Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo, facing rebels who refuse to lay down their arms, must now battle on three fronts — military, diplomatic and political.
”The logic of war will inevitably lead to the collapse of the State, with terrible consequences for the survival of the region,” if Gbagbo does not sign a ceasefire with the rebels, the Dakar-based African Encounter for the Defence of Human Rights warned on Wednesday.
With the rebellion by mutineers and former soldiers who have returned from exile about to enter its fourth week, the insurgents hold the entire Muslim-dominated north of the west African country, the world’s biggest cocoa-producer, and key towns in the centre, west and east.
Gbagbo went on national radio and television Tuesday evening to urge the rebels to lay down their arms, then negotiate, but they spurned the appeal on Wednesday, saying they would fight on.
On the diplomatic front, relations with other west African countries — and with former colonial power France ? have deteriorated sharply, and on the political front, Gbagbo’s attempts at national reconciliation are in tatters.
His address on Tuesday was more an exhortation than a threat, a far cry from the days following the September 19 uprising when the army crushed the mutineers in Abidjan, the big city on the Atlantic coast, at a cost of 270 dead on both sides, and the government said the only negotiations with the rebels would be over the details of their surrender.
To the rebels, the president said on Tuesday: ”I urge you, in the name of Ivory Coast, to lay down your arms. You will see then that everything will be on the table. So long as you are armed, and attack us, we are obliged to defend ourselves.”
The rebels are demanding an end to discrimination against northern soldiers in a country becoming increasingly divided between the largely Muslim north and Christian-dominated south.
The president’s placatory tone did not hide the underlying warning: that he is prepared to commit the army to fight to the finish, despite an uncertain outcome.
Gbagbo’s words to the 20 000 French nationals and 4,5-million west African immigrants who live in Ivory Coast were reassuring: the French were Ivory Coast’s friends, he said, and the west Africans need not fear xenophobic excesses.
Despite diplomatic words by both sides in public, relations
Paris are at an all-time low. This is a result of repeated attacks, some by government ministers, against France’s diplomatic stance on the crisis, against the more than
1 000 French troops in Ivory Coast who are nevertheless providing the Ivorian army with logistical support and effectively blocking a direct rebel push south on Abidjan, and against French-based media.
Relations with other west African states are also tense: the Ivorian presidency declared at the weekend that the ”war of occupation” was ”orchestrated and financed” by external and internal forces and backed by ”neighbouring countries”.
Niger and Ghana have drawn up plans to evacuate their nationals, and Burkina Faso — accused by media close to the Ivorian government of masterminding the rebellion — is preparing camps for any mass return of the three million Burkinabes in Ivory Coast.
Security forces have torched the homes of hundreds of immigrants in Abidjan shanty-towns, saying they had been hiding weapons there and that rebels had fled into the slums.
Gbagbo first promised mediators from the 15-nation Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) that he would sign a ceasefire with the rebels, but reneged on that pledge on Sunday, saying he would not put his elected government on a par with the insurgents.
That incensed the mediators, who boycotted a planned dinner and left for home immediately. On Wednesday, Nigeria said it had withdrawn three ground-attack jets that had been standing by at Abidjan’s military airport to back any west African peacekeeping force which would have acted as a buffer between the two sides.
The mediators said privately they believed the Ivorian army had used the delay over the ceasefire to reinforce strategic positions despite an agreement to freeze troop movements during the pre-truce negotiations.
Gbagbo, whose election in October 2000 was surrounded by political violence, claimed in his address that the nation’s voters had put him in office to reconcile a country which was regarded as a beacon of stability and prosperity before a coup d’etat on Christmas Day, 1999.
Gbagbo launched a National Reconciliation Forum in late 2001, but it achieved nothing. Now, leading opposition figure and former prime minister Alassane Ouattara, a Muslim northerner, is in refuge with the French ambassador in Abidjan; general Robert Guei, who seized power in the 1999 coup and ruled for 10 months, was killed on the first day of the uprising, probably assassinated, and former president Henri Konan Bedie is keeping quiet. – Sapa-AFP