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UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs |
COTE D'IVOIRE: Liberian leader discusses border security with Gbagbo
ABIDJAN, 24 November 2003 (IRIN) - Liberia's transitional leader, Gyude Bryant, held talks with President Laurent Gbagbo of Cote d'Ivoire on Monday about security along the two countries' troubled border.
Gbagbo's spokesman, Alain Toussaint, said they also discussed the peace process under way in both countries and ways of preventing the movement of armed men across the porous border.
Liberia is emerging from 14 years of civil war with the help of a large UN peacekeeping force. Cote d'Ivoire, on the other hand, is in danger of sliding back into open conflict following a two-month-old impasse between Gbagbo and rebels occupying the north of the country over how a peace agreement, signed in January, should be implemented.
Bryant's visit to Abidjan was his first since taking over as the head of a broad-based coalition government last month. It formed part of a flurry of top-level contacts between the rival Ivorian factions and West African leaders aimed at putting Cote d'Ivoire's faltering peace process back on track.
Gbagbo postponed plans to visit Burkina Faso and Mali on Monday after meeting Bryant, but Toussaint said the Ivorian leader would travel to both countries later this week.
Guillaume Soro, the Ivorian rebel leader, meanwhile held talks with President Mamadou Tandja of Niger on Monday before flying from Niamey to Libreville to meet President Omar Bongo of Gabon.
Gbagbo held two hours of talks with Bongo and visiting French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin in Libreville last Friday, but there was no indication afterwards of any breakthrough to end the increasingly tense stalemate in Cote d'Ivoire.
Amadou Kone, a senior aide of Soro, said the rebels, who are officially known as "The New Forces," were willing to attend an internationally-sponsored meeting that would put the Ivorian peace process back on track by establishing a "consensual roadmap" of agreed action.
But he reiterated that the rebels were not willing to renegotiate the French-brokered peace agreement signed 11 months ago, despite Gbagbo's reluctance to implement certain parts of the accord.
"The New Forces are favourable to a meeting, but not a new Marcoussis," Kone told IRIN by telephone from the rebel stronghold of Bouake in central Cote d'Ivoire.
In Niger, Soro told reporters after meeting Tandja that the New Forces wanted the African Union and the United Nations to become more closely involved in international efforts to break the deadlock.
"Today we would wish to see the African Union and the UN coming in to reinforce all the peace initiatives launched by ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) so that Cote d'Ivoire can rapidly find peace and unity," Soro said.
The UN Security Council was due to consider the situation in Cote d'Ivoire on Tuesday after hearing calls from several West African states for 5,300 French and West African peacekeeping troops in the country to be given a full UN mandate.
Tension has been rising in West Africa's most prosperous country since the rebels withdrew their ministers from a broad-based government of national reconciliation on 23 September in protest at Gbagbo's alleged refusal to devolve effective power to its ministers.
Diplomats said repeated attempts by ECOWAS leaders to persuade Gbagbo to be more flexible on this issue had so far failed to yield fruit.
Liberian militias fought for both sides in the Ivorian civil war earlier this year. The area near the western border with Liberia, where they once terrorised the local population, remains a dangerous and unstable place.
Diplomats say that many of the Liberians who fought for Gbagbo, were subsequently sent back across the border to fight for the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) movement which still controls the south and east of Liberia.
Since the signing of a peace agreement in Liberia last August, fears have been growing that many of these gunmen might drift back into Cote d'Ivoire to cause further trouble. UN peacekeepers are due to start disarming the warring factions in Liberia in early December.
Themes: (IRIN) Conflict
[ENDS]
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