Long queues in last-minute drive to change banknotes in rebel zone

Under the watch of UN peacekeepers and rebel soldiers, people lined up for hours on Thursday in Cote d’Ivoire’s rebel capital Bouake to swap old bank-notes for new in a last-minute operation launched by the Central Bank of the States of West Africa (BCEAO). The BCEAO, which controls the CFA franc currency used by eight nations in West Africa, launched a drive in mid-September to withdraw billions of the aged crumpled notes by 31 December and replace them with a new series. But in northern Cote d’Ivoire banks have been closed since the outbreak of civil war in September 2002. As a result, more than six million people living under rebel control faced the nightmare of being left with bags of worthless cash. The BCEAO finally agreed to launch an emergency operation to exchange old bank notes in the north last week and its tellers began counting out the new notes in Bouake on Wednesday. Farmer Nestor Kra Kouame lined up nine hours to exchange a wad of 375 000 CFA francs (US$787) which he had saved and kept at home. “The BCEAO tellers detected 35 fake 1,000-franc bills (total US$73) so I lost some money which is a shame, but it was better than nothing,” he told IRIN. Like many of the people in queues that snaked around the headquarters of the UN peacekeeping force (ONUCI), where the BCEAO set up a temporary office, Kouame came up from the countryside as soon as he heard the bank was launching a special three-day operation to mop up the old bank-notes in the rebel north. He had to travel 45 km into Bouake, but the BCEAO failed to provide facilities elsewhere in the rebel-held north to help people living up to 500 km from the city to change their money. With the deadline approaching, the bank sent a 26-person team from the loyalist south to man booths specially set up inside the ONUCI building. Members of the 6,000-strong UN peacekeeping force, backed by French troops and rebel soldiers of the New Forces, provided security “People are very disciplined, the operation is proceeding as planned,” Colonel Alassane Fall, who commands ONUCI forces in Bouake, told IRIN. UN soldiers checked identity papers and carried out body-searches before ferrying groups of people 10 at a time to a metal-detector located at the entrance to the building. In the town itself, there was a collective sigh of relief as the BCEAO began swapping the old notes, whose design has remained unchanged since 1992. For several days, shopkeepers and street sellers had been refusing payment in the smallest and most-used denominations, notes worth 500 ($1) and 1,000 CFA francs ($2), causing problems for poorer Ivorians. “There was a fight between a soldier and a shop-owner in my district yesterday,” Bouake resident Denis Kone told IRIN. “The soldier bought something and the shop-owner gave him an old 500 CFA franc bank-note as change. The soldier then came back to buy something else and tendered the same bank-note, but the shop-owner refused the bill and a fight broke out.” In all, the BCEAO set aside a total 255 billion CFA francs ($535.7 million) in new bank-notes to be exchanged in Cote d’Ivoire. The country, the region’s economic powerhouse, accounts for 40 percent of the monetary mass circulating in the eight mainly Francophone countries served by the central bank. Yao Sahi Kablan, the BCEAO manager in Cote d'Ivoire, said earlier this week that 94.3 percent of the estimated old notes in circulation in the country had been exchanged but that 14 billion CFA francs ($29.4 million) still remained to be collected. Because many people keep their savings in cash at home, the rebels have suggested the BCEAO could extend the deadline to ensure all the old notes are swapped. But at the bank’s headquarters in Dakar, a spokesman told IRIN it was sticking to the 31 December deadline. The BCEAO also set a ceiling of 4 million CFA francs (US$8,300) on the amount of old bank-notes exchanged by a single person. The bank has said the crispy-clean new notes will be harder to forge. But the introduction of the smaller bills will also prevent the laundering of buckets of cash which have been robbed from the BCEAO's coffers in Cote d’Ivoire. Diplomats suspect that the rebels financed their insurgency with the proceeds of a raid on the BCEAO's Ivorian head office in Abidjan shortly before the civil war began. Rebel fighters were subsequently blamed for a successful raid on the bank's Bouake branch and attempted break-ins to the BCEAO vaults in Man and Korhogo. Soldiers serving with the French peacekeeping force in Cote d’Ivoire have also been caught stealing notes from banks they were guarding in rebel territory over the last 15 months. The CFA franc, which is backed by the French treasury, was introduced in 1945 to provide the then French colonies with a stable currency. Originally tied to the French franc, it is currently pegged to the euro at a rate of 656 CFA francs to one euro. The BCEAO issues the currency in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo. The currency is also used by seven Central African states. These have their own central bank and use different notes which are due to be swapped for a new series in early 2005.