanaian official told IRIN in Accra: "As far as I am aware this summit is for heads of state. Perhaps others might attend, but as of Monday, there has been no confirmation of their attendance."
Diplomats in Abidjan said France, which has 4,000 peacekeeping troops stationed in Cote d'Ivoire to keep the army and rebel forces apart, was pessimistic that the Accra summit would make progress in putting the increasingly sour peace process back on track.
Although Gbagbo signed the French-brokered peace agreement 10 months ago, he has never been happy with its terms. The president has consistently alleged that it gives too many concessions to the rebels who seized control of the north of Cote d'Ivoire shortly after the country plunged into civil war in September last year.
Mamadou Koulibaly, the speaker of parliament and a senior member of Gbagbo's Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) party often voices the president's unspoken thoughts. He reiterated on Sunday that in his view the simple application in full of the Linas Marcoussis peace agreement, would not solve the crisis.
"You can't say Marcoussis or nothing," Koulibaly said in a debate on Ivorian state radio and television. Koulibaly, who has consistently been a hard line critic of both France and the rebels, said that in his view, the agreement signed on the outskirts of Paris "was not by its nature made to restore peace to Cote d'Ivoire."
He also made clear that the nub of the problem was a rebel demand that Gbagbo delegate effective powers to the broad-based government of national reconciliation headed by Prime Minister Seydou Diarra.
The rebels joined the coalition cabinet in April, but pulled out in frustration on 23 September and froze their plans to disarm.
Soro, the rebel leader, took the post of Minister of Communications. But when he tried to sack the head of state television after being mobbed by gangs of pro-Gbagbo youths during a visit to its headquarters in Abidjan in July, the president simply countermanded his orders.
Koulibaly said he remained dead against giving the government more powers. "Delegating power would in essence be a coup d'etat," he warned.
Meanwhile, Gbagbo has recently expressed concern about coup plotting within his own military establishment.
The government has denounced the existence of three separate plots to assassinate civic leaders and throw the country into turmoil over the past three months. And last Wednesday Gbagbo paid a surprise visit to the main barracks of the paramilitary gendarmerie in Abidjan to warn the garrison that it should ignore politicians who came whispering that it should take part in a military uprising against him.
Since then, Gbagbo has cautiously extended a couple of olive branches to his opponents. He met with Konan Bedie, the leader of the PDCI on Friday and a few hours later Alphonse Kossonou, a senior figure in the party, was released from jail after spending three weeks in detention on suspicion of plotting against the government.
And on Sunday, Gbagbo dispatched a special envoy to Burkina Faso to reassure President Blaise Campaore that the persecution of immigrants from other West African countries would come to an end.
Immigrants, mainly from Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea, and their offspring, comprised 30 percent of Cote d'Ivoire's 16 million population before the outbreak of civil war last year. But the government suspected them of being pro-rebel and they have been subject to constant harassment ever since the conflict erupted. At least 350,000 Burkinabe have returned home since the civil war broke out.
Gbagbo's special envoy, Laurent Dona Fologo, said in Ouagadougou on Sunday night that the nationalistic notion of "Ivoirete" which gave rise to much of the persecution of immigrants, should be scrapped.
"The time has come to bury this monster and go back to the great sense of brotherhood and the great love of bygone days," he said in a live interview with Burkinabe state television..
Fologo also pleaded for flexibility when it came to implementing the Linas-Marcoussis peace agreement. "We have Marcoussis, our road map to peace, but which is not easy to implement," the special envoy said. "We need to implement its complexity with delicacy," he added.
There is no love lost between Burkinabe president Blaise Campaore and his Ivorian counterpart. Gbagbo has repeatedly accused Campaore of supporting the rebels. The Burkinabe government has meanwhile implicitly accused Cote d'Ivoire of backing a coup plot which led to the arrest of 16 people in Ouagadougou last month.
Ghanaian President John Kufuour, in his capacity as chairman of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) chaired two earlier meetings in Accra to try and resolve the Ivorian conflict, the first on 29 September 2002 and the second on 8 March this year. Tuesday's summit has been labeled "Accra III."
Although Cote d'Ivoire is expected to be the main focus of the meeting, it is also due to discuss the situation in Liberia. There are worries that gunmen made idle by the August peace agreement in Liberia may drift over the border to cause trouble in Cote d'Ivoire and Guinea.
Liberian militias fought for both the government and rebels in western Cote d'Ivoire earlier this year.
Themes: (IRIN) Conflict
[ENDS]
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