Ivory Coast Violence - A'math of Abidjan riots, Yamoussoukro, French troops
NAME: I COAST VIOL 071104Nx
TAPE: EF04/1091
IN_TIME: 11:01:55:12
DURATION: 00:01:14:12
SOURCES: RTI/APTN
DATELINE: Various, 6/7 Nov 2004
RESTRICTIONS:
SHOTLIST:
VIDEO QUALITY AS INCOMING
RTI
Abidjan - 6 November 2004
NIGHT SHOTS
1. Protesters listening to a man speaking on a loudhailer
2. Dead body of man on the ground
3. Various hospital shots of doctors treating wounded people in the hospital
4. Injured man being carried on a stretcher from the ambulance into the hospital
APTN
Yamoussoukro - 7 November 2004
5. Four French armed vehicles on the streets
6. Damaged Shell petrol station, man walks past in front of destroyed garage
7. Damaged petrol station and pumps
8. Lebanese family surveying the damage from the top of the building
9. Lebanese family
10. Various of French soldiers in the armoured vehicles passing through street
STORYLINE:
France rolled out military might on Sunday to quell an explosion of anti-French violence in Ivory Coast, the pride of its former West African colonial empire, deploying troops, armoured vehicles and helicopter gunships against machete-waving mobs hunting for foreigners.
In the second of two violent days French forces summarily seized strategic control of Abidjan, commandeering airports and posting gunboats at bridges in the country's largest city and commercial capital.
The chaos began on Saturday when Ivory Coast warplanes launched a surprise airstrike that killed nine French peacekeepers and a civilian American aid worker - later calling it a mistake.
France hit back within hours, wiping out Ivory Coast's newly built-up air force - two Sukhoi warplanes and at least three helicopter gunships - on the ground.
On Sunday, loyalist mobs rampaged in a second day of looting and burning in outrage at the swift French payback.
Gunshots echoed and smoke billowed over Abidjan and the capital, Yamoussoukro, as thousands-strong crowds laid waste to foreign and locally
owned businesses and searched house to house for foreigners. Mobs set alight tyres in fiery roadblocks.
French helicopters fired percussion grenades to break up mobs holding the bridges and laying siege to the French military base in Abidjan.
France landed 300 reinforcements on Sunday at Abidjan's international airport, in French hands since a gunbattle with Ivory Coast forces a day
earlier. More heavily armed reinforcements rolled south from Yamoussoukro, and another 300 troops were on their way from France.
About 14,000 French citizens live in Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa producer and until the 1990s, West Africa's most stable and prosperous
nation. In Abidjan, they crouched in their homes.
Abidjan's hundreds of thousands of immigrants from neighbouring Muslim nations hid as well.
The world's top cocoa producer, Ivory Coast until the late 1990s had stood as West Africa's single-most prosperous and peaceful nation.
The slain French soldiers were among 4,000 French peacekeepers and 6,000 U.N. troops in Ivory Coast, divided between rebel north and loyalist south since civil war broke out in September 2002.