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Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara has met with his main political rival to discuss ending election-related violence, fueling fears that the country could plunge into civil conflict.
Wednesday’s meeting, less than two weeks after Ouattara’s disputed re-election, comes as the government updated the death toll from the recent riots to 85.
Ouattara, 78, and Henri Konan Bedie, an 86-year-old former president, arrived at a luxury hotel in the commercial center of Abidjan several hours after the government announced the long-awaited meeting.
Their talks are the first since the October 31 presidential elections resulted in a bitter confrontation, raising concerns about prolonged instability in the largest French-speaking West Africa economy and the world’s leading cocoa producer.
Ouattara was declared the winner with more than 94 percent of the vote, which was boycotted by the main opposition. The president’s opponents say he violated the country’s two-term presidential limits, but Ouattara says the constitutional amendments introduced in 2016 effectively reset the countdown clock to the two-term limit and allow him to run again.
The opposition has refused to recognize the election results, launched what it calls a campaign of civil disobedience, and vowed to establish a transitional government to replace Ouattara.
Several opposition leaders, including former Prime Minister Pascal Affi N’Guessan, an opposition spokesman, have been arrested, and security forces are blocking the homes of others.
Deadly violence, often tainted by ethnic rivalry, erupted in August after Ouattara formally announced his controversial third-term bid.
Communications Minister Sidi Tiemoko Touré told reporters that the official figure now stands at 85 dead and 484 injured, many of them in the southeast of the country.
Of the deaths, 34 occurred before the election, 20 on voting day and 31 after. Toure added that 225 people were arrested, of whom 45 were in custody and 167 were charged.
For many Ivorians, painful memories have emerged of the aftermath of the disputed 2010 elections. A political clash was followed by a brief civil war in which around 3,000 people died and an estimated 1.3 million people fled their homes. .
The head-to-head between Ouattara and Bedie follows growing calls from the United Nations (UN), the European Union, former colonial power France and the neighbors of the Ivory Coast to strive to ease the tension.
More than 8,000 people have left the country to seek refuge in neighboring states, especially Liberia, the UN refugee agency said Tuesday. More than half of them are children, many of whom have arrived unaccompanied or separated from their parents.
Ouattara, in a speech Monday, proposed a meeting with Bedie, whom he respectfully described as his “elder.”
In its response, Bedie’s Côte d’Ivoire Democratic Party set several conditions for such talks on Wednesday, including lifting house blockades and ending legal proceedings against the arrested leaders.
The blockade around Bedie’s home had been lifted early Wednesday afternoon. However, his fellow opposition leader Assoa Adou told the AFP news agency that there was still a blockade around his house.
Ouattara and Bedie have been central figures in Côte d’Ivoire politics for decades, each of them claiming the mantle of the late Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the very popular first post-independence president.
Their meeting place, the Golf Hotel in Abidjan, has a historical resonance.
Also known as Hotel du Golf, it was where Ouattara, as president-elect, installed his headquarters during the 2010-11 crisis, when the acting president, Laurent Gbagbo, refused to resign after being defeated at the polls.
Ouattara’s former allies at the hotel included Bedie, who fell out with Ouattara in 2018.
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