United Nations tents lined the waterfront at the Golf Hotel in Abidjan, Ivory Coast on Tuesday.
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — Laundry hangs from balconies, beer bottles remain in the lobby, officials emerge unshaven from darkened corridors after lengthy but inconclusive meetings, and a tent city full of T-shirted United Nations soldiers has sprung up on the steamy grounds of this hotel.
Armed men of various designations — including rebel soldiers from the north, private security agents and international troops tasked with protecting the hotel — stroll the halls. Meanwhile, in the city outside these walls, newspapers controlled by the nation’s strongman mock the hotel on a daily basis as the ineffectual “Republic of the Golf.”
This is the Hotel du Golf, the alternate seat of government of this West African nation. For weeks, this shabby resort on a filthy lagoon has been the headquarters of Alassane Ouattara, the man who governments around the world say defeated the incumbent, Laurent Gbagbo, in a presidential election on Nov. 28.
But it remains blockaded, even after West African diplomats announced this week that they had received promises from Mr. Gbagbo to lift a three-week siege of this increasingly disheveled-looking hotel.
Under mounting international pressure to step down and cede the real presidential palace to Mr. Ouattara, Mr. Gbagbo had promised to remove barricades from roads leading to the hotel, the regional alliance of African nations, Ecowas, said.
The pledge was supposedly part of Mr. Gbagbo’s effort to end the electoral standoff peacefully, Ecowas said, and there were no conditions attached to it. The alliance has threatened to use military force against Mr. Gbagbo if he does not give up power voluntarily.
But on Wednesday, the gun-twirling soldiers and the makeshift barricades on hilly roads leading to the hotel remained in place. The roads themselves were empty of traffic. And Mr. Gbagbo’s associates made statements suggesting that lifting the blockade that has hemmed in Mr. Ouattara was not going to be so simple after all.
“The blockade will be lifted if the rebel forces quit the Hotel du Golf,” Allen Toussaint, a counselor to Mr. Gbagbo, said in a phone interview. “They have heavy weapons. They need to clear out of there. It’s become a military training camp. The rebels need to leave, and Mr. Ouattara needs to go home.”
Analysts said there was little chance of either happening, and noted that in the past Mr. Gbagbo, who has clung to power for five years after the expiration of his legal term, often appeared to make concessions, only to reverse course soon after. He is known here in Abidjan as Le Boulanger, the baker, for his propensity to roll his opponents in flour — a half-admiring symbolic description of his persistent ability to stymie opponents.
There was no evidence Wednesday on the crowded but otherwise somnolent grounds of the hotel, baking in the near-equatorial heat, that military training was going on. But the rebel soldiers here from the so-called New Forces, who have controlled the north since a 2002 civil war, are firmly in Mr. Ouattara’s camp.
Very few vehicles were penetrating the series of improvised barricades erected by Mr. Gbagbo’s forces — a large garbage cart, old wooden tables and chairs, tires, concrete blocks. Trying to pass them prompted a search, and getting through required leaving the main road entirely to follow a series of garbage-strewn paths that eventually led to the hotel route. Getting through at all is rare, and several journalists were turned away at gunpoint on Wednesday.
Inside the hotel, the contrast with what it looked like before the blockade was striking. In the days immediately after the announcement of Mr. Ouattara’s victory, which was certified by the United Nations and has been recognized by most nations, the halls were packed with jubilant supporters, hangers-on, job-seekers, journalists and members of Mr. Ouattara’s new government. Pushing through the main entrance was often difficult because of the crowds.
On Wednesday, there were no such difficulties. The cavernous lobby was largely empty. A dozen or so Ouattara supporters lounged in a makeshift collection of chairs, reading newspapers, chatting, and sipping from bottles. United Nations troops munched on sandwiches. The desultory atmosphere of a place where not much happens prevailed. The hotel, supplied by United Nations helicopters, nonetheless manages to feed its denizens adequately, several said.
Outside, Mr. Ouattara was under a pavilion giving interviews to French television. Inside, his chosen ministers were holding a cabinet meeting, as they do every day, in one of the conference rooms.
Patrick Achi, the spokesman for Mr. Ouattara’s unempowered government, angrily dismissed Mr. Gbagbo’s apparently conciliatory new posture.
“The guy is saying, ‘Come, let’s talk.’ Talk about what?” Mr. Achi asked. “This is not a piece of apple pie that we are going to share,” he added before striding off to a cabinet meeting.
By: Adam Nossiter (ny times)
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