Political leaders meet –unofficially – at UN ceremony

Cote d’Ivoire’s rebel movement and the main opposition parties are still not on speaking terms with President Laurent Gbagbo following the violent repression of demonstrations against the head of state two weeks ago. However, they mingled informally with leaders of Gbagbo’s Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) party on Monday at a ceremony to mark the creation of a UN peacekeeping force in this divided West African country. Under a blazing sun, the polticial adversaries sat side by side and exchanged pleasantries while a military band played marching tunes. Gbagbo himself was absent from the ceremony, where Prime Minister Seydou Diarra was the most senior government official present. But Alphonse Djedje Mady, secretary general of the Democratic Party of Cote d’Ivoire (PDCI), the largest opposition party in parliament, was seen talking to former FPI prime minister Pascal Affi-Nguessan. And leaders of the Rally for the Republic, the other main opposition party in parliament, mingled with other FPI officials. The rebel “New Forces” who have occupied the northern half of Cote d’Ivoire since civil war broke out in September 22, were represented at their ceremony by their deputy political leader, Andre Dakoury-Tabley. Diarra, an independent figure who was charged last year with forming a broad-based government of national reconciliation to lead Cote d’Ivoire back to peace and fresh elections in October 2005, is currently engaged in shuttle diplomacy to try and put his splintered cabinet back together. The PDCI quit the coalition government in early March in frustration at Gbagbo riding roughshod over the authority supposedly held by the party’s own ministers. And following the security forces’ bloody repression of an anti-Gbagbo demonstration in Abidjan on 25 March, the rebels, the RDR and two other opposition parties also quit the cabinet. The government says 37 people died in the ensuing two days of street violence, but the opposition parties maintain that up to 500 people were killed as armed men in uniforms dragged suspected opposition supporters out of their homes and killed them. Many of these atrocities appear to have been carried out by pro-Gbagbo paramilitaries rather than regular members of the police and army. Security Minister Martin Bleou has admitted that such shadowy forces have begun terrorising the inhabitants of many the suburbs worst affected by the violence. Only 15 of Diarra’s 41 ministers are left in the cabinet and most of these are representatives of Gbagbo’s FPI. However, the prime minister began a round of high-level talks last week to try and put his team back together. Last week, he travelled to Douakro, a town 250 km north of Abidjan, to meet former president Henri Konan Bedie, the leader of the PDCI. And over the weekend he flew to Paris for meetings with the French government, which has 4,000 peacekeeping troops stationed in Cote d’Ivoire, and with exiled former prime minister Alassane Ouattara, leader of the RDR. Diarra subsequently told Radio France Internationale (RFI) that he had “a plan in mind,” but he declined to reveal details of it. “I think that the gap is not so wide, the amount of disagreement is not so big,” Diarra said.” If the various protatgonists come to the negotiating table I am sure that we will reach minimum of agreement.” The Prime Minister told RFI that there had to be a stage-by-stage twin-track process, with political reforms enacted by Gbagbo and the government matched by steps towards disarmament by the rebels. Immediately after Monday’s UN ceremony in Abidjan, he flew to the rebel stronghold Bouake in central Cote d’Ivoire for talks with rebel leader Guillaume Soro. However, the rebels and the opposition parties have jointly insisted that there will be no deal with Gbagbo until he lifts a ban on opposition demonstrations which he slapped on the country just before last month’s attempted protest. Rebel spokesman Sidi Konate told IRIN as Diarra left for Bouake that the New Forces had nothing new to say to the prime minister. “We have nothing new to submit to him. He knows all the problems,” Konate said. The UN peacekeeping force, known by its French acronym ONUCI, will eventually field more than 6,000 men to oversee the disarmament process and guarantee security and fair play during next year’s elections. Its nucleus is a 1,300-strong West African peacekeeping force, which has been in the country for the past year. The West African troops are due to be joined over the next four months by new contingents from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Morocco, Ukraine and other countries. France’s 4,000 troops in Cote d’Ivoire will cooperate closely with ONUCI, but will not come under UN command. The civil war, which was supposed to have come to an end with a peace agreement signed in January last year and a ceasefire implemented in May, has pitted the mainly Christian south of the country against the predominantly Muslim north. At Monday’s ceremony to launch ONUCI, Cardinal Bernard Agre, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Cote d’Ivoire, was symbolically seated alongside Imam Idriss Koudouss, the head of the country’s Islamic community, in the front row of specially invited guests. Cardinal Agre said afterwards that the arrival of UN peacekeepers in what was once West Africa’s most stable and prosperous country showed just how low it had sunk. “I hope we draw a lesson from this so that tomorrow the same situation does not repeat itself” he told reporters. “It is not just the phenomenon (of civil war) that must disappear but the causes of it too.”