/ 6 December 2004

Mbeki wraps up Ivorian peace trip

South African President Thabo Mbeki met his Côte d’Ivoire counterpart Laurent Gbagbo and other high-ranking officials on Monday as he wrapped up a four-day peace-making trip to a nation embroiled in conflict since 2002.

Even as Mbeki met Gbagbo, a key figure in Côte d’Ivoire’s struggling peace process, Benin’s Albert Tevoedjre resigned as the United Nations’s secretary general’s special envoy to the West African country.

Tevoedjre took his decision to resign early last month, when Ivorian government forces launched a series of air raids on cities in the north of the country, held by rebels since a failed coup in September 2002, said Margherita Amodeo, spokesperson for the UN mission in Côte d’Ivoire.

”His resignation has been accepted,” Amodeo said.

Tevoedjre (75) is also the head of an international committee monitoring the application of a peace accord signed in France in January 2003, aimed at ending the conflict in Côte d’Ivoire and dragging the country out of its political impasse.

The peace accord has never been fully implemented and has even been openly breached, notably when forces loyal to Gbagbo carried out the air strikes on the north early last month. In one of these attacks, nine French peacekeepers and a United States aid worker were killed.

Mbeki visited Côte d’Ivoire shortly after the raids, armed with an African Union mandate and charged with the tricky task of restoring peace to the country that was a haven of stability and economic growth in West Africa, but has been mired in political bickering and violence since a coup in December 1999.

On his latest visit, Mbeki presented all parties to the Ivorian conflict with a road map to peace, about which few details have emerged.

Since arriving in Côte d’Ivoire late on Thursday, Mbeki has criss-crossed the country, meeting with all the key players in the crisis.

”He [Mbeki] has come here to listen to the various stakeholders, and when he goes back he will have a clearer idea of how to take peace forward from point A to point B,” said Mbeki’s spokesperson, Bheki Khumalo.

On Sunday, Mbeki held talks in the central city of Bouake with rebels whose uprising in September 2002, aimed at ousting Gbagbo, sparked the simmering conflict and left the country geographically and politically divided.

The South African statesman met on Monday with Gbagbo to brief him on what he discussed with the rebels.

After his meeting with Gbagbo, Mbeki was to meet with Prime Minister Seydou Diarra, who was appointed under the 2003 peace pact brokered by France, which called for Gbagbo to cede many of his executive powers to ”a consensus prime minister”.

Mbeki was also to meet with parliamentary Speaker Mamadou Koulibaly, Khumalo said, before heading back to South Africa later on Monday.

Although little has filtered through about progress towards peace achieved by Mbeki, he appeared to have made some headway after Gbagbo’s government pledged to amend Côte d’Ivoire’s Constitution to broaden the range of Ivorians who can run for the presidency.

That change was one of several reforms called for in the January 2003 peace pact.

Under the current Constitution, both a presidential candidates’ parents must be Ivorian, a condition that prevented opposition leader Alassane Ouattara from standing in elections won by Gbagbo in 2000, and will do so again in a vote scheduled for next year. — Sapa-AFP

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