War-divided Ivory Coast risks unity in bid to end restive stalemate
BOUAKE, Ivory Coast (AP) - In a wide swathe of land cutting across the middle of Ivory Coast, there is no government. Farmers tend to yams and bananas near U.N. troops who patrol the zone, which separates army and rebel fighters.
The farmers go north only with insurgents' permission and south only with state-issued papers. Whole villages inhabit this limbo.
The so-called Zone of Confidence, guarded by French and U.N. peacekeepers, was set up as part of a 2003 cease-fire in this West African nation's civil war. It has since come to symbolize the country's not-quite-peace, not-quite-war stalemate.
Now, the latest peace deal envisions the end of this thick band -- 20 kilometers (13 miles) wide on average -- to connect rebel and government-held regions for the first time in more than four years. But even as Ivorians herald the new trust, the divisive issues at the root of the original conflict -- identity and power -- remain.
"I am Ivorian!" insists Abdoulaye Coulibaly, a 22-year-old music cassette vendor in Bouake, the rebel capital and his hometown. "I have Ivorian parents. They were born here." But Coulibaly has been refused an Ivorian identity card twice because he did not have papers proving his parents were citizens. His last name marks him as a member of an ethnic group that is more widely found in neighboring Mali or Burkina Faso.
When rebels launched the 2002 coup attempt that sparked Ivory Coast's conflict, they said they were fighting for such disenfranchised groups -- northerners who faced discrimination in the largely Christian south because of their ethnicity or their Muslim religion.
Rebel leader Guillaume Soro and President Laurent Gbagbo say the accord signed March 4 marks a new cooperation that makes the physical buffer zone unnecessary. Soro joined the government last week as prime minister as part of the deal. The two men have also agreed to a series of deadlines to issue identity cards, disarm forces and hold elections by the middle of January.
Ivory Coast is used to such promises. Cease-fires have been broken; election deadlines have twice passed without a vote. But the decision to turn the Zone of Confidence down to an easy-to-cross line suggests that at least the belligerent sides are working together. It's a sense that has roadside checkpoint officers inspecting papers with a new relaxation, smiling and joking as they glance over documents. National banks have started to reopen branches in the north.
The United Nations has backed the peace proposal, and U.N. troops are set to start drawing down troops from the zone on April 16. The French have already started to decrease their presence, though neither force has said when or if they plan to pull out completely from the no man's land. Ivory Coast's government is already making plans for mixed brigades of rebel and army fighters to police the dividing line.
Yet it is unclear if key issues such as identity cards and disarmament will be more easily resolved with this rebel-government cooperation or if the stalemate has simply shifted from the battlefield to the political arena.
"I don't think we'll have again the fighting between Forces Nouvelles and the army. I think we've seen the end of that," said Gilles Yabi, a West Africa expert with Brussels-based think tank International Crisis Group, using the French name for Soro's New Forces rebels. "But it's not necessarily the end of the political crisis."
Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa producer, was already suffering from regional and economic divisions that played out along ethnic lines before 2002. Poor laborers originally from countries such as Burkina Faso were derided as foreigners, along with their Ivorian-born children. Though President Gbagbo was embraced as a democratic alternative to the country's former military ruler, he was also accused of kindling ethnic divisions.
Years apart have made this division more palpable. Lower taxes levied by rebels mean many goods cheaper in the north, and the closed banks have meant money circulates more informally. The more fertile south, with its cosmopolitan port city of Abidjan and relatively uninterrupted cocoa trade, has been less isolated and, some say, less affected.
"They haven't seen the war," Zoumana Ouattara, head of a coalition of civil society groups in Bouake, said of those in Abidjan. "They've heard it talked about. We've seen it. In the west they've seen it. So we talk of 'war' and they talk of 'crisis.'" Though Abidjan saw heavy fighting in the first days of the conflict, much of the later violence was in the north and west.
Ouattara said he is eager to see the Zone of Confidence dismantled, but only so long as international peacekeepers remain.
"They can only leave at the end of the war -- after elections," Ouattara said.
The deep mistrust of Gbagbo in the north is unabated -- and many blame election delays on Gbagbo maneuvering to keep command.
Ivory Coast's U.N. envoy called the deal real progress in communication between the two sides, but added that some of Gbagbo's eagerness to stitch the country back together is also an attempt to regain status.
"He wants to be like his peers, also a president controlling an entire country," said Abou Moussa, the U.N. deputy special representative. A Gbagbo spokesman declined multiple requests to be interviewed.
Meanwhile pro-government militias -- groups that have historically taken to the streets against the rebels and decried the buffer zone as an obstacle preventing them from reuniting the country by force -- have backed the peace accord and started pushing for government posts.
Soro, at 34 too young to run for president under Ivory Coast's constitution, may also be positioning himself for future power. The minimum age is 40.
"Prime Minister, it's not an elected post, and it doesn't make a career either," Soro told The Associated Press at his villa in Bouake.
Soro said he expected to work easily with the president he has opposed for so long.
"Why wouldn't we agree?" he said of Gbagbo. "There's no reason we wouldn't be in agreement if we want peace for the country, if we want reconciliation."
