Ivory Coast tops agenda at Francophone summit
By NICOLE CHAVRANSKI, Associated Press Writer
OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso, Nov 27, 2004 (AP) — Francophone heads of state on Saturday urged Ivory Coast’s warring parties to renounce violence and reopen talks to end a long-simmering conflict threatening to destabilize West Africa.
Clashes between French and Ivorian troops earlier this month in Ivory Coast sparked a wave of anti-French mob violence that forced thousands to flee. The crisis has cast a shadow over the two-day summit of the International Organization of La Francophonie, which began in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, on Friday.
The French-bloc adopted a resolution on Ivory Coast after closed-door talks Saturday to discuss the crisis in what was once one of West Africa’s most stable nations.
The resolution called on all Ivorian parties to “definitively” end hostilities and “restart dialogue without preconditions.”
Ivory Coast has been split in two since a failed 2002 coup attempt sparked months of fighting. A French-brokered peace deal in 2003 ended major hostilities, but government hard-liners tried to restart the war earlier this month by bombing rebel positions in the north.
After one Ivorian airstrike killed nine French peacekeepers and an American aid worker, France retaliated by destroying Ivory Coast’s air force.
La Francophonie condemned the deadly Ivorian airstrike, as well as a wave of anti-French, anti-rebel mob violence that forced 9,000 foreigners and thousands of Ivorians to flee.
With French-Ivorian relations at an all-time low, Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo boycotted the summit. His government accuses neighboring Burkina Faso of supporting Ivorian rebels.
French President Jacques Chirac opened the summit Friday sounding a conciliatory note and calling Ivory Coast “a friend.”
About 30 heads of state attended, including Congo President Joseph Kabila, Rwandan President Paul Kagame, Haitian Prime Minister Gerard Latortue and President Omar el-Bashir of Sudan, where fighting between government-backed militias and Sudan Liberation Army rebels broke out last week despite a Nov. 9 cease-fire.
On Thursday, Kagame renewed a threat to restart central Africa’s deadliest conflict, claiming his tiny nation was coming under attack from Rwandan militiamen in neighboring giant, Congo.
The Rwandan militias fled to Congo after the 1994 genocide, which killed more than 500,000 people. Rwanda has already invaded Congo twice to hunt them down, first in 1996 and again in 1998 _ sparking a five-year war that drew in the armies of a half-dozen African nations and caused the deaths of more than 3 million people, mostly due to famine and disease.
La Francophonie was created to promote French culture and language, but is serving more and more as a forum to try to resolve armed conflicts among its members. The group includes French-influenced countries from Canada to Vietnam, most of them former French-speaking colonies in Africa.
The next summit is to be held in Bucharest, Romania in 2006.