4, March 2021
Ivory Coast enters final day of campaigning as all eyes on distant Gbagbo 0
Legislative elections take place in Ivory Coast on Saturday overshadowed by a figure in distant Europe – former president Laurent Gbagbo.
Nearly a decade has passed since Gbagbo was forced out of office by today’s president Alassane Ouattara before being flown to The Hague to face war crimes charges.
Acquitted since then but living in Brussels pending an appeal, Gbagbo plans to come home, thanks to an olive branch offered by his erstwhile rival.
His Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) party has ended a years-long electoral boycott, becoming the engine behind an alliance battling for seats in the National Assembly.
The elections “mark the return of Laurent Gbagbo and his political organisation in institutional politics,” said Gbagbo’s eldest son, Michel, a university academic running in a constituency in Abidjan.
“It has to be seen as the return to calmer democratic life and lasting peace,” he said optimistically.
Ouattara overture
Ouattara, 79, ignited political unrest last year when he announced he would seek a third term in office – a scheme that critics said sidestepped constitutional limits.
Clashes claimed 87 lives and left nearly 500 people injured, while most of the opposition snubbed the October 31 ballot.
Ouattara won by a landslide – but to his critics, the victory had scant credibility and the country remained deep in crisis.
Seeking a way forward, Ouattara reached out to Gbagbo, signalling his assent for his return home and issuing him with a diplomatic passport.
The runup to Saturday’s vote has seen a jolt run through Ivorian politics as the well-organised FPI strives to get out the vote.
Thousands of supporters wearing T-shirts with Gbagbo’s face took part in a campaign launch rally in Yopougon last Saturday.
“Gbagbo yesterday, Gbagbo today, Gbagbo tomorrow – Gbagbo forever, or else nothing,” were the words on a poster.
The pro-Gbagbo alliance, Together for Democracy and Sovereignty (EDS), is fielding candidates across most of the country.
The left-leaning coalition has forged an unprecedented electoral deal with the biggest centre-right party – the Democratic Party of the Ivory Coast (PDCI) headed by Henri Konan Bedie, a former president and former Ouattara ally.
The self-described goal is to win enough legislative seats to prevent Ouattara and his RHDP party from “consolidating (their) absolute power.”
The RHDP won a thumping majority in the December 2016 legislative elections with 167 out of 255 seats.
“We don’t share the same ideology” with the EDS, said Djedri N’Goran, a senior PDCI official.
“But whether you like it or not, Gbagbo has an aura – there are whole areas, including Abidjan, where it’s ‘Gbagbo or nothing’.”
Outsider
Gbagbo was president from 2000 to 2010, a time of turmoil, division and economic destruction in this major cocoa and coffee producer.
He was ousted by force of arms in April 2011 after a months-long conflict that claimed several thousand lives, sparked by his refusal to accept electoral defeat at Ouattara’s hands.
His long trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague was over charges that he abetted the post-electoral violence.
Despite Gbagbo’s turbulent record, he remains for many Ivorians a plucky and inspirational figure, said political analyst Rodrigue Kone.
He likened Gbagbo’s odyssey to that of “a poor child fighting the bourgeois system represented by leaders from aristocratic families.”
Reconciliation Minister Kouadio Konan Bertin last month paid tribute to Gbagbo, 75, as “a major player” in national politics, “whose views should be taken into account.”
Exactly when Gbagbo will make his return is unclear.
The ICC has authorised him to make foreign trips if the host country accepts him, pending the outcome of the appeal, which is due by March 31.
He previously said he hoped to return in December, but his increasingly frustrated supporters now say it will be in mid-March and have set up a committee to prepare a spectacular welcome.
(AFP)
4, March 2021
Corrupt France: Judge convicts ex-defence minister, acquits ex-PM Balladur in Karachi corruption trial 0
A French court on Thursday acquitted former prime minister Edouard Balladur on corruption charges after he was accused of using kickbacks from an arms deal but handed a suspended jail term to his former defence minister.
The verdict by the Law Court of the Republic (CJR), which sits to try serving and former ministers for alleged violations committed in office, came just days after ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy was convicted for corruption.
Balladur, 91, had been accused of funnelling illicit commissions from arms deals to his unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1995.
His former defence minister Francois Leotard, 78, was however convicted of complicity in the misuse of assets and handed a suspended two-year prison term and a fine of 100,000 euros ($120,000).
Neither was present in court for the verdict.
Balladur and Leotard, both right-wingers, were charged in 2017 with “complicity in the misuse of corporate assets” over the sale of submarines to Pakistan and frigates to Saudi Arabia between 1993 and 1995.
The verdicts came hot on the heels of a corruption conviction for former president Sarkozy on Monday which stunned France and has led to a debate about the extent of political corruption.
That judgement meant that both of the last heads of states from France’s right-wing party now called The Republicans (LR) — Jacques Chirac and Sarkozy — have criminal convictions.
Sarkozy has vowed to appeal and clear his name.
Swiss cash
The allegations against Balladur and Leotard came to light during an investigation into a 2002 bombing in Karachi, Pakistan, that targeted a bus transporting French engineers.
Fifteen people were killed in the attack, including 11 engineers working on the submarine contract, with the Al-Qaeda terror network initially suspected of carrying out the assault.
But the focus shifted and French investigators began to consider whether the bombing had been carried out as revenge for a halt in commission payments for the arms deals.
Balladur lost his 1995 presidential bid to rival Chirac who allegedly cut off the payments negotiated by the previous government.
Leotard was accused of having created an “opaque network” of intermediaries who took commissions on contracts signed with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and then paid back some of the money with illicit cash transfers.
Prosecutors alleged that the commissions totalled 550 million francs, or 117 million euros in today’s money, some of which was funnelled back to Balladur’s campaign.
At the centre of the case was a deposit of 10.25 million francs in cash made into Balladur’s campaign account three days after his electoral defeat in 1995.
Balladur claimed the money came from donations from supporters and merchandise sales, but prosecutors linked the money to cash withdrawals in Switzerland made by a Lebanese-French intermediary who took commissions on the arms deals.
Ziad Takieddine, long active in French right-wing circles, fled to Lebanon last June after a Paris court sentenced him and another middleman, Abdul Rahman El-Assir, to five years in prison over their role in the “Karachi” kickbacks.
Three others were also convicted but have announced appeals.
“I have a completely free conscience,” Balladur told the court during his interrogation.
Takieddine has also made — and retracted — claims that he delivered suitcases stuffed with cash from Libyan dictator Moamer Kadhafi to Sarkozy’s chief of staff to help with the ex-president’s 2007 presidential campaign.
Those claims are the subject of a separate investigation into Sarkozy.
Combative Sarkozy
On Monday, the 66-year-old ex-president was found to have formed a “corruption pact” with his lawyer Thierry Herzog to convince a judge to obtain and share information about yet another inquiry into his campaign financing.
Sarkozy, who has been dogged with investigations since leaving office in 2007, denies the charges and has vowed to clear his name with an appeal.
In two interviews Wednesday, he lambasted the verdict and said he was mulling filing a complaint with Europe’s top rights court.
“I never betrayed the trust of the French people,” France’s president from 2007 to 2012 told TF1 channel in a primetime interview on Wednesday evening.
(AFP)