South African President Thabo Mbeki held a second day of talks on Sunday with Côte d’Ivoire rebel leader Guillaume Soro and Prime Minister Seydou Diarra to broker peace in the war-wracked West African nation.
Rebel leader Soro hailed Mbeki’s insight into the Ivorian crisis but said no lasting solution could be found as long as President Laurent Gbagbo remained in power.
Mbeki’s spokesperson Bheki Khumalo said the South African leader, who has been mandated by the African Union to broker an end to the civil conflict in the world’s number one cocoa producer, said he held separate meetings with the two Ivorian leaders on Sunday.
Soro, the leader of the rebels who are now called the Nouvelle Force or New Forces, said in an interview after holding discussions with Mbeki that ”no credible or lasting solution for peace is possible as long Gbagbo is around.
”As long as Gbagbo is president, the Marcoussis accords cannot be applied,” he said, referring to a January 2003 French-brokered peace deal which has been repeatedly been breached by the government and the rebels.
”I was very favourably surprised with [Mbeki’s] knowledge of the Ivorian crisis,” Soro said but pointed out that ”all the scenarios with Gbagbo have revealed their limits”.
Soro appealed to the international community to apply more strictures against Gbagbo, saying that it had worked in the case of Haiti and led to the forced departure of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Mbeki on Saturday opened the talks by declaring that he wanted to return to Côte d’Ivoire ”very, very quickly.
”I want to go back to the Cote d’Ivoire and that includes Bouake and not only Abidjan,” the South African leader said, referring to the northern headquarters of the rebels and the coastal port city of Abidjan in the government-controlled south.
The objective would be to ”interact with the whole leadership, the government, the president, the Forces Nouvelles, the Parliament, everybody … to say ‘our assessment is as follows, and this is what we think should happen.”’
Côte d’Ivoire, once France’s star colony and an oasis of peace and prosperity in troubled West Africa, has been split in half by a September 2002 uprising.
It lurched back into crisis after the government launched air strikes on key towns in the north on November 4, in violation of an 18-month-old ceasefire monitored by French and other military peacekeepers.
Côte d’Ivoire Prime Minister Diarra, a veteran politician respected for his neutrality, took a careful line after speaking to Mbeki on Saturday, saying that he was ”very optimistic” following the talks.
”I think that he [Mbeki] has ideas which could be accepted positively,” Diarra said, hailing the South African leader for taking a ”very pragmatic and rational approach”.
A deadly air strike on a French position on November 6 prompted France to retaliate, destroying the tiny Ivorian air force — which in turn led to an upsurge in anti-French violence and an exodus of foreigners from the country.
According to Ivorian government figures, clashes between demonstrators and French forces in the country left 63 people dead and more than 1 300 wounded.
No independent confirmation of the casualty toll is available. – Sapa-AFP