/ 3 January 2003

Conflict in Ivory Coast widens

France is sending its foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, today to Ivory Coast, its former West African colony where rebels have opened a new front in the insurgency now in its fourth month.

”We are seeing the ceasefire violated in the north, clashes in the west. Threats to human rights are multiplying,” De Villepin told the daily Le Parisien, in an interview to be published today.

Refugees fleeing the village of Neka said people were butchered earlier this week when it was occupied by rebels sweeping south-west in a new offensive which threatened San Pedro, the port through which a fifth of the world’s cocoa beans are exported.

France, which has a force of about 2 500 in the country condemned an attack by government helicopter gunships which crossed a ceasefire line in the north, killed 11 civilians and wounded many others. The rebels promised to respond with a major offensive.

Hundreds have died and thousands have fled their homes since the failed coup in September opened ethnic divisions in what was once the most stable and prosperous country in West Africa.

Three rebel groups trying to depose the government control the north and west of the country. The government and the rebels are using foreign mercenaries.

Hope that the conflict could be contained faded when one of the rebel groups, the Ivorian Patriotic Movement of the Far West (MPIGO), struck the south-west on New Year’s Day, taking Neka and moving to within 200 kilometres of San Pedro.

The group bypassed a French military roadblock and entered an oil-palm plantation, seizing vehicles and fuel and scattering civilians, according to the BBC.

”There were a lot of dead; they killed lots of people,” said a refugee. ”We saw the bodies.”

A government representative accused the rebels of hacking people with machetes and burning homes. Veterans from the civil wars of neighbouring Liberia were said to be among the fighters.

A rebel representative said Neka fell without a fight when some government troops defected.

After the government helicopter gunships fired at civilians in the lakeside fishing village of Menakro the French news agency AFP quoted a French soldier as saying: ”People were shot like rabbits.”

A foreign ministry representative in Paris said: ”France considers this violation of the October 17 ceasefire unacceptable and will demand explanations from the Ivorian authorities.

”The ceasefire must be respected by everybody.”

The criticism was unexpected because the French force, which is ostensibly neutral, is widely regarded as having stepped in to shore up President Laurent Gbagbo’s government.

A representative for the Ivorian army, Colonel Jules Yao Yao, said that the rebels used civilians as human shields.

The October 17 ceasefire between the government and the main rebel group controlling the north, the Patriotic Movement of Ivory Coast (MPCI), has frayed as peace talks in Togo have become bogged down.

The appearance in the west of two other, less disciplined rebel groups raised the fear that the conflict might descend into a protracted scramble for power between rival warlords.

The French originally intervened to evacuate westerners. Their second objective, to freeze the front lines, has failed. Paris is reported to be exasperated that it been sucked into a major engagement on behalf of President Gbagbo, whom it has never especially liked. – Guardian Unlimited Â