SA probes mercenary claims
2005-04-12 22:53
Pretoria - South Africa, which is trying to mediate an end to Ivory Coast's long civil war, said on Tuesday it was probing rebel claims that President Laurent Gbagbo was recruiting mercenaries to sabotage the latest peace deal.
"We need to find if these latest claims from Bouake have any basis in fact and we have asked our officials to check on this," deputy foreign minister Aziz Pahad said, referring to the northern headquarters of the Ivorian rebels.
"If the claims are substantiated, we will take some action," Pahad told Radio 702.
Ivory Coast's rebel New Forces (FN) movement on Monday accused Gbagbo of seeking "to torpedo the national reconciliation process" and recruiting mercenaries with the ink scarcely dry on a latest peace pact.
On April 6, five Ivorian leaders including Gbagbo and the main rebel chief, pledged to put the west African country on the path to peace through disarmament, resolving a dispute over the eligibility of presidential candidates and providing for rebels' return to a unity government.
The pact was brokered in Pretoria by President Thabo Mbeki, who has been mandated by the African Union to seek an end to the two-and-a-half year war which has split the world's top cocoa grower in two and ruined its once-model economy.
Pahad on Tuesday stressed that "there have been charges on both sides that mercenaries are being recruited".
"We should not allow this to detract from what we have achieved," he said.
"I'd like to think that in four months the South African mediation has achieved more than the United Nations and other processes have achieved in three years."
Gbagbo's government and the rebels initially agreed to a ceasefire in the Linas-Marcoussis accords, signed in a town south of Paris in January 2003, and followed up by other pacts, but the ceasefire has been breached several times by both sides.
Pahad said he hoped that with the signing of the Pretoria accord "the conditions are there for elections to take place in (Ivory Coast) in October".
- AFP