AFRICAN CRISIS People flee; talks are set

Evacuations of trapped foreigners began Wednesday.
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP) -- Airliners were shuttling hundreds of trapped foreigners out of the Ivory Coast today, as South Africa convened urgent peace talks on a crisis that it said threatened to destabilize West Africa.
The evacuations began Wednesday, when the U.S. Embassy and others sent convoys through the city to pick up foreigners. French soldiers in boats plucked some trapped citizens from the banks of Abidjan's lagoons.
An Air France jumbo jet, with space for more than 500 evacuees, was due to join the effort today.
A French official has said that between 4,000 to 8,000 of its 14,000 citizens wanted to leave, a number that alone would make it one of the largest evacuations of Africa's post-independence era.
Chirac's demand
French President Jacques Chirac demanded that Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo's government rein in his thousands of hard-line supporters, who brought Gbagbo to power in 2000 and now lead the anti-foreigner violence that erupted Saturday.
Some foreigners fleeing Ivory Coast accused the government of encouraging violence against white people, while others complained they were losing everything they own in the rapid flight.
Foreign Affairs spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa said that South African President Thabo Mbeki would open the talks today in Pretoria.
Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Aziz Pahad said Ivorian rebel and opposition leaders, including former prime minister Alassane Outtara, will arrive in Pretoria today for the talks.
South African Foreign Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said a resolution to the crisis was critical.
Containing it
"A full scale war in Ivory Coast could affect a lot of other countries in the region," she told a parliamentary committee on foreign affairs in Cape Town. "We need to contain it in Ivory Coast and bring it under control, or it could turn into a regional problem."
The violence began Saturday when Ivory Coast warplanes killed nine French peacekeepers and an American aid worker in an airstrike on the rebel-held north in three days of government air attacks that violated a more than year-old cease-fire in the country's civil war.