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Ivorian youths riot over assembly dissolution call
Mon Jan 16, 2006 6:05 PM GMT

By Ange Aboa and Peter Murphy

ABIDJAN (Reuters) - Police in Ivory Coast fired tear gas at several hundred young demonstrators outside the U.N. mission in Abidjan on Monday as protests broke out across the city against foreign mediators' calls to dissolve parliament.

Some of the roughly 300 youths loyal to President Laurent Gbagbo hurled rocks at the police and a Reuters witness said at least one officer was injured. The crowd chanted: "Respect Gbagbo's power!"

Elsewhere in Ivory Coast's economic capital, hundreds more pro-Gbagbo protestors, some brandishing machetes and sticks, burned tyres and blocked roads, forcing shops and schools to close.

U.N. troops with anti-riot gear guarded their headquarters from behind a closed gate. The clash ended after several minutes but more protestors were still arriving by mid-afternoon.

An international working group charged with overseeing the latest U.N. peace plan in the divided West African country recommended on Sunday that the parliament's mandate, which expired last month, should not be renewed.

Gbagbo's supporters say the international group has no right to make such a recommendation.

Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa producer, has been split into a rebel-held north and government-run south since a civil war in 2002. A string of peace deals have failed to unite the country and presidential elections due last October were postponed.

As the disturbances broke out, some cocoa exporters in Abidjan, the country's main port, closed their offices as many staff stayed at home.

CONTRADICTS COURT

If applied, the mediators' proposal would fly in the face of the country's constitutional council, which ruled last month that the National Assembly should continue to work until elections could be held to elect a new parliament.

Interior Minister Joseph Dja Ble called on the population to refrain from any action that could harm the peace process in a statement which he read on state television news.

Under a U.N. peace plan that installed a new interim prime minister last month to serve with Gbagbo, presidential elections are due to be held by the end of October this year.

A hardline member of the ruling Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) party, Williams Atteby, accused the international working group of showing contempt for the Ivorian state and its institutions.

"The parliament will stay until the next elections," he told Reuters.

"No one has called Ivorians out into the street, but they will turn out more and more. It will only get worse. The (mediators) can't come and take decisions like that then just catch their planes to go back where they came from," he said.

Pro-Gbagbo youths known as the Young Patriots regularly take to the streets in Abidjan in times of political tension, although the president has temporarily banned protest marches.

Young Patriot mobs forced 8,000 mainly-French foreigners to flee in November 2004 during several days of anti-French rioting in the former French colony.


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