Speaker, Mr Gatsheni, I think that even if we jumped the gun, he should search thoroughly where some discussions were recorded; he will not find that this government supported Gbagbo, because it has never done so, even if we did not jump the gun. [Laughter.] What happened when the government was phoned by different leaders from abroad and Africa, was that they requested that we must stand up and support Ouattara. We said that it is unusual that at the end of the elections two legal institutions in Cte d'Ivoire, the one which is like our Independent Electoral Commission, IEC, declared Ouattara as the winner and the second one, which is the Constitutional Council, declared Gbagbo a winner in the same country - something that has never happened before, that is one country having two presidents.
In our reply we told them that we could support only one of the two. We would like to know the truth first as to what happened. What caused these very important institutions to come up with two different results? We have refused, and we were heard. If you research this you will actually find that we refused to support the one who was supposed to be supported by everyone and we did not support the one who was not supported. That is the truth. What we said was that we had never experienced such a thing; even yourself, you've never heard of such a thing - that in one country two people won, because only one person wins in an election. [Interjections.]
We made a proposal when we reached the AU that it should take over and conduct an investigation because it is a respected body, since there was a dispute - some say this one has won and some say that one has won. If that was just said by ordinary people, it would have had no effect but if that came from legal institutions, then there was a problem. That is why the institution called the High-Level Panel of the AU together with South Africa went and investigated and found the truth. These are the truths that have made us say that Ouattara is the one who truly won because now we know what truly happened and we were part of the AU's decision. There is nothing sinister about that, Gatsheni. Everything went accordingly. [Applause.]]