Ivory Coast President Alassane
Ouattara called on parliament on Wednesday to approve a new constitution that
he says will draw a line under years of turmoil and war but which the
opposition calls a backward step for democracy.
Ouattara promised during his
re-election campaign last year to remove the constitution's requirement for
presidential candidates to have parents who are both natural-born Ivorian
citizens, a sore point in a country that has long attracted immigrants from
neighbouring countries.
Nationality was at the heart of a
crisis that began with a 1999 coup and included a 2002-2003 civil war that
split the West African nation in two for eight years.
The draft constitution submitted to
parliament by Ouattara softens the clause, which had been used by his opponents
to bar him from elections and was a symbol of exclusion, particularly of
northerners like him, whose family ties often straddle borders.
"This is the occasion to
definitively turn the page on the successive crises our country has known, to
write new pages in our history by proposing a new social pact," Ouattara
told lawmakers at the National Assembly.
Ouattara finally won election in
2010, although his victory sparked a second war that killed more than 3,000
people after then president Laurent Gbagbo refused to accept defeat.
Gbagbo is now on trial at the
International Criminal Court accused of crimes against humanity.
"Today, the time has come for
us to define together what kind of nation we want to build. The time has come
to decide what we want to leave behind for our children," Ouattara said.
Parliament has until Oct. 15 to
approve the text in order to submit it to the public in a referendum on Oct.
30.
Other revisions include removing a
maximum age of 75 for presidential candidates and making it easier to change
the constitution in future.
Opposition politicians and some
civil society groups have criticised the drafting process as lacking consensus
and transparency.
Pascal Affi N'Guessan, the head of
Gbagbo's FPI party, now the main opposition, criticised the proposed creation
of the post of vice-president and a senate, a third of whose members would be
appointed by the president, among other changes.
He said they would allow Ouattara to
entrench the political coalition between his RDR and the other main party, the
PDCI.
"These are changes that take us
backward, that offer no solutions to the problems that the country has known
but allow one clan to take the state hostage," he told Reuters.
-Reuters
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