Two years after Côte d’Ivoire plunged into a low-level civil war following a rebel uprising against President Laurent Gbagbo, the West African state remains bitterly divided, with only one of 10 new laws aimed at reconciling the country passed.
Parliament began a special session on August 11, which is due to run until the end of this month, to debate and ratify 10 laws covering the disarmament of rebels and militias involved in the war, reunification of the country, land ownership and the make-up of an electoral commission, among other issues.
Protagonists in Côte d’Ivoire’s crisis agreed to the new laws at a meeting in the Ghanaian capital in late July, which was also attended by 12 African heads of state and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.
According to the accord reached in Accra, 10 laws were to be passed by the Ivorian Parliament to try to move the country down the difficult path of reconciliation. So far only one law — that covering rural land ownership rights — has been ratified.
One of the crucial Bills up for debate — covering the make-up of an independent electoral commission tasked with organising elections in October next year — has been held up at parliamentary committee level after Gbagbo’s backers locked horns with opposition lawmakers over the crucial issue of who should be on the commission.
”Today, we have to admit that debate of these Bills is not moving forward at the pace we expected, and it will be difficult to stick to our schedule,” said a diplomat in Abidjan.
The international committee monitoring progress of the Accra accord said this week it is concerned by the slowness of the parliamentary debate of the Bills.
The committee — made up of representatives from regional bloc Ecowas, the African Union and the UN mission in Côte d’Ivoire — urged all parties to the Côte d’Ivoire conflict to ”meet again for constructive dialogue” and to reach agreement on the electoral commission’s make-up.
Last week, deputies from the opposition Côte d’Ivoire Democratic Party (PDCI), Union for Democracy and Peace in Côte d’Ivoire and the Solidarity party refused to vote on an amendment proposed by lawmakers of Gbagbo’s party, which would reduce the opposition presence on the electoral commission’s central committee.
”The amendment is in total violation, in letter and in spirit, of the Marcoussis accord” signed in January last year to end Côte d’Ivoire’s civil war, PDCI lawmakers said before quitting the session.
The Accra accord was supposed to boost the ailing Marcoussis pact, which has been applied only patchily.
Under Marcoussis and Accra, each signatory to the accords would be given two seats on the electoral commission’s central committee, giving the ex-rebels six seats.
That would give a nominal opposition coalition a majority on the commission.
But an amendment proposed by Gbagbo’s FPI party would limit to two the number of seats allocated to the ex-rebels.
When the extraordinary session of Parliament winds up at the end of the month, several more Bills, all as sensitive as that concerning the electoral commission, are expected to be debated by lawmakers.
One of them concerns the very touchy issue of who can claim Ivorian nationality.
About five million foreigners, mostly from neighbouring Burkina Faso and Mali, settled in Côte d’Ivoire decades ago when the West African nation was a regional economic powerhouse, its strength based on exports of cocoa, of which it is the world’s largest producer.
”Old quarrels threaten to raise their heads again, and it will be difficult to reach agreement,” an Ivorian journalist said.
Parliamentary Speaker Mamadou Koulibaly gave a foretaste of the mood of the debate on the new Bills when he said in an interview published last month in the Courrier d’Abidjan daily: ”The rebels in Ivory Coast are invaders … assailants who demand to be naturalised en masse to be able to seize political power in what they say would be a democratic manner.”
”Can we not resist this totally illegitimate ambition to create an ‘electoral herd’, which would then lead to the colonisation of Ivory Coast by some of its neighbours?” he asked. — Sapa-AFP