Ivory Coast Abandoned By U.S. & U.N.! No Oil Interests!

So More Than 800 People Have Been Shot To Death During A Four-Month Long Civil/ Tribal War On The Ivory Coast. Excuse Me But Isn't This Also A Humanitarian Issue? Where's The U.N.? Where's France?? Could It Be The Lack Of America & France's Involvement Is Largely Due To Neither Country Having Any OIL Interests In That Part Of The World? Hmmm.





Red Cross: 800 killed In Ivory Coast Town

In an especially grisly chapter of Ivory Coast's four-month conflict, hundreds of people have been killed in the western cocoa-producing town of Duekoue.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said 800 people were shot to death. A United Nations official put the death toll so far at 330.

Guillaume Ngefa, the deputy human rights director at the U.N. mission in Ivory Coast, blamed 220 of the deaths on forces loyal to Alassane Ouattara, the man recognized by the United Nations and other global powers as the rightful president of Ivory Coast. Ngefa said pro-Gbagbo forces killed 100 people.

The massacre occurred between Monday and Wednesday as Ouattara's Republican Forces led an offensive through the country to the commercial center of Abidjan, Ngefa said.

"We have evidence, we have pictures. This was retaliation," he said, referring to Ouattara's forces.

The Ouattara camp denied the accusations.

"The government firmly rejects such accusations and denies any involvement by the Republican Forces of Cote d'Ivoire (the French name for Ivory Coast) in possible abuses," it said in a statement.

"The government wishes to establish that the situation is quite the opposite," it said. "Forces loyal to former President Laurent Gbagbo, and its affiliated mercenaries and militias that have engaged in countless atrocities in western Cote d'Ivoire, during their flight before the advance of Republican Forces of Cote d'Ivoire."

Ngefa said so far, 320 bodies have been identified and the actual number could be much higher. He said the dead included civilians as well as mercenaries.

Before the Duekoue killings, human right monitors documented 462 deaths in the Ivory Coast conflict. This was the single bloodiest incident yet.

The International Committee of the Red Cross sent a team to Duekoue on Thursday and said most of the victims were civilians, said spokesman Kelnor Panglungtshang in Abidjan.

"They saw the bodies on the streets," he told CNN. "There were so many.

"There is always a lot of resentment after something like this and it can explode," he said. "It's highly tense, obviously."

Ngefa said a contingent of U.N. peacekeepers are stationed in Duekoue and are patrolling the town.

The massacre illustrated the bloody nature of Ivory Coast's conflict, now in its fifth month. The violence erupted after a disputed November election led Gbagbo and Ouattara to both claim the presidency.

The international community recognized Ouattara as the legitimate winner but Gbagbo refused to cede power and violence engulfed the nation, escalating this week with a major offensive launched by Ouattara's Republican Forces.

Fierce fighting erupted for control of Abidjan, Ivory Coast's largest city. Gbagbo's forces were thought to be on the brink of defeat but regained key areas Saturday.

They retook control of Ivory Coast's all-powerful state-run television network that has been the embattled president's voice in his standoff with Ouattara.

An Abidjan resident, who asked not to be named for security reasons, said the network, which had gone dark after pro-Ouattara forces took control of the building, began broadcasting again Saturday morning.

An American teacher, holed up in her Abidjan apartment, told CNN she was frightened and was trying desperately to get help from U.S. or French officials to help evacuate her.

She said she last went to school Thursday and by that afternoon, she could hear the rattle of gunfire and the boom of explosions everywhere. She, too, was not identified for security reasons.

"I am very scared," she said, "because the shelling is intense."

A U.N. peacekeeping patrol came under attack from Gbagbo's forces Saturday in an Abidjan suburb, a U.N. statement said. In the exchange of fire, five members of Gbagbo's forces were shot, the statement said.

Gbagbo adviser Abdon Bayeto blamed the United Nations and global leaders -- including France and the United States -- for Ivory Coast's bloodshed by recognizing Ouattara as the legitimate president.

Ouattara knows he lost the election, Bayeto told CNN, adding that Gbagbo is a true democrat.

"For 30 years there was no trouble in the country," he said. "We are going to be victorious."

Gbagbo's whereabouts were unknown. He has not recently appeared in public and the French ambassador said his residence was empty.

Ngefa, the U.N. human rights official, said tension was running high everywhere and could explode as it did in Duekoue.

The nation had been on the rebound from a 2002 civil war and the elections last year had been expected to help begin a new chapter that would take Ivory Coast closer to becoming a stable democracy.

But the political chaos inflamed old tensions, including land issues in the nation's western region, rich with cocoa plantations that attract migrants from other parts of Ivory Coast as well as foreign workers from regional countries like Burkina Faso and Mali, said Panglungtshang of the Red Cross.

The violence has also displaced 1 million of Abidjan's 4 million people and sent thousands fleeing across the border into countries like Liberia, which is trying to hold onto its own fragile peace.

Some 1,400 foreigners, including 500 French citizens, have sought refuge at a French military camp, a spokeswoman for the French Defense Ministry said Saturday.

"The situation on the streets has deteriorated to such an extent that it's just become too dangerous to go outside," said Henry Gray, a field coordinator with Medicins Sans Frontieres, a humanitarian medical group known in English as Doctors Without Borders.

He said doctors were treating civilian casualties, many of them for gunshot wounds.

"There's a lot of pillaging and looting going on, and if you're out on the streets, you're basically a target," Gray said.

Abidjan, said Gray and others interviewed for this report, was now a shadow of its former self.


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Sources: CNN, Google Maps

Tom Donilon Is New National Security Adviser! Jones Resigns

More White House Shakeup: Donilon To Replace Jones As National Security Adviser


President Obama is announcing Friday that retired Marine Gen. Jim Jones is stepping down as White House National Security Adviser and will be replaced by his current deputy, Tom Donilon, according to two senior administration officials.

The move has been long anticipated because senior officials say Jones never quite clicked with other key members of Obama's inner circle. Jones was not an active part of the Obama presidential campaign and two people close to Jones tell CNN that when he accepted the appointment in 2009 he only agreed to stay on for two years.

The turnover comes after a slew of other top Obama aides have left the White House or signaled their plans to leave the administration either later this year or in early 2011, including Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, senior adviser David Axelrod, and top economic aides Larry Summers and Christina Romer.

But the choice of Donilon, a well-known quantity inside the West Wing, signals that even during a time of turnover Obama is someone who prefers to replenish the ranks with people from his inner circle. Given that approach, top Democratic advisers privately say it is highly unlikely that Obama will go far outside the circle when he eventually settles on a permanent chief of staff, despite expected pressure on the President to widen the circle after the midterm elections.

Continuity has reigned so far in the musical chairs of staff moves. Romer was replaced as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers by White House economic aide Austan Goolsbee, while Axelrod is expected to be replaced next year by someone already in the fold like Press Secretary Robert Gibbs or former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe while Axelrod moves to Chicago but stays on as an informal adviser on the expected 2012 re-election effort.

Earlier this month, Emanuel was replaced as chief of staff on a temporary basis by longtime Obama aide Pete Rouse. Donilon had been rumored to be a possible permanent successor to Emanuel, but two sources familiar with the conversation told CNN that Donilon recently told the President he wanted to take himself out of the running for chief of staff and instead stay at the National Security Council, knowing full well that Jones was likely to leave soon and he was expected to move up.

Jones' exit brings to a close a somewhat-tumultuous time as National Security Adviser, after he clashed with Emanuel and other top White House officials, in part because of a hands-off style that did not sit well with administration officials who were expecting a more take-charge leader at a time of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a slew of thorny national security challenges.

In his defense, Jones allies note he is a highly-respected former Marine Commandant and NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. These allies note that Obama, a commander in chief who came to the job without military experience, benefited from the credibility within the military that Jones brought to the table.

Jones will now be replaced by Donilon, who is widely hailed in Democratic circles as a sharp foreign policy mind, including his tenure as chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher in the Clinton administration.

But Donilon has himself clashed with some in the Obama orbit as well. Journalist Bob Woodward, in his new book "Obama's Wars," suggests there has been tension between Donilon and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

"Gates felt that Donilon did not understand the military or treat its senior leadership with sufficient respect," Woodward wrote. "The secretary later told Jones that Donilon would be a 'disaster' as Obama's national security adviser."

But a senior Defense official told CNN that "the Woodward characterization is just way out of date" because Gates and Donilon now have a "strong working relationship" within the administration.

Nevertheless, the Defense official acknowledged "they had some issues" during the sometimes-contentious internal "Af-Pak" debate last fall that resulted in the President crafting a new policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, which resulted in Obama announcing a surge of 30,000 more U.S. troops being sent to Afghanistan.

"They have long since been overcome," the senior Defense official said of the tensions.

Gates himself told reporters on Friday, "I have thoroughly enjoyed working with General Jones and I have and have had a very productive and very good working relationship with Tom Donilon, contrary to what you may have read. And I look forward to continuing to work with him."

Donilon's appointment, however, may ruffle some other feathers within the administration. Several of Obama's foreign policy advisers during the campaign, who were angling for the National Security Advisor job after the election but did not get the nod in 2008, were also considered contenders to replace Jones this time and might have been considered more inspired choices than Donilon.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, a former Assistant Secretary for African Affairs and scholar at the Brookings Institution, was one of Obama's most public foreign policy voices during the campaign. She is said to be disappointed with the New York job because she was lobbying hard to be National Security Adviser after Obama's election victory and aides have said she would have wanted to move back to Washington to take the post if Jones left.

Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, who was Deputy National Security Adviser in the Clinton administration, also wanted the job before it was given to Jones. Instead he was sent to the State Department and there has been speculation he wants out, hoping to land a top staff job at the White House.


Sources: CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Youtube