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.
He described hiding in the bush around Ivory Coast's southern cocoa port of San Pedro while mobs sacked French shops and warehouses.
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"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.
France blew up Ivory Coast's airforce on the tarmac.
Loyalists led by the government-allied Young Patriots popular militias took to the streets in five days of violent attacks after the French retaliation, burning and looting French businesses and schools across the loyalist south.
No deaths have been confirmed among non-Africans in the street violence. France says several expatriates were raped. Ivory Coast claims more than 62 loyalists died when French forces fired into crowds.
Helmut, in his 50s, said he and other foreigners in Ivory Coast's cocoa centre escaped on a prearranged route through one another's yards when violence broke out.
The last yard led into the forests, where expatriate families hid for hours at a time.
For others, last week's violence would be the last. Michele, a French man and another 10-year resident of Ivory Coast, said he was getting on Monday's flight to Paris - and never coming back.
"They say to me, 'French, go home - you have nothing to do here,"' said Michele, a legal notary. "I think what's going to happen will be like a Rwanda."
Since Wednesday, French forces have evacuated 4 248 foreigners who came to Ivory Coast from a total of 63 countries, French military spokesperson Colonel Henry Aussavy said.
Flights organized by businesses for their employees have taken out about 870 people, Aussavy said.
Spain, Canada, the Netherlands and others have evacuated about 550 others.
The number makes it the largest evacuation in Africa in at least a decade. In 1997, a French led evacuation brought 5 000 foreigners from the Republic of Congo amid election violence and civil war there.
Separately, the United Nations refugee agency in Geneva said about 10 000 Ivorians have fled into neighbouring Liberia.
Many are descendants of immigrants from neighbouring countries, or members of tribes at odds with those who control the southern-based government. Both groups have been targeted by loyalist attacks since 1999, when a first-ever coup ended decades of stability and relative prosperity in Ivory Coast.
About 700 other non-Ivorian African nationals have fled across Ivory Coast's eastern border, into Ghana, the UN refugee agency said. - Sapa-AP
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