IVORY COAST: The United Nations needs more troops in Ivory Coast to handle a rapidly worsening situation, a senior peacekeeper on the ground said yesterday, hours after UN secretary general Kofi Annan warned of a return to war.
Pro-government militias have pledged a fresh offensive after attacking rebel positions last month, dealing yet another blow to a moribund peace process, while the rebels have put their forces on maximum alert.
Some 6,000 UN and 4,000 French peacekeepers are keeping the two sides apart by policing a buffer zone which roughly cuts the world's top cocoa producer in half.
Nowhere is their mission more complex than in Ivory Coast's wild west, a region awash with guns and where ethnic rivalries are underpinned by a long-standing dispute over fertile land.
"We in the west are deployed across a big area and I think the UN should deploy more men, because the situation is changing quickly," Col Mohammed Shahidul Haque, the commander of 750 Bangladeshi troops in the rebel-held town of Man, said.
On Wednesday, Mr Annan said: "There is a very real danger that events may spin out of control." - (Reuters)