President concerned about Ivorian situation

Burkina Faso President Blaise Compaore expressed concern on Tuesday that his country was being made a possible scapegoat for political instability in neighbouring Cote d’Ivoire. “We do not know what to say, today, concerning the situation in Cote d’Ivoire without being involved in one way or another on either side,” he told reporters in Ouagadougou. That reference was to a prevailing public feeling in part of Cote d’Ivoire and an Ivorian court ruling last year that a major opposition political figure in that country, Alassan Ouattara, did not qualify to run for political office on grounds of nationality. Compaore, who until recently hardly spoke publicly about the situation in Cote d’Ivoire, said on Tuesday that “Ivorian officials have chosen to make an Ivorian politician a citizen of Burkina Faso”. Ouattara, a Muslim who claims to be from northern Cote d’Ivoire, was disqualified form presidential and parliamentary elections on the grounds that he was not an Ivorian. Some of his critics say he once represented Burkina Faso in at the BCEAO, the central bank for West African countries in the franc monetary zone. The public perception is that he would constitute a formidable challenger to any presidential candidate in a free and fair election. Burkina Faso is a landlocked country. In its 1998 population census release on Saturday, the Ivorian National Institute of Statistics puts the Burkina Faso nationals living in Cote d’Ivoire at 2.4 million. There are fears in Burkina Faso that its citizens would bear the brunt of an anti-foreigner backlash over the Ouattara issue.