Heaven help the new Prime Minister of the war-torn Ivory Coast in trying to coax together a reluctant government and distrustful rebel groups in the hope of bringing peace to what was once west Africa's most prosperous and stable nation.
Mr Seydou Diarra's appointment follows the agreement thrashed out in France last month which allows for a government of national unity and changes to controversial citizenship laws. But President Laurent Gbagbo, who agreed the deal - bullied into it by France, say his followers - has been busy backtracking since he returned home and realised how much opposition there is to it among his supporters.
The calamitous state that the country is in stems mainly from the fragile ethnic balance that makes up the 17 million population. Under the firm one-party rule of the founding president, Mr Félix Houphouet-Boigny, the Muslim north got along with the Christian south tolerably well. But democracy, introduced in 1990, was exploited by his successors, particularly Mr Gbagbo, who rigged the elections two years ago to disenfranchise much of the Muslim north.
Last September the north decided that only civil war would redress its grievances and within weeks the country was torn apart. To make matters worse, two rebel groups in the cocoa-rich west also rose up, prompted in no small measure by legions of mercenaries from Liberia who have shown themselves to be brutally undisciplined.
A sticking point for Mr Diarra, a Muslim and former diplomat, is the insistence by the main rebel group, the MCPI, that Mr Gbagbo stick to an agreement that rebel nominees get the defence and interior ministries in the unity government. This has gone down badly with the government's supporters and led to open defiance among the defence forces. Mr Gbagbo is trying to wriggle out of the agreement but the MCPI won't have it.
Caught in the middle is the former colonial power, France, now with more than 3,000 troops trying to keep the peace, never mind protect the 16,000 French citizens and many French-owned businesses. France risks becoming seriously bogged down in a policing role where it is quite unclear which - if any - of the competing forces are the good guys and where anti-French sentiment is running high. Nevertheless, the French forces must stick it out. Mr Diarra may yet fail to unite the country but nothing less than genocide lies in wait for Ivorians should the restraining hand of France be taken away.