Obasanjo Leaves Cote d'Ivoire, Gbobgo refuses to budge

FORMER president Olusegun Obasanjo has left Cote d’Ivoire after he tried to persuade sitting president, Laurent Gbagbo, to step down peacefully.

The workers of the hotel where Obasanjo was staying and a member of his security detail, according to the Associated Press (AP) confirmed that the former president left early yesterday for Nigeria.

Gbagbo has refused to step down even though results issued by the electoral commission and certified by the United Nations (UN) showed he lost to opposition leader, Alassane Ouattara, by a near nine-point margin.

Obasanjo shuttled between the two men, seeing each once on Saturday night following his arrival, and twice on Sunday. The purpose of the visit was to exhaust the diplomatic options before a military intervention is considered.

Obasanjo made a surprise visit on Saturday night on a mission sanctioned by Nigeria, part of a flurry of initiatives aimed at persuading Gbagbo to give up power peacefully.

“My own exploration remains positive and to that extent ... I am optimistic,” Obasanjo told journalists at a hotel in Abidjan late Sunday night.

He spent Sunday in talks with Gbagbo and Ouattara, who remains holed up in the lagoon-side Golf Hotel under guard of UN peacekeepers and blockaded by pro-Gbagbo military.

ECOWAS, headed by Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, has threatened to remove Gbagbo by force if he refuses to go quietly. But any such military effort would be logistically daunting, and Gbagbo has dismissed such threats as interference in Cote d’Ivoire’s sovereign affairs.

Asked whether he still thought military intervention was the solution, Obasanjo replied: “When you have a problem you must consider all possible solutions.”

“We know that an election has taken place. The whole world knows the result of the election. My exploration is to see how and where we go from here,” he said.

In a sign that cracks were appearing in ECOWAS’s tough stance, Ghana’s President John Atta Mills announced on Friday that he would not take sides in the conflict and he did not believe a military action would solve anything.

“We believe in quiet diplomacy, so I have expressed reservations about the success of the intended military option. There are more than one million Ghanaians in Cote d’Ivoire. I don’t want to be saddled with problems we can’t solve,” Mills said.

Four other African leaders were in Cote d’Ivoire at the start of last week to attempt to mediate, but came back empty-handed.

The UN says at least 210 people have been killed in violence since the election, including 14 in inter-ethnic violence in the western town of Duekoue in recent days.