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 BOUAKE, Ivory Coast (AP) - For more than four years, a 12-mile-wide band of land has split this once-thriving West African country in two, creating a north-south divide that symbolized Ivory Coast's inability to recover from a civil war even as fighting subsided.
Now the French and U.N. peacekeepers who patrol the so-called "Zone of Confidence" are drawing back troops so the buffer zone can be replaced with a thin line of checkpoints — reuniting Ivory Coast in what the northern rebels and the southern government both say is proof that peace is finally taking hold.
But the reunification of the New Mexico-sized country is coming before the resolution of divisive issues of identity and political power, and it remains unclear whether the rebels and the government can ever truly be on the same side.
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