ABIDJAN (AFP) - Ivory Coast marked the end of a second year suspended in near war, with no end in sight to a conflict that has wearied its population, brought government to a standstill and sent its economic fortunes plummeting.
A sombre ceremony, attended by the minister for national reconciliation as well as military and religious leaders, was held in the main city Abidjan during which wreaths were laid in memory of those who lost their lives in the conflict.
President Laurent Gbagbo, who did not attend the ceremony, called on Ivorians to be strong in the face of adversity.
"And we will win, we will win, because we are the Ivory Coast," he said as he left a Protestant church service.
In the rebel-held north the insurgents' political and military leaders held a meeting in the town of Bouna on the second anniversary of the army uprising that sparked the conflict.
On September 19, 2002, while Gbagbo was on a trip to Rome, soldiers attacked neighborhoods around Abidjan in a bid to oust him from the presidency he had won two years earlier on the back of a popular uprising.
Repelled by the regular army, which was backed by former colonial power France, the failed rebellion started several months of civil war adding to the instability that marks west Africa as one of the world's more troubled regions.
The attempted putsch was the latest in a string of coups to rock the country that had, since independence in 1960, been a leading light in Africa for both its political stability and affluence that made Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa producer, a magnet for millions of economic migrants.
While the actual fighting was short, producing a still unknown number of casualties, its effects have been intractable, dividing the country between north and south and pitting Ivorians against their immigrant neighbors in the scramble for shrinking resources.
In the two years since their uprising, the rebels have moved to transform their crusade into a political one, aiming to shepherd new laws through parliament that address key issues of the conflict such as national identity, land ownership and eligibility for presidential candidates.
Those laws, envisioned by a peace pact signed in January 2003, remain locked in debate. Backers of Gbagbo demand that the rebels lay down their weapons before trying to take up political reform.
A new timetable for reform and disarmament spelled out in July in Accra by an increasingly impatient group of regional heads of state, mindful of the consequences a stumbling Ivory Coast has for their own economies, also looks doomed.
This is despite warnings from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and the heads of state of the potential for targeted sanctions or prosecutions by international justice should progress fail to materialize.
And still there is violence, despite the presence of some 10,000 French and UN peacekeepers patrolling on both sides and inside of a ceasefire zone cutting a 400-kilometer (240-mile) swathe across the heart of the country.
At least 120 people were killed in March in a savage state-sponsored crackdown on a banned rally in Abidjan, with many telling a UN human rights team investigating the violence that migrants and activists were rousted from their homes in the middle of the night, never to return.
For the 16 million residents of Ivory Coast -- one-quarter of whom remain identified as foreigners -- the uncertainty of the situation has complicated everything from work to leisure to travel within its borders.
Economic growth has slowed and even reversed itself, despite rising prices for cocoa on the world markets. The International Monetary Fund has suspended disbursements for the country's failure to pay interest arrears on old loans.
Life in Abidjan, once a thriving and sophisticated city with skyscrapers packed with people clad in designer clothes, has slowed, its bars and nightclubs empty, the shelves of its modern supermarkets crammed with dusty treats whose gourmet allure can find no purchase.