South Africa says continuing mediation, cautious on sanctions

South Africa denied on Wednesday that it was concluding its mediation in the Cote d'Ivoire crisis as it warned the UN Security Council to take care that any sanctions action did not negatively affect the peace process. "The South African Mediation stated that it will continue its efforts... to ensure the holding of free, fair and transparent elections in Cote d'Ivoire as scheduled, which is the only solution to the crisis," the Security Council said in a statement after a closed-door briefing in New York. Elections on 30 October are at the heart of the international community's blueprint for peace in Cote d'Ivoire but progress towards that goal has been slow. South African mediators have already said that rebels and opposition parties are to blame for the impasse and warned that the world's top cocoa grower could explode into another cycle of violence. Diplomats and UN officials have been warning that individual sanctions, already approved by the Security Council, could now be enforced against spoilers of the peace process. During his briefing, South Africa Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota told the 15-member body it should only act on sanctions "in a manner that does not negatively affect the peace process." "We are not keen to punish people, we are keen to solve the situation and we need to get the elections in place so that people can decide on who runs the country," Lekota told reporters afterwards. "If we find that we have sanctions in place, then we would see this as a failure." Pierre Schori, the head of the UN mission in Cote d'Ivoire (ONUCI) told reporters that travel bans and asset freezes remained a definite option but suggested more verification would be done before any decision was reached. "It's very much on the table," he said. "It's important that the sanctions committee come down to Abidjan and report back to the Security Council." South Africa has been mediating for the last 10 months, at the request of the African Union, to try to bring peace to the West African nation that has been split into a government-run south and a rebel-held north for the last three years. On Tuesday, South Africa's Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad told a press briefing in Pretoria that the mediation had ended and it was now up to the UN to decide whether elections could go ahead as scheduled . But on Wednesday the Foreign Ministry clarified that the mediation was continuing. "What South Africa has concluded is not the mediation itself but a report on the current phase of the mediation," spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa told IRIN by telephone. With just under two months to go before the planned ballot, UN officials are starting to play down the significance of dates. "I'm not interested in dates. We are more interested in steps to get to the elections," Schori told reporters in New York. And on that front, there remains much work to be done. A voter register has not been drawn up, the National Electoral Commission supposed to supervise the elections has not got off the ground and deadlines in the disarmament process have fallen by the wayside. Meanwhile the security situation remains tense. "It makes grim reading," Schori said. "There is an absence of the rule of law and ongoing harassments." Underscoring that, ONUCI officials in Abidjan said that a peacekeeper had died in the main rebel city, Bouake, on Wednesday "from blows and wounds inflicted by as yet unidentified assailants". The 35-year-old Moroccan peacekeeper was found stabbed to death shortly after midnight near the police training school, UN military spokesman Renald Boismoreau said. ONUCI, whose 6,000 peacekeepers man the buffer zone with some 4,000 French troops, said it had opened an investigation into the killing.