Both sides in Ivory Coast’s four-month civil war said they believed peace talks which started yesterday outside Paris could end a conflict that risks plunging west Africa into turmoil.
”I am optimistic. I think we will find solutions, and what we hope is that everyone is flexible so that we arrive at a negotiated political solution,” said Guillaume Soro, head of the main northern rebel group, the Patriotic Movement of Ivory Coast (MPCI).
The president, Laurent Gbagbo, said he was ”totally confident” that the talks would allow his government to regain authority over rebel areas. ”If I am proposed something that can lead to the end of the war and which I can do, I will do it,” he said.
But the two sides are deeply divided: the rebels want Gbagbo to quit, saying his election in 2002 was unfair and insisting that early presidential and general elections are the only way to end the bloodshed.
He has rejected calls for his resignation and says the constitution does not allow him to call early elections. He has demanded that the rebels disarm, which they refuse to do until the peace process succeeds.
France’s foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, who brokered the talks, said the delegates ”must succeed” in reaching a deal for the sake of the country’s 17-million people, split along ethnic lines by the war. The conflict has displaced about a million people.
”Ivory Coast is a wounded country,” he said. ”It is up to you to head back in the right direction. History is waiting.”
The talks at the national rugby centre south of Paris follow a truce pact on Monday between the government and two rebel groups that have emerged in the country’s west in recent weeks. The MPCI signed a similar deal last October which has often been violated.
With the rebels all calling for elections which Gbagbo refuses to hold, most observers have been pessimistic about the prospects for peace. One commentator dismissed the latest truce as a short-term measure ”to prevent them punching each other in Paris”. – Guardian Unlimited Â