ABIDJAN, Oct 12 (AFP) - Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo fired Defence
Minister Moise Lida Kouassi Saturday and took personal control of the
portfolio as the government army battles rebels who have taken over half
the west African country, officials said.
   The embattled Kouassi was switched to the presidency ministry, state
television announced.
   The defence ministry was left vacant, but Bertin Kadet, a newly
appointed junior security minister, was named minister attached to the
presidency responsible for defence and civil protection.
   This means that Kadet will take his instructions directly from the
president, who will become de facto defence minister, Mamadou Koulibaly, the
president of the National Assembly, told AFP.
   "The president is positioning himself to wage the war as he wants to --
that is, to switch from being on the defensive to going on the offensive,
it's a new strategy," Koulibaly said.

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Ivory Coast's former ruling party urges government to negotiate

ABIDJAN, Oct 12 (AFP) - Ivory Coast's former ruling party on Saturday urged
the government to tread "the path of negotiation," saying a three-week-old
uprising by mutineers and soldiers who have returned from exile threatened
to degenerate into ethnic and religious conflict.
   The Democratic Party of Ivory Coast (PDCI), which ruled the west African
nation from independence from France in 1960 until a coup d'etat on
Christmas Day, 1999, voiced concern over what it said was a rapidly
worsening "socio-economic situation" and called for dialogue as "the only
path to a peaceful and lasting resolution of the conflict".
   The party is headed by Henri Konan Bedie, who took over from founding
president Felix Houphouet-Boigny in 1993 and ruled until he was ousted by
General Robert Guei, then a former military chief who was in retirement.
   Guei lost violence-wracked elections in  2000 to current President
Laurent Gbagbo, and was killed in Abidjan on September 19, the first day of
the uprising.
   Bedie has made virtually no public pronouncements since then.
   Gbagbo on Tuesday said in a nationally broadcast speech that he was
ready to talk with the rebels who now hold the predominantly Muslim north
of the west African nation, but only on condition that they disarm first.
The rebels rejected his precondition.
   The PDCI also called on the rebels to "take the government's extended
hand, " without explicitly asking them to disarm.

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