ABIDJAN (AFP) - Ivory Coast and France traded jabs over responsibility for last week`s unrest, as expatriates and nationals alike continued their exodus from the divided west African state bracing for a UN Security Council vote to impose an arms embargo.
Meanwhile in the rebel-held north of the world`s top cocoa producer, power and water were suspended for the second time since government airstrikes on key towns in the north began on November 4 in violation of an 18-month-old ceasefire, prompting renewed fears of a humanitarian crisis.
More than 5,000 French and other foreign nationals have been evacuated since Wednesday, following a week of anti-French violence and vandalism that claimed an estimated one in four Abidjan homes of European residents.
Even people who hold dual citizenship with Ivory Coast have boarded aircraft over the past six days, anxious to put behind them the turmoil that has convulsed the country, once a regional powerhouse, for the last two years.
"When 15 or 20 years of your life are just sacrificed, there is no excuse," said one man, carrying with him just a small suitcase as he departed his parents` homeland.
"It hurts me when someone is so able to destroy a country that he did not build himself," he added, in a terse allusion to President Laurent Gbagbo.
The leader of the pro-Gbagbo Young Patriots movement, Charles Ble Goude, Monday accused the French military of a "coup bid" against the head of state and said the "barbaric army" should withdraw from Ivory Coast.
At a press conference which was more like a public meeting, Ble Goude alleged that clashes in Abidjan on November 9 between "demonstrators with empty hands" and French troops had left "64 dead and more than 1,400 wounded" among the Young Patriots.
"Relations between France and Ivory Coast are old and deep," he said. "If today there`s a rift, this raises a question: who`s taking the French people hostage, the Ivorians or the French President (Jacques Chirac) to justify the presence of his troops."
"You should not mix up anti-French feeling with the resentment Ivorians have for Chirac`s policies in Ivory Coast," the former student union leader added, urging his own people to be "aware that not all the French approve of France`s policies."
More than 6,000 Ivorians have also fled by foot, mostly to northeastern Liberia where there is little food, water or shelter due to impassable roads and Liberia`s own struggle for peace after 14 years of war.
Tens of thousands of Gbagbo partisans flooded Abidjan last Saturday in an angry reaction to France`s destruction of virtually the entire air force to retaliate for a government air strike that left nine French troops and a US civilian dead.
French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier has called the strike "deliberate".
Skeptical of claims that there were any French casualties, Gbagbo has been making the rounds of international media to defuse some of the criticism that he was responsible for the unrest that claimed between 22 and 64 lives according to competing tolls released by his government.
He blasted Chirac in comments to the Parisian daily La Liberation for the "insult" to say that France will remain in Ivory Coast and respond to prevent a decline into anarchy or fascism.
France has stopped short of blaming Gbagbo outright for the strikes, but Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie ramped up demands that he rein in the "patriots" in the government-run south and insist that state radio and television curb their "racist, xenophobic and anti-white" appeals.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, too, has condemned hate-filled messages filling the airwaves in Ivory Coast, which was somewhat calmer Monday with celebrations of a day of peace instituted by post-independence icon president Felix Houphouet Boigny.
Ivory Coast has been split between rebel north and government south since a failed coup launched a civil war in September 2002.
Gbagbo`s regional counterparts sent him a stern message Sunday during an African Union summit in the Nigerian capital Abuja, prompting an angry response from the Ivorian leader`s emissary, hardline parliamentary speaker Mamadou Koulibaly, who then quit the summit before it ended.
The presidents of Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Gabon, Burkina Faso and Senegal made clear that the airstrikes against the north were a breach of the ceasefire and issued strong support for a proposed arms embargo against Ivory Coast.
The 15-member Security Council was expected Monday to vote on the French-sponsored resolution giving both sides in the crisis 30 days to implement a January 2003 peace pact or face sanctions, which would also included targeted travel bans and the freezing of assets.
11/15/2004 - 18:10 GMT - AFP