FREE DAILY EMAIL

Ivor y Coast President Laurent Gbagbo has drawn up a new government that includes rebels but does not give them key ministries they say they were promised by a French-brokered pact to end the country's war, a senior politician said Wednesday.

Alphonse Djedje Mady, the general secretary of the Democratic Party of Ivory Coast (PDCI), which ruled the west African country from 1960 until 1999, said the list of nominees was presented to political parties by Gbagbo and Prime Minister Seydou Diarra, named under the same French peace pact, on Tuesday.

The sensitive defence and interior ministries, which the rebels insist were promised them under the peace accord reached after ten days of talks in January in the French town of Marcoussis, near Paris, and accepted by Gbagbo, had been given to "neutral" figures, Mady said.

"The list that was presented to us is balanced but it is not exactly mathematical," he said.

"The basis -- and we all agreed on this -- is that everybody should be included," he said, without giving details.

Ivory Coast's armed forces and four main political parties have balked at the idea of seeing rebel representatives in a power-sharing government, especially in the key defense and interior ministries they have laid claim to.

The conflict in Ivory Coast, which began in mid-September when rebels launched an uprising against Gbagbo's government, has left hundreds dead and the country's cocoa-driven economy in tatters.

It has split the world's leading cocoa producer not only geographically but also widened ethnic and religious chasms. The rebels hold the Muslim-majority north and much of the west, and the government controls the Christian-dominated south.

On Sunday, both the main rebel Patriotic Movement Patriotic Movement of Ivory Coast (MPCI) and the Popular Movement of Ivory Coast's Far West (MPIGO) threatened to renew clashes with forces loyal to Gbagbo if they were not given the key ministries.

Gbagbo has vacillated over implementing the deal, which he endorsed at a summit of African leaders in Paris that followed the Marcoussis peace talks in January. Gbagbo did not attend those talks.

The embattled Ivorian president called the French-brokered deal into question on his return home after the Paris summit, calling it just a set of proposals.

After promising to address the divided nation on the deal, he then maintained a sphinx-like silence on the pact for two weeks, during which his hardline supporters ran riot in Abidjan, attacking French symbols including the embassy, schools and businesses and prompting Paris to advise nationals to leave its former star west African colony.

The Ivorian leader broke his silence on February 7 -- two weeks after his return from France -- with a televised national address in which he said he accepted the "spirit" of the accord but stressed that he would not implement anything that went against the grain of the Ivorian constitution.

Critics of the French deal have also vented their ire on the new consensus prime minister Diarra whom they lampooned as a "prime minister of the French." Diarra did not return home for days after the accord was finalised in France as Gbagbo's militant supporters launched a vitriolic campaign against the veteran diplomat, who served as prime minister under an earlier military government.

He finally came home after fiery pro-Gbagbo youth leader Charles Ble Goude, whose followers spearheaded riots against the Marcoussis accord in Abidjan, said he was swallowing Diarra as "a bitter pill" after Gbagbo called for an end to the violence sparked by the pact - Sapa-AFP.

SPONSORED BY

Advanced