France Not Faring Well In Ivory Coast

As you read the following, keep two things in mind:

• France has 4,000 troops in the Ivory Coast. The troops have been accused of various attrocities worse than the Abu Ghraib feather-rufflings
• Dominique de Villepin, the rabidly anti-Iraq War French functionary, is the new prime minister of France.

From Agence France-Presse:

Tensions ramped higher in Ivory Coast's cocoa-growing west Thursday as at least 70 people were killed over two days of violence which has stirred fears that a fragile peace will dissolve completely.

"According to the statistics at my disposal there are 70 confirmed dead by medical sources," Minister for Administrative Reform Eric Kahe said, stressing the toll could be even higher.

Violence over the last two days brings to more than 100 the number of people killed in the southwest since late April in clashes between indigenous farmers and the generations of economic migrants lured to Ivory Coast to turn it into the main driver of the west African economy.

Such ethnic tensions, exploited during Ivory Coast's three-year conflict by both northern rebels and the loyalist south, are heating up against a backdrop of a failing effort to dismantle pro-government militias as part of an overdue disarmament campaign set to conclude by October 30 elections.

Observers and aid workers fear the attacks signal a new wave of violence that may draw also on Ivory Coast's fragile neighbors Liberia, where thousands of disarmed ex-combatants sit idle, and Guinea, where the failing health of President Lansana Conte could provoke a power grab. ...

"There was complicity and ill will on the part of the security forces, who allowed this to happen even under a curfew," one young man told AFP, one of the few to be seen in the streets of Duekoue amid a mass exodus of both Dioula and Guere.

Duekoue sits just below the southern border of the confidence zone dividing rebel north from loyalist south that is patrolled by thousands of French and UN peacekeepers.

Of course, when deVillepin starts piping up about things going badly in Iraq, it will be played up in the world's media, which largely ignores the France's quagmire in Africa.