(Adds background) By Loucoumane Coulibaly ABIDJAN, Sept 13 (Reuters) - Long-delayed elections in top cocoa grower Ivory Coast could be delayed until October 2008, months later than foreseen under a post-civil war peace deal signed last March, the electoral commission said on Thursday. The peace deal to reunite a country split in two since the brief 2002-03 war provided for presidential and parliamentary elections within 10 months, but implementation has been slow and electoral preparations have yet to begin. The vote was first due in October 2005 but was postponed twice amid lack of preparation and bickering between the West African state's government and the New Forces rebels who seized the northern half of the country in the war. The government said late on Wednesday that a key step -- issuing identity papers to an estimated 3.5 million people born here but never registered, enabling Ivorian nationals among them to vote -- would begin on Sept. 25, months later than planned. "If (identification) starts in the month of September and finishes within three months, we should be able to go to elections by October 2008 at the latest," Robert Beugre Mambe, president of the Independent Electoral Commission, told reporters at its headquarters. President Laurent Gbagbo said in a speech last month he believed elections could take place as early as December. Mambe said however he had worked out the date on the basis of delays in electoral preparations since the latest peace deal. The government expects the identification process to take three months but some diplomats say it would require much more time. According to the March peace deal which led President Gbagbo to name rebel leader Guillaume Soro prime minister, the process was due to start a fortnight after a new consensus government was formed. Paul Koffi Koffi, head of peace building programmes for the prime minister's office, told a workshop for the media on Thursday that the vote may take place before rebel and government sides are disarmed and a new army formed. He said the mixed brigades, composed of rebel and government forces which have begun to replace United Nations and French peacekeepers who manned a no-guns buffer zone running across the country, would provide security during both the identification and electoral processes.
