International panel meets, Egeland winds up visit

A panel of international mediators overseeing a UN peace blueprint for Cote d’Ivoire met on Friday as the European Commission pledged funds to assist reunification of the war-divided nation. The European Commission pledged 33.2 million euros ($US 39.5 million) to assist in a countrywide scheme to grant Ivorian citizenship or residence papers to the nearly one in five people living in the country without an identity card. The pledge was made to interim Prime Minister Charles Konan Banny. The issues of identity and citizenship are at the heart of the war that has split Cote d’Ivoire in two since 2002, with rebels controlling the north and President Laurent Gbagbo’s administration the south. The lack of ID for an estimated three million people prompted many to join the rebel cause, and today makes travel across the divide difficult. Identifying Ivorians and determining their nationality is also a key to organising presidential elections by next October according to the UN peace plan set out in Security Council Resolution 1633. The panel of mediators assisting the implementation of 1633 - the International Working Group (IWG) - met for the fourth of its monthly meetings on Friday under the chairmanship of UN special envoy to Cote d’Ivoire Pierre Schori and Congolese Foreign Minister Rodolphe Adada. The group, which also includes Prime Minister Banny and government ministers from France and South Africa, is to issue by this weekend a recommendation on a dispute about the make-up of the Independent Election Commission. An IWG recommendation last month on the fate of the Ivorian parliament, whose mandate expired in December, triggered a political furore in the loyalist camp and set off four days of violent anti-UN protests in January in which UN offices, vehicles and compounds were torched and supplies looted, both in Abidjan and in the west. Winding up a visit to Cote d’Ivoire this week, Jan Egeland, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, lashed out against “impunity for the criminal acts that have been perpetrated against civilians, as well as the humanitarian agencies.” “They were pillaged, looted, destroyed and burned,” Egeland told the IWG. “Even the medicines had been destroyed,” he added, after a visit to the western town of Guiglo, scene of some of the worst attacks by pro-government militants. “It is as criminal to instigate violence as to carry out violence,” he added, referring to hate messages broadcast on radio. “The United Nations humanitarian agencies will do their best to return to the west as soon as possible, but there are real concerns that humanitarian space is shrinking and that respect for humanitarian principles is eroding.” Egeland, who also visited the northern rebel headquarters town of Bouake, called for the return to the north of teachers, doctors and other civil servants who left the region after the start of the war, leaving hospitals, schools and basic matters such as roadwork in the hands of volunteers and NGOs. UN and humanitarian agencies assist some 3.5 million people in the country of 17 million and in 2006 appealed for US $40.5 million to provide that aid.