TUESDAY, 3.30PM
FOLLOWING last week’s secession of the Comoran island of Anjouan, a second island in the Indian Ocean archipelago on Monday seceded from the federation. A small group of secessionists on the island of Moheli on Monday named a new president and prime minister and called for a return to French rule.
Meanwhile the Comoran government on Grand Comore said on Tuesday it will not intervene militarily on the breakaway islands for the moment. Comoran charge d’affaires in Paris Ahmed Wadaane said his government is giving priority to securing a peaceful settlement on the two islands.
He said the government is backing such efforts of the envoy of the Organisation if African Unity, Pierre Yere.
Yere on Tuesday told separatist leaders on Anjouan that secession from the Comores federation is “totally unacceptable”. He told 71-year-old Koranic teacher Aballah Ibrahim, “president” of the self-declared “State of Anjouan,” that the OAU is ready to help resolve the crisis, but cannot do so in an “insurrectional atmosphere”.
Yere, who is the Ivory Coast’s ambassador to Ethiopia, also told the secessionists that it was too late to turn back the pages of history and return to French colonial rule, as many separatists are demanding.