Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo insisted Sunday that the opposition rejoin the country's unity government, as his police chief announced an official inquiry into clashes last week between security forces and unarmed protestors that left at least 37 dead.
Meanwhile, a member of the opposition, former rebel leader Guillaume Soro, asked France to intervene in order to "bring peace back" to the volatile west African state.
Gbagbo, speaking to French public radio France Inter by telephone from Abidjan, mocked opposition leaders who quit the government after a demonstration they helped to organise last Thursday was quashed under presidential orders.
"The people who walked away from the ministerial table must return. They can't behave like spoiled children," he said.
"The departure of Haiti's president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, has given certain Ivorians ideas. But Gbagbo's not Aristide and Ivory Coast isn't Haiti," he said.
Tensions here have been running high since the clashes last Thursday and Friday between the security forces and anti-Gbagbo demonstrators.
Police chief Yapo Kouassi on Sunday raised the official death toll from the violence to 37 - all in Abidjan but for one casualty in Yamoussoukro, the administrative capital. Previously the government had said 25 died in violence on Thursday.
The opposition say around 160 people were killed over what was intended to be a peaceful march to protest over Gbagbo's perceived unwillingness to adhere to a peace deal signed in January 2003.
The clashes between the combined forces - police, national police and requisitioned army soldiers - and protesters drew expressions of concern from the United Nations, the European Union and the international committee which is overseeing the application of the peace accord.
Kouassi said judicial police had received instructions to "open a police inquiry to determine the causes and circumstances under which the individuals were killed" last week".
But he defended the actions of Gbagbo's forces during the unrest, saying his men only had "conventional means of keeping order - tear gas and police batons" and that the more heavily-armed military had "not once participated in public-order operations".
Several witnesses told AFP about military using force against unarmed protesters, however, and AFP witnessed soldiers beat up a young man on the morning of the march. The Marcoussis peace agreement, named for the Paris suburb where the deal was signed in January 2003, calls for Gbagbo to give up some of his executive powers, notably to a prime minister.
Its signature brought rebels, whose uprising on September 2002 plunged Ivory Coast into civil war, into the fragile unity government.
Now all the opposition parties, including the former rebels, have left the government, and on Saturday they refused calls to meet with Gbagbo.
Soro, the head of the New Forces, the political movement made up of former rebels, said the French peacekeepers in Ivory Coast must take action.
"France is militarily present today in Ivory Coast. Under a UN mandate, its soldiers are not merely charged with protecting its nationals, but in bringing back peace," Soro wrote in a copy of a letter to President Jacques Chirac sent to AFP on Sunday.
"In order to fulfill this mission, France can no longer content itself to mix of diplomatic inaction and inaction on the ground. It can no longer be content with 'counting the dead' and safeguarding the current regime," he wrote.
Some 4,000 French peacekeepers are already on the ground, and are due to be joined next month by a 6,000-strong UN peacekeeping force. Gbagbo told France Inter his rivals had walked out because of the expected deployment of UN peacekeepers.
"They don't want the UN troops to come here because that means the start of a disarmament process they don't want to see and preparations for elections some of them are worried about," he said.
The president also insisted he was the only person who was respecting the French-mediated 2003 peace agreement.
"I told them (the opposition groups) to come to a meeting on Monday so we can review the Marcoussis agreement because I am very critical of those agreements today. As it turns out, I'm the only one who's respecting them," he said. An international committee formed to monitor implementation of the Marcoussis peace deal denounced last week's clashes, and called for an international investigation into the deaths.
Ivory Coast, the world's largest cocoa producer and a former beacon of stability in the region, is still divided between a rebel-held north and the south, under government rule.
Comments
Comments are closed.