Shaken but safe, foreign evacuees on Sunday hugged relatives and exchanged tales of chaos reigning in a rebel-held city in western Ivory Coast.
”It was unbearable,” said Ashkar Louis Michel, a Lebanese man who fled his home of 38 years with just two pairs of pants and a few shirts.
After fighting gunbattles with the shadowy new insurgents, French forces flew some 160 people from the key cocoa city of Man to the former French colony’s commercial capital, Abidjan. The first plane landed after curfew on Saturday and a second one arrived overnight, French embassy officials said.
The evacuees — most of them French and Lebanese — were taken to a sleek lagoonside hotel for the night and were reuniting with relatives on Sunday.
Ivory Coast, the world’s leading cocoa producer, has been divided three ways as a two-month rebel uprising evolves into a multifronted war.
The government holds the south, including Abidjan, a regional financial hub and strategic port. The rebels who launched the September 19 uprising control the north, and the new insurgents claim the West.
Evacuees said there were two groups of insurgents in Man — Liberians who appeared to have come from the nearby rebel-held city of Danane, and Ivorians who came from the north.
Some identified the Ivorians as members of the northern rebel Patriotic Movement of Ivory Coast, which has denied any involvement in the fighting in the West. It was not immediately possible to verify the reports.
”The group from Liberia are unbearable,” Michel said. ”They enter the homes and steal. The others don’t do that.”
Others said the Ivorian rebels gunned down at least two Liberians who were caught looting.
”They were shooting in the streets,” said Fatme Mhane, a Lebanese woman, her eyes tearing as her two daughters played in the hotel lobby. ”They weren’t just carrying pistols, they had big guns as well”.
Danane is just 30 kilometers from the border with Liberia — itself battered by a brutal seven-year war waged by many anarchic factions and a rebellion that still pitches government forces against insurgents based in the north.
Liberian Information Minister Reginald Goodridge said on Saturday he could not rule out the possibility that Liberian mercenaries were involved in Ivory Coast, but he said the government did not sanction such action.
Ivory Coast was once a shelter for thousands of Liberian refugees. Now they are running from guns again, but this time they are heading home. The UN refugee agency says around 47 000 Liberian refugees are in the western region, and hundreds have already crossed the border.
The order to evacuate Man came after French soldiers fought a daylong battle for control of the nearby airport.
One French soldier was injured in the clashes, said Lt. Col. Ange-Antoine Leccia, representative for the 1 000-strong French force in Ivory Coast. The Djibouti-based parachutist was evacuated to Abidjan and was not in any immediate danger, he said.
Leccia gave a provisional death toll of five on the rebel side. Rebels calling themselves the Ivorian Popular Movement for the Greater West blamed the clashes on a ”misunderstanding.” They said there was no need for the French to evacuate their nationals from the western region because the rebels would not harm them.
The statement said the insurgents wanted to avenge the death of Gen. Robert Guei, who led Ivory Coast’s first ever coup in 1999, and was fervently supported in the west. The former junta leader was shot dead in the early hours of the uprising.
The rebels also claimed to have captured the town of Toulepleu, near the border with Liberia. Military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the attack but did not know the outcome.
Government officials say there is also a second group of western rebels, the previously unknown Movement for Justice and Peace, who are also believed to be Guei loyalists.
This is not the first time French forces have flown to the rescue of foreigners trapped by fighting in a country once seen as a haven of tranquility. French forces evacuated hundreds of French, American and other foreigners from rebel-held towns in the north at
the start of the uprising, whisking them out by helicopter or securing roads for them.
The French troops are also monitoring a cease-fire agreed between the northern rebels and the army on October 17, but which has crumbled in recent days.
At deadlocked peace talks in nearby Togo, the northern
insurgents tabled amended proposals they said would provide a basis for face-to-face talks. No details of the proposals were available, and the government did not immediately comment.
The negotiations have stalled on rebel demands that President Laurent Gbagbo resign — a demand Ivorian authorities refuse to countenance.
The conflict has fanned simmering ethnic tensions between northern and southern groups. The northern rebels say they are fighting against the discrimination of mainly Muslim northern tribes by Christian and animist southern groups that have traditionally dominated government. – Sapa-AP