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Bid resolve island crisis
13/05/2002 14:47 - (SA)
Dakar - A team representing Madagascar's elected President Marc
Ravalomanana has held talks with his Senegalese counterpart
Abdoulaye Wade, who is trying to resolve a leadership crisis on the island, officials said on Monday.
Ravalomanana was sworn in as president of the Indian Ocean
nation on April 29 in the wake of an accord signed in Dakar in a
bid to end a power struggle with longtime ruler Didier Ratsiraka,
but the latter refuses to step down.
"We came to discuss how to implement Dakar I," Ravalomanana's
aide and delegation chief Manandafi Rakotonirina said on
Monday, a day after the talks with the Senegalese leader.
Under this accord signed on April 18, Ratsiraka agreed to lift
roadblocks stifling Madagascar's highland capital Antananarivo,
which is a Ravalomanana stronghold, but the blockade persists and
the rival leaders and their supporters have effectively divided the large country between them.
The Dakar accord also provided for a referendum on the
presidency should neither man win an absolute majority in a recount of the votes in a hotly disputed presidential election last December.
But when Ravalomanana won that recount, Ratsiraka dismissed it
as a coup d'etat.
Torched shops and houses
Five of the country's six provincial governors back Ratsiraka,
and coastal parts of Madagascar have declared their "independence" from Antananarivo.
Last week, Ratsiraka supporters in the northwestern province of Mahajanga looted and torched shops and houses in a district
populated by Merinas, the ethnic group that predominates in the
highlands.
Wade is trying to set up a "Dakar II" round of talks between the rivals, which were to have taken place on Monday and Tuesday, but this has been postponed.
The Senegalese leader said on Friday that a new date would be
announced following "consultations under way on the make-up of the delegations and the agenda for the talks".
On Sunday, the Libyan official news agency Jana reported that
Ravalomanana had asked Muammar Gaddafi to help resolve the crisis in Madagascar and said the Libyan leader had received his envoy.
Rakotonirina said he was not the envoy in question, but said he would on Monday be travelling to Paris on a "technical stage" of his trip, before returning to Antananarivo. - Sapa-AFP
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