Debt payments suspended

Cote d’Ivoire’s new head, Brigadier General Robert Guei, on Wednesday announced that payments on Cote d’Ivoire’s foreign debt had been suspended for the moment. “The state coffers are totally empty,” Guei said at the inaugural session of a new transitional government. He added that the state had only been able to pay public servants’ salaries “because we have momentarily suspended the settlement of external commitments”. “The pillage has been immense and systematic,” he said, adding that everything would be done to recover the funds looted from the state. Guei heads Cote d’Ivoire’s Conseil National de Salut Public (CNSP), set up following the overthrow of President Henri Konan Bedie on 24 December 1999. He is also president and minister of security in the transitional government, whose composition he announced on Tuesday. The government includes members of the CNSP, political parties and civil society. However, one of the country’s two main opposition parties, the Front Populaire Ivoirien (FPI) on Tuesday declined to participate in the new cabinet. FPI head Laurent Gbagbo charged that the other main opposition party, ex-Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara’s Rassemblement des Republicains (RDR) was over-represented in the new government.