Rebel leader says no disarmament before passage of reforms

Guillaume Soro, the leader of Cote d'Ivoire's rebel movement, has flatly refused to start disarming his forces on Friday, as demanded by his latest pact with President Laurent Gbagbo, saying political reforms which were supposed to have preceded the move have not been enacted. Soro told IRIN at an interview in his stronghold of Bouake in central Cote d'Ivoire on Tuesday that he would wait "for as long as it takes" for the reforms, agreed in a January 2003 peace agreement to be implemented. But the rebel leader stressed that he would not order his men to surrender their weapons to UN peacekeepers until these reforms were fully in place. "Nothing is going to happen on 15 October. We are still armed, the country is divided and parliament hasn't voted through the reforms….So long as there is not a minimum level of confidence, which must exist as a contract between the political actors, we are not going to talk about DDR (disarmament, demobilization and rehabilitation)," Soro said. The 35-year-old former student leader raised the possibility that continuing deadlock in the peace process might undermine plans to hold presidential elections in October 2005. Should the elections postponed or cancelled, Gbagbo, who was elected in 2000, would lose his legitimacy as head of state, he said. Soro flatly denied suggestions that his New Forces rebel movement would resume hostilities in view of the latest impasse, breaking a truce that has held firm since May 2003. "Within the New Forces one thing is clear: there is no question of resuming the war. We will just administer and manage our zones to improve education and health. We have no choice but to relieve the suffering of the people," he said. "We are prepared to wait for as long as it takes" "The day the presidential camp wants genuine reconciliation we will be ready for it. We control 60 percent of the territory. We are in no more of a hurry than the presidential camp. Unlike in days gone by, we are prepared to wait for as long as it takes." But Soro accused the government of preparing to destabilise the rebel-held north of Cote d'Ivoire by sending soldiers and militiamen into neighbouring Guinea to attack rebel positions in the northeast of the country from across the Guinean border. "Groups of Young Patriots (members of a pro-Gbagbo militia-style youth group) and military personnel have been sent to Guinea," Soro said. "We know that the presidential clan wants to go for the military option. It wants to launch a military offensive from Guinea into our zones very shortly." Reports of preparations for such an attack have appeared in Abidjan newspapers and have circulated among diplomats in West Africa for several months. Gbagbo, parliamentary opposition parties and the rebel movement set 15 October as the target date for starting disarmament at a crisis summit in the Ghanaian capital Accra at the end of July. That meeting, which was attended by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and a dozen African heads of state, was designed to put Cote d'Ivoire's crumbling peace agreement back on the rails. However, so far the only positive outcome of the so-called "Accra Three" summit, has been the resurrection of a broad-based government of national reconciliation. This is headed by an independent prime minister, Seydou Diarra, and more than half its ministers are members of parliamentary opposition and the New Forces rebel movement. The coalition cabinet had previously been dormant for four months following the security forces' bloody repression of an opposition demonstration in Abidjan on 25 March. Although the parties agreed in Accra to legislate all the political reforms demanded by the French-brokered Linas-Marcoussis peace agreement by the end of September, Diarra's government was unable to push the measures through parliament as a result of blocking tactics by Gbagbo's Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) party. Most of the reforms are aimed at giving the four million immigrants from other West African countries and their offspring, greater rights to own land and take out Ivorian nationality. Immigrants from neighbouring countries such as Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea make up a quarter of Cote d'Ivoire's 16 million population. Gbagbo was also due to have launched moves to revise the constitution by the end of September to make it easier for Ivorians of immigrant descent to run for the presidency. Gbagbo defends his record But the president said in a televised speech on Tuesday that he would only put the constitutional reform process in motion once the rebels had started to disarm. Meanwhile an ugly indirect message was delivered to the intended beneficiary of the contitutional change, former prime minister Alassane Ouattara. He was banned from standing against Gbagbo in the 2000 presidential election on the disputed grounds that his father was Burkinabe. According to witnesses, on 4 October four of Ouattara's house staff in Abidjan were detained for questioning by paramilitary gendarmes. Three of them were beaten up and subsequently released, but the body of Ouattara's gardener was found floating in Abidjan's lagoon two days later. Ouattara himself has lived in exile in France since the civil war broke out in September 2002. The United Nations Operation in Cote d'Ivoire (ONUCI) protested to the government over the incident, which it described as part of "a resurgence of human rights abuse" in the country. In his speech on Tuesday, Gbagbo defended his record on reform, saying seven of the 16 measures called for by the Linas Marcoussis agreement 21 months ago had been implemented and five others had been approved by the cabinet. At the same time, he accused the rebels of having stalled on disarmament for more than a year after being granted an amnesty in August 2003. "Let us move forward to disarmament and the reunification of the country," he said. But Soro and the six other ministers appointed by the rebel movement failed to turn up for two meetings called by Gbagbo this week to discuss the way forward on disarmament, one in the official capital Yamoussoukro on Monday and another in the commercial capital Abidjan on Wednesday. The rebel leader told IRIN that he now feared assassination if he ventured back to the government-controlled south of Cote d'Ivoire. "We have heard talk of death squads targetting the New Forces leadership," Soro told IRIN in the relaxed atmosphere of his house in Bouake, where few guards were in evidence. "I am careful about my security," said Soro, who is Minister of Communications. "If I were assured that I was safe I would resume my work in cabinet, but for the time being tension is too high. I am courageous, but not foolhardy."