Pro-Gbagbo youths demonstrate outside French base

Several hundred hardline youth supporters of President Laurent Gbagbo staged a rowdy demonstration outside the French military base in Abidjan on Monday demanding that 4,000 French peacekeepers patrolling a buffer zone between government and rebel forces leave Cote d'Ivoire. The demonstrators, belonging to militia style youth groups known as "Young Patriots," lit a fire in front of the base near Abidjan international airport and threw stones at French soldiers inside the perimeter fence after they tried to disperse the crowd with tear gas. Residents also reported demonstrations by Young Patriots demanding the immediate "liberation" of the rebel-held north of the country, in the working class suburb of Adjame. Gbagbo meanwhile remained silent about an incident on Sunday night, when unidentified officers interrupted state radio and television broadcasts to demand that he sack General Mathias Doue as military chief of staff, General Denis Bombet as head of the army, and General Gregoire Touvoly as head of the paramilitary gendarmerie. The unidentified officers, who appeared to have government authorisation to enter the television centre, urged Gbagbo to remove Doue within 48 hours. They also called on him to order French peacekeepers to leave the frontline so that government forces could "liberate" the rebel-held north of Cote d'Ivoire. Earlier on Sunday, a group of about 200 pro-Gbagbo youths, escorted by about 100 Ivorian government soldiers, clashed with French peacekeepers as they tried to march through the demilitarised buffer zone to the rebel capital Bouake. The two sides exchanged fire and the French peacekeepers destroyed an Ivorian government tank. Six Ivorian soldiers were wounded in the clash. The rebels signed a peace agreement with Gbagbo in January and joined a broad-based government of national reconciliation in April. But they withdrew in September, just before they were due to begin a process of disarmament. The rebels protested that Gbagbo had failed to devolve real power to the coalition cabinet in which they held nine seats. Since then, the situation in the country has become increasingly tense. Last week, clashes took place near the southern town of Gagnoa between villagers of Gbagbo's Bete tribe and several hundred immigrant cocoa farmers whom they had driven off their land. Up to seven people were reported killed, including one gendarme, in several days of fighting. Diplomats in Abidjan said they were pessimistic that the situation would improve quickly. They observed that a flurry of meetings between Gbagbo and other West African leaders in West Africa during November had failed to produce a reconciliation between the Ivorian president and rebel leaders. Rebel leaders were meeting in the northern town of Korhogo on Monday to discuss their response to the splits emerging in the government army and the re-appearance of the Young Patriots as a bellicose force on the streets, despite an official three-month ban on public demonstrations. Eugene Djue, the leader of a faction of the Young Patriots which vandalised the offices of French-owned water electricity and mobile phone companies in early October, told IRIN on Monday: "We are not longer talking about disarmament. We are talking about liberating Bouake."