ACTIVITIES OF SECRETARY-GENERAL IN GHANA, 27 - 31 JULY
Secretary-General Kofi Annan arrived in Accra in the evening of Tuesday, 27 July. He conferred immediately with his Special Representative for Côte d’Ivoire, Albert Tevoedjre, and other advisers regarding the summit on Côte d’Ivoire that would begin in Accra in two days time.
On Wednesday morning, he met the Executive Secretary of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Mohamed ibn Chambas. They discussed the strategy for the next day’s summit, which the Secretary-General called an attempt to salvage the peace agreement between the Government, the opposition and rebel groups.
That afternoon, he met the Ivorian Prime Minister, Seydou Diarra. He then called on the President of Ghana, John Kufuor, who would co-host the summit with him. In comments to the press before the meeting, the Secretary-General said that he hoped the Ivorian parties would come to Accra “with an open mind, determined to resolve this issue.” He then added, “And I hope they will rise above individual interests and desire for power and put the nation first. Without that spirit, we will not make progress”.
After that meeting, he again spoke to reporters, saying, “I am hopeful that we will be able to build on the progress we made in Addis Ababa”, referring to the mini-summit on Côte d’Ivoire that he organized in the margins of the African Union Summit in the Ethiopian capital earlier that month. He urged the Ivorian parties coming to Accra “to forget individual ambitions and think of the people and the nation”. If they come with that spirit, he said, “they may surprise themselves”.
Later that evening, he met South African President Thabo Mbeki in his capacity as July’s Chair of the African Union’s Peace and Security Council. They reviewed the current situation in Côte d’Ivoire and the Secretary-General briefed the President on current developments on the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Coming out of that meeting, the Secretary-General was asked by a South African Broadcasting reporter about the prospects for the summit. He replied that he hoped the Ivorian leaders would “forget their individual ambitions for just 48 hours and work with us to find a solution”.
On Thursday morning, before travelling to the conference centre for the summit, the Secretary-General held two meetings.
The first was with former Malian President, Alpha Oumar Konare, who chaired the African Union Commission. They discussed the best way to structure the morning agenda of the summit and analysed its prospects. They also touched on the African Union’s observer mission in Darfur, Sudan.
The second meeting was with the President of Côte d’Ivoire, Laurent Gbagbo, who reviewed the steps he had taken to carry out the commitments he had made in Addis Ababa. These included separate meetings with the Heads of State of two of his neighbouring countries, Mali and Burkina Faso, as well as a three-way meeting among them; a meeting with the leaders of his own political party to solidify their support for negotiation and a meeting with the opposition. He said he had also submitted to the Parliament, which had gone into recess, key pieces of reform legislation and, just before he left for Accra, he called the Parliament into emergency session to deal with those draft laws.
He then asked to meet with the Secretary-General one-on-one to brief him on the outcome of those meetings.
The Secretary-General then went to the summit site, where he joined 12 African heads of State and government. They met among themselves to share information and plan strategy.
The plenary meeting then began with three short speeches by President Kufuor, the co-host; President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, Chair of the African Union; and, finally, by the Secretary-General.
In his remarks, the Secretary-General appealed to the Ivorian parties to put aside partisan and personal interests and work together in a spirit of commitment and compromise. He reaffirmed that the Linas Marcoussis Agreement, signed in Paris in January 2003, remained the road map to peace. He outlined specific issues on which consensus was to be reached in Accra and called for a timetable to implement them. The international community, he said was prepared to help the parties restore peace and prosperity to Côte d’Ivoire without delay.
“In the final analysis”, he concluded, “your people will be the judge of your actions. I trust that in your deliberations here today, the higher interest will be placed above all else”. (See Press Release SG/SM/9433.)
The principals then went into closed session. They spoke first with President Gbagbo, going directly to the heart of the issue: how to implement the provision in the Linas Marcoussis Agreement to resolve the problem of the constitution’s definition of who can be a candidate for the presidency. In the course of the afternoon, they met separately with the other Ivorian leaders to ask each of them how they saw a way out of the current impasse. President Gbagbo said he would confer with his party leaders overnight. The meeting broke up at about 8 p.m., having gone non-stop right through the day without the scheduled break for lunch.
As with the previous day, on Friday the African leaders worked through lunch and even later into the night.
In the morning, in the margins of the Summit, President Obasanjo convened a breakfast meeting to discuss the situation in Liberia. The Secretary-General was represented at that meeting by Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Hedi Annabi.
Presidents Obasanjo, Kufuor and Mbeki then met privately with President Gbagbo.
The Secretary-General came to the conference centre for a discussion in the margins of the Summit of the international response to what was happening in Darfur, Sudan, called by President Obasanjo in his capacity as Chair of the African Union. African Union Commission Chair Konare, President Kufuor and several other heads of State also attended. The group was briefed by the former Nigerian President, General Abdusalami Abubakar, who had recently carried out a fact-finding mission to Chad and the Sudan, including Darfur, as Personal Envoy of the African Union Chairman.
In a statement issued after that meeting they collectively expressed their concern about the deterioration that had taken place since the Government of the Sudan had pledged earlier in July to take effective steps to restore security. They called on the Government to put an end to the violence and to protect the civilian population and they announced their intention to reactivate the negotiating process.
They discussed the African Union’s observation mission in Darfur and agreed that this African force needed to be significantly expanded. They said they were finalizing arrangements with the troop contributors to this expanded force and called on the international community to provide logistic and financial support for it, as well as the necessary humanitarian assistance for the victims of the conflict.
The summit meeting on Cote d’Ivoire then resumed in closed session. They first called in the Ivorian Prime Minister, Seydou Elimane Diarra, to ask his views on a political solution to the constitutional dilemma. They then did the same with President Gbagbo.
In mid-afternoon, the Secretary-General took President Gbagbo and Prime Minister Diarra to a separate room for private talks. He and the Prime Minister then spoke to former Ivorian President, and now one of the main opposition leaders, Henri Konan Bedié.
The Secretary-General returned to the plenary hall and announced that he needed to “borrow” a couple of heads of State to help him negotiate. He asked President Omar Bongo Ondimba of Gabon and President Blaise Campaoré of Burkina Faso to leave the room with him.
The three of them, joined by the Secretary–General’s Special Representative, Albert Tevoedjre, then met privately with Guillaume Soro, the young military leader of the Forces Nouvelles, which control some 60 per cent of the country, or the entire northern half. They then called in former President Bedié for a separate talk, followed by Prime Minister Seydou Diarra. The talks began to build momentum.
The Secretary-General and the two Presidents then met with President Gbagbo. President Bongo was particularly instrumental in convincing the Ivorian leader of the wisdom of accepting back into the Government the three opposition leaders he had dismissed in May.
They summoned the four principal opposition figures, Bedié, Soro, former Prime Minister Ouattara, and Dje Dje Mady, who spoke for a grouping of seven parties known as the G-7. By now they were reviewing a draft agreement that the plenary had already reviewed with President Gbagbo. The differences were narrowing.
The Secretary-General, Bongo, and Campaoré returned to the plenary. All the Ivorian opposition figures were invited in. They collectively discussed the text, paragraph by paragraph. It was getting on to 10 p.m. Concessions were made by both sides and a consensus text was finally approved.
The press were called in as the parties, one by one, came to the head table to sign the Agreement. It was then taken around the table to be signed by the heads of State as witnesses. Both President Gbagbo and Prime Minister Diarra were among the signatories. There was applause all around.
The meeting adjourned, and the Secretary-General and President Kufuor, as the co-hosts of the summit, gave a press conference. The Executive-Secretary of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Mohamed ibn Chambas, started by summarizing the main points of the Agreement.
The journalists’ questions reflected their scepticism that the accord, which laid out specific tasks to be carried out according to a specific timetable, would be respected. In response to one such question, the Secretary-General acknowledged that some of these commitments had been made before and had not been honoured. “But times change”, he said. “The people are tired. The leaders themselves are beginning to realize that they need to get a handle on this.” He cited the great international pressure being brought on the parties by governments, as well as by civil society. And he reminded them that, “the first case the International Criminal Court is taking on is in Africa, is in the DRC, and it’s not too far from here.”
He was asked whether the three opposition leaders dismissed by the Government earlier in the year would be reinstated, and he replied, “We did get an agreement on that”. In response to a later question, he specified, “This Government is going to resume its work with all the members who had been in it until they suspended their activities”.
The press conference ended at about midnight.
The Secretary-General and his party left Accra for New York the next day.
In an interview with CNN before leaving, the Secretary-General was asked if “the mess” in Côte d’Ivoire could be cleaned up. “Messes have been cleaned up before”, he replied, citing the post-war reconstruction of Europe and Japan and South Africa’s navigation out of apartheid, “but the heavy lifting has to be done by the Ivorians and the Ivorian leaders themselves”. He added, “I’m challenging the Ivorian leaders to rise above the fray and to put their personal and selfish interests aside and work for the nation and the people.”