Cote D'Ivoire talks adjourned

Accra, March 7, GNA - Negotiations for the sharing of ministerial portfolios in a transitional government of Cote D'Ivoire have been adjourned until noon Friday to enable West African facilitators to "clean up" some fundamental difficulties threatening what could become a consensus among all the parties.

The negotiations, which re-opened on Thursday, were geared towards the implementation of the Marcoussis Peace Accord, signed by all the parties to end the five-month-old conflict in that West African country.

"We seem to have distilled a consensus from our negotiations for a power-sharing transitional government in our sister country and it has become necessary to suspend the meeting in order to clean it (consensus) up of certain fundamental difficulties," Foreign Minister Hackman Owusu-Agyemang announced to reporters early Friday.

Mr Owusu-Agyemang said the difficulty was about the re-allocation of the Defence and Interior portfolios, which the rebels had agreed to give up.

"The rebels have agreed that in the interest of peace they are prepared to let go of the Interior and Defence portfolios."

He explained that representatives of President Laurent Gbagbo led by ex-premier Affi N'guessan raised questions about what seemed to be a general agreement among all parties on what should be done with the two key portfolios.

He, however, did not give details but expressed the hope that by the time the talks resumed later in the day, the "thorny" issues would have been addressed.

West African diplomats close to the negotiations explained that after a lengthy bargaining, there was a consensus that the newly appointed Prime Minister Seydou Diarra should keep the portfolio of Defence while the security portion (Police and Gendarmes) of the Interior Ministry was put under a National Security Council to be formed. Membership of this Council should cut across the spectrum of all parties.

It was suggested that the rebels should retain the other half of the Interior portfolio (territorial administration in addition to the Ministry of Information/Communication.

But just as the negotiators were about to draft their final working document regarding the agreement, ex-Premier N'guessan raised objections to the deal, which was proposed by President Gbagbo himself.

N'guessan's objections led to the suspension of the talks, they said. Gbagbo had earlier rejected an earlier alternative that Premier Diarra should keep the two key ministries to himself.

Speaking to reporters, ECOWAS Executive Secretary, Mohamed Ibn Chambas expressed optimism that the outstanding issue would be resolved by the close of the meeting on Friday.

"We are just threading cautiously to have the understanding of all parties in order to make the final agreement acceptable to all," Dr Chambas said.

ECOWAS Chairman, President John Agyekum Kufuor, stayed with the negotiators from Thursday evening until early Friday and had helped to address some of the initial concerns raised by the various parties.

"He was on the phone with President Gbagbo for about one-and-a-half hours trying to explain issues out," a source told the Ghana News Agency.

Implementation of the French-brokered peace accords had stalled over President Gbagbo's reluctance to give the Defence and Interior ministerial portfolios to the rebels.

T he rebels to this point had insisted that they would not participate in a government in which they were not allocated the two seats.

Cote D'Ivoire, a former French colony, the world's top cocoa producer and eighth coffee producer, has been plagued by civil war since September