POLITICS-COTE D’IVOIRE: Efforts to End Civil War Take On an Int’l Tone

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Georges Konan

ABIDJAN, May 3 2003 (IPS) - Wary political efforts to put a stop to more than seven months of civil war in Cote d’Ivoire took on an international tone this week, with government and rebel forces sitting down again for peace talks as war-torn Liberia weighed in and the United Nations asked for millions of dollars in aid for the region.

On Friday, Cote d’Ivoire President Laurent Gbagbo reviewed a ceasefire accord, agreed to the previous day by loyalist and rebel troops.

"Now from east to west the ceasefire will be complete and total," said Michel Gueu, who represented rebel forces at the talks and said the agreement would likely be signed in the coming days.

Previous ceasefires signed between rebel and government troops have been repeatedly violated, especially in the area close to the country’s border with Liberia.

Gueu, Minister of Sports in the country’s new reconciliation government, said that a monitoring force would be sent to western Cote d’Ivoire to ensure the accord is applied. The monitoring force was to include rebel and government soldiers, along with peacekeeping troops from France and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

France, which has about 4,000 peacekeeping soldiers in Cote d’Ivoire, one of its former colonies, was reportedly ready to send more than 900 troops to the western part of the country.

In addition, Liberia’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Lewis Brown said on Thursday that his country’s army was ready to do all it could to help monitor the zone.

Liberian forces could be used to "help seal off points of infiltration from both sides," said Brown.

Liberians have been accused of taking up arms for both rebel and government forces in the volatile west of Cote d’Ivoire, near its border with Liberia. Fleeing civilians have repeatedly blamed English-speaking fighters in the area of looting and indiscriminate violence.

Rebel and government spokespersons have also accused rebels from Sierra Leone of contributing to the fragility of the zone. Last week Cote d’Ivoire rebels accused Sierra Leoneans of executing western rebel military commander Felix Doh near the border with Liberia.

Antoine Beugre, spokesperson for the Patriotic Movement for Cote d’Ivoire

(MPCI), the largest and most influential of the country’s rebel movements, said the foreign fighters in the west were being led by Sam Bockarie, the notorious leader of Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF).

Bockarie, more commonly known by his battle name, Mosquito, is being sought for war crimes by the prosecutor of the Special Court of Sierra Leone. Earlier this week the Special Court claimed Bockarie, whose RUF fighters gained infamy for cutting off the limbs of innocent civilians during his country’s 10-year war, was hiding in Liberia. The Liberian government denies the charge.

As the country awaited word on Friday of the signing of the cease-fire, President Gbagbo met privately with all nine rebels who now hold seats in the new reconciliation government.

The power-sharing government is the product of a peace accord signed on Jan 24 outside of Paris. France helped broker the deal, which created a government compromised of ministers from Gbagbo’s party, rebel forces, and other opposition parties.

Earlier in the week, United Nations agencies came together in Abidjan to launch an appeal for nearly 86 million U.S. dollars in funding for the humanitarian crisis gripping the region as a result of the Cote d’Ivoire conflict.

The money is needed, according to officials, to pay for health, education, nutrition, and other needs in Cote d’Ivoire and its five neighbours: Liberia, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Ghana. Nearly three million people in those countries have been directly affected from the war, says the United Nations, including one million who have been displaced from their homes in Cote d’Ivoire.

There are about 1,200 ECOWAS soldiers in Cote d’Ivoire helping to monitor ceasefire lines. "The ECOWAS force is about 2,000 short of what it should be because off lack of funds," said Brown, the Liberian Foreign Affairs Minister.

At a UN Security Council meeting addressing the conflict this week, the United States pledged 4 million U.S. dollars to support the ECOWAS peacekeeping force.

More and more international humanitarian and human rights activists are expressing concern that the Cote d’Ivoire conflict is destabilising the region to such an extent that it bears a frightening resemblance to Central Africa, where years of war were touched off by 1994’s genocide in Rwanda. The ensuing fighting spread to the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo, where several other African nations became involved and more than three million have died.

Cote d’Ivoire – the world’s number one exporter of cocoa and among Africa’s leading producers of coffee, cotton, and rubber – was long known as the most prosperous and stable country in West Africa. A coup d’etat in 1999 brought that era to a close and touched off years of political and economic instability.

The current crisis began in September of last year, when a failed attempt to overthrow President Gbagbo quickly led to rebel groups occupying the northern half of the country. Within a few months new rebel factions emerged and took over much of the west.

The government estimates that more than 3,000 people have died in the fighting.