Opposition members complete unity government

AFP - Ivory Coast's opposition parties on Thursday entered a new government, ending a weeks-long political crisis triggered when President Laurent Gbagbo dissolved the previous cabinet.
  
The 11 posts reserved for opposition parties in a 28-member team led by Prime Minister Guillaume Soro were handed out in the morning, under a decree read by Gbagbo's secretary-general in the presidency, Amedee Couassi Ble.
  
The complete cabinet headed by Soro, the leader of the former rebel New Forces, held a meeting which was chaired by Gbagbo.
  
The formation of a government for the divided west African country follows the creation last week of a new Independent Electoral Commission (CEI), after Gbagbo dissolved the previous one on February 12, the same day as he ditched Soro's last government.
  
Soro vowed Thursday to make "notable progress on the road to reunification", which would mean disarming his former rebels two months before a long-awaited presidential election.
  
Gbagbo's dual dismissals of the previous government and the vote panel plunged Ivory Coast into crisis and led to a wave of opposition street protests in which at least seven people were killed.
  
The main opposition coalition, the Houphouetist Rally for Democracy and Peace (RHDP), allied with the small Ivorian Labour Party (PIT), demanded the re-establishment of the CEI before joining a government of "national reconciliation."
  
The RHDP, led by former president Henri Konan Bedie and former prime minister Alassane Ouattara, has kept control over the revised electoral commission and chairs the vote panel.
  
The government and the electoral commission are tasked with leading Ivory Coast into a presidential election that has been postponed six times since Gbagbo's mandate expired in 2005.
  
On Wednesday, the RHDP coalition demanded that a date be fixed immediately for the presidential poll and said it should take place by early May, in line with international pressure for a vote.
  
Following a meeting in Abidjan, the RHDP also demanded that a dispute over the voters' register be tackled "immediately" by the new independent electoral panel.
  
When Gbagbo sacked the previous CEI, he accused its chairman Robert Buegre Mambe of fraud, saying that he was stacking the voters' roll with opposition supporters. The opposition has made counter-claims.
  
Soro said the main coming challenge was to draw up "a clean, transparent electoral list that reconciles Ivorians."
  
The vote is expected to be part of a process of reunification in the cocoa-rich country, where the New Forces have controlled the north since a foiled coup against Gbagbo in September 2002.
  
The UN Security Council has called for an election to be held by May 31, before the mandates for a UN force with nearly 8,000 personnel and a French 1,800-troop deployment in the country run out.
  
The vote is due to take place in "late April-early May", according to a timetable agreed among the parties concerned during a visit last month by the mediator, Burkina Faso's President Blaise Compaore.
  
Soro has said that he believes that his new government will have finished its task by June.
  
Before the opposition joined it after arduous negotiations, the government included Gbagbo's Ivorian Popular Front and Soro's FN.