UN and AU should organise polls and disarmament, says thinktank

Cote d’Ivoire, whose peace process is due to culminate in elections in October 2005, should delay the polls for several months and the United Nations and the African Union should be tasked with organising them, an influential thinktank said on Thursday. In a report entitled “The Worst May Be Yet to Come”, the Brussels-based Crisis Group also recommended that the international community should disarm pro-government militia forces and rebel troops controlling the north of the country. It also called on France, the former colonial power, to gradually withdraw its 4,000 peacekeeping troops from the West African country and urged the United Nations to replace them by increasing the strength of its own forces based there. “The worst is perhaps yet to come. With the prospect of the end of President (Laurent) Gbagbo’s constitutional mandate in October 2005, the game of deceptions could well transform itself into a game of massacres,” Crisis Group said in its report. Cote d’Ivoire has been split into a government-held south and a rebel-run north since a failed coup attempt against Gbagbo in September 2002 triggered civil war. The internationally accepted blueprint to bring peace to the world’s top cocoa producer has until now been the Linas-Marcoussis accord, drawn up on the outskirts of Paris in January 2003 under pressure from the French government. It foresees a UN-supervised process of disarmament followed by fresh elections in October 2005. With just seven months to go, South African President Thabo Mbeki, is spearheading efforts on behalf of the AU to get the country reunified in time for the vote, but hopes that he will succeed are fading. Crisis Group urged the international community to re-engage with the Ivorian peace process and warned against complacent thinking that Cote d'Ivoire, the most prosperous country in West Africa, could never degenerate into the same chaos and devastation as Liberia or Sierra Leone. “The AU… should work to organise in close cooperation with the UN the implementation of the Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programme, voter registration and a new schedule for three polls -- presidential and legislative elections preceded by a referendum on a key constitutional article determining who is eligible for the presidency,” Crisis Group said in its report. “While this may push back the electoral timetable by a few months, it is necessary because the present situation is so polarised that no Ivorian electoral commission can be expected to operate independently and effectively,” it said. The thinktank, which was formerly called the International Crisis Group, recommended that a finite 18-month timetable should be set for completing the electoral process. The first vote which Crisis Group would like the international community to supervise is a referendum on Article 35 of the Ivorian constitution which until recently stated that both parents of a presidential candidate must be Ivorian. Parliament revised the clause in December to specify that only one parent need be Ivorian, but President Laurent Gbagbo is insisting on holding a referendum to ratify the change. The clause was used in 2000 to bar Alassane Ouattara, a prominent opposition leader whose father was said to be Burkinabe, from standing against Gbagbo in the last presidential election. Crisis Group said Seydou Diarra, the independent prime minister who heads the stalled government of national reconciliation, had told Mbeki he was in favour of international assistance with the polls when the pair met in Pretoria earlier this month. The G7 opposition alliance, which groups the rebel New Forces movement and the main opposition parties in parliament, has already asked the United Nations to conduct the elections to ensure they are free and fair. But in the past, Secretary-General Kofi Annan has stressed that for such a step to be taken, it would have to be requested by all sides in the almost three-year-old conflict. Crisis Group said the neutral status of the French peacekeepers in Cote d'Ivoire had been compromised during a flare-up in November, when Paris retaliated for the killing of nine of its soldiers in a government air raid on rebel positions by disabling the jet bombers and attack helicopters of Gbagbo's air force on the ground. “The French government should begin negotiations with the UN about a gradual drawdown of its contingent, and a parallel substantial strengthening of the UN Operation in Cote d'Ivoire (UNOCI),” the group said. It suggested that replacement peacekeepers to swell the 6,000-strong force which ONUCI already has on the ground could come from South Africa and other European Union countries, The current mandate for international peacekeepers in Cote d’Ivoire is due to expire on 4 April. France has said it will not keep its troops in the West African nation unless Gbagbo, the AU and UN asks them to remain there. Annan has already requested more than 1,200 extra UN troops for Cote d'Ivoire, but the UN Security Council has yet to act on his proposal. The UN chief called on the body to approve the request, first made in December, in his latest report on the crisis. Crisis Group said the international community could not afford to sit back, because even if neither side possessed the might to win militarily, Cote d'Ivoire was likely to slide into “a long, ugly war of attrition accompanied by large-scale massacres.” “That would be a tragedy for more than Côte d'Ivoire: Guinea, Mali, and Burkina Faso would likely be drawn into a regional conflict. The greatest damage could be done to Liberia's fragile peace process,” the thinktank said.