Ivory Coast: Protests erupt against president

In Ivory Coast, police fired into a crowd of people protesting the government of President Laurent Gbagbo on Dec. 5, killing one person, witnesses said. Police officials denied shooting at protesters. The political opposition had mounted protests in several towns in the southern part of the divided West African country, including a large gathering in the main city, Abidjan. Intermittent, low-level protests have occurred in Ivory Coast since the United Nations recently increased the powers of interim Prime Minister Charles Konan Banny, splitting power between Banny and President Gbagbo. Ivory Coast has been divided between a rebel-held north and a government-run south since an attempted coup in 2002 sparked a civil war. Banny and Gbagbo are both members of a UN-backed transition government in place until the country can organize elections. Some 10,000 United Nations and French peacekeepers monitor a buffer zone on the former front line to prevent further fighting between the army, rebels and heavily armed militia groups. Banny has publicly criticized Gbagbo's decision to reinstate three senior officials identified as being partially responsible for allowing a toxic waste shipment linked to 10 deaths to enter the country in August. Banny said that he would fight the president's decisions. "If they are applied, these decisions will without doubt constitute a major obstacle in the war against impunity," Banny said. Gbagbo then fired the heads of the state-run Fraternite Matin newspaper and Ivorian Radio Television for airing Banny's statement, a step deemed by an international review committee to have violated the peace process aimed at reuniting the world's top cocoa producer. Acrid smoke drifted through Abidjan early on Nov. 30 as demonstrators erected barricades with burning tires in several neighborhoods, as well as in the interior cities of Toumodi, Yamoussoukro and Dabou, but police broke the demonstrations up with tear gas. "We are demonstrating against Laurent Gbagbo's toxic decision to rehabilitate assassins," said Salimata Porquet, president of the International Forum of Women for Peace and Development. "Today is just the beginning. Tomorrow there will be more of us in the street until the head of state cancels his decisions." "Gbagbo has declared war. We are going to go there and we are going to defeat him," a militia member with the Democratic Party of Cote d'Ivoire (PDCI), the former governing party, warned. "We have got extra provisions. We never know what will happen," said resident Maxime Taho.