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Abidjan horrors revealed
12/11/2004 20:58 - (SA)
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| A French citizen carrying his dog arrives by bus at the airport of Abidjan. (Schalk van Zuydam, AP) |
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Abidjan - Details of rapes and other atrocities against foreigners in Ivory Coast 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 Ivory Coast, a linchpin 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 some 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 UN 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.
Xenophobic violence
Military officials including General Henri Poncet, commander of the French Unicorn force in Ivory Coast, have confirmed that foreign women were raped in the xenophobic violence that swept through Abidjan.
There were no murders reported among the 14 000 French nationals who resided in Ivory Coast, 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 US aid worker dead.
France riposted by wiping out virtually the entire Ivorian air force and seizing 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.
'Barriers have been breached'
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 Catherine Rechenmann, a representative of the French community in Abidjan.
"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 some 400 people "entitled to protection" by the British foreign office early on Friday morning, a spokesperson told AFP 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.
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