UN Security Council imposes immediate arms embargo against Côte d'Ivoire. by UN News / The Guardian 10:24am 8th Nov, 2004   15 November 2004    Security Council imposes immediate arms embargo against Côte d'Ivoire. (UN News)    Seeking to end the violence in Côte d'Ivoire, the United Nations Security Council today imposed an immediate, 13-month arms embargo against the country and gave the parties there one month to get the peace process back on track or face a travel ban and a freeze on their assets.    Under a resolution adopted unanimously, the additional sanctions will go into effect on 15 December unless the Council determines before then that the signatories of two peace deals are working to implement them. Those measures would remain for one year.    The 2003 Linas-Marcoussis accord halted fighting between the Government of President Laurent Gbagbo and rebels who control most of the north, and created a government of national reconciliation. The second pact, reached this summer in the Ghanaian capital and known as the Accra III Agreement, focused on those parts of the 2003 pact that were still in dispute.    The latest unrest flared up on 4 November when the Government violated the ceasefire by launching an attack in the Zone of Confidence (ZOC) separating combatants. On 6 November, Government aircraft bombed French peacekeepers in the area, killing nine people and leading to French reprisals that destroyed the tiny Ivorian air force. This in turn led to anti-foreigner rioting in Abidjan, the country's largest city.    The Council text condemned the Government air strikes and demanded that all Ivorian parties to the conflict fully comply with the ceasefire. It also reiterated the Council's full support for the action undertaken by the UN Operation in Côte d'Ivoire (UNOCI) and French forces.    The 15-member body further demanded that the Ivorian authorities stop all radio and television broadcasts inciting hatred, intolerance and violence, and asked the UN peacekeeping mission to bolster its monitoring role in that regard.    The arms sanctions require all countries to prevent the “direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer” to Côte d'Ivoire of arms or any related materiel. Pending progress, the Council will also ban anyone “who constitute a threat to the peace and national reconciliation process” from travelling abroad, and “freeze the funds, other financial assets and economic resources” of those designated by a Council committee set up to enforce the measures.    The resolution provides for a number of humanitarian exemptions designed to allow UN peacekeepers and relief workers to carry out their operations on behalf of the Ivorian people.    November 14, 2004    "Africans Endorse Ivory Coast Sanctions", by Schalk Van Zuydam. (Associated Press Writer/ The Guardian)    ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP) - African leaders backed an arms embargo and other immediate U.N. sanctions against Ivory Coast on Sunday, isolating President Laurent Gbagbo's hard-line government even further in its deadly confrontation with its former colonial ruler, France.    As a French-led evacuation of Ivory Coast builds to one of Africa's largest, French President Jacques Chirac denounced President Laurent Gbagbo's ``questionable regime'' - and said France would not tolerate much more. `We do not want to allow a system to develop that would lead only to anarchy or a regime of a fascist nature,'' Chirac told an audience in the southern French city of Marseille.    Presidents from Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Togo and Gabon, meeting in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, on Sunday backed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an arms embargo, a travel ban and asset freezes against anyone blocking peace in Ivory Coast.    The arms embargo ``should be immediate,'' Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo - the current African Union chairman - told journalists after the meeting at the presidential wing of Abuja's airport. The call gives African approval to a tough stand in Monday's expected Security Council vote on the sanctions.    Gbagbo's representative at the talks, parliamentary leader Mamadou Koulibaly, condemned the call for sanctions, and complained African leaders had slighted him - barring him from most of the talks, and dinner. No other African leaders ``are capable of resolving our problems with France,'' Koulibaly said. One of his aides, speaking on condition he not be identified, warned that that other countries should ``come and collect their foreigners from Ivory Coast - because if there's an embargo we can't live with them anymore.''    In Abidjan, French civilians and other foreigners sprawled Sunday on camp beds set up in the airport departure lounge, their cats and dogs lined up in pet cages on the tarmac just outside - all waiting for loading onto an Air France jumbo jet for the latest in five days of evacuation flights. A handful of heavily armed U.S. Marines stood ready to assist French troops.    France's heavy criticism, and African mediation efforts, come after a five-day spate of anti-foreigner rampages last week that have sent Westerners and Africans fleeing a nation - the world's top cocoa producer - that once was stable and prosperous, and the pride of France's former West African empire.    Ivory Coast's latest crisis began when Gbagbo's military broke a more than year-old cease-fire in the country's 2-year-old civil war with airstrikes on the rebel-held north. Warplanes bombed a French peacekeeping post in the north on Nov. 6, killing nine French peacekeepers and an American aid worker and plunging the country into chaos. France wiped out Ivory Coast's newly built-up airport on the tarmac. The retaliation unleashed a violent loyalist uprising, with Gbagbo-allied Young Patriots popular militia leading looting, burning and attacks that targeted the French.    No deaths have been reported among French or other non-African foreigners targeted by the militia. France says attackers raped several expatriates. The Associated Press and hospitals confirmed at least 17 deaths in the rioting, all or most among Ivorians.    Gbagbo's government claims 62 of its supporters were killed, many of them when French forces opened fire on anti-French demonstrations in Abidjan. On Sunday, a few score Young Patriots manned roadblocks around Gbagbo's lagoon-side mansion and maintained a vigil outside nearby state broadcasting offices. Fearing an overthrow attempt by France, the Gbagbo-allied militia have called for a ``human shield'' around the two sites until French troops leave Ivory Coast.    Chirac said Sunday in Marseille the 4,000 French peacekeepers would remain, alongside a more than 6,000-man U.N. peace force. Gbagbo late Saturday put hard-liner Col. Maj. Philippe Mangou in charge of the country's military, in a move likely to anger both France and much of Gbagbo's own army. It was Mangou who oversaw the air campaign that reopened Ivory Coast's civil war and opened the confrontation with France. Gbagbo fired a popular moderate, Gen. Mathias Doue, from the top job - risking angering much of his army.    Further challenging France, Gbagbo told France-Inter radio he would buy new warplanes. `Do you think I'm going to leave my country without defense?'' he asked. `If the French army destroys them, I'll buy it again a third time.'' Gbagbo came to power amid street protests by the Young Patriots, after an aborted vote count in a 2000 election called to restore civilian government following a 1999 military coup, the country's first-ever takeover.    Most of the more than 4,000 Westerners who have left by Sunday are French, but they also include hundreds of British, American, Spanish, Dutch, Lebanese and other nationals. Private companies have evacuated an additional 470 of their employees.    (Associated Press writers Pauline Bax in Abidjan and Daniel Balint-Kurti in Abuja, Nigeria, contributed to this report. © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004).    12 November 2004    Clashes in Côte d'Ivoire could trigger violence across West Africa, UN envoy warns. (UN News)    The recent flare-up of violence in Côte d'Ivoire – where United Nations and French peacekeepers are monitoring a buffer zone separating the government-controlled south and the rebel-held north – could spread across West Africa and plunge the region back into conflict, a senior United Nations official based in Dakar warned today.    Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah released a statement voicing alarm “at the potential spillover of the crisis on neighbouring countries with new cross-border movements of combatants, small arms and mercenaries within and from outside the region.”    Since 2002 when the conflict broke out in Côte d'Ivoire, the economy of much of the sub-region has gravely deteriorated as a result of the disruption to trade, transportation, and monetary transactions.    Mr. Ould-Abdallah, who is the UN Special Representative for West Africa, praised regional efforts to contain the crisis, but warned that it is now imposing an additional burden on the limited resources of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), while further tarnishing the image of West Africa as a region of chronic instability.    Those responsible for the recent escalation are doing “incalculable damage not only to the future of their country, but to the whole of West Africa,” he said. “How can we hope to attract foreign investment, essential for creating the jobs that so many millions of West African youths desperately need, if some of our leaders continue to pursue the logic of war and vendetta year after year?” the envoy asked.“Future generations will judge some of today's leaders extremely harshly for once again holding back the advancement of our societies.”
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