Mbeki making headway in Ivory Coast
2004-12-04 22:44
Abidjan - South African President Thabo Mbeki on Saturday appeared to have made some headway in his peace mediation in the Ivory Coast.
Mbeki secured a government pledge to amend a contentious constitutional provision to open the way for a wider range of presidential candidates.
"We need to deal with election issues such as the question of nationality and voter identification," Mbeki told the Ivorian parliament, referring to the contentious Article 35 of the present Ivorian constitution.
Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo on Saturday agreed to introduce a key change to the constitutional provision that would open the way for a wider range of presidential candidates to parliament.
"I was very pleased indeed that President Gbagbo thought it was important to send the constitutional amendment to his parliament," Mbeki, who is on an African Union-sponsored peace mission to this troubled former French colony, said.
'No option to fail'
Article 35 requires presidential candidates to have both "a father and mother of Ivorian origin", a condition which prevented opposition leader Alassane Ouattara from standing in elections and would again in next year's poll.
Ouattara, who served as prime minister under post-independence icon Felix Houphouet Boigny and as a senior official of the International Monetary Fund, is enormously popular in the mostly-Muslim north.
Speaking after Mbeki's address, Mamadou Koulibaly, the speaker of the Ivorian parliament, said that if the parliamentary schedule is respected, the revised Article 35 "will come up for debate as early as the beginning of January".
Amid fears that civil strife in the world's largest cocoa producer could spill over into neighbouring countries in the volatile region, Mbeki stressed the need to complete legislative processes as a precondition for holding elections scheduled for October next year.
He pressed for the process of disarmament of rebel forces in the north to begin, saying that the general level of security for all Ivorians needed to be raised "so that we do not allow a culture of violence to get entrenched in Cote d'Ivoire".
For the Cote d'Ivoire to play a role (in Africa), it is critical that the Cote d'Ivoire unite," Mbeki told the packed 210-seat National Assembly, using the Ivory Coast's French name.
"There is no option to fail. To fail means to condemn the people of the Cote d'Ivoire to life of suffering," Mbeki told parliamentarians representing the ruling Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) and three other opposition parties.