Ivory Coast’s main rebel movement held talks with President Blaise Compaore on Burkina Faso during a west African tour to garner support for their claim to key posts in a new unity government.
An AFP journalist said the talks, led by Guillaume Soro, the executive secretary of the Ivory Coast Patriotic Movement (MPCI) holding the northern half of the world’s top cocoa producer since September, and Compaore went on till late on Monday.
Ivory Coast has charged that its northern neighbour Burkina Faso helped foment the rebellion that has split the country in two for five months, a charge repeatedly denied by the Ouagadougou government.
The MPCI delegation earlier held talks with Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and Mamadou Tandja of Niger.
The rebel delegation was accompanied by Mohamed Ibn Chambas, executive secretary of the 15-nation Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), which has been trying to mediate an end to Ivory Coast’s worst crisis.
According to Burkina Faso’s state-run Sidwaya newspaper, Louis Dacoury Tabley, the man in charge of the MPCI’s external relations department, was also present at the meeting with Compaore. The rebels flew into Ouagadougou, the Burkina Faso capital, on a plane belonging to the president of Niger and were received at the airport by Burkinabe Foreign Minister Youssouf Ouedraogo.
Soro said the group was determined ”to seek a political settlement to the crisis.
”We will continue to tour the capitals to seek peace and reconciliation in Ivory Coast,” he added. His delegation went to Nigeria before heading to Niger.
Niger and Nigeria are both members of a five-nation contact group set up by the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) to try to mediate an end to the conflict which threatens to destabilise volatile west Africa.
Rebels hold the mainly Muslim north and part of the west, while the government controls the mostly Christian south.
After Soro’s MPCI team met Nigerian President Obasanjo on Sunday and Monday, they issued a joint statement saying that Nigeria would ”take an active role” in ensuring that a controversial peace deal was implemented in full.
The rebels claim the French-brokered deal gave them the key defence and interior ministries in a power-sharing government but this has been rejected by the country’s armed forces and four leading political parties.
In Nigeria, ”President Obasanjo urged all sides to the ongoing crisis in Cote d’Ivoire to continue to utilise dialogue and negotiations to return the country to peace and stability,” an Ecowas statement said.
Soro led the rebel side in unsuccessful talks on Friday in the Ghanaian capital Accra with the new ”consensus” prime minister Seydou Diarra on the formation of a government to end the ruinous war. – Sapa-AFP