Foreign journalist disappears in Abidjan

A journalist holding joint French and Canadian nationality has disappeared in Abidjan, raising speculation in the local media that he may have been arrested and killed by armed men linked to the government of President Laurent Gbagbo. French and Canadian diplomats said on Monday that Guy-Andre Kieffer, the Cote d'Ivoire correspondent of the French newsletter La Lettre du Continent was last seen at a shopping mall in the city on Friday, but they declined to speculate what may have happened to him. "There is nothing that allows us to make a link between his work as a journalist and his disappearance," one French diplomat, who asked not to be named, told IRIN. Last October, Jean Helene, a correspondent of Radio France Internationale, was shot dead at point blank range by a policeman as he was waiting to interview a group of detainees who were about to be released from the police headquarters in Abidjan. His killer was subsequently arrested, convicted of murder and sentenced to 17 years in jail. The French government and Radio France Internationale have often been accused by Gbagbo and his supporters of favouring the rebel movement which has occupied the northern half of Cote d'Ivoire since September 2002. Helene was killed at a time of rising tension between Gbagbo and the rebels. Although Gbagbo condemned the murder, he also said he could understand his people's frustration with France and why someone might felt driven to such a desperate act. Kieffer has gone missing during a new period of rising tension between the president on one side and the rebels and parliamentary opposition parties on the other. Following the security forces' bloody repression of a banned demonstration against Gbagbo on 25 March, the New Forces rebel movement and the four main parliamentary opposition parties walked out of a broad-based government of national reconciliation that has been struggling for the past 15 months to implement a peace agreement aimed at ending the country's civil war. The government says 37 people were killed during two days of street clashes and house-to-house searches by the security forces, but the opposition puts the death toll at between 350 and 500. The stand-off continued on Monday, despite efforts by Prime Minister Seydou Diarra to persuade Gbagbo to accept a list of opposition pre-conditions for returning to government. These include the restoration of the right to demonstrate peacefully, which the president said at the weekend that he accepted in principle. However, Alphonse Djedje-Mady, the secretary-general of the Democratic Party of Cote d'Ivoire (PDCI), the largest opposition party in parliament, said no date had been set so far for a new opposition rally to test the president's tolerance and there were no plans for the opposition alliance to resume a dialogue with him either. "We haven't set a date yet (for a new rally)," said Djedje-Mady, who acts as official spokesman of the "G7" opposition alliance. He added that the opposition was not optimistic that Gbagbo would concede its demands. "If he does, so much the better. If he doesn't, we won't be surprised," the opposition leader said. Kieffer, 54, only worked part time as a journalist. He was also a cocoa and coffee trade expert for a small firm of consultants called Commodities Corporate Consulting. Cote d'Ivoire is the world's biggest cocoa producer and a large exporter of robusta coffee. The daily Le Patriote, which is owned by the Rally for the Republic (RDR) opposition party, said he was believed to have been detained by plain clothes security men and speculated that the bullet-ridden body of a white man which had been seen in a banana plantation outside Abidjan might have been his. Another newspaper, Le Courier D'Abidjan, also questioned whether Kieffer was still alive. It said he had frequently annoyed the authorities by his reporting of murky financial deals in Cote d'Ivoire linked to the world of commodities.