Ivory Coast Unrest

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast - French tanks took up positions outside the home of Ivory Coast’s president Monday, his spokesman said, raising fears of an attempt to oust him as French forces clamped down on an explosion of violence in its former West African colony.

Some 50 armored vehicles were moved around the home of President Laurent Gbagbo in Ivory Coast’s commercial capital, Abidjan, said presidential spokesman Desire Tagro.
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France rolled out overwhelming military force Sunday, deploying troops, armored vehicles and helicopter gunships against machete-waving mobs that hunted house-to-house for foreigners.

In the second of two stunning days that stood to alter French-Ivory Coast relations — and perhaps Ivory Coast itself — French forces seized strategic control of the largest city, commandeering airports and posting gunboats under bridges in the commercial capital, Abidjan.
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French military helicopters swept in to rescue a dozen trapped expatriates from the rooftop of a once-luxury hotel, flying them and their luggage to safety.
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The chaos erupted Saturday when Ivory Coast warplanes launched a surprise airstrike that killed nine French peacekeepers and an American civilian aid worker. The government later called the bombing a mistake.

France hit back within hours, wiping out Ivory Coast’s newly built-up air force — two Russian-made Sukhoi jet fighters and at least three helicopter gunships — on the ground.
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The slain French troops were among 4,000 French peacekeepers and 6,000 U.N. troops in Ivory Coast, serving as a buffer between the rebel-held north and loyalist south since civil war broke out in September 2002.

The peacekeepers are trying to hold together a nation whose stability is vital in a region where several nations are only just recovering from devastating civil wars in the 1990s. Ivory Coast is the world’s top cocoa producer and until the late 1990s stood as West Africa’s most prosperous and peaceful nation.
>> Full Article [MSNBC]