Race on to evacuate westerners from Ivory Coast

France and the UN today 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, 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.

“It is on a voluntary basis. We are not going to evacuate all our French citizens because they are too many,” the official said.

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.

State television today broadcast what the UN called hate messages, including images of the bodies – one with its head blown off – of some of seven people reported killed in a clash at a French evacuation centre.

France says they 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 on state television. “Let us all mobilise.”

“All those who saw the pictures of our compatriots killed yesterday please go back and continue the resistance," another urged.

In Paris, President Jacques Chirac demanded that Gbagbo’s government act: “The Ivorian authorities should assume their responsibilities regarding public order.”

Foreign aid workers, businessmen and long-time residents of Ivory Coast huddled at UN agencies today.

“The people here have lost everything – their houses, the companies, everything,” a Belgian businessman said.

“I see a very dark picture for the future of Ivory Coast,” said the man, a 23-year resident of the country.

UN convoys were shuttling foreigners to the airports, passing through “very virulent” crowds of loyalist youths and passing burned vehicles and roadblocks of burned tires, 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 shuttles to Paris and to Dakar, Senegal, French officials said.

The US Embassy and others also sent convoys to pick up Americans, Canadians, Spaniards and others. Americans would likely fly to Accra, capital of neighbouring Ghana, the embassy said.

Spain, Belgium and Italy also were sending military planes to be on standby in the region.

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

Ivory Coast 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 in the country trying to maintain a 2003 ceasefire that the government broke last week with air attacks on rebel territory.