Warning of Ivory Coast humanitarian crisis

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news/article.cfm?id=5066&cat=field-news

Thankfully there are organizations like Doctors Without Borders that do not discriminate in their humanity.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110304/ap_on_re_af/af_ivory_coast_17

This is horrible.

"– The government of Ivory Coast's internationally recognized leader said the country's deepening political crisis has "crossed over to a new level of horror and barbarism" after soldiers backing his rival fatally shot six female demonstrators.

Thousands of women were protesting sitting president Laurent Gbagbo's refusal to cede power on Thursday when tanks showed up and soldiers opened fire.

"Indeed, we anticipated everything short of imagining that one could shoot live rounds at unarmed women, all the more with tanks," said Patrick Achi, the spokesman for the government of Alassane Ouattara, whom the U.N. said defeated Gbagbo in the Nov. 28 election.

The United Nations says that nearly 400 people have been killed in the three-month-long dispute, though Ouattara's camp said Friday that total was too conservative and should be closer to 1,000.

Thursday's deaths were especially shocking, however, because many assumed soldiers would never open fire on women.

"The killing is going on unabated," said Ouattara's Justice and Human Rights Minister Jeannot Kouadio Ahoussou in Geneva.

More than 200,000 people have fled Abobo, the local U.N. peacekeeping mission reported, after a week when Gbagbo's security forces entered the neighborhood and began shelling it with mortars.

The shocking escalation indicates the army is willing to use war-grade weapons on its citizens. Ouattara's camp has also stepped up its resistance, led by rebels from the north and soldiers defecting from Gbagbo's army.

Thursday's attack prompted an immediate rebuke from the U.S., which like most governments has urged Gbagbo to step down and has recognized his rival as the country's legitimate president.

"The moral bankruptcy of Laurent Gbagbo is evident as his security forces killed women protesters," said U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley in a Twitter message.

In New York, the U.N. Security Council said it is "deeply concerned" about the escalation of violence in Ivory Coast and that it could lead to a resurgence of civil war there.

The European Union's top diplomat Catherine Ashton called for Gbagbo to cease all violence and cede power to Ouattara."