By IPS Correspondents
ABIDJAN, Jan 27 2003 (IPS)

The latest peace deal, that triggered angry protests by supporters of President Laurent Gbagbo at the weekend, comes at a time of rising religious tensions in Côte d’Ivoire.

Under the deal, signed in Paris late last week, president Laurent Gbagbo, a southern Christian, will cede some of his powers to a neutral prime minister – Seydou Diarra – who will head a national unity government.

Diarra – a northern Muslim – headed a Forum for National Reconciliation set up by Gbagbo in an effort to defuse tensions in the strife-torn West Africa country.

Hundreds of thousands of Gbagbo supporters, protesting in Paris and Abidjan, the commercial capital of Côte d’Ivoire, rejected the power-sharing deal with rebels, sealed at a summit of 10 African leaders in the French capital.

Even before the peace deal, Imam I. Koudous, the president of the Superior Council of Imams of Côte d’Ivoire, had complained that ”the noose is tightening around our religion.”

”Since October 2000, the Muslim community has been subjected to a wave of extortions, disappearances and lynching,” he says.

Koudous’s outbursts follow the Jan 6 murder of Mahamoud Samassi, the imam of Siad Promo Mosque in Abidjan, the commercial capital of Côte d’Ivoire.

That day, at around one O’clock (13 GMT), four gunmen opened fire on the 50-year-old clergyman in front of his house.

Neighbours claim members of the National Armed Forces of Côte d’Ivoire were involved. ”The men who killed him were wearing military uniforms,” insists one neighbour.

Sammasi’s death has shaken the Muslim community.

”The government has a duty to protect all its citizens, especially religious leaders, whatever their creed,” says Koudous, who lives in Abidjan.

Two days after Samassi’s murder, a group of imams took to the streets of Abidjan, protesting, what it claims, the ”targeting” of Muslims, by the security forces, a phenomenon that, the imams say, began soon after the Sep 19, 2002 army revolt.

The police are investigating the murder. Samassi, who was a popular clergyman, taught mathematics at Moderne High School in Treichville, a middle-class suburb of Abidjan.

Samassi was known for ”telling it like it is” during his sermons in the mosque, according to a member of his family.

It has taken the Muslim community, which makes up more than half Abidjan’s three million inhabitants, the death of Samassi ”to break with the tradition of silence”.

”Imam Mahmoud Samassi’s death is of particular concern to us because it shows just how much Muslim leaders have become a target of assassinations in Côte d’Ivoire,” says Koudous.

Koudous also complains about the frequent ”searches of mosques and homes of Muslims in Abidjan, San Pedro, Divo and Gagnoa” by the security forces.

He also condemns the killing, on Oct 18, of two Muslims at a cemetery in Williamsville, a suburb of Abidjan, where two gunmen in military uniform fired into a crowd of mourners attending the burial of a woman. More than 20 worshipers were also gunned down in front of their mosque in Daloa, western Côte d’Ivoire, in October, according to Koudous.

In both cases, the ministry of defence issued statements, distancing the Ivorian security forces from the killings.

Muslims claim they now live in constant fear. Death squads, they say kidnap members of their community from home, their bullet-ridden bodies later discovered in outlying neighbourhoods of Abidjan.

Dr. Dakoury Tabley, the brother of Benoit Tabley, a top official of the Patriotic Movement of Côte d’Ivoire (MPCI), the main rebel group fighting in the north, has been lynched in a similar circumstance.

Gbagbo, who returned from Paris on Sunday, called for restraint and urged Ivorians ”not to attack innocent people”.

Earlier, Jules Yao Yao, army spokesperson, called on Ivorians to stay out of the conflict. ”Do not take the law into your own hands, and avoid turning this war into an ethnic or religious conflict,” he said.

Religious watchers blame the present tensions in Côte d’Ivoire on immigrants, who now make up around 40 percent of the country’s population. This is causing considerable stress to the nation. Land pressure and economic recession have led to tensions and clashes between Ivorians and immigrants.

”The rapid swell in the immigrant population has also created religious tension. Côte d’Ivoire sits atop the African ethnic/religious fault-line. The northern population is predominantly Muslim and the southern population is predominantly and traditionally Christian and animist,” says the Australia-based World Evangelical Alliance Religious Liberty.

The group, which monitors persecution of Christians, says 27 percent of Ivorians are Muslim, yet when the immigrant population is added in, Islam becomes the majority religion in Côte d’Ivoire. The immigrants have come from the surrounding strongly Islamic nations of Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea and Senegal, Niger, Mauritania and Nigeria.

”The situation is most marked in central Côte d’Ivoire. For example, the Baule people, who have lived in the region for centuries and are traditionally animist and Christian, now find themselves to be a minority in their homeland, a region that is today reportedly 68 percent Muslim – primarily immigrants,” says the Alliance.

This is not the first time that Ivorians have signed a peace accord. Last year they concluded one in Lome, Togo. There is fear that last week’s deal – backed by French President Jacque Chirac – may fail to end the four-month civil war, if government and rebels drag their feet over its implementation.

The civil war in Côte d’Ivoire has unleashed a wave of xenophobia, directed mainly against people from neighbouring Burkina Faso, who have settled in the north.

Côte d’Ivoire’s 16 million people include 2.2 million Burkinabe, 800,000 Malians and 230,000 Guineans, according to government statistics.

The anti-immigrant feelings in Côte d’Ivoire, once a bastion of stability in West Africa, began after the economic boom, which attracted millions of workers from poorer neighbours.

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