Kindgo
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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...vorycoast_dc_18
Ivory Coast's main rebel group snubbed French efforts to keep peace in the West African country on Friday and told the former colonial power to withdraw its troops or face war.
France is sending hundreds more troops to bolster its force monitoring a shaky cease-fire and offered the rebel group which holds the north of the country, the MPCI, a place at Paris peace talks provided it showed it was a political force.
"The French force in Ivory Coast is deviating from its mission and becoming a true force of occupation. In light of this, the MPCI will fight and its forces are ready to take up the challenge of war," chief rebel negotiator Guillaume Soro told a news conference in Togo's capital Lome.
Soro said the rebels were demanding the "pure and simple departure of France from Ivory Coast." Hundreds of French troops are due to begin arriving on Saturday with extra firepower to reinforce some 1,500 soldiers already there, making it France's biggest intervention force in Africa since the 1980s in Chad.
Split between the northern-based Patriotic Movement of Ivory Coast (MPCI) rebels and government forces since a September 19 uprising, Ivory Coast has plunged closer to anarchy since two more rebel groups emerged last month in the west of the country.
France said it supported West African efforts to find a peaceful solution to the crisis but also wanted meetings in the French capital as soon as possible, uniting regional heads of state and those involved in the war.
"The MPCI will be invited to Paris, if it shows itself to be a political force," French Foreign Ministry spokesman Francois Rivasseau said on Friday, adding that France had not yet decided whether to invite the two other factions.
Rivasseau said France would ask the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights to investigate massacres in Ivory Coast. Both sides are accused of summary executions and other abuses.
Francophone ministers, ending a two-day conference in the Swiss city of Lausanne on Friday, condemned violence and massive rights abuses in Ivory Coast, opposed "all outside interference" and called for a political solution to the conflict.
TOGO SUMMIT
West African leaders were also stepping up the pace on Friday, planning a summit in Togo to chart a way out of the deepening war in which hundreds have died and hundreds of thousands of people have been forced from their homes.
U.N. agencies said on Friday they were preparing for a possible refugee crisis in the world's top cocoa grower.
Togolese President Gnassingbe Eyadema plans to hold a summit next week with some of West Africa's most powerful leaders, including Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo and Senegal's Abdoulaye Wade, Togolese presidency officials said on Friday.
Eyadema has been hosting peace talks in Togo's capital Lome since the end of October, but scant progress has been made.
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) also plans to send a buffer force to Ivory Coast although Nigeria, which has led previous regional peacekeeping forces in Liberia and Sierra Leone, has said it will not send troops.
But delays assembling the force have left French troops monitoring the cease-fire agreed in October between the rebel MPCI and the government.
The government has hired foreign mercenaries and thousands of youths have volunteered to go to the front after an appeal for 3,000 new recruits to help beat the rebels.
Growing divisions between northern Muslims and Christians from further south such as President Laurent Gbagbo have been at the heart of Ivory Coast's crisis since a military coup in 1999
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God bless,
Kindgo
Inside the will of God there is no failure. Outside the will of God there is no success.
Posts: 4320 | From: Sunny Florida | Registered: Jun 2002
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