Two main political parties in Côte d’Ivoire rejected on Tuesday a plan to scrap Parliament in order to hasten a peace process, bringing renewed paralysis to Abidjan streets after a day of massive disruption.
Both the Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) and the once all-powerful Côte d’Ivoire Democratic Party (PDCI) said the proposal made by a large United Nations-mandated working group on Côte d’Ivoire to wind up the legislature was unacceptable.
After a quiet start to the day, barricades went up again across the West African country’s commercial capital after youths protesting the plan and backing President Laurent Gbagbo on Monday brought Abidjan to a total halt. In late morning 200 to 300 Gbagbo backers tried to get into the Abidjan headquarters of the United Nations Operation in Côte d’Ivoire (ONUCI), a source there said.
“[They] tried to enter the headquarters… but were repelled with the help of teargas grenades,” the source said, adding that Jordanian troops guarding the site had fired warning shots in the air.
“For the moment they have dispersed but the security forces are very discreet and you don’t see them.”
A convoy of about 15 ONUCI trucks had been stoned on their way to the headquarters, the source said.
ONUCI has about 7 000 peacekeepers in Côte d’Ivoire, backed up by about 4 000 French troops.
PDCI Secretary Alphone Djedje Mady said the working group’s scheme breached a UN Security Council resolution to sort out Côte d’Ivoire’s three-year conflict and that, like the presidency, “the National Assembly must be maintained”.
Affi N’Guessan, chairperson of the FPI — the largest party in Parliament — dismissed the plan as “obviously null and without effect. It’s null because the [group] doesn’t have the power to decide the future of Ivorian institutions”.
The working group, known by its French acronym GTI, was formed to oversee the implementation of the UN resolution passed last October, which prolonged Gbagbo’s expired term in office for a year and led to the naming of a prime minister acceptable to Gbagdo and his political foes.
On Sunday, the GTI team of key African leaders, western donor nations and world finance bodies stated that the elected Parliament’s term, which ended in December, should not be extended in the interests of ushering in peace.
The disbanding of Parliament was to give new Prime Minister Charles Konan Banny a freer hand with a GTI “road map” to end a conflict that began with a coup bid in September 2002 and has since seen Africa’s main cocoa producer split between rebels in the north and the army in the south.
While the current plan includes measures to give new tasks to prominent members of a scrapped Parliament, many were livid at the prospect of being ejected from office.
On December 14, the four main parties recommended the extension of their expiring mandate for a year.
Anger and squabbles over whether the GTI has the right to propose such a measure caused massive disruption in Abidjan on Monday when youth gangs erected roadblocks everywhere, shops closed and people could not get to work.
Barricades went up again on Tuesday and police kept a low profile rather than moving to enforce a year-old ban on protests. Shops and offices reopened in some districts but later began to close again.
The demonstrators had already pressed for the departure of UN troops patrolling ceasefire lines. Several hundred pro-Gbagbo Young Patriots led by firebrand Charles Ble Goude pursued a sit-in on Tuesday outside the French embassy, protesting at France’s role in its former colony.
The next GTI meeting is due on February 17.
Schoolchildren came home because when they got to their classes they found them closed, witnesses said. At one roadblock, an Agence France-Presse journalist saw one group of youths stoning another for having let a motorist through.
After damage to four UN vehicles on Monday, UN special envoy Pierre Schori was asked back to the world body’s headquarters for talks on developments, officials in New York said. – AFP