Airliners were shuttling hundreds of trapped foreigners out of Côte d’Ivoire on Thursday, as South Africa convened urgent peace talks on a crisis that it said threatens to destabilise West Africa.
France and other nations launched the evacuations on Wednesday.
Convoys sent out by the United States embassy and other nations gathered foreigners from their homes, rounding them up for evacuation as Côte d’Ivoire state television alternately appealed on Wednesday 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, was due to join the effort on Thursday.
A French official has said between 4Â 000 and 8Â 000 of its 14Â 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 Côte d’Ivoire 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 Côte d’Ivoire 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 Côte d’Ivoire, I have 60kg of luggage and a dog,” said a Belgian businessman who said he was leaving the country and not returning.
Mayhem condemned
The mayhem, checked only intermittently by Gbagbo’s government, has been unanimously condemned by Gbagbo’s fellow African leaders and drawn moves toward United Nations sanctions. It threatens lasting harm to the economy and stability of Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s top cocoa producer and once West Africa’s most peaceful and prosperous nation.
South African Department of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Ronnie Mamoepa said President Thabo Mbeki will open the talks on Thursday in Pretoria.
South African Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Aziz Pahad said Ivorian rebel and opposition leaders, including former prime minister Alassane Outtara, will arrive in Pretoria on Thursday for the talks. Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said a resolution to the crisis is critical.
”A full-scale war in Côte d’Ivoire 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 Côte d’Ivoire and bring it under control, or it could turn into a regional problem.”
The violence began on Saturday when Côte d’Ivoire warplanes killed nine French peacekeepers and an American aid worker in an air strike on the rebel-held north in three days of government air attacks that violated a more-than-year-old ceasefire 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 air strike, 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 air strikes, 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.
Côte d’Ivoire presidential spokesperson Alain Toussaint said 37 loyalists had died.
On Thursday, Côte d’Ivoire’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.
Evacuees arrive in Paris
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 on Wednesday night in Accra, capital of neighbouring Ghana, on a Canadian-organised evacuation flight.
Evacuees also included some UN employees and others among 1Â 500 expatriates holed up at UN offices around the city. More than 1Â 600 others — most of them French, but also citizens of 42 other countries — had taken refuge inside a French military camp.
At the UN, France revised a UN Security Council resolution on Wednesday to give Côte d’Ivoire 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 Côte d’Ivoire’s government and the rebels need more breathing room to return to the peace process, diplomats said on condition of anonymity. — Sapa-AP