African mediators on Monday named Charles Konan Banny, the governor of West Africa's central bank, as Ivory Coast's interim prime minister, a step meant to break a deadlock in the country's faltering peace process.
The world's top cocoa grower has been split in two since rebels seized its north after failing in a bid to oust President Laurent Gbagbo three years ago. A series of UN-backed peace deals have so far failed to reunite the West African country.
"Our achievement today is a victory for all of the people of Ivory Coast," Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo told a news conference in the country's main city, Abidjan, with Gbagbo sitting by his side.
"For those who are on the government side and those on the other side there is no victor and no vanquished," he said after meeting Gbagbo and South African President Thabo Mbeki, who has also been mediating in the crisis.
Banny will have an expanded mandate under a UN-backed deal giving him powers to carry out disarmament and electoral reforms with the aim of organising presidential elections by the end of October next year.
Ivory Coast's warring factions were supposed to agree on the new prime minister as part of an African Union peace plan endorsed by the UN Security Council.
But Gbagbo's government, opposition parties and the rebels had been haggling for weeks over who should get the job.
Rebel leader Guillaume Soro has said the UN proposal was too unclear on what powers the prime minister would have and has written to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan with a new plan in which the two warring sides would share power.
Opposition welcomes move
The rebels were not immediately available to comment on the mediators' choice of Banny, but the opposition welcomed his nomination.
"We are very happy about his nomination and we hope he will succeed in his mission for all of Ivory Coast," opposition coalition leader Alphonse Djedje Mady told Reuters.
Banny, a political outsider, had been tipped as a leading candidate for the post. He is governor of the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO), whose common currency, the CFA franc, is used by eight countries in the region.
Analysts and diplomats like the Senegal-based banker's distance from local politics and his economic know-how.
"It's a good move. He is independent," said one Western diplomat in Abidjan.
The prime minister in the former French colony is usually overshadowed by the more powerful president, who heads the executive. But Banny will have broader powers under a UN resolution adopted in October.
The resolution allows Gbagbo to remain in power for a further year after his mandate ended on October 30, when polls set for that date were postponed.
Mbeki said earlier that failure to agree on a new prime minister would have endangered the new election timetable.
The UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, Juan Mendez, said during a trip to Abidjan on Saturday that simmering tensions could lead to "massive and serious violations of human rights" unless a way out of the crisis was found.
