Mediators urge action as aid workers focus on troubled west

A group of international mediators overseeing a UN peace plan for Cote d’Ivoire have urged key players in the conflict to move quickly on essential obstacles to October polls while aid workers made commitments to focus on the troubled west. The International Working Group (GTI) on Thursday urged key players to press ahead to disarm tens of thousands of rebel and pro-government militias and identify of up to three million disenfranchised Ivorians simultaneously ahead of the end October poll deadline. “There is very little time left” to carry out the peace plan, warned Congolese Foreign Minister Rodolphe Adada, who co-chairs the group with UN special envoy Pierre Schori. President Laurent Gbagbo said earlier this week that weapons should be handed in first contrary to previous agreements he signed earlier this month with rebel and opposition leaders and fears of more delays. The GTI was set up in October to assist in implementing UN resolution 1633, the blueprint for reuniting the war-divided nation and organising presidential elections considered essential to peace. Some 7,000 UN and 4,000 French peacekeepers monitor a buffer zone between the rebel held north and the government controlled south and have come under attack during Cote d’Ivoire’s sometimes turbulent peace process. Some 500 UN peacekeepers were forced to abandon positions in western Cote d’Ivoire during riots targeting UN offices and staff in January. Five pro-government supporters died in clashes with peacekeepers in the town of Guiglo, sparking a looting spree which destroyed UN facilities in the town. However, this week the troops from Benin and Bangladesh were redeployed to the west as aid workers there stepped up humanitarian aid to the region, which holds an estimated 10 percent of the total number of war-displaced. Assistance will be channelled through a new UN fund, the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), representatives said in a joint press conference on Wednesday. At least 700,000 people have been displaced nationally since a failed attempt to topple President Laurent Gbagbo in September 2002, according to a new survey financed by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Although the security situation in the west had improved since January, say UN officials, there is still no short term solution for some 7,000 mainly Burkinabe immigrants who were driven off their cocoa farms and sought shelter in a temporary camp for displaced in Guiglo. “Most displaced express a strong desire to go back to their plantations but the conditions for their return are not met until this day,” said Jacques Seurt of the UN’s International Organisation for Migration. But nearly 9,000 Liberians sheltered in refugee camps will have no choice but to return home or resettle in Cote d’Ivoire by the end of the year. UN agencies are already pulling the plug on free medical care and monthly food allocations for 6,000 Liberians in the Nicla camp near Guiglo and 2,600 refugees in the southwestern Tabou transit centre. “Strictly speaking we cannot close the Nicla camp, because the refugees have built their own village there,” said Sanda Kimbimbi of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). “But we are encouraging the refugees to relocate as we will stop assisting them by December 2006.” Nearly 38,000 Liberians refugees are currently living in Cote d’Ivoire. Several thousand have settled in the main city Abidjan but the majority live in villages along the Liberian border. Donors are axing funds for Liberian refugees in other countries as well. In Guinea, tens of thousands of Liberians have been told to go home following elections last year which brought a new Liberian president to power and revived hopes for lasting peace in the war-ravaged nation.