ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP) - A leading opposition party pulled its ministers from Ivory Coast's power-sharing government on Thursday, charging that President Laurent Gbagbo was destabilizing the west African nation's shaky peace deal.
| Are they early or late, I can't tell. |
The Democratic Party of Ivory Coast decided its seven ministers would boycott the transitional government arranged under a January 2003 peace deal to "protest against Gbagbo's acts of aggression and humiliation," against the bloc, said its spokesman, Maurice Kakou. "Gbagbo's destabilizing the peace process," he said in Abidjan, the commercial capital of the world's largest cocoa producer. He did not say what would induce the ministers back to the cabinet.
Minister of Reconciliation Dano Djedje - a Gbagbo ally - said the boycotting ministers are the ones threatening the peace process.
"Are too!"
"Am not!"
"Did too!"
"Did not!" |
Despite the France-brokered accord, Ivory Coast remains divided between a government-held south and a north controlled by fighters in an insurgency that sprang from a September 2002 attempt to depose Gbagbo.
| Notice the AP sorta forgot who's behind the rebels. |
The boycotting party's leader is ex-President Henri Konan Bedie, whose 1999 overthrow in Ivory Coast's first coup shattered the country's reputation as a bulwark of stability in a turbulent region and ushered in a half-decade of strife. Rebel ministers have previously bolted the 41-person cabinet, only to rejoin later. The power-sharing administration is to cede to a democratic one after 2005 elections, under the peace accord.
| Followed by another coup. |
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