Ivory Coast unable to host international postal forum in 2004
Strife-torn Ivory Coast has pulled out of an agreement to host a major international postal services conference in 2004, Economic Infrastructure Minister Patrick Achi said Friday.
The west African country had been selected at the UN’s Universal Postal Union (UPU) conference in Beijing in 1999 as the host of the organisation’s 23rd congress, set for 2004.
But Achi told AFP that he officially announced at a recent UPU conference in Geneva that Abidjan, the main city in Ivory Coast — split into opposing rebel and government camps since an uprising on September 19 — would not be able to host the conference.
“Everyone was really sorry in Geneva,” Achi said.
“This is a blow to us, as we have been working on the project for two years now.”
Preparatory work for UPU-2004 was launched in July 2001 by the Ivorian authorities, amid great fanfare.
“We were expecting 3,000 delegates from 189 countries, and it was an important event for us in our process of renewing good international relations,” Achi said.
“It was also significant because it would have been the first time in 70 years that the UPU held its conference on the African continent. It would have been a first for sub-Saharan African, too, and the first time a French-speaking country had hosted the conference since 1974,” the conference’s organiser, Louis Blaise Aka Brou, told AFP.
“Now, we have to find a 1,500-seat exhibition hall and 20 to 30 others with 800 seats; give each delegation a computer-equipped office and set up a simultaneous translation service in 10 languages,” Aka Brou said.
The conference would have been a much needed boost for Abidjan’s hotel industry, already in deep crisis because of the eight-week old rebellion.
On Thursday, the head of Ivory Coast’s hotel industry said in an interview with Fraternite newspaper that around 40 percent of hotels could go out of business because of the feud that broke out when rebels rose up against President Laurent Gbagbo’s government in September.
Talks launched on October 30 in the Togolese capital, Lome, to resolve the crisis are moving forward with great difficulty, as both sides refuse to budge on opposing demands.
The rebels want Gbagbo to stand down and new elections to be held, while the government wants the rebels to disarm before it takes any concrete steps towards resolving the conflict, which has already claimed at least 400 lives and forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes.
The talks’ chief negotiator, Togolese President Gnassingbe Eydaema, was expected Friday to put a partial agreement to the rebels and Ivorian government, in a bid to break the deadlock.
A United Nations agency since July 1, 1948, UPU was created in 1874 and is headquartered in Bern, Switerzerland.
Calling itself the “primary forum for cooperation between postal services”, UPU helps to ensure a universal postal network of up-to-date products and services by working in an advisory, mediating and liaison role, and giving technical assistance where needed.
