November 21, 2004, 15:00
France vigorously rejected today charges by Ivory Coast's president and its leading Roman Catholic cleric that French troops had beheaded young protesters there, dismissing the statements as outrageous disinformation.
Michele Alliot-Marie, the defence minister, urged Laurent Gbagbo, the Ivory Coast president, to stop stoking anti-French hatred in the country, where French troops are trying to keep the peace between the rebel north and the south he controls. Gbagbo said in a French Internet forum yesterday that he believed that the charge, first made by Cardinal Bernard Agre on Vatican Radio last week, was true even though he had not visited morgues as Agre had and seen proof for the accusation.
"The outrageousness of the terms president Gbagbo has used rob them of all credibility," Alliot-Marie said. "These charges amount to disinformation similar to president Gbagbo's doubts about the reality of the French military victims in Bouake," she told France-Inter radio, referring to nine French soldiers killed in a rebel raid on November 6. Asked about the charge that French soldiers had beheaded young Ivorians during protests in the capital, Gbagbo told the Internet forum run by the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur: "This testimony by the prelate was reported by all the people who were present at the siege of the Hotel Ivoire by the French army and all those who were in the hospitals. I wasn't in the hospitals but everyone who went there said it. We can assume this testimony repeated by several people is true."
Agre told the French service of Vatican Radio on November 11: "I've just come back from the hospitals, it's unbearable, these young girls decapitated by the French army, these people even lying on the floor." Alliot-Marie accused Ivory Coast's leaders of manipulating crowds of protesters in an extremely dangerous way. "The racist and xenophobe statements made about us by Ivory Coast leaders are intolerable," she said. French troops had done a remarkable job in Ivory Coast, she said, to keep a ceasefire between the two rival sides in the fighting that has torn apart the world's largest cocoa producing country. - Reuters
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