ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast, 8 November 2004 — Machete-waving mobs thousands strong looted and burned in Ivory Coast’s largest cities yesterday, laying siege to a French military base and searching house to house for French families after a day of sudden ground and air clashes between France and its former colony.
France’s military responded in force, sending helicopters to pluck trapped expatriates from rooftops as other French helicopter gunships and armored vehicles moved out to confront the mobs, lobbing volleys of tear gas and percussion grenades that sent anti-French mobs fleeing.
French forces took up positions with gunboats at bridges in skyscraper-lined Abidjan yesterday, a day after seizing control of Ivory Coast’s two main airports.
France landed 300 French reinforcements from elsewhere in West Africa, and dispatched another 300 from France.
A Red Cross official, Kim Gordon-Bates, said about 150 people had been wounded in the mob violence by midday yesterday, most by bullets. The official refused to discuss the number of deaths.
France’s punishing military strikes came in retaliation for the Ivory Coast Air Force’s surprise bombing — publicly called a mistake by Ivorian leaders — of a French peacekeeping position in the north.
Anti-foreigner, anti-French violence raged for a second day in Abidjan and in the capital, Yamoussoukro. In Abidjan, gunfire rang out and smoke billowed into the air from throngs laying waste to both foreign and locally owned property.
Loyalists set up roadblocks of burning tires. “It’s better to kill the whites than steal their stuff,” one rioter shouted.
Foreigners cowered. “We are all terrified, and try to reassure each other,” one French resident said by telephone from his home elsewhere in the city.
