According
to Agence France-Presse (AFP), some 150 paratroopers had landed at the
international airport in Abidjan late Saturday, December 14.
France
has broadened the mandate of its soldiers in Ivory Coast, authorizing
them to enforce - rather than just monitor - an October ceasefire
between government forces and the rebels who now control the north of
the country, reported the BBC's online news service.
On
Friday, December 13, a spokesman for the Patriotic Movement of Ivory
Coast (MPCI) Guillaume Soro accused the troops of deviating from their
peacekeeping mission, and demanded their withdrawal.
In
all, 500 additional troops will reinforce the current 1,200-strong
French military presence in Ivory Coast, sent to contain a
three-month-old conflict.
The
main rebel group, the Ivory Coast Patriotic Movement (MPCI), condemned
France for sending more troops and involving itself in a "purely
Ivorian affair" while an anti-French march turned violent in the
country's rebel-held second city of Bouake.
The
MPCI's Guillaume Soro renewed a warning to the French Friday to leave
or risk all-out war.
The
French government took the decision to send more troops as fighting in
Ivory Coast intensified.
At
least 400 people have been killed since the uprising by disgruntled
soldiers, and hundreds of thousands displaced by the fighting. Since
then, new rebel factions have emerged in the west of the country.
A
quarter of a million people have now been displaced by the worsening
war in Ivory Coast - half to neighboring countries.
The
United Nations Assistant High Commissioner for Refugees and the
regional director of the UN's World Food Program have made special
visits to the country to oversee preparations for the all-out civil
war.
The
UN refugee agency says it will begin evacuating people from
neighboring countries who had fled to Ivory Coast for safety.
Ivory
Coast has been one of the few countries where refugees from Africa's
wars have been able to live not in camps but among the local
population. For most of the four decades since independence from
France the west African country was also a haven of relative stability
in a region known for brutal civil conflicts.
"I
fled the war in Congo, but now it is war here too. We are caught
between a rock and hard place," a pregnant woman, Paulette
Mokuba, told AFP at a refugee shelter in Ivory Coast's economic
capital Abidjan.
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War
in Ivory Coast added to the woos of African refugees, where else
to go?
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The
question of where next weighs heavily on her and 140 other foreigners
as they wait under self-imposed house arrest for a way out of Ivory
Coast's three-month-old crisis.
"We
are waiting for peace, here or where we come from," Mokuba says.
Pointing at her three children, she adds: "But for the moment,
these are children without a future."
A
bloody soldiers' mutiny on September 19 prompted the military to raze
Abidjan's shantytowns which they believed were harboring rebels.
The
refugees lost their homes and fell victim to an outbreak of ethnic
violence targeting immigrants - mainly from Burkina Faso - who have
been killed or abducted amid accusations that the mutineers are
fighting a foreign-backed war.
"My
home was burned down on the orders of President (Laurent) Gbagbo. It
was he who started this," Mokuba says.
Like
her compatriot Jean Robert, she trekked from the war-torn Democratic
Republic of Congo through the troubled Central African Republic and
Chad, as well as several other countries, before settling three years
ago in Abidjan's Agban shantytown.
They
lost everything the night the gendarmes torched it as rebels attacked
a nearby military base.
Around
Mokuba, men from Sierra Leone, Sudan and Liberia - all wracked by
civil war - sit in a courtyard in the scant shade of drying washing
and talk while their children play in an empty swimming pool.
Too
scared to risk talking to a journalist on the street, they say they
are repeatedly stopped and beaten by soldiers, even after showing
their refugee papers.
"Two
days ago I tried to go out, but I was arrested and tried to explain
that I was a refugee, but they slapped me. I kept trying to talk to
them but they were beating me and trying to push me into their
pickup," says 27-year-old Mosisho Zand from Sudan.
"I
decided it was better to run, even if they shot at me, than to go with
them and be killed anyway."
But
none of the refugees at the migration centre in Abdijan's Plateau
district want to go home, despite urgings by the UNHCR that they may
be safer there than in Ivory Coast.
Kamel
Morjane, the UNCHR's number two, said Saturday during a four-nation
visit to the region: "Sometimes when you are in difficulty it is
better to be at home, even if there are problems in your own
country."
But
Joe Stevenson, who fled Liberia five years ago, retorted: "We
will not go back to Liberia. We have been victimized by a civil war
there. People came here because they had problems with the
authorities, and if we go back they will be persecuted."
A
civil war ended in Liberia in 1997 but a rebellion began two years
later and shows no sign of ending. Only 33 of Ivory Coast's 72,000
Liberians have been repatriated with the help of the UNHCR.
However,
this week UN agencies said that some 22,000 Liberians have become
forced "returnees" - driven home by heavy fighting that
erupted late last month near the Liberian border in western Ivory
Coast, weak from walking and waiting again for help.
Two
thousand refugees from Sierra Leone's decade-long civil war remain in
Ivory Coast, resisting the urge to flee fighting and the xenophobia
that has forced almost 100,000 immigrants to return to their more
stable native countries.
Most
were part of the country's massive foreign work force that have over
decades come from Burkina Faso, Mali and Ghana and settled here, only
to be randomly hunted down in reprisal after Gbagbo said the Ivorian
rebels were backed by a "rogue nation" in the region,
implicitly fingering Burkina Faso.
