Global Policy Forum

The United Nations may have slapped an embargo on Cote d'Ivoire, but with both government and rebels digging in their heels over key issues that have deadlocked the political process for months, analysts and diplomats doubt the sanctions will prompt a fast return to the negotiating table. President Laurent Gbagbo is adamant the rebels must disarm to break the political stalemate in Cote d'Ivoire. The New Forces rebels and other opposition leaders maintain that Gbagbo must go before peace talks can take place. And both sides are trying to use this week's UN sanctions as ammunition for their arguments.

The UN Security Council voted unanimously on Monday to impose a 13-month weapons ban on the divided West African nation and warned that certain individuals would be blocked from travelling abroad and their overseas accounts frozen next month if steps were not taken to get the shattered peace process back on track. Having broken a shaky 18-month ceasefire earlier this month by bombing rebel strongholds, Gbagbo said on Tuesday he was committed to reunifying his country, which has been split into a government-run south and a rebel-held north for more than two years after a failed coup attempt against him.

"The President takes note of the resolution and assures the United Nations, member states and friends of Cote d'Ivoire that he will do nothing to hinder the peace process," Gbagbo's spokesman said in a statement read on state television on Tuesday. "He invites the UN to apply this resolution with the same rigour to the rebels and to immediately begin the disarmament process included in the Marcoussis peace deal." The UN Mission in Cote d'Ivoire (ONUCI), which has some 6,000 peacekeepers on the ground, has repeatedly said that its mission is not to disarm the rebels, but to support the transitional government in moving the country to peace and elections planned for October 2005. But some diplomats suggested a change of approach was needed.

"We should now work on an hypothesis along the lines of Sierra Leone, where ONUCI will be charged with carrying out disarmament, by force if necessary," one Western diplomat in Abidjan told IRIN, noting that the ONUCI number two was Alan Doss, the man who managed the disarmament process in Sierra Leone after a decade-long civil war there. The rebels had been due to hand over their weapons a month ago but they flatly refused, saying the government had not passed the political reforms that were supposed to precede disarmament.

Hurdles to disarmament

Guillaume Soro, leader of the New Forces, on Tuesday applauded the UN resolution but warned disarmament was still some way off. "We welcome the immediate arms embargo which we have been calling for since the Marcoussis peace deal of 2003," Soro told IRIN by telephone. "But the political process can only start up again once Gbagbo is no longer in power."

Rebel leader Guillaume Soro

"We will disarm immediately if Gbagbo goes. If he goes, there will be no obstacles to the reforms being adopted," he added. In the meantime, analysts agree that the UN sanctions will not stop the small-arms trade across Cote d'Ivoire's porous borders, although they will likely prevent the Ivorian government from replacing fighters jets destroyed by the French army after a bombing raid in the rebel-held north killed nine of their peacekeepers.

"If you can manage to get truckloads of smuggled coffee beans across the borders than you can certainly get arms in disguised as something else," said Colin Waugh of the London-based independent research body, Chatham House. "Based on the state of Cote d'Ivoire's borders,. the countries that are its neighbours and previous embargoes in the region, I think this embargo will have minimal effect," he added. In neighbouring Liberia, for example, weapons were still going into the country right up until the end of the civil war in 2003, despite an arms embargo imposed two years earlier. The Liberia-Cote d'Ivoire border is of particular concern and impossible for UN peacekeepers in either country to control fully, analysts said.

But while analysts were in total agreement about the effect the UN sanctions would have on weapons, they were split when it came to the impact on the diplomatic process. A Paris-based analyst, who declined to be named, said the French-sponsored resolution had played into the hands of both camps. "They won't lead to a weakening of Gbagbo, in fact quite the opposite. His party's main strategy is casting themselves as people under siege," he said. "The demonisation of the Gbagbo regime also works for the New Forces who are trying to press home their advantage because no pressure is being put on them."

But others saw the sanctions process as more effective, particularly the role African leaders played in calling on the UN Security Council to start the arms ban immediately rather than waiting until 10 December as previously envisaged.

African leaders worried

Worried about the Ivorian conflict sucking in neighbouring countries in the fragile West African region, the leaders of Nigeria, Senegal, Togo, Burkina Faso, Benin and Ghana held crisis talks on Sunday and threw their support whole-heartedly behind the international community. "Losing the AU's support had a significant impact psychologically on Gbagbo. They removed the ground from beneath him," explained Stephen Morrison, head of the Africa programme at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

And Mike McGovern, the West Africa project director for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, said the second wave of sanctions, which are set to kick in on 15 December, might worry some of the key players in the Ivorian crisis. "There will be a list with specific names and the implication is that they have dossiers on these people. It's one short step to referring those dossiers to the ICC (International Criminal Court)," McGovern said.

He felt the diplomatic baton would now almost certainly fall to the Ivorian president's African peers either through the African Union (AU) or the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). "It makes sense for the AU and ECOWAS to take the lead, simply because tensions are so high between France and the Gbagbo government," McGovern said. When France retaliated for the killing of its peacekeepers by destroying the Ivorian air force, an anti-French backlash erupted on the streets of Abidjan. Expatriate homes were stripped bare, schools and businesses torched, women raped and men attacked, various sources reported. Ivorian government sources said French forces killed a number of protesters. More than 6,000 foreigners have since been evacuated from the city.

On Wednesday the AU's Peace and Security Council called for an urgent heads-of-state meeting "to review developments in Cote d'Ivoire and agree on the steps to be taken to contribute to the restoration of lasting peace and security." But it is unclear exactly how African leaders will force the warring sides in Cote d'Ivoire to make peace. Just this July, African leaders and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan met in the Ghanaian capital, Accra, where Gbagbo promised to push through reforms and the rebels vowed to disarm on 15 October.

Since the latest cycle of violence exploded two weeks ago, South African President Thabo Mbeki, under an AU mandate, has already flown to Abidjan to meet Gbagbo and received several Ivorian opposition leaders in Pretoria but nothing concrete has emerged. Soro was absent from the opposition talks, but Mbeki's spokesman told IRIN on Wednesday that the rebel leader was scheduled to arrive on Saturday, completing the South African president's first round of discussions. Before that, Soro is planning a tour of West African leaders. He told IRIN that he would begin on Thursday with Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade and then he would visit Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and Togolese President Gnassingbe Eyadema.

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