Jubilation After Ivory Coast Rescue
Jubilation replaced fear within the whitewashed walls of a U.S.-led missionary school in battle-divided Ivory Coast on Wednesday, as French troops evacuated the mostly American staff and students.
As CBS News Correspondent Richard Roth reports, flanked by French troops who led their rescue, a convoy of celebrating Americans rolled out of Ivory Coast's second largest city -- safe and grateful.
Children hanging from windows waved American flags and shouted "Vive la France!" — "Long live France!"
For days, nearly 200 residents of the mostly American missionary school — including 160 children ranging in age from 5 to 18 — had been holed up as gunfire erupted outside their walls.
At their mission school for six days, they'd been pinned down by gunfire, while fighting between government soldiers and rebel troops has killed almost 300 people in the former French colony.
As Roth reports, the government's promised to put down the rebels, but violence has been spreading along the country's dividing line between Christians and Muslims. And in the biggest city Abidjan, there were new threats today against foreign embassies.
Despite the fighting and their hasty departure, the children were in good spirits, according to Neil Gilliland, who has functioned as the school's spokesman from Nashville, Tenn., since the school was besieged.
"For many of these kids, it's not the first time they've been evacuated," said a relieved Gilliland.
"They've shown resilience and toughness that you don't often see."
Normally an idyllic scattering of low-slung, pale-colored buildings surrounded by the verdant foliage of Ivory Coast's savannah highlands, the International Christian Academy became a shooting gallery over the past six days.
Fighting between disaffected soldiers and loyalist forces broke out last Thursday, engulfing some of Ivory Coast's main cities, including Bouake, where the missionary compound is located. At least 270 Ivorians have been killed in the carnage.
On Wednesday, about 100 heavily armed French forces punched through to Bouake's outskirts to reach the U.S.-led school and other foreign nationals in the area.
They later led the evacuees toward the main road to their staging area in Ivory Coast's capital, Yamoussoukro, about 40 miles to the south.
Two cargo-planefuls of American forces also arrived at an airstrip near Yamoussoukro on Wednesday. American officials said they hoped to evacuate as many as possible of the 300 Americans living in Bouake.
"Our idea is to get as many out as possible,'' Richard Buangan, a U.S. diplomat helping to coordinate at the staging area, said of the Americans.
U.S. special forces troops spilled out of C-130s at the rescue staging area in Yammoussoukro, 40 miles to the south of the rebel city. Unloading duffel bags and metal boxes, U.S. commandoes set up base on the side of the airport tarmac. The American troops refused comment as they worked.
During the past week, running water to the school compound was cut off, food supplies dwindled, and friends and family members abroad fretted — but kept their faith.
"They know that the Lord wants them to be there," said Janie Hutton, mother of one of the trapped missionaries and a former missionary herself now living in Highlands Ranch, Colo.
"They have a sense that the Lord is protecting them."
The International Christian Academy has educated children of missionaries in West Africa since 1963.
Bouake and the northern opposition stronghold of Korhogo fell into rebel hands during a bloody coup attempt Thursday. The uprising killed at least 270 people in its first days.
Ivory Coast's military and government has pledged to retake both cities. The country's military officers said only concern for civilian casualties was staving off full-scale attack.
Firing broke out again on both sides of the mission around daybreak Wednesday, said Neil Gilliland, speaking by telephone from the affiliated Free Will Baptist Missions in Nashville, Tenn. "Nobody was firing at them, but there was gunfire all around," Gilliland said.
Water and electricity in Bouake had been cut since the weekend, most shops were shuttered, and prices of food and fuel were skyrocketing, they said. Few braved the rebel barricades thrown up across the city.
The insurgency — with a core group of 750-800 ex-soldiers angry over their dismissal from the army for suspected disloyalty — poses Ivory Coast's worst crisis since the country's first-ever coup in 1999 shattered stability in the once-prosperous country.
The uprising has sparked ethnic, political and religious hostilities that divide Ivory Coast's predominantly Christian south and its largely Muslim north.
The mutineers, dismissed from the army for suspected loyalty to ousted former junta leader Gen. Robert Guei, have found at least a measure of support from the Muslim northerners — who complain of being treated as second-class citizens by the southern-based government.