Read and comment on this story from CNN on how U.S. and French troops plucked missionaries, aid workers and orphans from a second rebel-held Ivory Coast city, as West African leaders launched a diplomatic offensive to persuade forces behind the country's deadliest uprising to lay down their arms.
French troops led an evacuation of more than 2,000 Westerners from Bouake on Thursday and Friday. Sunday's daylong evacuation brought about 400 people -- including 55 Americans -- out of Korhogo and surrounding areas.
For the 2,000 Americans based in Ivory Coast, it was the last major evacuation for now, said Richard Buangan, a Paris-based U.S. diplomat helping coordinate the rescues. U.S. and French forces were now working on rescuing small pockets of Americans and other foreign nationals scattered across northern Ivory Coast.
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Hundreds airlifted in Ivory Coast
Monday, September 30, 2002 Posted: 7:40 AM EDT (1140 GMT) Troops supervise the disembarkment of evacuees at Yamoussoukro airport
YAMOUSSOUKRO, Ivory Coast (AP) -- U.S. and French troops plucked missionaries, aid workers and orphans from a second rebel-held Ivory Coast city, as West African leaders launched a diplomatic offensive to persuade forces behind the country's deadliest uprising to lay down their arms.
"A threat to Ivory Coast is a threat to all of us," declared President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, which has dispatched fighter jets to Ivory Coast for a looming showdown between government and rebel forces.
In Korhogo, a northern city held by rebels since a September 19 coup attempt, French helicopters swooped in before dawn on Sunday to airlift foreign and some Ivory Coast nationals pinned down by sporadic gunfire for 10 days and nights.
"There was firing, firing all the time," said an Ivory Coast worker at a Spanish Catholic orphanage evacuated with her 14 charges, most babies and toddlers. She gave her name only as Cecile.
"At night, we couldn't sleep because of the shooting," she said, trying to comfort fretful orphans hanging on her and picking at her clothing. "And the children are afraid."
French and U.S. C-130 military cargo planes ferried hundreds to hoped-for safety at the airfield in Yamoussoukro -- Ivory Coast's central capital, now Western forces' staging point for rescue missions in what was once one of West Africa's most prosperous and stable countries.
A truckload of smiling and waving Americans drove down the ramp of one cargo plane, shouting their thanks to soldiers lining the airstrip with assault rifles at the ready. Children clutching stuffed rabbits, nuns in white habits, and U.S. Peace Corps workers in T-shirts milled about the terminal -- struggling to get their bearings.
"It's really hard to leave," said Carrie Brunger of Knoxville, Tennessee, who holed up with other Peace Corps volunteers in a Baptist mission after heavy firing around the village north of Korhogo where she was working. "I didn't get to say goodbye. I really don't want to leave it like that."
Ivory Coast's government has repeatedly threatened an all-out attack to retake Korhogo and the larger, central city of Bouake.
Both cities have been in rebel hands since the beginning of the uprising that killed some 270 people in the first days alone.
"People are very nervous, because they fear this is just the calm before the storm," said Anne Abbot of Lubbock, Texas, a missionary airlifted with her husband and two young sons from Ferkessedougou, near Korhogo. "When the government comes back, they have it all over again."
French troops led an evacuation of more than 2,000 Westerners from Bouake on Thursday and Friday. Sunday's daylong evacuation
brought about 400 people -- including 55 Americans -- out of Korhogo and surrounding areas.
For the 2,000 Americans based in Ivory Coast, it was the last major evacuation for now, said Richard Buangan, a Paris-based U.S. diplomat helping coordinate the rescues. U.S. and French forces were now working on rescuing small pockets of Americans and other foreign nationals scattered across northern Ivory Coast.
Western diplomats call the rebels well-armed, well-disciplined and motivated. Some diplomats privately say West African deployment would be decisive -- and suggest Ivory Coast loyalist forces, hesitating still to counterattack, may be outgunned.
Meeting in Ghana on Sunday, the leaders of nine West African nations assigned six among them -- from Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Togo -- to open talks with rebels for an immediate cease-fire.
At the same time, they ordered their regional bloc's defence commission to start work putting a joint West African military force on standby.
"We must send a clear message ... that those days of illegitimate governments are gone. There must be zero tolerance for coups in West Africa," said Mohammed Chambas, the secretary-general of the West African leaders' bloc.
Senegal's Abdoulaye Wade, chairman of the group, urged deployment of a regional "peace contingent." The failure of Sunday's meeting to come up with an immediate deployment indicated that not all leaders were ready to intervene.
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