ABIDJAN: The slight man sitting in the lobby of an expensive hotel in Ivory Coast’s main city was wearing a red T-shirt and a Manchester United baseball cap. But the waitress addressed him as ‘General’.

Despite his youthful appearance, Charles Ble Goude is one of the most powerful forces in this West African nation, which slipped into civil war in 2002 after rebels tried to oust the president and seized the north.

He can, and has, summoned thousands of supporters, known as Young Patriots, onto the streets of the main city Abidjan to support President Laurent Gbagbo or to vent anger at France, the former colonial ruler of this one-time economic powerhouse.

Sometimes the rallies are peaceful: thousands of young people dressed as traditional warriors with faces painted white and heads crowned with palm leaves marching along the city’s wide boulevards beside the pungent lagoon, chanting slogans.

Sometimes, the protests turn nasty: most notably last November when angry youths looted French homes and businesses, sparking a wave of panic that drove around 8,000 mostly French expatriates to leave the country.

“It’s not a well-organized movement that sells membership cards so we can know how many there are but when I call people for protests, you can tell from that,” Ble Goude told Reuters.

“I don’t know the number but there are thousands of people,” said the former student leader, who often appears on television, jabbing his finger and ordering members to mobilize.

Ask many Ivorians what they think of the militant youth group and they say the Young Patriots were created and funded by members of Gbagbo’s government to intimidate opponents.

Now, the Patriots have a new battle — attempting to prevent opposition parties from campaigning for a presidential election due on Oct. 30 but looking increasingly unlikely since rebels said they would not allow the vote to go ahead in the north.

In July, as rebels and the government traded accusations over deadly attacks on police posts, Young Patriots beat up several opposition supporters and tore up pro-opposition papers.

Young supporters of the RDR opposition party have been keeping guard day and night for weeks at a barricade of barrels and branches outside their party headquarters, aiming to stop Patriots from burning their building as they did in November.

“A patriot should love his country and protect it but what we are seeing is that they chase out white people, spread racism and destroy businesses. It is killing the country,” said Ibrahim Kourouma, 30, among the guards armed with sticks.

The Patriots say they are protecting Gbagbo from what they believe is France’s plan to oust the president. They accuse Paris of backing the rebels who tried to topple him.

The November 2004 riots exploded after France, which has around 4,000 peacekeepers in Ivory Coast, destroyed Ivorian warplanes after the army bombed a French base, killing nine French peacekeepers.

“We are leading a battle for the liberation of Ivory Coast,” said Richard Dakoury, a Young Patriot who runs the ‘Sorbonne’, an ad hoc talking shop in the southern city of Abidjan where speakers bellow anti-French slogans into a microphone.

“We love our country and are ready to defend it,” he said.

Western diplomats say the Patriots’ fierce loyalty to Gbagbo is less about love for their country and more about the money it brings from shadowy sponsors in the government.

“They are founded on money and ignorance,” said one Western diplomat, adding the Patriot movement would evaporate as soon as their supporters cut off funding.

Many Patriots are young, unemployed men with little else to do, motivated primarily, their opponents say, by cash handed to them when they turn up at protests. Members usually deny this.

“We do this of our own free will,” said Jean Jacques Amani, 25, who has been jobless for the duration of the war.

The Patriots’ violent streak may partly reflect the shallow roots of democracy in Ivory Coast, where late President Felix Houphouet-Boigny ruled from independence in 1960 until his death in 1993, only allowing multi-party politics in 1990.

The first president to succeed Houphouet-Boigny was ousted in a 1999 coup, the start of an uncertain, violent period when politics was poisoned by disputes over nationality and the question of who should be eligible to run the country.

Whatever the roots of Ble Goude’s movement, its potential for causing chaos may be demonstrated again.

Analysts and local officials say the Patriots have access to weapons, some supplied by the military. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned in March that militia activities could cause the unstable situation in Ivory Coast to ‘spin out of control’.

—Reuters