Protesters shun plea for violence to stop

ATTACKS on United Nations peacekeepers in Ivory Coast continued yesterday as the UN Security Council considers imposing sanctions on those behind the violence.

The protesters, mainly young supporters of the president, Laurent Gbagbo, are demanding the withdrawal of 7,600 UN troops and police and 4,000 French soldiers from the war-divided West African nation. They ignored a direct appeal from the president to end the violence, which started on Monday.

Hundreds demonstrated yesterday outside UN bases in the main city, Abidjan, at Daloa and San Pedro in the west and at Bondoukou in the east.

In Abidjan, pro-government protesters manned roadblocks on the streets, while UN troops protecting their headquarters fired warning shots and tear gas to keep back about 2,000 protesters, some of whom lit fires close to the perimeter fence.

There were several hundred protesters outside the French embassy and at a French military base in Abidjan. French troops fired tear gas to keep them back, witnesses said.

"Unfortunately, the situation remains tense," a UN spokesman said. "It is identical to yesterday, despite Gbagbo's appeal."

Four protesters died on Wednesday when government supporters stormed a UN base in the west, forcing peacekeepers to open fire.

The UN and foreign mediators have been struggling to implement a peace plan involving disarmament and presidential elections by the end of October in the former French colony, which has been split in two since a brief 2002-3 civil war. Rebels hold the north of the country.

The anti-UN riots, triggered by a foreign peace mediators' recommendation to dissolve a national parliament dominated by Gbagbo loyalists, have targeted UN bases, houses, vehicles and personnel in the government-controlled south. After crisis talks on Wednesday, Mr Gbagbo and Olusegun Obasanjo, the president of Nigeria and the current chairman of the African Union, appealed to Ivorians to halt the riots, which have revived calls for the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on those blocking the path to peace.

Analysts say the attacks against the peacekeepers appear to be a co-ordinated strategy by supporters of Mr Gbagbo who fear the peace process could reduce his power - the president's party, the Ivorian Popular Front, said on Tuesday it was pulling out of the peace process.

"It is a carefully orchestrated political strategy to show that the presidential camp is still alive and can influence the peace process. It's saying 'we're still here and we can block the process'," Gilles Yabi, an analyst with the International Crisis Group think tank, said.

He attributed the violence to a power struggle between Mr Gbagbo and the prime minister, Charles Konan Banny, who was installed last month by international mediators to lead the country to elections.