Hundreds of foreigners fleeing Ivory Coast
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-11-11 20:59

Airliners were shuttling hundreds of trapped foreigners out of the Ivory Coast on Thursday, as South Africa convened urgent peace talks on a crisis that it said threatened to destabilize West Africa.

The evacuations began Wednesday, when the U.S. Embassy and others sent convoys through the city to pick up foreigners. French soldiers in boats plucked some trapped citizens from the banks of Abidjan's lagoons.

An Air France jumbo jet, with space for more than 500 evacuees, was due to join the effort Thursday.

A French official has said between 4,000 to 8,000 of its 14,000 citizens wanted to leave, a number that alone would make it one of the largest evacuations of Africa's post-independence era.

French President Jacques Chirac demanded that Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo's government rein in his thousands of hard-line supporters, who brought Gbagbo to power in 2000 and now are led the anti-foreigner violence that erupted Saturday.

Some foreigners fleeing Ivory Coast accused the government of encouraging violence against white people, while others complained they were losing everything they own in the rapid flight.

The mayhem, checked only intermittently by Gbagbo's government, has been unanimously condemned publicly by Gbagbo's fellow African leaders and drawn moves toward U.N. sanctions. It threatens lasting harm to the economy and stability of Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa producer and once West Africa's most peaceful and prosperous nation.

Foreign Affairs spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa said that President Thabo Mbeki would open the talks Thursday in Pretoria.

Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Aziz Pahad said Ivorian rebel and opposition leaders, including former prime minister Alassane Outtara, will arrive in Pretoria on Thursday for the talks.

South African Foreign Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said a resolution to the crisis was critical.

"A full scale war in Ivory Coast could affect a lot of other countries in the region," she told a parliamentary committee on foreign affairs in Cape Town. "We need to contain it in Ivory Coast and bring it under control, or it could turn into a regional problem."

The violence began Saturday when Ivory Coast warplanes killed nine French peacekeepers and an American aid worker in an airstrike on the rebel-held north in three days of government air attacks that violated a more than year-old cease-fire in the country's civil war.

France wiped out the nation's newly built-up air force on the tarmac within hours. The retaliation sparked a violent uprising by loyalist youths who took to the streets waving machetes, iron bars and clubs.

Including the airstrike, the turmoil since Saturday has claimed at least 27 lives and wounded more than 900. The toll, likely incomplete, includes the 10 victims of the airstrikes, five loyalists whose bodies were shown on state TV, and 11 loyalists and one Ivorian security force member received Monday and Tuesday by hospitals. Ivory Coast presidential spokesman Alain Toussaint said 37 loyalists had died.

On Thursday, Ivory Coast's largest city, Abidjan, awoke to the first calm day since Saturday. Shops were open and traffic returned to streets being cleared of burned vehicles and roadblocks of tires.

In Paris, the first several hundred evacuees arrived overnight. Christophe Larrouilh, arriving in France, said he and his wife were forced to make a quick decision to stay or leave. On Sunday night, "there was a knock on my door. A (French) soldier said 'You have three seconds to go.' It was like in a movie. I left," Larrouilh said. He added that those leaving were kept in a military camp until planes arrived to take them out.

Eleven Portuguese citizens were among those evacuated to Madrid, Spain, the Portuguese Foreign Ministry said. About 20 Americans landed Wednesday night in Accra, capital of neighboring Ghana, on a Canadian-organized evacuation flight.

Evacuees also included some U.N. employees and others among 1,500 expatriates holed up at U.N. offices around the city. More than 1,600 others — most of them French, but also citizens of 42 other countries — had taken refuge inside a French military camp.

At the United Nations, France revised a U.N. Security Council resolution Wednesday to give Ivory Coast more time to resurrect a peace process with northern rebels or face an arms embargo and other sanctions, diplomats said.

The decision to push back the deadline from Dec. 1 to Dec. 10 was made at the request of the United States, which thought Ivory Coast's government and the rebels needed more breathing room to return to the peace process, diplomats said on condition of anonymity.

Close

Today's Top News     Top World News
Nation likely to be 3rd largest trading power         Nutritional imbalance plagues people         Mine blast kills 33, injures 6 in Henan         Coal mining: Most deadly job in China         Shen and Zhao win Cup of China         Consumer price remains stable in October	Police lose control of Mosul amid uprising       Arafat buried in Chaotic scenes in West Bank       U.S. may use Iraq meeting to engage Iran       Bush vows second-term push for Palestinian state       Dutch to withdraw troops from Iraq in March       Haiti PM orders arrest warrant against Aristide