President Thabo Mbeki on Sunday arrived to a rousing welcome in the central Ivorian rebel stronghold of Bouake, where a rebel spokesperson said the South African statesman was regarded as a ”guarantee” to the peace process in the divided West African nation.
Mbeki was met as his plane touched down by Guillaume Soro, leader of the New Forces (FN) rebels, who have staged an uprising against Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo since September 2002, effectively splitting the country into a Muslim-dominated rebel north and Christian government-held south.
”We have reached a point where the Ivory Coast peace process went off the tracks. We want to reach a point where the process gets back on track,” Soro said later.
”We have no problem with President Thabo Mbeki being here,” FN spokesperson Konate Sidiki shortly before Mbeki arrived at around 10am (10am GMT) in the city, about 350km north of the commercial capital Abidjan.
”President Thabo Mbeki must take the peace process in his hands. He’s the only guarantee,” said Sidiki.
Mbeki and Soro — under a military escort which included South African special forces and two helicopters overhead — then drove to a hotel in the city centre while tens of thousands of people, many dressed in white traditional dress, lined the streets.
Many carried placards in French and English saying ”We demand that Gbagbo resign” and ”Welcome President Mbeki. Gbagbo must leave power.”
At the Ran Hotel, about five kilometres from the airport, Mbeki pressed rebels at a public meeting, saying the FN leadership owed it to the people of Bouake, which has an estimated 600Â 000-strong population, ”to reach a decision”.
”The challenge is that later today when we leave Bouake and we tell people ‘no decision has been made’, we would have let them down,” Mbeki said, before meeting Soro behind closed doors.
Adressing Mbeki, Soro added he [Mbeki] was ”the only man in the world who can understand the situation in the Ivory Coast”.
”You give hope to all the people in the Ivory Coast,” he added.
One of the issues to be discussed is the disarmament of his soldiers as a prerequisite for the peace process, said Mbeki’s spokesperson Bheki Khumalo on Saturday.
In a speech to the Ivorian parliament, Mbeki called for ”a return to safety” in the country, warning that a culture of violence should not be entrenched here.
Mbeki arrived in the troubled country late on Thursday and has been shuttling between talks with with various groups in the country, caught in the grip of a bitter conflict with political and ethnic origins.
He has met Gbagbo, members of the ruling party as well as opposition groups and has seemed to secure some headway in his peace mediation after a government pledge to amend a Constitution provision to open the way for a wider range of presidential candidates.
Article 35 requires presidential candidates to have both ”a father and mother of Ivorian origin”, a condition which prevented opposition leader Alassane Ouattara from standing in elections and would again in next year’s poll.
”I was very pleased indeed that President Gbagbo thought it was important to send the constitutional amendment to his Parliament,” Mbeki, who is on an African Union-sponsored peace mission to this troubled former French colony, told members of the 210-seat Parliament.
Seen as neutral, Mbeki visited the country early last month in a bid to restore calm after government air raids on rebel-held cities in the north marked a sharp escalation in the conflict, despite a peace pact signed in January 2003.
The last of the air strikes hit a camp housing French peacekeepers in Bouake, killing nine of them and a United States aid worker.
France retaliated swiftly, wiping out the Ivorian air force and sparking riots targeting French and other expatriates, many of whom have fled Côte d’Ivoire.
The mediation effort takes Mbeki back to the diplomatic challenge that he faced during his time as the first AU chairperson in 2002 — when the northern Ivorian rebels tried to stage a coup against Gbagbo, accusing him and his government of disenfranchising the Muslim-dominated north.
A peace deal was signed in Marcoussis, France in January 2003 to bring the rebel leaders into a unity government, and a ceasefire was reached in May that year.
Another agreement, reconfirming the commitment of all parties to the Marcoussis pact, was signed in Accra in July of this year. – Sapa-AFP