PEACE MISSION South African leader launches effort to end standoff in Ivory Coast

About 1,000 loyalists were outside a French temporary base.
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP) -- South African President Thabo Mbeki flew to Ivory Coast today to launch an African effort to rein in chaos here amid four days of government and street-level confrontations with French troops that have wounded more than 600 and left at least 20 dead.
The U.N. Security Council, African Union, European Union and a bloc of West African leaders have all condemned President Laurent Gbagbo's government in the violence, which began when Ivory Coast warplanes killed nine French peacekeepers and an American aid worker in an airstrike on the rebel-held north.
France, Ivory Coast's former colonial ruler, wiped out the nation's air force in retaliation, sparking massive anti-French rampages by mobs of thousands in the fiercely nationalist south.
Standoff
About 1,000 loyalists today were maintaining a standoff outside a hotel commandeered by the French military.
Some of the 1,300 French and other foreign civilians evacuated from their homes by the French military amid looting and burning stared out at the protesters from a protective ring of barbed wire around the hotel.
"We are not going to leave," one loyalist outside the French temporary base said, adding that protesters would take shifts to eat. "If I get the French, I can eat them," he said.
Protesters tried at one point this morning to pull down the barbed wire around the French evacuation point but scattered when two French snipers moved forward and drew beads on them.
After securing Abidjan's airport and bridges over the weekend, French forces today appeared to have withdrawn from at least one main bridge in the lagoon-bordered city.