Ivory Coast: Ex-presidents Gbagbo and Bedie set for talks

AFP | Ivory Coast’s former president Laurent Gbagbo, who returned home last month a decade after falling from power, will meet ex-president Henri Konan Bedie this weekend, Bedie’s office said on Monday.

“The visit will be the chance for a fraternal reunion between the two presidents following president Laurent Gbagbo’s return to his homeland as free man,” it said in a statement.

The meeting between the both men – former rivals who are now allies – will take place on Saturday in Daoukro, a Bedie stronghold in central Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire).

Gbagbo, 76, Bedie, 87, and Alassane Ouattara, 79, the current president, have dominated the country’s political scene in the past 15 years – often plunging into rivalries or forging alliances.

During Gbagbo’s term in office, the country was wracked by revolt and turmoil, culminating in a conflict that erupted after he refused to cede electoral defeat to Ouattara.

Gbagbo was arrested in April 2011 and hauled before the International Criminal Court (ICC) to face charges of crime against humanity resulting from the violence, which claimed some 3,000 lives.

He was acquitted in January 2019, a decision that was upheld in March this year and enabled him to return home on June 17.

Ouattara, his erstwhile rival, has officially welcomed his return, seeing in it a possibility of easing the country’s entrenched problems.

Bedie teamed up with Ouattara in the 2010 elections, but in 2018 his Democratic Party of the Ivory Coast (PDCI) joined the opposition.

In March, it forged an electoral alliance with Gbagbo’s Ivorian Popular Front (PFI) party.

Gbagbo’s former prime minister, Pascal Affi N’Guessan, has called on Ouattara, Bedie and Gbagbo to meet so that Côte d’Ivoire “emerges definitively from the crisis and seals reconciliation.”

Gbagbo is currently in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he has been on a private visit since Friday to see former warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba, with whom he became friends when the pair were both in detention at the ICC.

He is scheduled to return home on Thursday.