COTE D IVOIRE: UN must take decisive steps to avert disaster, think tank

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

DAKAR, 12 Oct 2005 (IRIN) - Time is running out to salvage peace in Cote d’Ivoire and the United Nations needs to take decisive action to avert a return to violence, according to a report by the Brussels-based think tank Crisis Group released on Wednesday.

“It is now clear to everyone that this is the last chance we have to steer Cote d’Ivoire towards elections…decisive action is needed,” Gilles Olakounle Yabi, Crisis Group analyst, told IRIN.

The report warns that if sweeping measures are not taken to end definitively the conflict sparked by a September 2002 rebellion that split the country in two, Cote d’Ivoire could join the list of other African nations that have descended into violent ethnic conflict in the past decade.

The Crisis Group report comes one day ahead of a special meeting of the UN Security Council in New York, where high on the agenda are proposals to increase the size of a 6,000-strong UN peacekeeping force in the world’s largest cocoa exporter.

A three-year-old peace deal was to have been sealed with presidential elections on 30 October. But nearly all key deadlines building up to elections have been missed and last month UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said intransigence on the part of all the warring parties rendered elections impossible.

President Laurent Gbagbo’s mandate officially expires in less than three weeks, but with the presidential elections called off, the African Union has suggested the former university lecturer be granted 12 more months in office to avert a “constitutional crisis.”

“Unless the UN Security Council on 13 October strengthens the AU measures and mandates an ambitious twelve-month rescue plan, disaster remains on the horizon,” the Crisis Group says in its report. “The machetes and AK-47s will come out again.”

Twelve-month deadline

Crisis Group recommends that if presidential elections do not take place within 12 months the AU should install an entirely new transitional government made up solely of civil society representatives.

A UN representative should assume responsibility for organising credible elections and the long-running problem of nationality must be resolved once and for all, the report says.

“Nationality is a key component of the crisis in Cote d’Ivoire. It is an old problem – not something created by Gbagbo but the main political players are collectively responsible,” the Crisis Group’s Yabi said.

Nationality was used as a political tool by Henri Konan Bedie, former president and current leader of the main opposition party the Democratic Party of Cote d’Ivoire (PDCI), to exclude a key rival from elections, Yabi said.

Bedie and Alassane Ouattara – head of the Rally of Republicans party (RDR) and a key Gbagbo rival – have both participated in recent South Africa-mediated negotiations in Pretoria.

Yabi praised the South African team for resolving key stumbling blocks, such as Ouattara’s exclusion from presidential elections, but said their team of legal experts did not have the necessary depth of knowledge to deal adequately with Cote d’Ivoire’s nationality problem.

The Crisis Group says UN sanctions should be imposed against rebel and militia leaders who have not disarmed as agreed under the January 2003 Marcoussis peace accord and subsequent deals signed in South Africa. The group also calls for investigations into human rights violations since fighting began three years ago.

To achieve these goals, a new forum for national dialogue should be established before 1 February 2006, the report says.

“This plan may appear overly ambitious and difficult to apply, but halfway measures have not worked. It was partly the lack of international audacity that cost millions of lives in Rwanda, the Congo and Sudan in the past decade,” the report says.

And many fear the violence could start as soon Gbagbo’s mandate officially ends on the 30 October.

At a press conference in the economic capital, Abidjan, earlier this week, key opposition parties said they had not ruled the possibility of organising demonstrations against Gbagbo’s extended presidency.

But further demonstrations would likely lead to more loss of life, the Crisis Group said, citing anti-government demonstrations that left 120 people dead in March 2004.

Then, hundreds of opposition supporters - mainly from ethnic groups from the north of the country – were killed or beaten in house-to-house raids by security forces and pro-government militias.

And the massacre of scores of men women and children around the town of Duekoue on the evening of the 31 May and 1 June this year, is a foretaste of what could be a national bloodletting, unless the international community takes a more interventionist approach to the Ivorian problem, Crisis Group warns.

[ENDS]