20100110

ABIDJAN (Reuters) - Ivory Coast's electoral commission said on Sunday it had settled all legal disputes over its provisional voter list, paving the way for a final list to be drawn up and the long delayed poll to go ahead.

But President Laurent Gbagbo accused the commission (CEI) of failing to deal thoroughly with all contested cases, saying it had admitted hundreds of thousands of possibly illegitimate names onto the register.

The elections, which have been repeatedly postponed since 2005, are badly needed to end years of stalemate and uncertainty after a 2002-3 war split West Africa's former economic giant in two, leaving the north controlled by rebels.

The polls are currently scheduled for around the end of February, though with no date fixed.

"We finished the process last night," said Bamba Yacouba, a spokesman for the commission. "We are now in the phase of validating the list ... In principle, that means we should have the final list ready by the end of January."

Six million Ivorians registered to vote in the world's top cocoa grower, but a million of those were contested, many on grounds they were not really Ivorian; a sensitive issue in a country that fought a civil war over nationality disputes.

In a statement read out by his spokesman on national TV late on Saturday, Gbagbo said 429,000 disputed cases had been registered without being carefully examined.

"They should have been treated with the utmost rigour to inspire the trust of everyone for a just, credible and transparent vote," he said. "No fraud, no manipulation, no tinkering of any kind can be tolerated ... from the CEI."