France and UN evacuate Ivory Coast

FRANCE and the UN yesterday launched the evacuation of thousands of foreigners trapped for days by violent attacks targeting French civilians and troops in Ivory Coast.

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

“The government is pushing to kill white people - not just the French, all white people,” said Marie Noel Mion, who was rescued in a wooden boat at daybreak and waiting with hundreds of others at Abidjan’s airport for a flight out.

In Paris, the 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 Abidjan tarmac in mid-afternoon, bearing 240 evacuees in the first of what were expected to be days of shuttles to neighbouring African countries and Europe. France alone expected to fly out between 4,000 to 8,000 citizens, a French official said - potentially the majority of the 14,000 French still in the former French colony.

Violence erupted in the country, the world’s top cocoa producer and West Africa’s economic powerhouse, on Saturday after Ivory Coast warplanes killed nine French peacekeepers and an American aid worker in an air strike on the rebel-held north.

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

President Laurent Gbagbo’s government, blamed by the French for the air strike, has failed to rein in the thousands-strong crowds of loyalists.