COTE D'LVOIRE: Police patrol streets after protests

ABIDJAN, 6 December 2006 (IRIN) - Anti-government protests in Cote d’Ivoire have intensified in recent days and the most recent left two people dead with no apparent end in sight to a political impasse that has pitted the president against his prime minister.

The country was calm on Wednesday but police maintained street patrols. Thousands of protesters turned out in San-Pedro, Divo, Tanda, Bouafle and Agnibilekrou on Tuesday to call on President Laurent Gbagbo to annul recent decrees reinstating officials blamed for a toxic waste scandal in September. Protest organisers put the number of demonstrators at 50,000 while police put the figure at 10,000.

Of the two people killed on Tuesday, one died from a gunshot wound and the other died after police fired teargas to disperse the demonstrators, according to political opposition leaders.

The demonstrators burned two buses belonging to the local Abidjan transport company Sotra. They have said they will continue protesting until Gbagbo rescinds the decrees reinstating the government officials.

"The situation has returned to normal since yesterday afternoon. The students have returned to classes and populations carry out their normal occupations," said Geoffroy Kouassi, a civil servant in Bouafle, told IRIN.

On Monday, the United Nations Operation in Cote d'Ivoire (ONUCI) called on all parties to end demonstrations that could trigger violence and therefore threaten the country’s fragile peace process.

Cote d’Ivoire has been divided between a rebel-held north and government-run south since a failed coup in September 2002 triggered a brief civil war. Some 10,000 UN and French peacekeepers monitor a buffer zone dividing the two regions.

Meanwhile, a curfew has been declared in the troubled west where inter-ethnic clashes have left six dead and many injured in the buffer zone. The UN humanitarian coordination agency (OCHA) said the clashes claimed six lives in the region of Duekoue and involved local populations and non-indigenes, whose homes were burned. They fled their villages.

The latest violence appears to have been sparked in part by the impasse between President Gbagbo and Prime Minister Charles Konan Banny, observers said. National identity issues are at the heart of the Ivorian conflict. When elections scheduled for October failed to materialise because of problems with disarmament and registration of undocumented Ivorians, international mediators gave Banny wider powers through UN resolution 1721 on recommendations of the African Union.

Gilles Yabi, of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG), told IRIN on Wednesday that the toxic waste scandal appeared to offer Gbagbo and his hardliners a reason to demonstrate that they still retain most of the power. The director of the port, who had been suspended and then reinstated, is close to Gbagbo and is an alleged financier of the militant Young Patriots who support the president, Yabi said.

ICG blames the political impasse on the lack of sanctions against those civilian and military officials responsible for impediments to the peace process in Cote d'Ivoire. The international community has been divided over how hard a line to take on the Ivorian crisis.

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