Slip sliding away

Adam Nossiter has an article in The New York Times about the Ivory Coast:

The president who refuses to relinquish power after losing an election has agreed to lift the blockade on his winning rival’s headquarters, West Africa’s political-economic alliance said.
The move by the president, Laurent Gbagbo, appeared to represent a slight softening of his stance after weeks of diplomatic pressure from the alliance and others, though there were still no signs Mr. Gbagbo was budging from the presidential palace here.
Mr. Gbagbo “pledged to immediately lift the blockade around the Hotel Du Golf, the temporary headquarters of Mr. Alassane Ouattara, the president-elect,” the West African alliance, known as ECOWAS, said in a statement in Abuja, the Nigerian capital. The announcement followed a diplomatic mission here by ECOWAS leaders that otherwise ended in failure, as the group’s goal, dislodging Mr. Gbagbo, appeared distant.
Mr. Gbagbo’s refusal to leave office in Ivory Coast, the world’s leading producer of cocoa, has become something of a test case in Africa, pitting him against a broad array of critics that include not only Ecowas and the much bigger African Union, but also the United Nations, the European Union and major global financial institutions like the World Bank.
For weeks, as part of his effort to consolidate his grip on power after his ally on the Constitutional Council threw out the election results, Mr. Gbagbo has blocked the roads leading to the hotel. Mr. Ouattara and his ministers have been forced to rely on United Nations helicopter flights for food.
Despite Mr. Gbagbo’s new pledge, members of Mr. Ouattara’s government were saying by telephone from the Hotel du Golf that the roads remained blocked. Mr. Gbagbo also “agreed to negotiate a peaceful end to the crisis without any preconditions,” the ECOWAS statement said. Still, Mr. Gbagbo told the Ecowas delegation on Monday that his continuing tenure as president was not negotiable.
“His version of the end of the crisis is quite different from what we have in mind,” said a Western diplomat in Abuja knowledgeable about the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his government had not authorized him to speak to the news media. Indeed, the previous threat by ECOWAS to use military force to dislodge Mr. Gbagbo remains active, the diplomat said.
In Abuja, the ECOWAS commission president, James Victor Gbeho, told reporters that the military objective remained a tool of the alliance.
Diplomats here and in the Nigerian capital said Mr. Gbagbo appeared to be engaging in a practice in which he has shown himself to be masterful: stalling. For five years, up until the now disputed election last November, he put off calls for a new vote. Now, he was doing the same, diplomats said, and apparently at the expense of ECOWAS.
“It’s so limpid, so clear, I don’t see why people aren’t seeing it,” said a diplomat here in Abidjan.
In another indication of the tension here, security forces raided an opposition party headquarters early Tuesday, killing one, a United Nations official said. “They opened fire on the people who were in there,” said Simon Munzu, the official, arresting 130 people, and taking them to a nearby police station. He said his attempt to investigate the episode later was blocked by several dozen policemen.

Rico says that ECOWAS needs to invest in some attack helicopters; that'll winkle the Nixon-of-the-Ivory-Coast out...