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Konate Navigue was speaking to The Herald in the Ivorian economic capital Abidjan ahead of what shall be a crucial African Union summit in Addis Ababa early next week which shall centre more on trying to resolve the electoral deadlock that has seen President Gbagbo fight for legitimacy in an election touted by the West as having been won by Ouattara.

Ouattara was declared the winner of the election held in November last year by the country’s electoral council under some dubious circumstances that have irked President Gbagbo’s supporters, but the more senior Constitutional C declared President Gbagbo the winner before he was inaugurated as the country’s leader.

In a fatalistic show of patriotism, Konate Navigue said; “we hope now for dialogue between conflicting (political) parties. We do not want war. (But) we are ready to resist. Young people, without weapons, shall resist if dialogue is spurned. But we do not want that (dialogue to fail). We can resist without weapons but we know that we can win but that will mean that 3, 4 or 5 thousand young people may die to secure that victory.

That is why we want dialogue to prevail.”
Konate however is sure that the dialogue process will be skewered as the interests of much loathed France are believed to be the driving principles behind Ouattara’s agenda at the dialogue table.
“Whenever there is an effort at dialogue in Africa is that there are always people who support the imperialists and are sell-outs which complicates the process of dialogue,”
“This is no longer an electoral result fight to see who won or who did not. We are past that now. It is now a stage to show that we are against imperialism. It is now an economic war because we know our country is rich and they now want to keep a (strangle)hold on our nation,” said Navigue.

Western nations led by former colonial power France have however vigorously worked against the declaration of Gbagbo as President and have throttled this economically powerful West African nation with a raft of sanctions including freezing the nation’s central reserves, handing down ‘targeted sanctions’ that enact travel bans against certain Gbagbo government members and cutting the nation’s access to international monetary assistance from the Bretton Woods institutes, the IMF and the World Bank.

While the West initially has argued that President Gbagbo rigged the poll, indications on the ground suggest that it is actually Ouattara’s camp that massively rigged elections in their rebel controlled stronghold north Ivory Coast region that is anarchic. While the United Nations was expected to superintend over the demilitarisation of the region ahead of the Presidential poll, that was not done hence a myriad of stories recounted of people being intimidated to vote for the rebel’s preferred candidate, Ouattara. There have also been documented reports of summary executions of Gbagbo supporters who refused to be intimidated into legitimising the intimidation and rigging in the rebel stronghold.

Although he Herald could not independently verify these allegations, the summary executions have not been dismissed by Ouattara’s camp which alos has counter claims of intimidation it levels against the President Gbagbo supporters instead.-The Herald