POLITICS: First Meeting between Rebels and Ivorian President

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Georges Konan

ABIDJAN, Apr 18 2003 (IPS) - Rebel ministers sat down with President Laurent Gbagbo this week in the first meeting of Cote d’Ivoire’s new reconciliation government in the economic capital, Abidjan, raising hopes in the troubled West African nation for a return to peace after nearly seven months of civil war.

The government’s spokesperson and minister of economic infrastructure, Patrick Achi, said the ministers, who met on Thursday, called on "all actors to immediately cease acts of belligerence and commit in a resolute and irrevocable manner to the way of peace."

Achi also said that President Gbagbo had "expressed his optimism about a return to peace", referring to the presence of all ministers at the Abidjan meeting "a major first step to the return to peace".

The rebel ministers, including leader Guillaume Soro, had arrived in Abidjan earlier in the week – the first time rebels had officially travelled to the city since fighting broke out last September.

The reconciliation government was created in a peace accord organised by France and signed by rebel and government representatives in January in Paris. It is made up of members of President Gbagbo’s party, rebel forces, and opposition parties.

Thursday’s sense of cooperation and optimism about impending peace stood in stark contrast to overwhelming evidence that the Ivorian army has been bombing rebel positions with helicopter attacks over the past week and a half.

In statements released Wednesday and Thursday from Cote d’Ivoire’s second city, rebel-held Bouake, rebel spokesperson Antoine Beugre said that government helicopter attacks had resulted in more than two dozen deaths and over 90 injuries, many of them civilian.

Beugre called upon several international groups – comprising a United Nations committee that is monitoring the Cote d’Ivoire peace process, a peacekeeping military force representing the Economic Committee of West African States (ECOWAS), and the French force that is aiding the ECOWAS force in monitoring fragile cease-fires in the country – to officially denounce the government’s actions.

Cote d’Ivoire’s army spokesperson, Lt. Col. N’Goran Aka, has repeatedly denied rebel claims that helicopters have been used to attack rebel-held towns in the western part of the country, saying that the aircraft have remained grounded.

The use of helicopters was banned in a January cease-fire signed by government and rebel representatives.

Despite Aka’s claims to the contrary, the U.N. monitoring committee drafted a report to the Security Council earlier in the week confirming and denouncing the helicopter attacks, while blaming both sides for "repeated violations" of cease-fire agreements.

Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF), a French-based humanitarian organisation, posted a statement on its website this week saying that they had treated about 50 wounded civilians in a hospital in western Cote d’Ivoire. MSF said many of the wounded were women, children, and elderly people and that they had claimed to be victims of helicopter attacks.

The western zone, near Cote d’Ivoire’s border with Liberia, has been the most volatile in the country over the past few months. Rebel and army officials have repeatedly accused each other of instigating fighting in the region, which has been joined by many fighters crossing over from Liberia.

Liberians are reportedly fighting for both rebel and government forces, and have been accused by many of looting and violence in the area. Friday’s edition of the Ivorian newspaper Fraternite Matin reported that French, government, and rebel military representatives met together for the first time on Thursday to discuss the fighting in the west, agreeing to "bring together their forces to fight the Liberians and Sierra Leoneans who are carrying out the massacres in the west of the country."

A former French colony, Cote d’Ivoire was once the most stable and prosperous country in volatile West Africa. A 1999 coup d’etat ended nearly 40 years of peace, and the country has been a victim of instability ever since.

The current conflict began on Sep 19, 2002, with an attempt to overthrow President Gbagbo. Although the coup attempt failed, rebels quickly occupied the northern half of the country, and later captured much of the west.

The Ivorian government claims that the fighting has killed several thousand people, and caused hundreds of thousands to be displaced from their homes.