President Gbagbo urges greater cooperation with Burkina Faso

OUAGADOUGOU, July 29 (Xinhua) -- President Laurent Gbagbo of Cote d'Ivoire has expressed a longing desire to see links between Ouagadougou and his country's political capital Yamoussoukro become the backbone of integration in west Africa, according to official sources.

President Gbagbo, who has been in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso, on an official visit since Sunday, made the remarks when he addressed parliamentarians from the national assembly late Monday.

"We have intelligence and the means to do so for the benefit of West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS)," said the Cote d'Ivoire's head of the state.

The president further told Burkina Faso's parliamentarians that the people of Cote d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso were linked by history and geography, according to a number of lawmakers.

Defining the contours of bilateral cooperation, President Gbagbo talked of the genesis of the existing cooperation between the two countries, starting from the colonial period to today, a relationship that, according to him, was "beyond reason as it is also based on sentiment."

According to President Gbagbo, the current relations between the two sides must be consolidated in order to transform the Ouagadougou-Yamoussoukro axis into the main driving force for integration among the member states of both WAEMU and ECOWAS.

To make this integration a reality, the president said challenges ranging from internal and external migration, training of elites with harmonization in upgrading universities, the fight against pandemics such as malaria, meningitis and HIV/AIDS had to be tackled.

In addition, President Gbagbo called for the development of the regional road and energy infrastructure, environmental and ecological protection, the fight against hunger with a reorientation towards agriculture and the fight against insecurity in all its forms.

"The storm has passed. We are coming to the end of the war in Cote d'Ivoire. There is peace and we must get down to serious work now," said Gbagbo, who praised the efforts of President Blaise Compaore in the search for a solution to the crisis in his country.

Cote d'Ivoire, which once was one of the most stable democracies in a turbulent French-speaking West Africa, descended into chaos after the former New Forces rebels seized the northern part of the country in the wake of a botched coup in September 2002.

Burkina Faso, led by its president, has been at the forefront of international efforts to oversee the implementation of a comprehensive peace agreement that it helped broker last year and that will culminate in presidential elections later this year.

In his welcoming remarks, Roch Marc Christian Kabore, president of the national assembly of Burkina Faso, said that the extension of an invitation to President Gbagbo was "a mark of respect and sympathy to the man who is fighting for the return of lasting peace" in his country.

Referring to the dispute that had characterized relations between the two countries since the outbreak of the six-year old political-military crisis, Kabore expressed hope that the two heads of state had now acquired the ways and means to deepen bilateral cooperation.