By Peter Murphy BANGOLO, Ivory Coast, April 30 (Reuters) - Once sworn foes, government and rebel soldiers in Ivory Coast on Monday began their first joint patrols in a "battle for peace" aimed at reuniting the West Africa state split by a 2002/2003 civil war. The patrols will gradually replace United Nations and French peacekeepers in a 600 km (375 mile)-long buffer zone that has kept the two sides apart since the brief conflict that divided the world's top cocoa producer into two opposing halves. It is being dismantled under a March 4 peace plan struck between President Laurent Gbagbo and his rebel foes which foresees national reunification and elections within a year. At a ceremony on Monday in the small town of Bangolo in western Ivory Coast, soldiers and civilians cheered as the U.N. flag was lowered at a military base and replaced by the orange, white and green Ivorian flag. "I would like to invite you all to adopt an attitude of non-belligerence and forgiveness," Defense Minister Michel N'Guessan Amani told the joint brigade of government and rebel troops as they paraded together. "I would like to ask everyone to dedicate themselves to this last battle, the battle for peace," he added. The first joint patrols under the peace plan will each consist of 10 government soldiers, a similar number of rebel soldiers and four U.N. police officers. These mixed brigades will be the seeds of the new, integrated Ivorian armed forces. The mixed patrols were starting out around Bangolo and nearby Zeale in western Ivory Coast, one of the country's most turbulent zones which has seen bloody ethnic clashes, militia raids and massacres of civilians in recent years. CONFIDENCE BUILDING U.N. officials said restoring security cooperation between the two former enemy armies could be a slow, sensitive process. "They have been separate for a long time, so now they are together we have to be very cautious and help them in confidence building, step by step," Bangladeshi Brigadier-General Islam Mainul, the U.N. commander in the western zone, told reporters. At least one humanitarian group, Medecins sans Frontieres, has reported an increase in killings, rapes and murders in the west since the moves to dismantle the buffer zone and withdraw U.N. forces were started by President Gbagbo on April 16. Local residents said they had doubts the mixed Ivorian patrols would be able to keep the peace in a region of mountain and forest where gangs of armed bandits, known in French as "coupeurs de route", often raided villages and robbed vehicles. "There are not enough (patrols), they should send a lot more. We are scared to travel. There is no security," said Mohammed Diomande, a local Imam or religious leader. Other locals said they believed the Ivorian soldiers would be less reticent about opening fire on suspected bandits. "They will shoot at them ... the U.N. didn't do that," said local civil servant Joseph Ba. Analysts credit Gbagbo and his new prime minister, former rebel chief Guillaume Soro, with having breathed new life into a peace process which has often stalled amid political wrangling. But they say the real test will be disarming rival militias and providing identity papers to hundreds of thousands of undocumented Ivorians, both thorny issues in a nation rent along ethnic and religious faultlines. But for the moment, government officials say the reconciliation embodied in the joint patrols is on track. "Now we have finished fighting, why would we fight again?" asked Lt. Col Rene Sako of the government army.
