Supporters of Côte d’Ivoire President Laurent Gbagbo maintained barricades in many areas of Abidjan on Wednesday, bringing the West African country’s main city to a halt for the third straight day.
In France, Côte d’Ivoire’s former colonial power which has 4 000 troops in the country operating alongside a United Nations peacekeeping force, the growing crisis prompted the chief of army staff to call for sanctions to be imposed.
The protests were a reaction to a call to wind up the current Parliament, made at the weekend by an international working group (GTI) trying to steer the world’s largest cocoa producer out of a crisis that began with a failed coup in 2002 and has left most of the north of the country controlled by rebels.
Gbagbo’s supporters regard the GTI’s move as ”an attack on national sovereignty” and his party, the Ivorian Popular Front (FPI), which enjoys a significant legislative majority, announced on Tuesday it was pulling out of a new transitional government and the peace process.
On Tuesday, the UN, which has a large peacekeeping mission in Côte d’Ivoire, was targeted by protesters who stormed the mission’s complex in Abidjan, only to be repelled by tear gas and warning gunshots.
Other UN bases in the west of the country were also attacked.
The FPI also called for the departure of the UN mission and the 4 000 French troops stationed in Côte d’Ivoire.
The usually bustling business and commercial district of Plateau was deserted on Wednesday as so-called Young Patriots blocked roads, including those leading to the French embassy and, further south, the main route to the international airport.
Several hundred youths have camped out in front of the French mission since Monday evening, singing and dancing to the blare of a loud music system.
Roadblocks in many other areas prevented traffic, especially buses, from circulating and the few vehicles moving on the roads were thoroughly searched.
Most schools and shops stayed shut.
Some of these youths said they would keep up their protests until the GTI revised its position: that Parliament’s term had expired in December and should not be extended, as this would allow newly appointed interim Prime Minister Charles Konan Banny better to carry out his mandate of organising elections and national disarmament.
In New York on Tuesday, the Security Council held closed-door discussions on what UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and other officials described as ”orchestrated violence”.
”I think every effort must be made so that [the FPI’s threatened pull-out] is not implemented; the whole spirit of the Ivorian peace process is that all the parties are together in the government,” said Jean-Marie Guehenno, the senior official in charge of UN peacekeeping operations.
”We are at a critical moment. Just a few weeks ago, an agreement was reached by all the Ivorians to be behind a new prime minister to manage peacefully the transition, the preparation of elections,” the UN official said. ”We cannot now move away from that agreement.”
In Paris on Wednesday, French chief of army staff General Henri Bentegeat said in a radio interview that ”the time had come” for the Security Council to make good its threat of imposing sanctions on Côte d’Ivoire.
”The situation goes against the rules laid down by the UN,” he said, adding that even Annan’s special representative in Côte d’Ivoire, Pierr Schori, was unable to move freely around Abidjan. — AFP
