French, South African and Bulgarian mercenaries have arrived in Ivory Coast to help the army counter a rebellion that has split the west African country in two, government sources admitted here on Monday.
They said the 50 odd mercenaries are mainly helicopter pilots who have been hired to teach the army to handle new equipment it has acquired since the start of the uprising on September 19.
”The mercenaries we have employed are instructors who have to teach the Ivorian soldiers how to use new arms we have received for our war effort,” said a source close to President Laurent Gbagbo’s regime.
”We do not see them going into combat alongside our troops. They are meant to help organise the military and to take care of certain security issues,” he added.
An analyst at the Institute of Security Studies in Pretoria said in late October that about 40 mercenaries, some of them South Africans, had arrived in Ivory Coast to help the army, and that 160 would soon follow.
But Gbagbo’s aides at the time dismissed this as rumours.
A high-ranking officer in the Ivory Coast army on Monday confirmed the mercenaries’ presence in the country but was indignant at any suggestion that they would fight alongside Ivorian soldiers.
”It would be humiliating for us. We will never allow the government to deploy mercenaries to fight in this war. The only foreigners we will accept, are flight teams for the combat helicopters we have just received,” he said.
Air force sources said the hired helicopter pilots are mainly Bulgarian. They will work with three Russian-made MI-24 Hind helicopters recently acquired by the government and two MI-8 carrier helicopters.
Witnesses last week spotted the MI-24 flying over Bassam, 40 kilometres from Ivory Coast’s main city Abidjan, and firing practice rounds.
According to intelligence sources, some of the mercenaries work for Sandline International, a company which says on its Internet website it provides ”military services” and has operated in Sierra Leone in 1998 and in Papua New Guinea in 1997.
The sources said its men were due to train Ivorian soldiers to use recently acquired Russian-made weapons and vehicles, including heavy machine guns and armoured personnel carriers.
The Ivory Coast crisis, the worst since independence in 1960, has claimed 400 lives. A ceasefire was signed in October but setbacks in peacetalks have raised fears of more fighting. – Sapa-AFP