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UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs |
COTE D IVOIRE: Step ahead for peace as rebels rejoin cabinet, but no disarmament deal
ABIDJAN, 15 Apr 2005 (IRIN) - The Cote d'Ivoire peace process inched forward on Friday when two ministers from the rebel camp attended a cabinet meeting in the capital Abidjan, but on the military front there was little visible progress on disarmament.
After a five-month absence from the broad-based government of national reconciliation, two of nine rebel ministers travelled south into enemy territory to attend the regular weekly cabinet meeting.
Their reappearance in Abidjan followed a rebel commitment to return to the power-sharing government given at the latest round of peace talks in the South African capital Pretoria last week.
"We are returning with much hope. We respect the pledges we made in Pretoria," Local Administration Minister Issa Diakite told IRIN before entering the cabinet room. Another rebel representative in the 42-member cabinet, Sports Minister Michel Gueu, accompanied him.
The 6 April Pretoria accord brokered by South African President Thabo Mbeki, has raised new hopes for an end to more than two years of civil war in the country once seen as a beacon of prosperity and peace in West Africa.
Earlier this week, Mbeki called on President Laurent Gbagbo to show political goodwill vis-à-vis the rebels by using his special constitutional powers as head of state to allow all of the country's main political players to run in presidential elections next October, including opposition leader Alassane Ouattara.
Ouattara, who has broad support in the north, was barred from competing for the presidency in 2000 on the disputed grounds that his father was born in Burkina Faso.
Last December, parliament voted through a constitutional amendment which stipulates that only one parent of a presidential candidate need be of Ivorian origin, but Gbagbo has been demanding that this be confirmed by a referendum. Mbeki urged Gbagbo to use special powers conferred to him by the constitution to override the need for such a vote.
Disarmament talks continue
In another bid to break the political deadlock in Cote d'Ivoire, military commanders of the government and the New Forces rebel movement held talks on Thursday in the northern rebel stronghold of Bouake on establishing a timetable for disarmament.
It was the first time the two sides had discussed disarmament since September last year, when the rebels ignored an earlier deadline to start handing in their weapons to UN peacekeepers. They argued then that Gbagbo was holding up promised political reforms including the constitutional amendment that would allow Ouattara to run for president.
There was little visible progress however, beyond pledges to continue talking on Saturday. The two sides were at odds over how militia groups formed to support the government should be disarmed and the rebels expressed concern over ethnic discrimination within the military high command.
"Deliberations are continuing," Mbeki's special envoy to Cote d'Ivoire, Sokupa Silumko, told IRIN on Friday. "I think we will move forward. We are discussing the rehabilitation of disarmament sites."
Rebel sources in Bouake said there was disagreement between the two camps over the disarming of militia groups loyal to Gbagbo.
"We can't hand in our guns if the militia are still roaming around armed," one rebel official told IRIN. "We want them to disarm before the Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programme begins."
Pro-Gbagbo militia attacked rebel positions in Logouale in the volatile western region near the Liberian border in February. Since then, there have been repeated warnings from humanitarian workers and diplomats that the militia groups are continuing to hire more gunmen, including former combatants from Liberia.
Thursday's meeting was to have set out a timetable of a DDR programme for rebel forces and 4,000 soldiers recruited into the government army since Cote d'Ivoire plunged into civil war in September 2002.
Since then, rebel forces have controlled the north of the country. However government forces retain control of the densely forested south where most of Cote d'Ivoire's lucrative cocoa and coffee plantations are situated.
Not all the rebels are due to be disarmed. Several hundred former government soldiers, who joined the rebel camp, are to be re-integrated into the ranks of the regular army.
"We are ready to return to the national army," said Siaka Ouattara, deputy chief of staff of the New Forces, "but there is this problem of ethnicity."
Complaints of ethnic bias in the armed forces were a key factor in the 2002 rebellion. Northerners claimed that most of the top jobs were going to southerners.
Under the Pretoria deal, some 600 rebel troops recruited since the war broke out are to be incorporated into the national gendarmerie, a paramilitary security force.
Quick implementation of peace deal is needed
While the disarmament talks drag on, the country is waiting to see whether Gbagbo caves in to Mbeki's demand that he use his special powers to clear the way for arch foe Ouattara to stand in the October presidential elections.
Speedy implementation of the Pretoria deal is needed if the elections are to be held on schedule, but Gbagbo is in no hurry to say yes or no to the South African mediator's proposals on constitutional reform.
The Ivorian president is due to start a series of meetings next week to consult members of civil society about the Mbeki peace deal. These include traditional chiefs, youth groups, farmers and members of the security forces.
These meetings have been scheduled to last until 2 May, just 48 hours before the expiry of a UN Security Council mandate for 10,000 UN and French peacekeeping troops to remain in the country.
In his letter to the signatories of the Pretoria accord, Mbeki was quoted as writing: "The mediator is asking ... President Gbagbo to make use of the powers bestowed upon the president under the constitution of Cote d'Ivoire, in particular Article 48, to give legal backing to the above decision."
Article 48 allows the president to take extraordinary measures when institutions or territorial integrity are at stake, such as the current partitioning of the country.
Mbeki, who was appointed by the African Union to mediate in the Ivorian conflict last November, urged Gbagbo to consult the speaker of parliament and the constitutional council.
In a reminder of the stark brutality of the continuing war, the bodies of 48 people killed on 25 March 2004 during an opposition demonstration were finally buried on Friday in a mass grave in an Abidjan cemetery.
A UN report into the government's bloody repression of the banned demonstration concluded that the security forces had killed at least 120 people during the protest and in house-to-house searches for opposition sympathisers afterwards.
"They died because they wanted the application of the Linas-Marcoussis (peace accord), while others were saying no to peace," Alphonse Djedje Mady, who heads the G-7 opposition alliance, told a crowd of hundreds of family and friends at the funeral.
"Today the entire world, the United Nations and the African Union recognise that what they wanted was just."
The G7, formed last year, groups the rebel New Forces movement and the four main opposition parties in parliament.
[ENDS]
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