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ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast - Leading political figures renounced a days-old peace plan for Ivory Coast - one called it "null and void" - and hundreds of French nationals fled the country, fearing more anti-French violence over the accord.
In Paris, French authorities declared themselves ready for a full-scale evacuation of their citizens, targeted by enraged pro-government rioters who say the French-brokered plan to end a civil war gives too much power to rebels.
French business people already were sending home their families - mostly women and children - on flights chartered by French companies based in Ivory Coast, the world's largest cocoa producer and West Africa's economic hub.
Frazzled-looking adults oversaw clinging babies and backpack-toting teen-agers sitting on piles of luggage at Abidjan's international airport.
"We're going back home," one woman said, arriving in a convoy of a bus and two escort cars sent by a French telecom company.
President Laurent Gbagbo had yet to say whether he will stick to the peace plan reached Friday in Paris to end the four-month conflict.
It calls for the government and rebels to share power until 2005 elections.
Government supporters and the army vehemently oppose provisions in the accord that reportedly give rebels control of the Interior and Defense ministries - and with them control over the military and strongly loyalist paramilitary police.
The concession sparked days of loyalists riots in Abidjan recently. Mobs attacked France's Embassy and military base, looted other French enterprises and beat foreigners.
Rebels, accusing Gbagbo's southern-based government of fanning ethnic hatreds, rose up in September and have since seized the northern half of the country and parts of the cocoa- and coffee-rich west.
At the airport, the first French flight took 250 passengers, and at least eight more such charter flights were planned yesterday alone.
The U.S. Embassy, closed because of the violent protests, "strongly urged" American citizens in an e-mail yesterday to leave as well.
The exodus once would have been unthinkable in Ivory Coast, a comparatively prosperous nation shaken out of decades of stability by a 1999 military coup, which unleashed ethnic and political violence that led to the four-month-long insurrection.
Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun