Westerners Leave Ivory Coast

Western nations launched one of the largest evacuations of Africa’s post-independence era Wednesday, with France commandeering commercial airliners and other countries scrambling military jets to fly out thousands of foreigners after attacks on civilians and peacekeepers.

The U.S. Embassy and other missions sent escorts into Abidjan, the main city, rescuing Americans, Canadians, Spaniards and others.

Spain, Belgium and Italy sent military cargo planes to aid in the evacuations. French officials said three jets with space for about 250 people each would run shuttles to Paris and to Dakar, Senegal, probably for days.

As the convoys rounded up foreigners from their homes for evacuation, Ivorian state TV appealed alternately for calm and for a mass uprising against the French, the country’s former colonial ruler. French citizens darted out to the banks of lagoons, which surround the capital, Yamoussoukro, and were picked up by French soldiers in boats.

The Ivorian “government is pushing to kill white people -- not just the French, all white people,” said Marie Noel Mion, rescued in a wooden boat at daybreak, and waiting with hundreds of others at Abidjan’s airport, some camped in tents on the floor of the terminal.

About 20 Americans arrived in Accra, capital of neighboring Ghana, on a Canadian-organized evacuation flight Wednesday night.

A few hundred Americans remain in Ivory Coast, many of them missionaries and aid workers. By late afternoon, much of Abidjan was quiet -- the first break from violence since Saturday.

Fighting erupted after government forces renewed attacks on rebels, ending a 17-month cease-fire in the country’s civil war. Nine French peacekeepers and an American civilian died in a government air attack Saturday, prompting the French military to destroy Ivory Coast’s tiny air force.

The retaliation sparked violence by loyalist mobs, who took to the streets waving machetes, iron bars and clubs and attacking white expatriates.

The airstrike and other turmoil since Saturday have claimed at least 27 lives and wounded more than 900.

At the United Nations, France revised a Security Council resolution Wednesday to give Ivory Coast more time to resurrect a peace process or face an arms embargo and other sanctions, diplomats said. The decision to push back the deadline from Dec. 1 to Dec. 10 was made at the United States’ request.