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Ivory Coast Declares State Of Emergency After Deadly Pre-Poll Violence
ABIDJAN (AFP) - Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo declared a state of emergency and nighttime curfew across his country Monday ahead of parliamentary elections next weekend, after a day of violence linked to the polls claimed several lives in Abidjan.
Speaking in a national television broadcast, Gbagbo said he was calling out the army to reinforce the security measures, which were to run to December 12th, two days beyond Sunday's election.
He also said he would not overrule a Supreme Court decision to ban the leader of the main opposition party, former prime minister Alassane Ouattara, from running in the elections because of doubts that he was really an Ivory Coast citizen.
The court's ruling - criticized by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan - fuelled the clashes Monday between police and thousands of Ouattara supporters who took to the streets of Ivory Coast's economic capital in protest.
Ouattara's Rally of Republicans (RDR) party spokesman, Amadou Coulibaly, said 15 people died in street clashes, "either by bullets or beatings".
Interior Minister Emile Boga Doudou said at least three people died, including one policeman.
The RDR has pledged to push on with further protests from Tuesday.
"An escalation of the violence is unacceptable," Gbagbo said in his address.
His broadcast came after police arrested four senior RDR officials following the confrontation, including chief party spokesman Aly Coulibaly and secretary general Kafana Kone, according to the RDR. It said a bodyguard of the party's deputy leader Henriette Diabate had also been arrested.
The violence came after more than 20,000 Ouattara supporters abandoned a rally in a stadium to spill out onto the streets, erecting barricades of burning tires and declaring their intention to march on the national television station.
Security forces responded with tear gas to try to stop the protests, but even live rounds fired above their heads or into the crowd was not enough to halt the momentum of the Ouattara faithful.
After hours of chaos, the situation had calmed to a point where police were seen patrolling areas of the city, chasing demonstrators, beating and whipping them. Some of the victims were young boys rounded up at random.
Witnesses indicated calm in the various suburbs where the protest movement had started earlier in the day.
The RDR claimed supporters of President Laurent Gbagbo’s Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) beat its supporters. Ouattara himself is currently in France, and there has been no indication of when he may return to Ivory Coast.
The Supreme Court had previously barred Ouattara from contesting a presidential election held October 22nd, again over the question of his nationality. Opponents of the RDR leader claim he is a native of Ivory Coast's northern neighbor Burkina Faso.
Monday's demonstrators claimed that they were being disenfranchised by the continued obstruction of Ouattara's political ambitions.
"They have deprived us of the possibility to express ourselves at the ballot box," said Mohammed Sokounou, a machete-wielding RDR supporter.
"The only course of action left us is violence or the secession of the north," he continued.
Ouattara is from the mostly Muslim north, which has traditionally lost out to the predominantly Christian south economically and politically.
Gbagbo became president after the October 22nd polls when an uprising put an end to attempts by the leader of the military government at the time, General Robert Guei, to hold on to power seized in a December 1999 coup.
The uprising turned into bloody fighting between various political and ethnic factions.
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