This Wednesday, May 19, a trial opens against Guillaume Soro and members of the GPS. The former Ivorian Prime Minister is notably accused of "endangering the security of the State".
At the end of last year, the battle between Alassane Ouattara and Guillaume Soro had been strained. Questioned at the end of October by Le Monde, the Ivorian president said: “For him (Guillaume Soro, editor's note) it will be prison. There is no doubt about it. He deserves life imprisonment for what he did ”. The head of state blames his rival for the mutinies of 2017. “We found tons of weapons in his home. Then we found some at his party headquarters. Why does a president of the National Assembly need to have rocket launchers at his party headquarters? », Asked Alassane Ouattara, who accuses the former Prime Minister of an attempted coup.
Far from calming the debates, a few days later, Guillaume Soro spoke directly to the military. He asked the "soldiers, non-commissioned officers, officers, senior officers and general officers" of the army "to act to stop the killings, to act to preserve our country from intercommunity pogroms, to act to restore peace and harmony, act to restore our Constitution to its former glory ”. A hawkish exit which had the gift of annoying an Alassane Ouattara busy reviving his image with the international community.
Trials disputed by Soro and his lawyers
So the trial that opens today in Côte d'Ivoire should finish burying the last hopes of reconciliation between the Ivorian power and the opponent. A eagerly awaited hearing: with about twenty of his relatives the former Prime Minister is accused of "undermining the security of the State", "conspiracy" and "dissemination of false information".
In exile, Guillaume Soro will obviously not be present during his trial. Worse: the lawyers of GPS, Soro's party, have also announced their refusal to participate. For the defenders of the one who also presided over the National Assembly, it is a “sham trial” which begins this Wednesday, May 19. They criticize decisions taken by the Ivorian justice "in defiance of two decisions of the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR)", dated April 22 and September 15, 2020.
Justice, moreover, intends to rely on recordings that the intelligence services would have intercepted. These, assure the lawyers, are "truncated, rigged and resulting from an illicit capture". As regards the weapons discovered in Soro's residence, the opponent's defenders affirm that there is "no link with GPS and a fortiori with Guillaume Soro".
Guillaume Soro has already received a heavy prison sentence in Côte d'Ivoire. The former Prime Minister was sentenced to 20 years in prison for concealing embezzled public funds and money laundering. Soro had, already at the time, denounced "a sentence that absolutely does not move us. The parody of the trial that we have witnessed today is the ultimate proof that the rule of law is definitely buried by Alassane Ouattara ”.