LOME -- The head of Ivory Coast's government team attending peace talks with rebels who control half the country has said the negotiations in Togo were going well, though virtually no progress has been apparent.

"There is no failure in Lome," Laurent Dono Fologo said late Friday, after a top Senegalese official suggested that mediation by Togo's President Gnassingbe Eyadema had collapsed.

"We're for our part totally satisfied with the progress of the negotiations and the way in which President Eyadema is handling them," Fologo told AFP. "The path of negotiations is not a straight, well-paved road," Fologo said. "It's a track that can be difficult, where there can be obstacles. There must be no talk of failure. There hasn't even been a breakdown."

Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade on Friday agreed that his country should head a West African peacekeeping force due to replace French troops currently monitoring a cease-fire in divided Ivory Coast, one of his advisors told AFP.

But Wade also wanted to take over from Eyadema as mediator on behalf of the 15-nation Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which Senegal currently chairs.

"As the negotiations in Lome have failed, President Wade is prepared to mediate between the rival Ivorian sides but on condition that he is the sole mediator," the anonymous advisor told AFP in Paris.

To regional observers, the talks in Lome appeared to have got nowhere during the course of a week, though a cease-fire has held between government forces and the rebels after initial fighting claimed at least 400 lives.

President Laurent Gbagbo's government remains determined that the rebels, who took control of the Muslim-majority north of the country in and after their uprising of September 19, should disarm.

The rebels, mutinous troops joined by former soldiers, have insisted that Gbagbo must quit office, opening the way for elections. But Fologo said that "The mutineers have stated that they will never leave the negotiating table chaired by President Eyadema, while we have always shown respect for his rendez-vous."

"I would wish that within ECOWAS, there's no quibble over leadership or being the star and that we are all motivated by a spirit of solidarity and brotherhood," he added.

"Ivory Coast needs peace, it needs the help of all its friends and all its brothers. What it doesn't need is added pain," Fologo declared.