Naming of two key ministers unblocks peace process

President Laurent Gbagbo appointed new ministers of defence and internal security on Saturday, filling key portfolios that had been vacant for six months. The long-awaited move should allow Cote d'Ivoire's derailed peace process to get back on track. Gbagbo named law professor and human rights activist Martin Bleou Minister of Internal Security. Rene Amani, a political independent with close personal links to Prime Minister Seydou Diarra, was named Minister of Defence. The two appointments were announced in an official communique after an eight-hour meeting between Gbagbo and Diarra's broad-based government of national reconciliation which ended early on Saturday morning. The president chose the two ministers from a list of four names submitted by Diarra earlier this week. He had vetoed all previously suggested candidates for these key posts which had been vacant since Diarra's coalition government was formed on March 13. Its task is to reunite Cote d'Ivoire after a brief but bitter civil war which broke out on September 19 last year and left rebel forces controlling the northern half of the country. Diplomats said the president appeared to have been rattled into compromise on the ministerial appointments by the uncovering of a coup plot earlier this month. This led to a security clampdown in the commercial capital Abidjan and a wave of arrests in both France and Cote d'Ivoire. Two generals and several other senior military officers were detained in Abidjan on charges of plotting to assassinate Gbagbo in order to continue to process of national reunification without him. At the same time, several noted sympathisers with the rebel cause were arrested in France on charges of plotting to destabilise Cote d'Ivoire with the assistance of mercenaries recruited in France Gbagbo signed a Frech-brokered peace agreement with the rebels in January and fighting finally died down in April. However, the peace process had been stuck in the mud for the past two months by the president's failure to appoint defence and internal security ministers acceptable to all the main political forces. The rebel Patriotic Movement of Cote d'Ivoire (MPCI), which has nine ministers in Diarra's broad-based government, had refused to begin a process of demobilisation and disarmament until these key posts were filled. It had also refused to allow government administrators to return to the north, where banks have been closed for the past year and the few civil servants to remain at their posts have gone unpaid. The two men finally selected to run internal security and defence are both independent of Cote d'Ivoire's main political parties. Bleou, who is president of the Ivorian League of Human Rights (LIDHO) remained silent during the early days of the civil war and was at first suspected of sympathising with the rebel cause. But the LIDHO eventually issued a public condemnation of the uprising, which was motivated by the exclusion of people from the mainly Muslim north of Cote d'Ivoire from political power. Amani previously worked alongside Diarra as a senior executive of the Cocoa Stabilisation Fund, a government organisation that controls the price of cocoa, Cote d'Ivoire's main export. He is widely thought to sympathise with the Democratic Party of Cote d'Ivoire (PDCI), which was founded by former president Felix Houphoet Boigny and ruled the country from independence in 1960 until its overthrow by a military coup in 1999. However, Amani has no official party affiliation and has not previously served in government. The PDCI opposed Gbagbo's election in 2000, but subsequently entered a coalition with the president's Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) party. The long awaited miniterial appointments followed several other moves in recent days to unblock Cote d'Ivoire's political logjam. On Tuesday Diarra set up a committee of army and rebel military representatives to kick-start the demobilisation process and clear the way for the return of government administration to the north by the end of this month. And on Wednesday, Gbagbo finally authorised the resumption of trade and the movement of people between the government-held south of the country and Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire's northern neighbour. The president has long accused Burkina Faso of supporting the rebel cause and Burkinabe immigrants to Cote d'Ivoire have been harassed since the outbreak of the civil war, prompting more than 350,000 of them to return home. Officials of the railway company SITARAIL, said train services from the port of Abidjan to landlocked Burkina Faso would resume on 20 September. In a further sign of confidence that the peace process was back on track, the United Nations downgraded its security rating of Cote d'Ivoire on Friday. Abidjan and most of the government-held south have been reduced to Phase Two, allowing UN international staff to bring back their families, who were evacuated earlier this year. The rebel-held north and the volatile west of the country, along the Liberian border, have been downgraded from Phase Four - one step away from total evacuation - to Phase Three.