An uneasy calm hung over Côte d’Ivoire’s main city, Abidjan, on Monday as opposition backers failed to heed a call to renew protests against President Laurent Gbagbo, after at least 37 people were killed when the army quashed a demonstration last week.
The opposition on Sunday called for peaceful demonstrations on Monday around the West African country to protest at the violent quashing of a banned anti-government protest on Thursday.
Police have said 37 people were killed when security forces, on orders from Gbagbo, cracked down on the protest, but former president and opposition leader Henri Konan Bedie has said between 350 and 500 people died, ”not counting the very many wounded, those unaccounted for and those arrested arbitrarily”.
Gbagbo had put the army on high alert ahead of that protest.
Soldiers patrolled the streets of Abidjan in armoured vehicles as helicopters overflew the central Plateau district, where the opposition marchers were supposed to converge.
Any groups of would-be protesters who dared to venture out of their homes were dispersed before they could form.
On Monday, the scene was entirely different, with people going about their business as usual in most neighbourhoods of Abidjan, and only a handful of armoured vehicles parked in the Plateau neighbourhood. Police were patrolling elsewhere in Abidjan.
”It’s calm,” army spokesperson Lieutenant-Colonel Aka Ngoran said, adding that the military presence on the streets of the city was ”very, very light”.
One of the organisers of the protest said opposition activists were preparing to launch ”specific actions” throughout Abidjan, but insisted that the city should remain relatively calm.
Security Minister Martin Bleou denied ”rumours suggesting that inopportune and arbitrary arrests have taken place from March 25 to today”, adding that most of the 205 people who had been arrested following Thursday’s protest had been released.
The arrests were made ”for security reasons by the defense and security forces, in accordance with the law”, he said, but ”only 33 people remain in detention for investigative purposes”.
Bleou also urged the protest organisers to submit a list of opposition activists who allegedly suffered in the crackdown, saying ”all information concerning people who died or are thought to have died as a consequence of the events should be made available to legal authorities and to the parliamentary and international investigations that will be created”.
Gbagbo has asked the Justice Ministry and Parliament to open separate investigations into the unrest in the country, the world’s top cocoa producer.
The president also asked the United Nations to investigate, in response to a plea by an international committee that is supervising a January 2003 peace plan for the country, split in half by civil war.
The Marcoussis peace agreement, named for the Paris suburb where the deal was signed, calls for Gbagbo to give up some of his executive powers to a prime minister.
It brought rebels, whose uprising in September 2002 plunged Côte d’Ivoire into civil war, into the fragile unity government.
Now all the opposition parties, including the former rebels, have left the government, and on Saturday they refused calls to meet with Gbagbo, saying he had the blood of Ivorians on his hands. — Sapa-AFP