LONDON: African leaders in the Ghanaian capital of Accra will try to prevent a conflagration spreading across West Africa following the violence that has gripped the Ivory Coast.

The country has been in turmoil since 19 September, when army rebels attempted to seize power by launching simultaneous attacks on Abidjan and two northern towns, Bouake and Korhogo.

A third northern town, Odienne, has now fallen into the hands of the rebels, in effect dividing the Ivory Coast in two. Fresh fighting broke out between rebels and government soldiers as French troops wound down a mission to help foreigners escape the rebel-held Bouake.

The dividing line lies close to Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast’s northern neighbour, which Ivorians believe supports the rebels.Yet both the Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso belong to the West African Economic Community, Ecowas, whose leading member, Nigeria, has sent three jet fighters to the Ivory Coast to help the government of President Laurent Gbagbo.

Ghana, another Ecowas member, also says it is ready to lend military support. However, Gbagbo wants to ‘cut off the rebels’ head’ — perhaps with a pre-emptive strike against Burkina Faso positions where he believes they have bases.

Ecowas could therefore find itself dragged into an internecine war. At least one other country, Liberia, could be expected to side with Burkina Faso. Mali, whose citizens in the Ivory Coast have, like their Burkinabe counterparts, been subjected to periodic xenophobic attacks by the Ivorians, might also be tempted to send forces.

Libya’s position could also be crucial. Many African regimes believe that Libya is always behind the scenes when conflict breaks out anywhere in Africa, stoking the fires with cash and arms.

West Africa could therefore be fated to re-run the bloody mess in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where, over the past two years, Uganda, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia have been engaged in what has been described as ‘Africa’s first world war’.

Sources close to the current chair of Ecowas, President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, suggest that he is leaning towards the drafting of a contingent of between 3,000 and 4,000 men, to help Gbagbo regain control of his country, under the auspices of Ecowas’s military wing, Ecomog, which already has a force in Sierra Leone.

Whatever Ecowas decides to do will, be complicated by the presence of French troops in the Ivory Coast. While the conflagration has cost an estimated 600 Ivorian lives so far, France has been able to remove to safety — without firing a single shot — some 2,000 French citizens and other foreigners, including 150 American school children, caught behind rebel lines in Bouake.

But the French operation obstructed the Ivory Coast government’s efforts to recapture the northern towns seized by the rebels. The Ivorian Defence Minister, Lida Kouassi, has made a thinly veiled attack on the French, claiming that their ‘invisible hands’ had put pressure on President Gbagbo not to pursue the rebels as strongly as he wanted. Kouassi added that French troop movements had made it impossible for the government forces to be reinforced and resupplied.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.