Official: Ivory Coast rebels take 2 more towns

[March 29, 2011]  ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP) -- Rebels fighting to install the internationally recognized president of Ivory Coast seized two towns overnight amid heavy fighting, including one in the cocoa-producing heartland with highway access to a major seaport, an official said Tuesday.

Ivory Coast's four-month-long political crisis caused by incumbent leader Laurent Gbagbo's refusal to leave office is quickly degenerating into a full-scale war in the world's main cocoa-producing country whose economic capital was once known as the Paris of West Africa but is now a ravaged and fearful city.

The United Nations said Tuesday that fighting was still raging in the two towns -- Daloa in the central region and Bondoukou in the east -- and that some 20,000 people had sought refuge at a Catholic mission in a third city that rebels seized Monday morning.

"Terrified displaced persons have been streaming in, some with gunshot wounds as they cannot receive emergency treatment from the local hospital," said Jacques Seurt,the U.N. refugee agency's emergency coordinator in Ivory Coast, describing conditions in Duekoue

Capt. Leon Alla, defense spokesman for internationally recognized president Alassane Ouattara, said Daloa fell at 1 a.m. Tuesday. Highways from Daloa lead south to the port of San Pedro and east to the capital of Yamassoukro. Fighters loyal to Ouattara seized Bondoukou Monday night, he said.

Ouattara was declared the winner of the country's Nov. 28 election, but has been unable to assume office because Gbagbo is refusing to leave office after a decade in power.

Daloa is a cocoa producing center but cocoa exports have been shut down following Ouattara's call for a cocoa export ban in January, so Gbagbo already lost revenue from the cocoa regions even before the rebels seized control of part of the chocolate-producing crops.

In the seaside economic capital of Abidjan, the political standoff has led to daily fighting where security forces loyal to Gbagbo have used heavy weapons against the population, acts the U.N. said could be crimes against humanity. Pro-Gbagbo roadblocks are in many places, with armed youths looking for suspected rebels who are sometimes shot.

The majority of the U.N. count of 462 confirmed killings were carried out by Gbagbo's security forces against Muslims and northerners perceived as being supporters of Ouattara, Human Rights Watch said in a report released earlier this month. Pro-Ouattara fighters, however, were responsible for some revenge killings, the report said.

More than 1 million people have fled the fighting, the U.N.'s refugee agency said last week, the majority leaving Abidjan where many believe a bloody final battle for the presidency will take place.

A former International Monetary Fund economist, Ouattara has long tried to distance himself from the rebels based in the country's north who have pledged their support and who fought in a brief but vicious civil war almost a decade ago.

[Associated Press; By MARCO CHOWN OVED and RUKMINI CALLIMACHI]

Callimachi reported from Dakar, Senegal.

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