Ivory Coast president to snub UN peace meeting

ABIDJAN, Sep 14 (Reuters) Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo today said he would boycott a meeting in New York to evaluate progress on the war-divided country's peace process and lashed out at foreign mediators working to implement it.

The West African country has been divided into a rebel-held north and government south since a brief 2002-03 civil war which grew out of the rebels' attempt to oust him.

A string of peace deals aiming to reunite the world's top cocoa grower have foundered as the foes bicker over the implementation of the agreements. Presidential elections due by October 31 are now set to be postponed for the second time.

''It has been four years we are in this process and we are not reaching peace. It means this peace process has failed,'' Gbagbo told several hundred military personnel in the courtyard of the presidential palace in the main city Abidjan.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called all sides to a Sept. 20 meeting on the margins of the UN general assembly in New York with regional African leaders to evaluate progress on the latest UN-backed peace plan.

But Gbagbo said he would not go or be represented.

''I won't go to New York to protest against the impolite way (foreign mediators) deal with the affairs of my country,'' he said to rapturous applause from the soldiers.

The UN-backed peace plan kept Gbagbo in power for up to a year after his mandate expired last October with no elections possible to name a successor after rebels refused to disarm.

It also installed a new prime minister with additional powers to reunite the country and organise elections by October 31.

FEARS OF RENEWED CIVIL WAR Gbagbo lashed out at a group of foreign diplomats who meet monthly in Abidjan to evaluate progress on the U.N. plan, saying they ''annoy'' him. He said he would soon make his own proposals for a new framework for the peace process.

''The (working group) is manipulated by people for whom peace in Ivory Coast is not important. What is important for them is that Gbagbo is no longer president,'' he said.

''As this peace process has failed, I have written to the leaders of the African Union to ask them to bring together their Peace and Security Council and there I will make propositions for another peace process.'' The foreign mediators' group last Friday called on the pan-African body and leaders from neighbouring states to propose how the country should be governed when the U.N.-backed transition period ends at the end of next month.

Gbagbo says he remains the country's constitutional leader until a successor is sworn in, but the rebels and opposition say he will lack legitimacy after October.

Some analysts warn that more delays to elections could plunge the country, which was once an oasis of stability and prosperity in conflict-ravaged West Africa, back into civil war.

Ivory Coast's tangled political outlook has been further confused since toxic waste was unloaded from a ship and dumped at sites around Abidjan, killing seven and causing more than 23,000 people to seek medical care, the Health Ministry said.

The government resigned amid the public outcry but Gbagbo said a new administration was expected by the end of the week.

Reuters VJ VP0235