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Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - Web posted at 8:57:56 GMT

Violent standoff in Ivory Coast

ABIDJAN - Scores of French armoured vehicles took up positions near the home of Ivory Coast's president yesterday, and thousands of enraged supporters marched on the site, fearing an attempt to oust the hard-line leader as French forces clamped down on violence in the former West African colony.

As French troops fired warning shots against surging, chanting throngs around President Laurent Gbagbo's home, chiefs of Ivory Coast's army and France's military mission here appeared jointly on state TV to appeal to rioters to return home.

"Everything should go back to normal," General Henri Poncet urged, saying, "it is absolutely not a matter of ousting President Laurent Gbagbo."

"I call on people to remain calm," General Matthias Doue, Ivorian chief of army staff, said.

The French denied targeting Gbagbo's home, saying the forces were only securing a temporary base at a hotel a couple hundred metres away for foreign evacuations.

"They have not surrounded Gbagbo's residence.

I formally deny that," French Embassy spokesman Francois Guenon said.

"It is not a question of ousting him, that is very clear."

National radio and state TV called on young and old alike to take up positions around Gbagbo's home, and at Ivory Coast's nearby broadcast headquarters.

Hard-liners have called throughout the weekend for loyalists to form a "human shield" around Gbagbo's home as French forces deploy in Abidjan, quelling mob violence that erupted after France destroyed the country's fledgling air force on Saturday.

The destruction came in retaliation for an Ivory Coast airstrike on Saturday that killed nine French peacekeepers and one American aid worker.

The punishing French response set off three days of violent rampages by angry government loyalists, with mobs of thousands confronting French peacekeepers, looting and burning, and roaming house to house with machetes in search of foreigners.

Yesterday, Red Cross official Kim Gordon-Bates said the chaos has left "over 500 wounded -- much more than that."

Asked how many had died, he said, "God knows."

Gordon-Bates had said Saturday that most of the injuries were from bullets.

On Yesterday, loyalist mobs were stopping Red Cross workers as they tried to set up an emergency clinic in the area near Gbagbo's home.

"The situation is very tense.

I'm in the middle of a riot," he said.

Thousands responded to the state broadcast's appeals to fill the streets around the president's home, chanting angry anti-French statements.

"The whites don't like the blacks, but we don't care!" mobs yelled.

"Ivory Coast is a sovereign state," declared slogans on signs waved by the protesters.

French troops fired warning shots to hold back the crowd, which was trying to block the road near the president's home, said a worker at the nearby hotel, the Hotel Ivoire, reached by telephone and speaking on condition of anonymity.

The mobs swarmed one foreigner -- who appeared to be an immigrant from a neighbouring country -- caught up in their midst, kicking and beating him.

"Kill him," young men shouted before he was dragged into the crowd.

Six men, their faces painted black, forced an Associated Press reporter from his taxi at gunpoint, commandeering the vehicle.

French armoured vehicles rolled through the city, the country's largest, after taking control of the international airport and strategic points including bridges over the weekend.

Yesterday, saddened residents assessed the damage to a skyscraper-lined city that was once West Africa's most prosperous.

"Everything is burned," said one woman, a teacher at a French school looted and torched in the riots.

"They have stolen everything they could."

"They even tore out the toilet seat," the teacher said, speaking on condition her name not be used.

"The only thing I'm waiting for is for the airport to open, so I can get out of here."

The weekend's chaos erupted after French forces destroyed what France said was the whole of Ivory Coast's recently built-up air force -- two Russian-made Sukhoi warplanes and at least three helicopters -- on the ground.

The crushing French military response came hours after Ivory Coast's surprise and deadly airstrike on a French peacekeeping post, the third day of a renewed government offensive against rebels after a more than one-year cease-fire in the nation's civil war}.

France has about 4 000 peacekeepers in Ivory Coast.

The United Nations has about 6 000, manning a buffer zone between rebel north and government south.

In Paris, French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie rejected accounts by some Ivory Coast officials that Saturday's bombing was a mistake, saying there was "no reason" for Ivory Coast warplanes to have "missed their targets".

The defence minister called a reopening of peace talks for Ivory Coast "indispensable".

African Union leaders called an emergency session for late yesterday on Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa producer and for decades the most thriving and peaceful nation in West Africa -- and the pride of France's former colonial empire.

AU Commission Chairman Alpha Oumar Konare condemned the attacks by government forces on the various locations in the north of Ivory Coast, including those that hit the French forces.

- Nampa-AP ___ Associated Press writer Nafi Diouf in Dakar, Senegal contributed to this report.

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