Rebels retake Man

The western town of Man, near the Liberian border, has been retaken by one of the new armed movements following "serious" fighting between the group and the national army, sources in Man told IRIN on Thursday. By Thursday morning Man, which last month was the birthplace of two new groups who were then overtaken by the FANCI (Armed Forces of Cote d'Ivoire), had been recaptured by the rebels after heavy fighting. "I can confirm that Man has been retaken", a French military source told IRIN, adding that the fighting was "serious". However the source could not pinpoint exactly which one of the Mouvement pour la Justice et la Paix (MJP) or the Mouvement Populaire Ivoirien du Grand Ouest (MPIGO) was controlling the town. The MJP and MPIGO say that their objective is to avenge the death of General Robert Guei, a native of the area who ruled the country during the 1999-2000 military transition and was killed in the early hours of the current rebellion. News agencies quoted Ivorian military sources as saying that the rebels launched a three-prong attack to beat out the FANCI. Already home to thousands of displaced, Wednesday's fighting displaced hundreds more, Catholic Church sources in Man told IRIN. The fighting took place while Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo attended an ECOWAS summit in Dakar, Senegal, convened to find solutions to the three-month long crisis. The summit, which in addition to Gbagbo and Senegalese president and ECOWAS chairman Abdoulaye Wade, only saw the participation of the presidents of Burkina Faso and Cape Verde. Other countries were represented by senior officials. It reaffirmed the necessity to deploy a West African peacekeeping force and pledged to do so by 31 December. The deployment, which would replace the French troops currently in the country, was already a few weeks behind schedule. Another highlight of the summit was a proposed referral to the UN Security Council of the Ivorian crisis. France, which has deployed troops since October to monitor the 17 October ceasefire, has expressed support for that referral. While supporting diplomatic avenues to solve the crisis, a second contingent of 300 French soldiers, as part of a 500-troop reinforcement, has left for Cote d'Ivoire to beef those already in the country. Some 200 arrived in the country on Saturday. In a press briefing in Paris on Wednesday, the spokesman of the defence ministry, Jean-Francois Bureau, said there could be as many as 2,500 soldiers before the end of the year. In the same briefing, the spokesman of the Foreign Ministry said that France was still trying to organise a meeting, on one hand, of west African heads of state and, on the other hand, a round-table of all Ivorian political forces. In related news, six UN humanitarian agencies briefed the press today on their responses to the current crisis. While the World Food Programme had distributed items to some 15,000 people in the Daloa area, the UN Population Fund was planning three assessment mission to take stock of the needs of the displaced. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees again reiterated that its main concern was the protection of some 70,000 refugees, most of them Liberian refugees in western Cote d'Ivoire. In turn the World Bank said it was mobilising 7.5 million FCFA (about US $12,000) to reconstruct housing for some 10,000 families who lost their homes during the government's mop-up operations of shantytowns.