[It appears to me that West Africa, which has experienced the longest period of Black independence, is also starting to fall apart. West Africa has tremendous riches and did not have to engage in wars of Liberation – yet – their societies are now surviving. Jan]

ABIDJAN: Men armed with machetes and rifles stormed three western Ivory Coast villages overnight, killing at least 50 people in what security forces and local officials described Wednesday as ethnic clashes.

“The bodies of 50 people, all of them Guere, have been taken to hospital,” said Marcel Djahi, mayor of Duekoue, a town in the loyalist south that has been a tinderbox of the ethnic and communal violence that has marked the three-year conflict in Ivory Coast, producer of 40 percent of the world™s cocoa.

A senior UN official said among the dead were four soldiers of the Ivorian national army who were staffing a command post during the pre-dawn attacks that appeared to be a reprisal for last week™s killing of four ethnic Senufo, among the legions of economic migrants lured to the west African state.

Administrative Reform Minister Eric Kahe said the first target was Guitrozon, one of a cluster of villages around Duekoue mostly populated with Guere, an ethnic group that straddles the western border with Liberia. “The assailants entered the homes in this village, killing and cutting the throats of the townspeople, with the help of pistols and rifles and knives,” he told AFP, saying that witnesses told him the attackers were traditional hunters who hail from the north of Ivory Coast.

Eleven people were burned alive in their homes, he said, bringing the death toll in Guitrozon to 28. Duekoue is nestled under the southern border of the confidence zone that has divided rebel north from loyalist south since September 2002 that is patrolled by thousands of UN and French peacekeepers.

The town, at the heart of the cocoa belt, is no stranger to violence. Over four days in late April, local Guere clashed with Dioula Muslims from northern Ivory Coast and neighboring countries, killing some 30 people according to an official death toll and twice as many according to local leaders.

URL: http://jang.com.pk/thenews/jun2005-daily/02-0…/p>