Horror of Abidjan violence revealed

Details of rapes and other atrocities against foreigners in Côte d’Ivoire began to emerge on Friday as thousands of expatriates continued to leave the West African state and African leaders moved to prevent the crisis from igniting the entire region.

The region cannot afford a reprise of the conflict in Côte d’Ivoire, a linchpin both geographically and financially due to its robust, cocoa-based economy that has attracted hundreds of thousands of migrants over the four decades since independence from France.

Those responsible for the recent escalation in violence that has claimed about 60 lives and left more than 1 000 injured according to government tolls are doing “incalculable damage not only to the future of their country but to the whole of west Africa,” said United Nations special envoy for west Africa, Ahmedou Ould Abdallah.

Injuries including blows from machetes were among incidents reported by the hundreds of French nationals who have returned to Paris since Wednesday, when evacuation flights began lifting off from the airport in the commercial capital.

Military officials including General Henri Poncet, commander of the French Unicorn force in Côte d’Ivoire, have confirmed that foreign women were raped in the xenophobic violence that swept through Abidjan.

“I confirm there have been rapes. There were atrocities, tragedies for a certain number of women,” he said.

“I will not comment further out of respect.”

A representative of the French community in Côte d’Ivoire, Catherine Rechenmann, said there were “37 serious atrocities including three or four confirmed rapes”.

There were no murders reported among the 14 000 French nationals who resided in the Côte d’Ivoire, foreign ministry spokesperson Herve Ladsous said from Paris on Friday. The whereabouts of two French nationals remain unknown, he added.

But the damage has been done to relations between France and its former star colony in west Africa following government air strikes on a French military base in the central town of Bouake that left nine French troops and a United States aid worker dead.

France then wiped out virtually the entire Ivorian air force and seized the airport, which in return provoked a violent and angry outburst by partisans of President Laurent Gbagbo, egged on by hate messages broadcast over state radio and television.

Their rampage laid waste to parts of Abidjan, once one of Africa’s most modern and sophisticated cities, and spread down the coast to the port city of San Pedro, also home to a sizeable French expatriate community.

Ethnic clashes were also provoked in the southwestern town of Gagnoa, leaving six dead, including five Burkinabe planters.

“For the past five days, I have felt constantly ill,” said Rechenmann. “When people start attacking women, when they are raped, it’s over, the barriers have been breached.”

The exodus of foreign nationals gathered pace on Friday, with Britain beginning the evacuation of about 400 people “entitled to protection” by the British foreign office early on Friday morning, a spokesperson said from London.

Diplomatic sources in Abidjan said the number of flights would increase substantially to evacuate foreign nationals from Canada, the United States, Australia and Europe. More than 2 600 people have boarded planes from Abidjan since Wednesday.

And in Dakar aid officials working for the United Nations said Côte d’Ivoire was facing a “serious and lasting crisis,” which risks spilling over the borders unless something is done.

“There has to be a much bigger recognition of the humanitarian crisis in Ivory Coast,” Joel Boutroue, the head of the humanitarian coordination bureau of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees told reporters after a meeting of aid organisations.

“If nothing is done we are moving towards a regional conflict,” he said, saying they were linked to the massive movements of populations outside the Côte d’Ivoire borders.

Meanwhile, crisis talks were to resume Friday in Pretoria in a bid to forestall a return to war in the country of 17-million in the heart of volatile west Africa, which borders Liberia, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana.

The South African mediation, under the aegis of the African Union, has postponed until Monday a vote by the UN Security Council on a French-backed resolution giving Côte d’Ivoire 30 days to implement a January 2003 peace pact or face sanctions to include an arms embargo.

The grouping, led by President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria has also called an emergency summit for Sunday in Abuja, inviting presidents such as Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, Gabon’s Omar Bongo, Burkina Faso’s Blaise Compaore and John Kufuor, who is both president of Ghana and chairperson of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas).

In the rebel-held north of the divided state, meanwhile, power and water were reinstated after a week of cuts that had prompted fears among humanitarian agencies of an outbreak of diseases such as cholera.

Demonstrators were expected to depart on Monday from the central rebel stronghold of Bouake for a two-week march to Abidjan to demand the reconciliation of the divided country. – Sapa-AFP