(Adds disarmament chief in paragraphs 3-4, U.N. comment) By Peter Murphy ABIDJAN, March 5 (Reuters) - The people of Ivory Coast expressed hope on Monday a home-grown peace deal signed at the weekend would succeed where four years of international efforts to reunite the war-divided West African state had failed. President Laurent Gbagbo and rebel leader Guillaume Soro signed the deal on Sunday in neighbouring Burkina Faso after their representatives spent nearly a month discussing disarmament, Ivorian nationality and new elections. "We've had 14 peace accords so far and we hope this one -- which is the work of the belligerents themselves -- will be the last one," said General Gaston Ouassenan Kone, head of Ivory Coast's disarmament programme (CNDDR). "It's important not just for Ivory Coast but the whole region," he told Reuters on the sidelines of a meeting in Senegal's capital Dakar. Rebels seized the northern half of the world's top cocoa grower in a 2002-2003 civil war, which erupted after they attempted to topple Gbagbo. A string of U.N.-mandated deals have failed as the foes bickered over how to implement them. Though fighting was brief, Ivory Coast has seen poverty spread while the political crisis endures. The former French colony has been destabilised by rioting and protests. "It's a joy. If they accept to do what they have agreed to, everyone will win," Jean N'Degbe, a retired primary school, said in the Cocody suburb of the economic capital Abidjan. France, which has expressed willingness to scale back its operations, welcomed the deal but some diplomats were cautious. "It is encouraging that they have come to an agreement," a U.S. diplomat said. "All kinds of things have been agreed to in the past but the problem has always been in the implementation." The deal foresees a new transitional government within five weeks and the relaunch of a stalled voter registration and identification process to enable elections within 10 months -- slightly later than a U.N. imposed end-October deadline. It also calls on the United Nations and French military, which have more than 11,000 peacekeepers in the country, to slowly withdraw their troops from the zone running across the country that keeps rebel and government forces apart. The two forces are to partially merge before a new national army is formed. "The two sides have finally understood that their combatants are no longer willing to fight," said secondary school teacher Moussa Kone in the rebel stronghold city of Bouake in the north. Gbagbo, whose mandate officially expired in 2005 but has been twice-extended under U.N.-backed deals, has frequently denounced foreign meddling in Ivory Coast in the past. "This is the first time we have had an accord where the two sides who are fighting are actually in agreement," Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, U.N. Special Representative for West Africa, told Reuters in Dakar. (Additional reporting by Nick Tattersall in Dakar, Salim Bamba in Bouake)
