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8 French Soldiers Killed in Ivory Coast
4 minutes ago
By PAULINE BAX, Associated Press Writer
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast - Warplanes bombed French peacekeepers Saturday, killing eight French soldiers and wounding 23, and French forces responded by shooting down government aircraft, French and U.N. officials said, in a clash that threatened to escalate Ivory Coast's renewed civil war.
The attack threatened to drag French and U.N. peacekeepers into the new fighting, which began Thursday when hard-line commanders in Ivory Coast's military broke a more than year-old ceasefire and launched bombing strikes on rebel positions in the north.
The French military announced afterward it was sending three Mirage fighter jets to West Africa, beefing up its military presence in the region. The jets will land at Libreville, Gabon, near Ivory Coast, spokesman Col. Henry Aussavy said.
At 1:30 p.m., government warplanes struck French positions at Brobo, near the northern rebel-held town of Bouake, U.N. military spokesman Philippe Moreux said. "As a response, the French shot down two Sukhoi 25s and one MI-24 helicopter," Moreux said.
In Paris, a Defense Ministry spokesman said eight French soldiers were killed and 23 others wounded in the bombing raid and that two Sukhoi's were shot down in response.
"Our forces responded in a situation of legitimate defense," said spokesman Jean-Francois Bureau. "Now the priority is the immediate end of combat."
France and the United Nations (news - web sites) have about 10,000 peacekeepers in Ivory Coast, a former French colony, and many are deployed in the buffer zone between the government-held south and rebel-held north. Ivory Coast military commanders have vowed to retake the north, controlled by rebels since the September 2002 start of the war in the world's top cocoa producer.
Shortly after news emerged of Saturday's strike, the Ivory Coast's military chief of operations said French forces attacked the airport at the capital Yamoussoukro, 75 miles south of Brobo, destroying aircraft there.
It was not immediately clear if this was a separate attack or if Ivory Coast Col. Philippe Mangou was giving a different account of how the same aircraft were destroyed. The claim could not be immediately confirmed.
"The planes were destroyed by shots from the French military at Yamoussoukro airport," Mangou told The Associated Press. "The planes were on the ground." He said he didn't know how many aircraft were destroyed, or what kind, and refused to give any further details.
At the Yamoussoukro airport, edgy-looking soldiers turned away a members of an Associated Press crew seeking access, telling them it was not safe.
Scores of people streamed from the airport to town.
Fearing a spread of the fighting, the France-based relief group Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Border, said Saturday it was evacuating some staff from its hospital in the western town of Danane, about 20 miles from Ivory Coast's border with Liberia (news - web sites). The west saw some of the most brutal attacks of the war.
"We are very worried," the aid group's spokeswoman Vanessa van Schoor said. "We really hope that the hospital will not be attacked. We still have patients inside. The population of Danane has suffered a great deal already" in the war.
Van Schoor said the hospital would remain functioning. She declined to say how many staffers were being brought out or where they were being taken.
Ivory Coast's war killed thousands and uprooted more than 1 million, threatening efforts by neighboring countries — Sierra Leone and Liberia — to recover from their own vicious civil wars of the 1990s.
Last year's peace deals, brokered under international pressure, ended major fighting but an agreed-upon power-sharing government has never taken hold.
The U.N. Security Council — which has poured billions of dollars and thousands of peace troops into West and Central Africa to support peace accords — expressed alarm at the renewed fighting, as have France, the United States and others.
Nigerian President Olosegun Obasanjo, current president of the African Union, opened talks with regional leaders Saturday at his farm on the outskirts of Nigeria's commercial capital, Lagos, to look for a way out of the crisis.
Senior African Union officials were among those attending. Remi Oyo, Obasanjo's spokeswoman, declined to say if Ivory Coast government or rebel representatives would take part.
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Associated Press writers Parfait Kouassi in Abidjan and Daniel Balint-Kurti in Abuja, Nigeria, contributed to this report.
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