20110521
Reuters
YAMOUSSOUKRO (Reuters) - Alassane Ouattara was to be inaugurated as president of Ivory Coast on Saturday, in a ceremony most Ivorians hope will put a decade of conflict and instability behind them and mend a once prosperous economy.

French President Nicholas Sarkozy is among the heads of state and dignitaries scheduled to attend the event in the former French colony's largely ceremonial capital Yamoussoukro.

He will also address some of the thousands of French citizens living in the commercial capital Abidjan.

Ouattara was declared winner of a U.N.-certified election last November billed as a chance to reunite the fertile, cocoa-growing West African nation, after rebels seized its northern half in late 2002.

Instead, the country lurched back into civil war when incumbent leader Laurent Gbagbo refused to step down -- and used troops, paramilitaries, violent youth militias and Liberian mercenaries to entrench his position and crush dissent.

At least 3,000 people were killed and more than a million displaced in the power struggle, in which cocoa exports ground to a halt, banks shut and shops were ransacked by militiamen.

The impasse ended when pro-Ouattara rebels backed by the French military raided Gbagbo's compound at the height of the fighting and seized him from his blast-proof bunker.

U.N. Secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon, en route to the Ivorian capital to take part in the inauguration, said the international community should support Ouattara and send a strong message that the will of the people should be respected.

"A democratically elected person should be the one to lead the country based on the will of the people. This is what we have learned, this is what we have to send out," Ban said at a meeting with Ghana's president John Atta Mills in Accra on Saturday.

CHALLENGES

Hundreds of soldiers practiced marching to a brass band late on Friday outside a shiny reception centre in Yamoussoukro, a city of wide boulevards carved out of the jungle by independence leader Felix Houphouet-Boigny, who also adorned what was once his home village with the world's biggest Catholic Cathedral.

President Ouattara faces the task of reuniting a bitterly divided country and getting its wrecked economy back on track -- and Ivorians are keen to move forward after years of stalemate.

"What has happened, has happened. We don't want to look back anymore -- we want to look straight ahead," said Youssouf Toure, an electrician, as he waited outside the ceremony grounds.

"This crisis is finished. We can forget it, we can forgive. President Ouattara has said we need to forgive. Then we can start to get back what we lost."

Ban said that though the Ivorian crisis was over, the UN and the international community still had challenges to deal with.

"There are serious challenges like national reconciliation, restoration of peace, and humanitarian affairs as well as accountability questions and impunity issues," he said.

Gbagbo is under house arrest in Ivory Coast's north and Ouattara wants him tried for human rights abuses during the conflict, but he also wants a South Africa-style truth and reconciliation commission -- two aims which may conflict.

The International Criminal Court said this month Ouattara had asked it to probe all allegations of serious abuses during the post-election crisis. Ouattara's forces are also accused of abuses, such as looting, rape and killing civilians.