ACCRA, 1 August 2004 — A new timetable for disarmament and political reform could finally restore peace to Ivory Coast, but observers are wary the pact signed at a marathon UN-sponsored summit will end up on the heap of broken promises that have come over the last two years.
“The agreement is hopeful,” said Mike McGovern, west African director of the International Crisis Group, which recently warned that without concerted diplomacy, the 22 months of unrest in the world’s top cocoa producer could bleed over its borders and further destabilize the troubled region.
“The question, as it has been for the past two years, is in its application.”
On the surface, the agreement brokered by 12 African heads of state and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan among President Laurent Gbagbo, his political opposition and the rebels whose failed coup in September 2002 plunged the country into war is concrete.
It mandates a return to Cabinet meetings of opposition ministers — including three sacked by Gbagbo, among them a prominent rebel leader — who walked out to protest a savage state-sanctioned crackdown on a pro-peace rally in March that left at least 120 dead.
This, in turn, will allow debate to resume over laws addressing the thorny issues of national identity and land ownership — catalysts of the rebellion.
The accord also aims, once and for all, to put to rest the long-standing issue about who is eligible to stand for president, which, in the run up to elections set for October 2005, was the make-or-break issue that deadlocked the summit at Accra’s La Palm Hotel for nearly its entire two days.
UN and African sources involved in the talks, which saw Annan and presidents from Gabon, Burkina Faso, Nigeria and South Africa, as well as summit co-host Ghana President John Kufuor, shuttling back and forth between the protagonists, said that Gbagbo dug in deep behind Article 35 of the Ivorian constitution.
Article 35 stipulates that all presidential candidates be born in Ivory Coast to Ivorian-born parents.
Under a peace pact signed in January last year, by all the protagonists gathered this week in Accra except for Gbagbo, it was to have been amended to read that either parent needed to be Ivorian born.
Gbagbo, virtually forced against the wall by counterparts who were led, summit sources said, by Gabon President Omar Bongo, has been given until the end of September 2004 to implement the change with “the powers conferred upon him by the constitution,” according to the text of the agreement.
“That crucial word or is the most important success of this summit,” UN special envoy to Ivory Coast Albert Teovoedjre said.
But privately, officials expressed little optimism that Gbagbo, notorious for the ease with which he reneges on international promises, will enact the change.
“Frankly it is what we pushed hardest for and what we are still most worried about,” a west African diplomat said. “We know that when he returns to Abidjan he will be confronted with the reality of what it means and the implications for his political career and his standing within his (Ivorian Popular Front) party.”
The most positive elements to come from the Accra agreement were the tacit warnings that all eyes were on Ivory Coast, and the implied consequences — including possible sanctions and prosecutions by international justice — should any of the political foes fail to fall into line. “Annan warned that the UN was watching and that the International Criminal Court was watching, which is precisely the coercion that is needed here,” said the ICG’s McGovern. “That kind of real and credible threat, that kind of pressure on all sides, is exactly what is needed here.”
