Opposition will march amid rising tension

Despite a last-minute mediation attempt by the Ghanaian president, Cote d'Ivoire's opposition leaders said on Wednesday that an officially banned march would still go ahead in the economic capital, Abidjan, on Thursday as planned. The main opposition parties, the Ivory Coast Democratic Party (PDCI), and the Rally of Republicans (RDR), among others, met president John Kufuor of Ghana early in the afternoon at Abidjan's Hotel Ivoire. “The demonstration is maintained,” said PDCI representative Alphonse Djedje Mady,as he left the meeting. Kufuor, who is also current chairman of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), met Cote d'Ivoire's President Laurent Gbagbo before flying home to Accra on Wednesday evening. Kufuor headed to Cote d’Ivoire on an emergency trip on Wednesday morning in an attempt to heal rifts in the government of reconciliation after the PDCI staged a walk out. The PDCI, which withdrew its ministers from the transitional government earlier this month, argues that Gbagbo himself is the biggest obstacle to the implementation of the Linas-Marcoussis peace accord signed in France under the auspices of the French government in January 2003. The PDCI, backed by all the opposition parties and representatives of the former rebel movements, now known as the 'New Forces', has called the march in protest at what it describes as Gbagbo's refusal to abide by Linas-Marcoussis. Residents said tension was growing in Abidjan in the build-up to the march. In Plateau, the central business district where the demonstration is scheduled to take place, there were fewer cars on the streets than usual. Most shops and businesses closed their doors in the early afternoon. Armoured vehicles appeared on Tuesday at a number of the strategic points in Abidjan, residents said, after Gbagbo put the West African country’s army on full alert until mid-April. In a televised address to the nation on Tuesday night, Gbagbo reiterated his appeal to marchers to call off the demonstration. “I call for everyone to put the national interest first,” President Gbagbo said. He stressed that he had already met with opposition leaders and would be going through their complaints and grievances at a meeting scheduled for Monday, March 29. “Now that our most personal problems are exposed and the discussion is scheduled [for Monday], I call on everyone to be reasonable, notably to renounce actions that have risky consequences for the peace process,” he added. But the main opposition parties have reiterated their intention to march on the Place de la Republique, close to the Presidential Palace. They stressed their protest is for peace and in defence of the Linas Marcoussis accords. “We stand by our position, and nothing can come to change it now,” an official from the PDCI youth branch told IRIN. The PDCI dominated the Ivorian political landscape under Presidents Félix Houphouet-Boigny and Henri Konan Bedié, but is now one of the main opposition forces. “Each party has recruited 200 young people for the demonstrators’ security,” the PDCI official said. “We’re waiting for nearly three million people.” “If they shoot, we will sit down and we’ll start marching again,” the PDCI official said. On Monday Gbagbo ordered "a general mobilisation" of the armed forces "to maintain public order throughout the country from March 22 to April 15", in a decree read out on national television. Presidential and national guard commanders have already declared that the area around the presidential palace will be a "red zone" in which demonstrators "will be considered enemy fighters and treated as such without warning". Last week, Ivory Coast's Young Patriots Movement, a youth organisation which is nominally allied to Gbagbo and has campaigned consistently against the Linas-Marcoussis accords, warned that it would prevent the march from taking place. At the 'Sorbonne', where the Young Patriots hold open air political meetings in the heart of Plateau, many of those present warned that protesters would be beaten if they went on with their demonstration. “We’re going to kill them,” says a father of three, who declined to be named. The latest rise in tension comes three weeks before the United Nations begins its first full-scale peacekeeping mission in the former French colony. The UN is to deploy some 6,240 peacekeepers in Cote d’Ivoire. The government said last week the ban on public demonstrations and the recent re-introduction of checkpoints across Abidjan are meant to allow the mission to begin working in a peaceful atmosphere. Once a model of stability, Cote d'Ivoire was plunged into civil war after a failed coup d'etat in September 2002.