Opposition parties and former rebels in Côte d’Ivoire said they would continue their protests against President Laurent Gbagbo on Friday despite a violent crackdown by security forces that left at least 25 people dead a day earlier.
The police and army used deadly force to stop the opposition from holding a banned march in the main city, Abidjan, on Thursday.
The events prompted two key groups to pull out of the government of national unity, effectively terminating the country’s fragile peace accord.
Twenty-five people, including two police officers, were killed in Thursday’s clashes, police Director General Yapo Kouassi told a news conference in Abidjan.
He said his officers fired only in self-defence and claimed many demonstrators were armed and violent.
”It was the fault of the protestors that the demonstration degenerated,” Kouassi said.
The demonstration was in fact ”an attempted armed insurrection”, the secretary general of the ruling Ivorian Popular Front, Miaka Oureto, said on state television.
Opposition officials put the death toll at 31.
The opposition wanted to protest what they describe as Gbagbo’s refusal to implement a peace deal brokered last year by former colonial power France. Gbagbo in turn banned the march and put the army on high alert.
On Thursday, tanks took to the streets and helicopter gunships fired tear gas from the skies over Abidjan, once the commercial nerve centre of francophone West Africa. Witnesses said the security forces prevented people from leaving several of Abidjan’s poor suburbs, prompting violent clashes and dozens of arrests.
The opposition Rally of Republicans party and the former rebel fighters known as the New Forces announced their withdrawal from the government of national unity, created last year out of a peace agreement known as Linas-Marcoussis.
”We cannot be part of any government that is going to use violence against its people,” said Konate Sidiki, a spokesperson for the opposition groups that organised the protests, in an interview with the BBC.
The rebel group will immediately ”suspend its participation in the government”, secretary general Guillaume Soro said in a statement.
Coupled with the withdrawal earlier this month of the Democratic Party of Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI), Thursday’s withdrawals spelled the collapse of the power-sharing deal.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan called for calm and dialogue.
”The secretary general urges all Ivorian parties and every citizen of Côte d’Ivoire to put the national interest foremost, stop all confrontations, and resume, without further delay and without any preconditions, the full implementation of the Linas-Marcoussis agreement,” UN spokesperson Fred Eckhard told reporters on Thursday in New York.
A UN force of 6 200 peacekeepers is slated to start operating in Côte d’Ivoire on April 4, but Annan raised the possibility that its deployment could be delayed if the Ivorian parties do not cooperate with each other and reject violence.
His comments coincided with a special Security Council meeting on conflict in West Africa.
French President Jacques Chirac appealed to all sides to ”return to the route of dialogue”.
In anticipation of the march, Gbagbo had declared Thursday a public holiday, closed schools and declared the central business district — near his presidential palace — a military no-go zone.
State media said police had orders to shoot to kill protestors without warning if they tried to get near the presidential palace.
Three international radio stations that normally broadcast in Abidjan — BBC, RFI and Africa Number One — went off the air on Thursday for unknown reasons.
Air France cancelled its daily flight to Abidjan because of the demonstrations.
The rebels launched an uprising in September 2002 that has since effectively split Côte d’Ivoire in half. The peace agreement brought the rebels and the political opposition into a power-sharing deal but failed to end the polarisation.
At the root of the conflict is the country’s ethnically based political divide. Gbagbo won disputed elections in 2000 after key opposition candidates were banned from contesting because they were deemed not to have Ivorian nationality under a definition that particularly affected northerners.
The political temperature rose sharply in March, with the PDCI’s withdrawal from the power-sharing government, accusations the rebels were plotting a coup against Gbagbo, and failure of yet another deadline for disarmament. — Sapa-DPA