Horizons Unlimited - The HUBB - Cote D Ivoire Rebellon

What is Reuters reporting about this?

"Sept. 22
— By David Clarke

ABIDJAN (Reuters) - Rebels and troops loyal to Ivory Coast's President Laurent Gbagbo were poised for battle on Sunday in the most serious crisis to hit the West African country since independence from France in 1960.

A French military source said loyalists Sunday morning encircled Ivory Coast's second largest city Bouake, which is 350 km (220 miles) from the main city Abidjan and held by dissident soldiers, angry at being forced out of the army.

"The loyalist forces are going to intervene in a few hours. They left Yamoussoukro at 6.30 (0630 GMT) ... They are now surrounding Bouake," he told Reuters by phone in Bouake.

State television said Saturday that 270 people had been killed and some 300 injured so far in a bloody uprising by dissident soldiers which started Thursday and has left swathes of the country in rebel hands.

"We are preparing for a historic battle. We will hold our positions and beat them back and we are pushing down the road toward the capital," one rebel spokesman told Reuters by phone from Bouake.

A first wave of French troops arrived in Abidjan at dawn on Sunday after being flown in from French bases in Chad and Djibouti to reinforce their 500-strong division in Abidjan and help protect the 20,000 French citizens who live in the country.

"We want to be able to protect French nationals and members of the international community by creating pockets of safety that will avoid them being caught in the crossfire," Army Colonel Christian Baptiste told Reuters in Paris.

He said helicopters were due to arrive at midday and that all the troops due to arrive should be in Ivory Coast by then.

Gbagbo has promised all out war on his enemies after returning hurriedly from Rome to a country in crisis after what the government said was a failed coup Thursday.

It accuses the mutineers of trying to seize power in a coup plotted by former junta leader Robert Guei, who was shot dead by loyalist forces in bloody clashes in Abidjan. Interior Minister Emile Boga Doudou was also killed.

The home of opposition leader Alassane Ouattara, a few hundred yards from Gbagbo's residence, was torched by security forces overnight, according to Ouattara's Rally of the Republicans (RDR) party. He is hiding in the French embassy.

APPEAL TO YOUTH, HOMES RAZED

Residents in Bouake reported hearing several loud explosions around 6 a.m. (0600 GMT) Sunday, but could not say where they came from or what had caused them. Witnesses saw heavily-armed mutineers in a southern suburb of the town setting up barrages.

Witnesses said the rebels had recruited young men in Bouake and hunters known as dozos, decked in traditional cloth garb and sporting magic charms, in the northern town of Korhogo near the border with Burkina Faso.

Ivory Coast's Prime Minister Affi N'Guessan urged the country's youth on state radio to reject the path of violence -- and the weapons being dished out by rebels in the north.

"We invite the youth to put down the guns, or turn them on the aggressors. It's up to them to chose which side they are on: that of destruction, or the Republic," he said.

The turmoil in Ivory Coast has fueled fears of a wider conflict in the country of more than 16 million, the world's largest cocoa producer and until a 1999 coup an oasis of stability in a region battered by war.

Diplomatic sources said they believed some rebels, reported to be speaking English, were from neighboring Liberia, itself gripped by a bloody rebellion reminiscent of its anarchic 1990s civil war. In Ivory Coast French is more commonly spoken.

Ivorian officials have also said rebel reinforcements came from a neighboring country, but have not identified which. Relations with Burkina Faso to the north, which Ivory Coast has long accused of harbouring rebel soldiers, are poor.

Ivory Coast's main ethnic faultline is tied to a political rift between opposition leader Ouattara's Muslim north and the more Christian south and west -- Gbagbo's homeland.

Ouattara is barred from contesting elections because the courts said he was from Burkina Faso.

In the last two days security forces have razed the homes of immigrants from Burkino Faso in what they say is a hunt for those behind Thursday's attack. Some refugees from Sierra Leone living in Abidjan have also been hounded from their homes.

Millions of immigrants, mostly from Burkina Faso, live in Ivory Coast and play a vital role as cocoa farmers. But they have suffered increasing harassment in recent years."

Big problems!

gregor