By Pauline Bax
Abidjan - France has completed the evacuation of 5 000 Westerners and others from violence-torn Ivory Coast as Africans - with no hope of such rescue - have fled into neighbouring countries.
Two French-organised flights to Paris and to neighbouring Ghana ended six days of shuttles overseen by the French military, French spokesperson Jacques Combarieu said.
With anti-foreigner rampages subsiding and commercial flights restored in Ivory Coast's largest city, any other foreigners who want to leave will be able to do so on their own, Combarieu said.
'I think what's going to happen will be like a Rwanda' "It was terrible," said a German who had lived in Ivory Coast for a decade as he waited for one of Monday's last evacuation flights out. He provided only his first name, Helmut, and said he was an aid worker.
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He described hiding in the bush around Ivory Coast's southern cocoa port of San Pedro while mobs sacked French shops and warehouses.
"But I'll come back" when Ivory Coast calms down, Helmut said, as calls over Abidjan's airport loudspeakers instructed the last evacuees to gather their luggage. "I'm sure I want to come back."
As Ivory Coast's defiant leader, President Laurent Gbagbo, remained holed up in his lagoon-side mansion and surrounded by hard-liners, the United Nations Security Council voted to impose an immediate arms embargo against Ivory Coast, giving the country's warring sides one month to revive a shattered peace process or face more sanctions.
African leaders had urged late on Sunday that the sanctions be imposed immediately.
Gbagbo's government reopened the nation's civil war on November 4 with airstrikes on the rebel-held north. Two days later, Ivory Coast warplanes bombed a French peacekeeping post, killing nine French troops and an American aid worker and plunging the world's top cocoa producer into its current unprecedented crisis.
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