Cabinet meets in rebel city as train service resumes

Cote d'Ivoire's government of national reconciliation held a ground-breaking cabinet meeting in the rebel-held city of Bouake on Thursday as the first freight train for eight months left Abidjan carrying cement and fertilizer to the rebel-held north of the country. Radical youth groups opposed to appeasement of the rebels ripped up a small section of the track in central Abidjan on Thursday morning to try and prevent the train from leaving. Railway officials said it eventually departed at night with a military escort after the line had been repaired. Diplomats believe these youth groups have close links to President Laurent Gbagbo, who was pressured by France, the former colonial power in Cote d'Ivoire, into signing a peace deal with the rebels in January. A government of national reconciliation, which includes nine rebel ministers, was formed in early April. Many diplomats and relief workers fear that the "patriotic" associations, which often conduct military-style drill, could rapidly turn into armed militias that would be used by opponents of the peace accord to attack immigrants from other West African countries. Immigrants from Burkina Faso, Mali and other states in the region make up 30% of Cote d'Ivoire's 16 million population and are widely suspected of sympathising with the rebels, who still control the northern half of the country. The cabinet meeting in Bouake, which had been delayed several times over fears about the security of pro-Gbagbo ministers was presided over by Prime Minister Seydou Diarra. The ministers flew up to Bouake, where their security was guaranteed by peacekeeping troops from France and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and returned a few hours later. While the cabinet met in Bouake, Cote d'Ivoire's second largest city in the centre of the country, Gbagbo met leaders of the radical youth movements in Abidjan, the commercial capital, for the second time in a week. Gbagbo gave these organisations a public seal of approval at a first meeting last Sunday, saying they should not be considered militias so long as they remained unarmed. A presidential spokesman said Gbagbo persuaded them at Thursday's encounter to call off a demonstration against the terms of peace accord which they had planned to hold in Abidjan on Saturday. Officials of the French-owned railway which links the port of Abidjan with landlocked Burkina Faso to the north, said the freight train which left on Thursday night would only go as far as Ferkessedougou, near the Burkinabe frontier. International services to the Burkinabe capital Ouagadougou are expected to resume following a meeting of security chiefs from the two countries on May 28 and 29. However, the fact that normal rail traffic has resumed between the two halves of divided Cote d'Ivoire is widely seen as an important gesture of normalisation. Although nine ministers, drawn from the ranks of the rebel Patriotic Movement of Cote d'Ivoire (MPCI) now have offices in Abidjan, the government's civil administration in the north remains paralysed with banks shut and most schools and hospitals closed. Rail traffic had been suspended since Cote d'Ivoire, the world's biggest cocoa producer, slid into civil war after a failed military coup on September 19. An inspection train returned from a successful reconnaissance trip as far as the Burkinabe border last week.