Another year of stalemate in the peace process

Two years after the outbreak of civil war, Cote d'Ivoire remains partitioned and unstable. The guns have fallen silent, but none of the underlying causes of the conflict have been resolved. Diplomats and political analysts worry that the prospects for holding free and fair presidential elections in October 2005 are increasingly uncertain. Deadline after deadline for implementing political reforms agreed under the terms of a January 2003 peace accord has been missed, pushing the West African country from one crisis to another. There has been no relapse into full-scale fighting, but ethnic killings have continued in government-held areas of western Cote d'Ivoire and rival factions of the rebel movement have periodically clashed with each other in the north. Two separate UN human rights investigations have accused both sides of killing unarmed civilians. And throughout the country idle gunmen lounge at roadblocks extorting bribes from passing vehicles. Jean M'Bahia, a sociology professor at Abidjan University, said Cote d'Ivoire was now so polarised along tribal and political lines that he doubted that elections by themselves would provide a solution to its problems. "Elections won't necessarily usher in peace because the crisis has left the political sphere. Things have become personal," he told IRIN. One diplomat in West Africa warned that Cote d'Ivoire should not be pushed into elections while the rebellion, which began on 19 September 2002, was unresolved. Elections were held in Cambodia in 1992 when disarmament was only 30 percent complete and 12 years later the country was still not at peace, he noted. Latest peace deal runs into problems The latest deal to try and put the shaky peace process back on track was agreed by President Laurent Gbagbo, the rebel movement occupying the north of the country and the main opposition parties represented in parliament, at a crisis meeting in the Ghanaian capital Accra at the end of July. A dozen African heads of state were present, breathing down the necks of the rival factions to force a compromise. Under the terms of the resulting "Accra Three" agreement, Gbagbo agreed to push long-delayed political reforms onto the statute book by the end of August. These are aimed at giving immigrants to Cote d'Ivoire from other West African countries and their descendents stronger rights to inherit land, take up Ivorian nationality and run for the presidency. The rebels pledged at Accra that once the reforms were duly enacted, they would start to disarm on 15 October under the supervision of a 6,000 strong-UN peacekeeping force and 4,000 French peacekeepers deployed alongside them. Meanwhile, the opposition parties and the rebels agreed to return immediately to a power-sharing government of national reconciliation, ending a boycott of more than five months. But August came and went without a single political reform making it through parliament following blocking tactics by Gbagbo's Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) party. The different factions were not even able to agree on the composition of an electoral commission that is due to supervise next year's elections. Mamadou Koulibaly, the speaker of parliament and a hardline leader of the FPI, said last week that he did not believe the rebels would start to disarm on schedule in October. But his remark surprised no-one. The rebels have one card to play The rebels occupy the northern half of Cote d'Ivoire, a country of 16 million people, richly endowed with tropical rainforest and Savannah farmlands. But once they start handing in their guns under the planned programme of Disarmament, Demobilisaton and Rehabilitation (DDR) and surrender control of their territory to the government, the insurgents will have no further political leverage. "The Forces Nouvelles (rebel movement) have one card to play: DDR," said Stephen Ellis, the outgoing director of the African affairs at the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank. "They will use it to get as many guarantees as possible before turning in their weapons." "Their weapons are their sole bargaining chip," agreed one former Ivorian journalist, who has since carved out a career for himself as a political consultant. "Once they give that up, what are they left with?" Meanwhile there are pressures on both sides to end the current stand-off. The international community has starved the government of aid funds pending a resolution of the political impasse and the start of disarmament and this has aggravated an economic crisis prompted by the partition of the country. The World Bank alone, which suspended aid to Cote d'Ivoire in May following an accumulation of debt arrears, has frozen the disbursement of US$331 million. But so far, no-one in the diplomatic community is talking seriously about sanctions to make Gbagbo stick to political commitments given at international meetings, which he consistently ignores as soon as he gets home. Alan Doss, the deputy head of the UN Operation in Cote d'Ivoire (ONUCI) remarked: "The Security Council hasn't said a thing on sanctions. The Council told the parties that they have the first responsibility and each has a personal responsibility…as far as I know, the Council has not talked about sanctions in open and direct terms." Serious divisions within the rebel movement The rebels meanwhile are struggling with internal divisions and an economic crisis in the north that is even more serious than in the government-held south of what is still West Africa's most prosperous country. All banks are closed in the north, along with most schools and health centres. Its factories have shut down, trade has slowed and its mainly rural population is drifting back to subsistence farming. And Guillaume Soro, the rebel leader, is grappling to control a faction-ridden rebel movement at the same time as dealing with Gbagbo. Increasingly the authority of Soro, a 35-year-old former student leader, is being challenged by Master-Sargent Ibrahim Coulibaly, a former non-commissioned officer in the Ivorian army. He played a key role in planning the successful 1999 coup led by General Robert Guei and is widely believed to have been a mastermind of the botched 2002 coup attempt which led to civil war instead. Coulibaly, who is popularly known as IB, has been based in exile in Paris for the past year, but his supporters in the rebel movement in Cote d'Ivoire have clashed repeatedly with the faction loyal to Soro back home. The most serious incident took place in the northern city of Korhogo on 20 and 21 June, following what Soro claimed was an attempt to assassinate him. Two days of heavy fighting ensued. Soro's faction gained control and UN human rights investigators who visited the city later found the bodies of at least 99 people buried in mass graves. Many of them appeared to have suffocated to death in overcrowded containers used as a makeshift prison after being rounded up as suspected IB supporters. "The rebellion is currently fighting Gbagbo militarily and politically while fighting its own demons," one former rebel supporter who still lives in the rebel capital Bouake, told IRIN. But he stressed that the rival factions would still unite to face their common enemy. "This is a well-organized movement with friends inside and out who are making sure that they keep on fighting what they took up arms for," he said. No change in the political landscape At this time last year, the political landscape in Cote d'Ivoire looked depressingly similar. Gbagbo, a former history professor who was an opposition activist for 30 years until he came to power in the 2000 presidential election, was dragging his heals over the implementation of reforms agreed in the French-brokered Linas-Marcoussis peace agreement. The rebels, meanwhile, were holding their own ground and refusing to disarm until the reforms were in place. Since then, the rebels have twice pulled out of the the broad-based government of national reconciliation, led by Prime Minister Seydou Diarra. The rebels first withdrew their nine ministers in September 2003 in protest at Gbagbo's refusal to implement agreed political reforms, returning eventually in December. Then they quit the cabinet for a second time in March 2004, along with 17 other ministers representing the four main opposition parties in parliament. The entire opposition pulled out in protest at Gbagbo's heavy handed repression of a banned demonstration in Abidjan. According to a subsequent UN human rights investigation, soldiers, policemen and shadowy gunmen linked to pro-Gbagbo militia groups killed at least 120 people, mainly in poor suburbs of the city suspected of sympathy with the rebel cause. The power-sharing government was reconstituted in early August following the Accra Three agreement, but so far there has been no progress in moving forward on the political reforms aimed at placating the rebels' core supporters in northern Cote d'Ivoire and the four million people in the country of immigrant origin, who feel themselves excluded from power by the present laws. Amending the constitution Their frustration is exemplified by article 35 of the constitution which states that both parents of a presidential candidate must be born in Cote d'Ivoire. This was used as a pretext to prevent former prime minister Alassane Ouattara, a popular figure in the north, from running against Gbagbo in the 2000 election. Ouattara's exclusion from the contest and a similar ban imposed on Henri Konan-Bedie, the civilian president overthrown by General Guei in 1999, turned the election into a straight fight between Gbagbo and the military strongman who had seized power. Gbagbo won and Guei was killed in the early hours of the rebellion that triggered the civil war two years ago. The Linas-Marcoussis peace agreement calls for article 35 to be modified so that Ouattara can run in 2005, but Gbagbo and the FPI have consistently put obstacles in the way of changing it. So where does Cote d'Ivoire go from here? On the plus side, the various parties have been cajoled back into the government of national reconciliation. Diarra, its prime minister, is a politically independent former civil servant respected by all sides who is viewed by the international community as the lynchpin of the peace process in Cote d'Ivoire. "We are not in a Liberia situation" And unlike neighbouring Liberia, which was totally destroyed by 14 years of civil war, the economic infrastructure in Cote d'Ivoire remains intact. Abidjan, a city of modern skyscrapers and urban freeways, has been untouched by the fighting. The country's tarred roads are still in good condition, the electricity supply and telephone systems work - supplying customers in the rebel zone for free at present. Meanwhile exports of cocoa and coffee, the two main export crops, continue albeit at a slightly reduced level. Poverty and unemployment are steadily increasing since investment in the economy has ground to a halt, but once the country has been reunited and the million or more people who have been displaced from their homes by the fighting are able to return, normal life should be able to resume very quickly. "We are not in a Liberia situation here," said Doss, who until recently headed the UN operation that rescued Sierra Leone from a decade long civil war. "The crisis has gone on quite long, but the actual conflict was relatively short. And certaintly from my experience in Sierra Leone the level of destruction doesn't begin to approach that." There is also a consensus view, both among the rival factions in Cote d'Ivoire, the United Nations and most independent observers, that there is still time to prepare for meaningful elections next year. "Cote d'Ivoire is not a failed state," Ellis at ICG explained. "Logistically, the elections can be held at short notice. Some countries, like East Timor, were in a weaker position," he noted. Doss at ONUCI agreed. "There seems to be a consenus that we must have our elections no later than October 2005," he told IRIN. "I think free and fair elections were seen as the apex of the peace efforts and I think everybody seems committed to that, so let's all work towards that deadline." But although the way forward remains unclear, diplomats and political analysts agree that national reconciliation must come from within Cote d'Ivoire - it cannot be imposed by the international community - and that Gbagbo, who wields immense personal power, must lead the way. "The question is what can Ivorians do? We can't be a substitute for the national will to seek a solution and reconciliation," Doss said. "Gbagbo has an obligation towards the population," Ellis stressed. "Politics is the art of the possible and creative politicians try to find solutions to problems." Meanwhile, about 500,000 people internally displaced within Cote d'Ivoire and about 500,000 more immigrants from Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea who have fled back to their countries of origin to escape persecution, the children in the north who cannot go to school and the army of unemployed youths in Abidjan are waiting for the solution to appear.