Côte d’Ivoire’s main opposition parties signed a deal in Paris on Wednesday ahead of general elections later this year, an alliance that will see them govern together should they defeat President Laurent Gbagbo.
”This is a major moment, a promise of reconciliation and a new change for our poor country in crisis and despair,” said former prime minister Alassane Ouattara as he put pen to paper to sign an agreement alongside ex-president Henri Konan Bedie and two other opposition movements.
”This alliance responds to the needs of the people, who are confronted with a realpolitik that has steered us towards chaos and ruin,” said Ouattara, who has already announced he will contest the October polls.
”We now urge all Ivorians to forgive one another in order to rise from the bloodshed and the misery.”
The agreement formalises an alliance born in July last year at talks in Accra, Ghana, aiming to jumpstart a moribund peace process in the world’s top cocoa producer after a divisive civil war begun in September 2002 left the north in the hands of rebels and the south controlled by Gbagbo loyalists.
It lays out terms for the distribution of power in the event of an opposition win in presidential polls slated for October 30, with legislative elections to follow.
While setting victory in the presidential balloting as its main goal, the deal does not foresee the naming of a consensus candidate. It does stipulate that candidates will drop out of the race after the first round in favour of the one with the most votes.
The alliance between Ouattara and Bedie, heirs to the legacy of post-independence icon Felix Houphouet Boigny, has been viewed with scepticism by Gbagbo supporters, who note that Ouattara was banned from standing in 2000 polls by a constitutional amendment pushed through by Bedie to eliminate his strongest competition.
”We are not opposed to reconciliation, but we do not want to see an artificial and circumstantial reconciliation that is only politically motivated,” said Laurent Dona Fologo, a former leader of Bedie’s Ivory Coast Democratic Party who is now the third-ranking member of Gbagbo’s government.
”Those who drape themselves in the ideology of Houphouet failed to learn how to maintain it, and are at the root of the problems that now plague us.” — Sapa-AFP