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France rushes minister to warring Ivory Coast
( 2003-01-03 09:50 ) (7 )

France said on Thursday it was rushing its foreign minister to war-torn Ivory Coast and condemned a bloody attack by government helicopter gunships as rebels fought toward a key southwestern port.

The hurriedly arranged two-day visit by Dominique de Villepin, starting on Friday, comes as civil war in France's former West African colony drags into its fourth month.

Terrified civilians fleeing southwestern Ivory Coast said on Thursday they had seen many corpses after a rebel attack in Neka that opened a new front just 125 miles from the port of San Pedro, which exports a fifth of the world's cocoa beans.

Paris has piled on pressure for a diplomatic solution to the crisis which has left hundreds dead and sliced up the nation.

"It is urgent that we move on to a new level... Nothing but dialogue will work if we want Ivory Coast to get back to what it used to be," de Villepin told France 2 television.

France has sent helicopters, heavy arms and 2,500 soldiers to Ivory Coast in its biggest African intervention in years to try to stabilize what was once the region's economic powerhouse.

Earlier on Thursday, France said an attack by a helicopter gunship which crossed a cease-fire line in northern Ivory Coast on Tuesday killing 12 civilians was unacceptable and demanded an explanation from the Ivorian authorities.

"We are seeing the cease-fire violated in the north, clashes in the west. Threats to human rights are multiplying," de Villepin told daily Le Parisien in an interview to be published on Friday.

"France is working, and we want the international community to work with us, to put an end to this dangerous spiral," said de Villepin, who is due to arrive in Ivory Coast's main city of Abidjan early on Friday afternoon.

A war sparked by a failed September 19 coup has increasingly fractured Ivory Coast's 16 million people along ethnic lines and destroyed the world's biggest cocoa grower's reputation as an oasis of calm in an often troubled region.

The main rebel group the Patriotic Movement of Ivory Coast (MPCI) signed a cease-fire in mid-October, but peace talks have made little progress and two new factions using Liberian fighters sprang up and seized chunks of the west in November.

All three groups want to oust Ivory Coast's President Laurent Gbagbo and accuse him of fanning ethnic division since coming to power in a disputed election in 2000.

De Villepin was due to meet Gbagbo on Friday and the MPCI on Saturday. France has been pushing to host a peace summit as soon as possible to solve the crisis once and for all.

HELICOPTER GUNSHIPS TAKE TO THE AIR

Helicopter gunships -- piloted by mercenaries -- and loyalist troops headed for Neka, where rebels struck on Wednesday, and army spokesman Colonel Jules Yao Yao said there were clashes on Thursday with rebels in the area.

Gbagbo's government accused rebel-backed Liberian mercenaries of hacking to death civilians and burning homes during the attack in Neka.

The MPCI, which controls the northern half of Ivory Coast, issued a statement on Thursday condemning the government attack near its northern stronghold in Bouake and said it had given its troops carte blanche to launch an offensive if there were another attack.

"There is a risk we will react after the next attack. We think that enough is enough," MPCI spokesman Antoine Beugre told Reuters from Bouake, Ivory Coast's second biggest city.

COCOA PRICES SURGE

Villagers who escaped Neka said there were many Liberians among the fighters who struck on Wednesday in an attack claimed by the Ivorian Patriotic Movement of the Far West (MPIGO).

"There were a lot of dead, they killed lots of people," said one woman called Aminata, who had found a truck to San Pedro after escaping into the bush. "We saw the bodies."

Sergeant Bamba, a spokesman for the allied rebel Movement for Justice and Peace (MJP), told Reuters by satellite phone on Thursday the insurgents were aiming for Grabo, which is about 70 km from the coast -- and then San Pedro.

Benchmark March cocoa futures leapt more than six percent in London on Thursday because of fears the fighting in Ivory Coast might disrupt the flow of beans to San Pedro and Abidjan.

A contingent of crack French troops is based in San Pedro to protect hundreds of foreigners.

The Ivorian army says Tuesday's helicopter raid on a small village called Menakro near Beoumi followed an attack on its own positions and Colonel Yao Yao accused the rebels of using civilians as human shields.