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France to Monitor Ivory Coast Truce

Vanguard (Lagos)
NEWS
October 21, 2002
Posted to the web October 23, 2002

IVORY Coast's former colonial ruler France agreed Friday to help oversee a
ceasefire as rebels who staged a four-week uprising said they would respect the
west African-brokered truce but not lay down arms. French foreign ministry
spokeswoman Cecile Pozzo di Borgo said in Paris that Ivorian President Laurent
Gbagbo "asked for France's help in implementing the ceasefire accord" by
providing troops to patrol a buffer zone between the rebel-held northern half
of Ivory Coast and the government-controlled areas. "Our country has accepted
that request," she said, noting: "This is an observer mission and a mission to
preserve the ceasefire." Di Borgo said the French troops' involvement would
"not last longer than two weeks" when west African peacekeepers were due to
arrive to take over the role of a buffer force. Gbagbo agreed to the ceasefire
late Thursday, pulling the world's biggest cocoa producer from the brink of
civil war.
The deal ensivages talks as early as Tuesday between the government and the
rebels in a city in Ivory Coast. But the path towards lasting peace remains an
uphill task. Guillaume Kigbafori Soro, the leader of the rebels' political
wing, Ivory Coast Patriotic Movement (MPCI), Friday said the insurgents would
not disarm and insisted that Gbagbo stand down. "We will not lay down our arms.
We will continue the war of liberation against the fascist regime of Laurent
Gbagbo," he told AFP by phone. But he gave his assurance that the rebels would
abide by the ceasefire.
The agreement appears to leave the rebels in control of the northern half of
Ivory Coast. The rebels, meanwhile, appeared to be divided on the ceasefire.
Sergeant Zacharias Kone, the rebel chief in charge of Vavoua near the western
cocoa capital of Daloa, told AFP: "For the moment, there is no ceasefire. "The
whole world knows that Gbagbo is a chameleon," he said, accusing the Ivorian
president of accepting a truce to gain time to re-arm his forces.
Rebels had captured Daloa on Sunday, but the city of 200,000 people was retaken
by government troops on Wednesday in their first major victory in the four-week
rebel campaign. The rebels have said they want to oust Gbagbo, to reverse an
order to demobilise some 700 troops, and to fight for the rights of Ivory
Coast's Muslim majority population who they claim have been marginalised.
Soro, the rebels' politicial leader, has called for an interim government to be
set up for eight months in Ivory Coast, with a leader "drawn from civil
society", whose key role would be to organise "free, democratic and historic
elections". Gbagbo, who in just a few days will mark the second anniversary of
his election to power, Thursday said he had chosen the path of dialogue because
there "has been a lot of useless damage" already. The government roped in
Angolan soldiers to bolster their forces -- a move officially denied by Abidjan
and Luanda but finally confirmed by Ivory Coast's national assembly speaker
Mamadou Koulibaly in a newspaper interview published Friday.
Gbagbo also said he would revive national peace talks to "exorcise the demons
of war." The Ivorian leader had launched reconciliation talks to bury social
and political tensions and violence that came to a head after a coup on
Christmas Eve 1999, the country's first since it gained independence from
France in 1960. He appeared to have succeeded in burying the hatchet between
himself and three other national leaders. But one of them, General Robert Guei
who led the 1999 coup, was killed in Abidjan on the first day of the uprising.
Opposition leader and former prime minister Alassane Ouattara has been
sheltered in the French embassy since the start of the uprising, while former
president Henri Konan Bedie, toppled in the 1999 coup, has maintained a very
low profile.
Ouattara, who was barred from contesting the 2000 persidential elections won by
Gbagbo, as well as Bedie returned last year from self-imposed exile in France
to attend the peace talks. Ivory Coast is the world's largest producer of
cocoa, growing 40 percent of the world's crop. The conflict had helped push
prices to touch 17 year highs, but cocoa prices had eased Friday on news of the
ceasefire.

   

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