FRANCE: France fears genocide on a Rwandan scale if it simply walks away from the civil war in the Ivory Coast, writes Lara Marlowe in Paris.
French patience with its former West African colony Ivory Coast will be sorely tested over the next 10 days, as Paris attempts to end the four-month-old civil war there. The Foreign Minister, Mr Dominique de Villepin, will today open a "round table" of 32 Ivorians at the national rugby training centre at Marcoussis, 30 km south of Paris. Leaders of three rebel movements that have seized half of the country are represented, along with the Ivorian government, led by Prime Minister Pascal Affi N'Guessan, and seven political parties.
Most of the men were flown by French military aircraft to Dakar, Senegal, yesterday from whence they were to take an Air France flight to Paris. Their all-expense-paid, 10-day visit includes a daily stipend from the French government.
But they are being isolated in the expectation they will agree to a French-sponsored peace plan by the evening of the 24th. From January 25th, an international peace conference will bring together African heads of state and the UN Secretary General Mr Kofi Annan in Paris. The Ivorian President, Mr Laurent Gbagbo, whose departure is demanded by the rebels, was above participating in the 10 days of haggling, but will deign to attend the international conference.
Experts are confident the French can extract an agreement from the warring parties. But all have a record of breaking promises as quickly as they make them. On January 3rd, during Mr de Villepin's perilous journey to the Ivory Coast, Mr Gbagbo promised to expel 200 mercenaries shoring up government forces. Nearly two weeks later, the Ivorian president's guards are still Israelis, and eastern European helicopter pilots are standing by.
Ivory Coast is the world's leading cocoa producer and the third largest producer of coffee. The country accounts for 40 per cent of economic activity in former French West Africa. Abidjan's port is the gateway to the landlocked Sahel countries.
The French military deployment was ostensibly to protect 25,000 French people living in the Ivory Coast, not to mention €1 billion in French investments.
The French soldiers were meant to leave after the October 17th cease-fire, but instead their numbers have quadrupled to 2,500.
A West African peace-keeping force to replace them has not yet materialised. France fears genocide on a Rwandan scale if it simply walks away.
Mr Affi N'Guessan gave the government's version of recent history at a press conference. The attempted coup of September 18th, which expanded into full-blown rebellion, was "a great surprise". He blamed earlier wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea for leaving "tens of thousands of soldiers at loose ends with their weapons, pillaging - even the corrugated steel roofs the Liberians steal to take back to Liberia." If the fighting doesn't end soon, the Ivorian Prime Minister warned, "there will be no stopping the contagion of war and it will spread to Ghana, Nigeria and Togo."
Mr Affi N'Guessan insisted that President Gbagbo is "a man of peace" who never used so much as a pocket knife during 10 years in opposition. French sources describe the Ivorian leader as "an old socialist more wily than Francois Mitterrand".
Paris gives the impression of supporting Mr Gbagbo while pinching its nose; he is no longer referred to as "democratically elected" but "internationally recognised". The problem is that Mr Gbagbo's chief opponent, Mr Alassane Ouattara, was disqualified from standing in the 2000 presidential election because one of his parents is from Burkina, north of the Ivory Coast.
Mr Ouattara, a former deputy director general of the IMF, now lives in exile in Paris. Asked whether the government would be willing to welcome him back as part of a settlement, Mr Affi N'Guessan said, "There are 16 million Ivorians. We're not here to talk about individual cases. We're here to talk about serious things." Yet Mr Ouattara's exclusion from Ivorian politics aggravated the deepest grievance of the rebels, over "Ivoirité" - the definition of who is or is not Ivorian. More than a quarter of the population are immigrants from Ivory Coast's poorer neighbours, and the rebellion is partly a backlash against discrimination. Mr Ouattera fanned the tensions that led to war by claiming he was disqualified because, like the majority in the north of Ivory Coast, he is a Muslim. For decades, most of the farming in Ivory Coast has been done by immigrants from Burkina, but they are considered foreign and are not allowed to buy land. And the rebels accuse the government of running death squads to kidnap and murder opponents.