UN human rights team lands as political stalemate continues

A United Nations commission has landed in Cote d'Ivoire to investigate human rights abuses during the first four months of civil war that followed a September 2002 rebellion in the world's top cocoa producer, a UN official said on Friday. Joseph Owondo, the head of the human rights department at the UN Operations in Cote d’Ivoire, said the five-member international team had arrived in Abidjan on Thursday on a three month mission. Cote d'Ivoire has been split into a government-controlled south and a rebel-held north ever since the 2002 rebellion, with French troops and UN peacekeepers now patrolling the ceasefire line. More than a year after the official end of fighting, the peace process is deadlocked and disarmament has yet to begin. Diplomats said the UN human rights team would be working on both sides of the ceasefire line. "They have a mandate that covers the entire country," one UN diplomat told IRIN. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has said the experts may also travel to neighbouring countries as they try to "establish the facts and responsibilities concerning serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law that were committed between 19 September 2002 and 24 January 2003." The team will only focus on the period of conflict up to the signing of a French-brokered peace agreement. Fighting continued after that up to the signing of a definitive ceasefire on 3 May 2003 and hundreds have died in clashes between armed men and civilians since then. This is not the first time the OHCHR has dispatched an international team of human rights investigators to Cote d'Ivoire this year. In April, three experts were sent to investigate killings by the government security forces after opposition parties tried to stage a banned rally on 25 March. They concluded that at least 120 people had been killed in a two-day crackdown by the security forces and shadowy paramilitary groups linked to President Laurent Gbagbo. The government, which had given a death toll of 37, rejected the report. The latest human rights team touched down in the former French colony two weeks before a summit in neighbouring Ghana that is aimed at getting the peace process back on track and just before the expected conclusion of a separate human rights investigation by the local UN mission in the northern town of Korhogo. Violent clashes broke out between rebel factions in Korhogo at the end of June. The New Forces rebel group said 22 people died in the skirmishes but allegations of a mass grave have surfaced and some humanitarian sources suspect that the true death toll was much higher. Reports of mass graves in Cote d'Ivoire have cropped up repeatedly since a coup d'etat in 1999 put the country on a slippery path towards outright civil war three years later. Shortly after the presidential elections in October 2000 which brought Gbagbo to power, a mass grave containing the bodies of 57 young men was found in a neighbourhood of Abidjan. Against this backdrop of suspected human rights violations, the two feuding Ivorian sides are due to sit down together in Accra on July 29 to try to revive the peace process. The Accra meeting will be hosted by Ghanaian President John Kufuor, the current chairman of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Several other West African leaders are expected to attend. So too is South African President Thabo Mbeki. Cote d'Ivoire's peace process has been frozen since March when the rebels and the four main opposition parties represented in parliament, collectively known as the G7, walked out of a broad-based government of national reconciliation. Gbagbo retaliated in May by firing three G7 ministers, including rebel leader Guillaume Soro. In the build-up to the so-called "Accra 3" summit, a host of preliminary talks are taking place. Togolese President Gnassingbe Eyadema hosted representatives from the G7 on Thursday night in the town of Pya, north of the capital Lome. He told them that all sides needed to make concessions and have good faith if any progress were to be made, French news agency AFP reported. Cote d'Ivoire's politically independent Prime Minister, Seydou Diarra, who has been trying to save the faltering peace process from collapse, held talks with Soro, the rebel leader, in the rebel capital Bouake on Friday.