ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast – African leaders backed an arms embargo and other immediate U.N. sanctions against Ivory Coast on Sunday, isolating President Laurent Gbagbo’s hard-line government even further in its deadly confrontation with its former colonial ruler, France.
As a French-led evacuation of Ivory Coast builds to one of Africa’s largest, French President Jacques Chirac denounced President Laurent Gbagbo’s “questionable regime” – and said France would not tolerate much more.
Presidents from Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Togo and Gabon, meeting in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, on Sunday backed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an arms embargo, a travel ban and asset freezes against anyone blocking peace in Ivory Coast.
The arms embargo “should be immediate,” Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo – the current African Union chairman – said after the meeting. The call gives African approval to a tough stand in today’s expected Security Council vote on the sanctions.
Gbagbo’s representative at the talks, parliamentary leader Mamadou Koulibaly, condemned the call for sanctions, and complained African leaders had slighted him, barring him from most of the talks, and dinner.
One of his aides, speaking on condition he not be identified, warned that that other countries should “come and collect their foreigners from Ivory Coast – because if there’s an embargo we can’t live with them anymore.”
Ivory Coast’s latest crisis began when Gbagbo’s military broke a cease-fire in the country’s 2-year-old civil war with airstrikes on the rebel-held north. Warplanes bombed a French peacekeeping post in the north on Nov. 6, killing nine French peacekeepers and an American aid worker.
France wiped out Ivory Coast’s newly built-up air force on the tarmac. The retaliation unleashed a violent loyalist uprising, with Gbagbo-allied Young Patriots popular militia leading looting, burning and attacks that targeted the French.
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