Battered, Ivory Coast despot finally surrenders

Ivory Coast’s strongman Laurent Gbagbo has surrendered and asked for United Nations protection, an internal UN document seen by Reuters said on Tuesday.

“…President Gbagbo has also surrendered and has asked UNOCI’s protection,” the document to UN staff said. Gbagbo was negotiating his departure after forces loyal to his presidential rival, backed by UN and French helicopter, struck targets at his residence, his offices and two of his military bases.

France’s prime minister, Francois Fillon, told members of parliament that French representatives were negotiating with two Ivory Coast generals loyal to Gbagbo as the forces of his rival, Alassane Ouattara, surrounded the presidential palace in Abidjan, the nation’s economic capital. Gbagbo was in a bunker beneath his residence, a spokesman for Ouattara’s PM, Guillaume Soro, said on Tuesday.

Gbagbo had clung to power refusing to concede he lost last November’s presidential election to Alassane Ouattara, plunging the world’s top cocoa-growing nation into renewed civil war.

An unidentified senior diplomat reported Ouattara’s forces had taken over the residence. The fighting was reported to have grown in the hours before dawn, with news reports and witnesses speaking of sustained machine-gun and heavy-weapons fire ringing out over the city, and people pinned down in homes.

France, which showed a newfound muscularity by championing military strikes against colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s forces in Libya, attacked heavy artillery and armored vehicles at Gbagbo’s residence and presidential offices, a French military spokesman said.

The United Nations said that it had also carried out helicopter strikes against Gbagbo’s forces at two of his bases to prevent them from using the kinds of heavy weapons that have been aimed at civilians and United Nations personnel during the crisis.

The international attacks coincided with a renewed assault by local troops loyal to Ouattara, the man recognized by the UN, the African Union and other international bodies as the winner of last year’s presidential election. With the attacks under way, Soro, Ouattara’s PM, declared that Gbagbo’s rule was only hours away from ending.