IMF 'won't fund' Ivory Coast

2005-09-14 19:08

Paris - The International Monetary Fund (IFM) will withhold help to Ivory Coast until the war-divided West African country has an effective government and disarmament gets under way, said a senior official on Wednesday.

The director of the IMF's African department, Abdoulaye Bio-Tchane, said: "We could step in quickly enough if a certain number of conditions are met.

"This means a government that works and that disarmament begins."

However, he rejected setting "political conditions" for renewed IMF funding, suspended on the outbreak of war three years ago, in the onetime regional economic powerhouse and the world's leading coca producer.

Political condition

Bio-Tchane, a former finance minister in Benin, said: "To say disarmament begins isn't a political condition.

"There has to be a programme set up."

An IMF team had just completed a mission to Ivory Coast and decided on conditions under which the country could benefit from post-conflict emergency assistance but this would require deploying a national administration across its territory.

The country was under government control in the south, while rebels of the New Forces (FN) held the north and part of the west across truce lines patrolled by French soldiers and a UN peacekeeping force.

Disarmament, demobilisation, rehabilitation

A series of peace accords had largely upheld an edgy ceasefire, sometimes violated, but rebel participation in a transitional government had been on and off and plans to hold elections on October 30 had been scrapped as quite unrealistic by the rebels, opposition and UN secretary-general Kofi Annan.

The IMF insisted on concrete moves to implement a Disarmament, Demobilisation and Rehabilitation (DDR) programme, which had so far seen only symbolic pullbacks of heavy guns from the front lines.

Annan said last week on Thursday it would be impossible to hold presidential elections as planned and blamed both sides for creaking a "blockage" in the peace process.

Implementation 'another story'

He said: "Each side is waiting for the other. They've signed several agreements. They have no problem signing them, but implementation is another story."

Advocating sanctions against the country, Annan said: "If that's what is needed to get them moving, then the security council should apply them."

The crisis had wreaked havoc on the Ivorian economy and the IMF mission estimated that the growth rate might not even match the one percent mark set for this year unless there was stability.

Most cocoa plantations and industrial investment were in the predominantly Christian south, while the north relied on cotton farming, another potential source of foreign income.

- AFP