November 08, 2004

France Deploys Major Force in Ivory Coast

France rolled out overwhelming military force Sunday to put down an explosion of anti-French violence in its former West African colony, deploying troops, armored vehicles and helicopter gunships against machete-waving mobs that hunted house-to-house for foreigners.

Actually, it's a little spookier than just "foreigners."
Further down in the report, it becomes clear that they're after whites:

An AP reporter watched a crowd clutching machetes and iron bars enter one neighborhood, demanding if any French lived there.

"If there are any whites in this neighborhood, we're going to get ... them," one man shouted.

Here's how all the trouble apparently started:

The airstrike on the peacekeepers came after government forces last week broke a cease-fire that had been in place for more than a year and launched aerial bomb attacks on rebel positions.

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.
[Poor b*stards! It probably was a mistake, but the damage was done.--Jen]

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.

President Laurent Gbagbo appealed for calm Sunday in his first public comments since the cease-fire was broken on Thursday.

"I implore, I implore the population to stay calm ... and I ask all demonstrators to go back to their homes," the Ivorian leader said.

What a mess...or quelle bourdelle!, as they'd say in France.
Let me see if I got this straight: the French went in to Cote d'Ivoire to support the legitimate goverment, but got fired on by them and now they're attacking both rebel forces and government ones?
Or maybe it's just anyone (black) with a machete?
And France has the um...GALL to lecture President Bush and the United States for military action and acting "unilaterally" in Iraq!
Maybe the real reason Weasel Power France keeps opposing us in Iraq is because they're bogged down in the real quagmire of the Ivory Coast.
And they care intensely about their source of chocolate!

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.

Ah! Africa, our politically youngest and most troubled continent.
Say a prayer tonight for Cote d'Ivoire along with those for Darfur in the Sudan that they might see peace and not violence sometime soon.