By Ange Aboa ABIDJAN, March 16 (Reuters) - Ivory Coast's President Laurent Gbagbo signed a decree on Friday creating a joint military command centre, the first step towards unifying government and rebel forces in the West African country. The creation of the Integrated Command Centre (CCI) was part of a peace deal signed by Gbagbo and rebel leader Guillaume Soro in Burkina Faso's capital Ouagadougou two weeks ago, the latest in a series of agreements aimed at reunifying the country. The new centre will focus on demobilising militia fighters from the government and rebel sides but will not immediately replace the existing command structures for each force. The head of the Ivorian army, Gen. Philippe Mangou, and the chief of staff for the rebel New Forces, General Soumaila Bakayoko, met Gbagbo in the economic capital Abidjan where they were handed copies of the decree and the Ouagadougou accord. "There will be no blockage in implementing the Ouagadougou agreement," Bakayoko told reporters after leaving the presidential palace with Mangou by his side. The latest peace agreement, reached after nearly a month of talks, came after a series of U.N.-backed plans failed to deliver long-delayed elections in the world's largest cocoa producer, divided since a brief 2002-2003 civil war. Under the terms of the deal, brokered by Burkina Faso's President Blaise Compaore, Gbagbo and Soro pledged to relaunch a stalled voter registration and identification process to prepare for presidential elections within 10 months. The agreement also called on the United Nations and French peacekeeping mission in Ivory Coast to dismantle a buffer zone which they have policed between the rebel-held north and government-run south since the war. The deal envisages a line of observation posts staffed by "impartial forces" running through the centre of the current buffer zone. These would be halved in number every two months. France, which has repeatedly expressed willingness to scale back its obligations in Ivory Coast, has welcomed the deal while the interim head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission has said he believes it could succeed because all parties had backed it.
