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UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs |
COTE D IVOIRE: Decision on peace-sealing elections in September
YAMOUSSOUKRO, 6 Jul 2006 (IRIN) - The UN will decide in September if Cote d’Ivoire’s peace-sealing presidential elections can go ahead as scheduled for October, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said after a mini-summit convened on the Ivorian crisis.
“A meeting will be organized in mid-September in New York to decide how to continue with the process according to the progress that has been made,” Annan told reporters. “The postponement or not of the elections will be decided.”
Annan suggested at an African Union summit last weekend that the election may have to be delayed because of delays in preparations for the poll.
Some 750,000 people have been displaced by the almost four-year long Ivorian conflict. UN agencies feed and provide humanitarian assistance to almost one million people faced by food insecurity in the country. About one out of five among the 17 million people in Cote d’Ivoire receives humanitarian assistance of some kind, according to humanitarian officials.
The UN secretary general flew into Cote d’Ivoire after the AU summit and met Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo, rebel New Forces leader Guillaume Soro and political opposition leader Allassane Ouattara. Other regional leaders also attended the meeting.
Elections were to have been held last October but were delayed by a year under a UN peace plan providing for disarmament of both rebels and pro-Gbagbo militia, as well as for an update of electoral rolls before the ballot. Disarmament has been delayed several times.
The presidential term for Gbagbo, who won disputed elections in 2000, was to have ended last October but under resolution 1633 the UN called for him to stay on for a year provided a new prime minister was appointed with a stronger mandate to oversee the transition process.
At question now is whether Gbagbo will continue as president if the election is again postponed, and if he does remain in office, for how long.
“It is very well possible that things remain as they are, with Gbagbo staying on as president for at least another three of four months,” a Western diplomat told IRIN. “Beyond that point, the matter of maintaining Gbagbo could become problematic.”
Observers consider Prime Minister Charles Konan Banny as a less divisive figure on the Ivorian political scene. Gbagbo has strong support in the south while leading political opposition figure Ouattara draws much of his support from the north, as does rebel leader Soro.
Cote d'Ivoire has been divided since an army mutiny in 2002. Mutinous troops withdrew to the north and reconstituted themselves as the New Forces. The rebels have not yet disarmed and are demanding to be reintegrated into the national army after the polls. Pro-government militias in the southern part of the country have also refused to hand in their weapons.
“We insisted that the militia must be disbanded by the 31st of July, and here the president will make the relevant forces available to the prime minister so that he can carry out his responsibility for the dismantlement of the militia,” Annan said.
Some 10,000 United Nations and French peacekeepers monitor a buffer zone between Cote d’Ivoire’s north and south.
A key element of the peace process is the identification of an estimated three million disenfranchised residents of Cote d’Ivoire. Some have no identity papers because they were not registered at birth, others because they or their parents migrated to seek work.
Their registration is key to the holding of fair elections and the Ivorian parties agreed at the talks with Annan that 50 mobile courts are to be deployed nationwide by 15 July to start the identification programme.
A donor conference to help fund the polls will be organised as soon as sufficient progress has been made in moving forward to the election, according to a three-page statement issued after the talks.
Simultaneously Gbagbo is to issue a decree by 15 July enabling the Independent Electoral Commission to revise the election code if necessary, and the commission itself is to have opened offices across the country by 31 July.
On disarmament, the parties decided to establish a monitoring group by mid-July with representatives from the rebels, the army, the government and peacekeeping forces to supervise the programme. By the end of July, militias must be disarmed and fighters must be withdrawn from the frontline.
Annan said that further funding for Cote d'Ivoire's transition depended on advancing the peace accord.
"We believe once genuine progress is seen in the process, the donor community will be forthcoming and make resources available,” he said.
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This material comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. If you re-print, copy, archive or re-post this item, please retain this credit and disclaimer. Quotations or extracts should include attribution to the original sources. All materials copyright © UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 2006
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