Exiled Côte d’Ivoire opposition leader Alassane Ouattara will have another shot at the presidency in the 2005 elections, after being barred from standing five years ago, supporters said on Saturday.
Rally for Republicans (RDR) secretary general Henriette Diabate said: ”At the next elections, the RDR will put forward the candidate of its choice.”
Diabate added: ”No one can stop us … we will accompany Alassane Dramane Ouattara to the polls to win them.”
Another senior party official, Amadou Coulibaly, said: ”Mr Ouattara is the natural candidate of the RDR,” adding that his candidacy has yet to be confirmed officially by the party hierarchy.
A former prime minister under Côte d’Ivoire’s late founding father, Felix Houphouet-Boigny, Ouattara currently lives in exile in France but said this week he will run for office in October 2005 if the RDR wishes him to.
Under international pressure to implement the terms of a French-brokered peace pact signed two years ago with rebels, Côte d’Ivoire’s Parliament last month amended an Article of the Constitution that was aimed to disqualify Ouattara from ever standing in an Ivorian presidential vote due to lingering questions about his parentage.
Legislative elections are also due to be held in October, but current President Laurent Gbagbo said earlier this month they could be postponed because of the current crisis in the country.
In such a case, he said, he will remain head of state to avoid a political void.
”No Constitution in the world foresees a judicial void, none. Otherwise it was not written by people with a sane vision of their country,” Gbagbo was quoted as saying by the daily Fraternite Matin. ”If at the end of October the elections are not held, I will remain president.”
He said the holding of the vote hinges on a disarmament process in the divided country, in line with the peace accord signed in Marcoussis, France.
”The president remains in his post until his successor is sworn in,” Gbagbo added.
”The people [rebels] must disarm,” Gbagbo told Fraternite Matin. ”If they do so, we will prepare the elections and go ahead with them.”
Various political groups have begun to question whether the elections will actually take place in light of the tense situation in the country and the de facto division between the north and south.
Long seen as a beacon of peace and economic stability in troubled West Africa, Côte d’Ivoire has since a failed military coup against Gbagbo in 2002 been divided between a mainly Christian south and a rebel-held Muslim majority north, with French and African troops under a United Nations umbrella maintaining a very fragile peace. — Sapa-AFP