Côte d’Ivoire’s President Laurent Gbagbo has issued a new version of laws on electoral and nationality matters after causing a storm of protest in the divided country, his office announced on Friday.
”Three legal texts, relating to the nationality code, naturalisation of citizens and the independent electoral commission [CEI], were adopted on August 29 by the head of state,” Gbagbo’s spokesperson Desire Tagro said.
The opposition and rebels in control of half the West African country for nearly three years would make no firm comment on a decision that apparently met some of their demands, with several spokespersons stressing they would check first.
Previous versions of the three texts deeply angered both the rebels and the political opposition, who said Gbagbo had broken the latest peace accord known as Pretoria II, reached through mediation from South Africa.
The rebels, mainly the New Forces (FN) based in the central town of Bouake, refused to go on disarming under accords affecting all belligerents until the laws first promulgated on July 15 were revised.
The opposition and rebels also asked South African President Thabo Mbeki to intervene and arbitrate, while discord over the nationality issue that was one of the main causes of the outbreak of war in September 2002 effectively brought a halt to any progress towards elections scheduled for the end of October.
”The mediator [Mbeki] asked that certain themes be clarified in relation to the July 15 version,” Tagro said. ”The president has thus made the necessary changes.”
One such clarification stresses the CEI, already by name an independent electoral body, is the ”only one responsible for the election process”, and not just ”responsible”.
Another stipulates that the National Statistical Institute (INS), widely seen as a body controlled by Gbagbo and his loyalists, should answer fully to the electoral panel.
”The INS must account to the CEI for everything related to the elections,” Tagro explained, which will ensure opposition parties have their say and are not sidelined.
The once-all-powerful Ivory Coast Democratic Party (PDCI), now one of two main opposition parties, was cautiously upbeat.
”At least this means we were right to demand changes, facts have borne that out,” PDCI secretary general Alphonse Djedje Mady said.
In a country with a large regional immigrant population and a mainly Muslim north that has long felt itself discriminated against by mostly Christian southerners, the issues of full or partial Ivorian nationality and voting rights became flashpoints for war.
About four months after hostilities broke out, the parties reached a first peace pact in France, which has built up its military presence in the former colony into a substantial peacekeeping force that patrols a ”confidence zone” with other troops now working under a United Nations mandate.
Tensions flared with the approach of possible elections planned for October 30, and with military moves such as a threatened coup made and then withdrawn by an exiled former armed-forces chief.
Gbagbo’s latest changes, made under considerable domestic and international pressure on all parties to get the peace process back on the rails, were done under Article 48 of the Constitution, Tagro said. This enables him to take ”exceptional measures demanded by circumstances”.
The Ivorian president, formerly a Socialist opposition leader, used Article 48 just as he did in the July 15 version and has also done to enable former prime minister Alassane Ouattara to be a candidate in the scheduled presidential poll of October 30.
It was the exclusion of Ouattara, a Muslim northerner whose full Ivorian nationality was challenged and rejected in the past, from previous polls that partially started the war with a failed uprising to oust Gbagbo. — Sapa-AFP