New talks to set a calendar to begin disarming fighters in Côte d’Ivoire were postponed on Friday as both sides in the protracted crisis huddled to weigh indictments in a World Bank report that judged all preparations ”insufficient”.
Armed forces and rebel military commanders met quietly on Thursday under the auspices of the national disarmament commission, hoping to reach agreement on practicalities of the long-overdue disarmament process first envisioned under a January 2003 peace pact to end the West African state’s civil war.
”There is still technical work being done here in committee in Abidjan that is not yet finished,” armed forces spokesperson Colonel Jules Yao Yao said.
”We have to harmonise, to act upon already existing proposals. Once everything has been locked up, we will go to Yamoussoukro, sign the accord and announce the dates that disarmament will begin.”
According to Cisse Sindou, a senior adviser to the rebel New Forces, the most important questions remain the ”how” of disarmament, not the ”when”.
”It is not the question of a date that is the most important thing, but the question of whether the process will go well,” he said.
”No one wants to see a repeat of what happened in [the Democratic Republic of Congo] or Rwanda, when people disarmed and then there was a genocide again.”
No cantonment sites have been erected in the rebel-held north of the divided country, and no accurate census of the number of fighters, or number of weapons, has been completed, Sindou said.
”There are three technical questions we need to ask, and the World Bank, I think, finally, has realised what they are: Is the national commission technically ready? Are both sides ready, materially and practically? Is the web in place for the fighters to return to civilian life?” he added.
”To each of these questions, the answer is no. And until we can answer them, there is no reason to set a date for political reasons.”
Much of the fault for the delay, according to a World Bank report seen on Thursday by news agency AFP, lies with the national disarmament commission itself.
Unlike in neighbouring Sierra Leone and Liberia where United Nations operations were responsible for paying for and coordinating disarmament, in Côte d’Ivoire the responsibility lies with the state-run national commission.
The World Bank has committed to paying at least half of the $150-million price tag attached to the process, while the government of the world’s top cocoa producer will pick up the rest.
To date, however, only $15-million have been spent, and the accounting, according to the Bank report, has been less than transparent.
The bank also expressed concern about the apparent conflict of interest that has put commission president Alain Donwahi, a businessman close to the ruling Ivorian Popular Front, in charge of operations.
”An ambiguous distribution of responsibilities, highly centralised management, a lack of transparency, particularly in financial management, and a failure of internal communication were evoked as the most serious problems confronting the national commission,” the report said.
Seemingly undaunted by the criticism, disarmament commission spokesperson Honorine Kouman expressed confidence that the commission has wrangled agreement and is ready for the signing ceremony.
”We have reached agreement, the signing will take place Saturday,” she said.
But staff of the UN operation in Côte d’Ivoire (Onuci), mindful of the three aborted attempts to launch disarmament already — one of which preceded by three weeks a string of government raids on the rebel zone — were less optimistic.
”We are not surprised that nothing happened [Friday] and don’t expect anything to happen [Saturday],” an Onuci official said on condition of anonymity. — Sapa-AFP