France, United States and other nations evacuate foreigners trapped in Ivory Coast

[SR-25]

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

BY PAULINE BAX
ASSOCIATED PRESS


ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast - France and the United States on Wednesday began evacuating thousands of foreigners trapped for days by violent attacks targeting French civilians and troops in this West African nation.

As state television aired fiery calls to mobilize against the French, French troops combed Ivory Coast's largest city to rescue foreigners, sending boats to pluck some French off the banks of Abidjan's lagoons.

"The government is pushing to kill white people - not just the French, all white people," said Marie Noel Mion, rescued by French troops in a wooden boat at daybreak and waiting with hundreds of others at Abidjan's airport for the first flight out.

In Paris, France's Cabinet approved a decree requisitioning commercial aircraft to carry out French citizens in what was shaping up as one of the largest evacuations from Africa since the independence era.

An Air France Boeing 777 pulled off the tarmac at mid-afternoon, bearing 240 evacuees in the first of likely days of shuttles to neighboring African countries and Europe.

France alone expected to fly out between 4,000 to 8,000 of its citizens, a French official said - potentially the majority of the 14,000 French still in the former French colony.

"It is on a voluntary basis. We are not going to evacuate all our French citizens because they are too many," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The U.S. Embassy also sent convoys through the city, picking up Americans, Canadians, Spaniards and others for the airport. Americans would likely fly to Accra, capital of neighboring Ghana, the U.S. Embassy said. There are a few hundred Americans in the country, most of them missionaries and aid workers.

Violence erupted in Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa producer and regional economic powerhouse, on Saturday after government warplanes killed nine French peacekeepers and an American aid worker in an airstrike on the rebel-held north.

France wiped out the nation's newly built-up air force on the tarmac in retaliation, sparking a violent uprising against the French, including looting, burning and attacks by loyalist youths. The turmoil has claimed at least 27 lives and wounded more than 900.

Ivory Coast, which gained independence in 1960, has been divided between rebel north and loyalist south since civil war broke out in September 2002. France and the United Nations have more than 10,000 peacekeepers trying to maintain a 2003 cease-fire broken Thursday by the government airstrikes on rebel territory.

President Laurent Gbagbo's government, blamed by the French for the airstrike, has failed to rein in the thousands-strong crowds of loyalists, prompting a demand from French President Jacques Chirac for more action.

"The Ivorian authorities should assume their responsibilities regarding public order," Chirac said in Paris.

On Wednesday, state television aired what the United Nations has described as hate messages.

State media showed the bodies, one with its head blown off, of some of seven people reported killed in a clash at a French evacuation center on Tuesday.

France said the seven were killed when demonstrators opened fire on the French and Ivory Coast security forces returned fire; demonstrators claim it was French troops who opened fire.

"The French are assassinating our children," one man cried Wednesday on state TV. "Let us all mobilize."

Foreign aid workers, businesspeople and longtime residents huddled at U.N. agencies on Wednesday.

"The people here have lost everything, their houses, the companies, everything," one of them, a Belgian businessman, said.

U.N. convoys shuttled foreigners to the airports, passing through "very virulent" crowds of loyalist youths and passing burned vehicles and roadblocks of burned tires, U.N. spokesman Philippe Moreux said.

"It's a very hostile crowd," Moreux said. "They're chanting slogans and insults, things like, 'All the whites out,' 'Everybody catch a white.'"

Three Boeings with space for 250 people each would run what shuttles to Paris and to Dakar, Senegal, French officials said.

Evacuees included some U.N. employees and others among 1,500 expatriates holed up at U.N. headquarters.

More than 1,600 French and citizens of 42 other countries who have taken refuge in a French military base in Abidjan were to be flown out, according to French officials.

As the evacuations began, South African President Thabo Mbeki invited representatives of Ivory Coast's warring sides to peace talks there meant to end the violence.

No date has been set, but the meeting is expected "soon," spokesman Bheki Khumalo said.


Associated Press writers Daniel Balint-Kurti in Abuja, Nigeria and Nafi Diouf in Dakar, Senegal, and Associated Press photographer Schalk van Zuydam in Abidjan, contributed to this report.