France entangled in Ivory Coast war after Legionnaires kill rebels

France appears finally to have become entangled in the civil war in Ivory Coast after a fierce battle between rebels and the French Foreign Legion in the west of the country.

A force of Legionnaires, including light tanks, put to flight a rebel group that was pursuing routed government forces near the town of Duekoue. Up to seven rebels were said to have been killed in the fighting on Saturday, which included shelling by at least two French tanks.

French officers said they had fought back after coming under fire. Another French officer spoke of an ambush by rebels. Rebel commanders said the Legionnaires – who had been in the country for only a matter of days – had intervened to halt their advance. They accused France of waging a colonial war.

Whatever the truth, France appears to be being dragged deeper into a messy civil conflict of three or four parties, although its forces are officially present only to protect foreigners and monitor a shattered ceasefire. The decision last week by Paris to double its force to 2,500 by the end of the year was widely interpreted by the French press as a move to shore up the regime of President Laurent Gbagbo.

Paris insists that its role is still one of peace-keeping, not peace-making, but the French ambassador in Abidjan – who opposed deeper French involvement in the civil war – has been removed, apparently at the insistence of the Ivorian President.

The tactics of French troops at the weekend appeared to mark a clear switch towards intervention. The Foreign Legion and other elite French units had dug in with tanks, anti-tank missiles, rocket launchers and heavy machine-guns to defend Duekoue, a strategically important crossroads in the cocoa- producing region.

After defeating government forces and capturing the town of Blodi, a column of pick-up trucks and cars from the Popular Ivorian Movement for the Far West (MPIGO) ran into the French force. French officers said that they fired two warning shots. When the rebels fired back, French light armoured tanks destroyed the three leading vehicles in the convoy.

The war began after a failed coup on 19 September. Most of the early fighting was in the Muslim north of the country but two other rebel groups have taken to the field in the past month in the prosperous western provinces.

Since the widespread condemnation of French policy before and during the Rwandan civil war in 1994, a succession of governments in Paris has abandoned the long-standing French tradition of direct, and indirect, intervention to bolster client governments in Francophone Africa.

The decision of the present centre-right government to send troops to Ivory Coast – even with United Nations blessing – is seen by critics in Paris as a resurgence of the old habits.

Felix Doh, of MPIGO, told Reuters news agency yesterday: "We are trying to understand why the French are stopping us from advancing when Gbagbo's men are killing our relatives in Abidjan. If the French bar our way we will be obliged to force it open."