Ivory Coast: African leaders try to launch peace talks

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

France and other nations launched the evacuations yesterday. Convoys sent out by the US Embassy and other nations gathered foreigners from their homes, rounding them up for evacuation as Ivory Coast state TV alternately appealed for calm and for a mass uprising against the French. 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 people, is due to join the effort today.

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 leading the anti-foreigner violence that erupted on 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.

“After 23 years in Ivory Coast, I have 130 pounds of luggage and a dog,” said a Belgian businessman who said he was leaving the country and not coming back.

The mayhem, checked only intermittently by Gbagbo’s government, has been unanimously condemned by Gbagbo’s fellow African leaders and drawn moves toward UN 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.

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

South African Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Aziz Pahad said Ivorian rebel and opposition leaders, including former prime minister Alassane Outtara, will arrive in Pretoria today for the talks. 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 on 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 treated by hospitals on Monday and Tuesday. Ivory Coast presidential spokesman Alain Toussaint said 37 loyalists had died.

This morning, 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 last night in Accra, capital of neighbouring Ghana, on a Canadian-organised evacuation flight.

Evacuees also included some UN employees and others among 1,500 expatriates holed up at UN 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 UN Security Council resolution yesterday 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 December 1 to December 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.