"I don't think mediation should be on the agenda (anymore)." [7]
In fact, an invasion by the ECOWAS African Standby Force is exactly what is being finalized by the U.S. and its NATO allies with the connivance of local surrogates, Senegal in the first place.
France had intervened in Ivory Coast starting in 2002, initially to serve as a buffer between the government of President Gbagbo and rebel forces infiltrating from Burkina Faso, and at first engaged in fighting with rebel forces headed by Guillaume Soro, now Ivory Coast's prime minister.
But in 2002 France forced a so-called peace agreement with the Ivorian government (similar to that forced on Macedonia by the U.S., NATO and the EU two years earlier which brought the Kosovo-based National Liberation Army leader Ali Ahmeti into the parliament and his party into a coalition government) and Soro was made prime minister. It is intriguing to note that the year before he threatened France with another debacle like that at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 as he "reminded France of its fate in Indochina where Vietnamese nationalists threw off French colonial rule in bloody fighting in the 1950s." [8]
Tens of thousands of Ivorians protested outside the French embassy in Abidjan in January of 2003 against the French-engineered "national reconciliation" pact with Soro's New Forces (Forces Nouvelles) rebels and French troops fired stun grenades into the crowd. The U.S. embassy was also besieged.
In January of 2004 Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade called for United Nations forces to support French troops in Ivory Coast, stating "he would expect the French to provide the weapons and other countries, possibly the United States, to help with transport." [9]
French troop strength in the country had grown to over 3,000 the following month with the U.S. deploying an initial military contingent as well.
In November of 2004 Ivorian planes bombed a rebel stronghold in the north of the country, killing nine French soldiers and an American national, and French forces responded by shooting down two government Sukhoi fighter-bombers and a helicopter. In fact France destroyed the entire Ivorian air force: Four Sukhois and six helicopters. General Charles Wald, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, which before AFRICOM included most all of Africa in its scope, applauded the French action, saying: "We strongly believe the French took the exact right action: they destroyed those aircraft." [10]
France scrambled three Mirage jet fighters from Chad to Gabon (where it maintains a military base) and set up a forward base in Togo for its aircraft. President Jacques Chirac "ordered the destruction of any other aircraft that violated the ceasefire and his office announced that two companies of troops were being rushed to the area to buttress the 4,000-member French peace-keeping force." [11]
France was at war with the government of Ivory Coast. Its troops clashed with Ivorian civilians in the commercial capital of Abidjan after the downing of the aircraft. As the New York Times put it at the time:
"Since civil war erupted in 2002, the French, who exercise significant economic influence in their former colony, have been accused of aiding rebels and have repeatedly come under attack by supporters of President Laurent Gbagbo." [12]
The country's speaker of the parliament accused France of occupying the nation and conniving with Soro's and other rebel groups operating out of neighboring states, saying that "Since the beginning of the crisis, we have had the feeling and the evidence that it is Jacques Chirac who has armed the rebels at first.
"The Ivorian people and government hope that this occupation army will leave the territory and go away." [13]
The speaker, Mamadou Coulibaly, told French public radio on November 7 that French troops had recently killed 30 and wounded 100 civilians, and on the same day reinforcements arrived in Ivory Coast from the French base in Gabon.
Coulibaly also warned that France was in for a "long, hard war" and that "Vietnam will be nothing compared with what we are going to do here." [14]
On November 10 France deployed two ships - Le Foudre with 250 marines, tanks, five helicopters and light vehicles and the cruiser La Fayette - off the shores of Ivory Coast.
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