Strikes called in bid to oust Ivory Coast president

Allies of the man who the world says won Ivory Coast's disputed presidential election called for a immediate general strike from today until his defiant rival conceded defeat and left office.

It was the latest form of pressure to force Laurent Gbagbo from the presidency nearly a month after the United Nations said his political rival Alassane Ouattara won the run-off vote.

Gbagbo has refused to leave despite international calls for him to be ousted and West African leaders say they will remove him by force if he fails to go.

Djedje Mady, the head of Mr Ouattara's electoral coalition, said it called on "all Ivorians and those who live in Ivory Coast and believe in peace and justice to cease all their activities on Monday, December 27, 2010, until Laurent Gbagbo leaves power".

The United Nations has said at least 173 people have been killed in violence over the vote, heightening fears that the country once divided in two could return to civil war.

The toll is believed to be much higher, though, as the UN mission has been blocked from investigating other reports including an allegation of a mass grave.

Yesterday the interior minister appointed by Gbagbo accused the UN of only telling half the story.

"The government of Ivory Coast denounces the lack of objectivity and balance in the procedures carried out by the UN Human Rights Council," said Emile Guirieoulou. He said that at least 36 of the victims were police or other security forces who "were targeted by gunfire coming from the protesters".

Guirieoulou also claimed that thousands of refugees arriving in Liberia had fled violence perpetrated by rebels who supported Mr Ouattara.

The UN refugee agency says at least 14,000 people have fled the violence and political chaos in Ivory Coast, some walking for up to four days with little food to reach neighbouring Liberia. At least one child drowned while trying to cross a river.

Gbagbo has been in power since 2000 and had already overstayed his mandate by five years when the long-delayed presidential election was finally held in October. The vote was intended to help reunify the country, which was divided by the 2002-2003 civil war into a rebel-controlled north and a loyalist south.

Instead, the election has renewed divisions that threaten to plunge the country back into civil war.

While Ivory Coast was officially reunited in a 2007 peace deal, Mr Ouattara still draws his support from the northern half of the country, where residents feel they are often treated as foreigners within their own country by southerners.

The UN certified Mr Ouattara as the winner of the November 28 run-off vote, but a Gbagbo ally overturned those results by throwing out half a million ballots from Ouattara strongholds in the north.

The move angered people who had waited for years as officials settled who would be allowed to vote in the long-delayed election, differentiating between Ivorians with roots in neighbouring countries and foreigners.

For nearly a month, Gbagbo has defied calls from the UN, US, former coloniser France, the African Union and the European Union to hand over power to Mr Ouattara.

On Friday West African leaders from the regional bloc ECOWAS threatened military intervention and yesterday Sierra Leone's information ministry said three presidents from the region would visit Gbagbo and offer him asylum.

But Gbagbo has shown few signs that he plans to go and his security forces are said to have been behind hundreds of arrests and dozens of disappearance and torture cases in recent weeks.

The United Nations reported on Thursday that heavily armed forces allied with Gbagbo, joined by masked men with rocket launchers, were preventing people from getting to the village of N'Dotre, where the world body said "allegations point to the existence of a mass grave".

But while the threat of a military intervention creates pressure on Gbagbo, Africa security analyst Peter Pham said there were "serious doubts that ECOWAS has the wherewithal to carry it out".

"None of the ECOWAS countries has the type of special operations forces capable of a 'decapitation strike' to remove the regime leadership," said Mr Pham, senior vice president of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy in New York.

"That leaves the rather unpalatable option of mounting a full-scale invasion of the sort that would inevitably involve urban fighting and civilian casualties."

Gbagbo has been able to maintain his rule because he still has the loyalty of security forces and the country's military, but that may disappear if he runs out of money to pay them.

His access to the state funds used to pay soldiers and civil servants has been cut off and only Mr Ouattara's representatives now have access to the state coffers.