By Peter Murphy

ABIDJAN, March 6 (Reuters) - A new peace deal between Ivory Coast's warring factions could succeed where previous foreign-backed ones failed because all parties in the enduring conflict have backed it, a senior U.N. official said on Tuesday.

President Laurent Gbagbo and the leader of rebels who seized the north of the world's top cocoa grower in a brief 2002-2003 civil war signed the plan on Sunday, which aims for reunification and long-delayed elections within 10 months.

Earlier deals brokered by international mediators have been repeatedly bogged down as the foes squabbled over how to implement them.

"What makes the difference is that compared to all the other agreements signed so far, with which there has been a kind of violent reaction, all of the political parties ... by and large recognise that it is a good agreement," said Abou Moussa, interim head of the country's U.N. peacekeeping mission.

"We will have to wait at least the next few weeks to see how all the parties are respecting the initial stages of the agreement. Right now we are still cautious," he told Reuters at the mission's headquarters in the economic capital Abidjan.

The latest agreement was the result of almost one month of direct negotiations held at Gbagbo's initiative between his advisors and senior rebels in neighbouring Burkina Faso.

The talks were overseen by Burkinabe President Blaise Compaore, head of the ECOWAS association of West African states.

Gbagbo, who has denounced foreign meddling in Ivory Coast and been hostile to the current U.N.-backed peace plan, hailed the deal as a victory: an African solution to African problems.

The deal foresees a new transitional government within five weeks and the relaunch of a stalled voter registration process to enable elections to take place after being postponed twice.

It also calls on the United Nations and French military, who number more than 11,000 peacekeepers, to slowly withdraw from a buffer zone separating rebel and government forces.

The warring factions are to partially merge before a new national army is formed. They plan to jointly police this zone while state administration is redeployed in the rebel-held north, prior to disarmament and the formation of a new army.

Though the foreign troops were guarding the ceasefire line at the belligerents' request, Moussa said any decision to withdraw peacekeepers from the ceasefire line would ultimately be taken by the U.N. Security Council.

"Much as we cannot say there is not going to be any violence, the possibility of direct confrontation has been reduced," he told Reuters.

Moussa said the new peace plan was due to be passed on for approval to the African Union then to the U.N. Security Council, which meets on March 12.

The Ivorian press has speculated the country's Prime Minister Charles Konan Banny who was appointed by the current foundering U.N.-backed plan and who has clashed several times with Gbagbo, will be replaced, possibly by rebel leader Soro.

AlertNet news is provided by