President Returns From Ivory Coast Crisis Meeting

President John Agyekum Kufuor has returned home from Ivory Coast and Togo, where he attended a one-day summit of five leaders in the sub-region on the Ivorian crisis. President Kufuor and leaders of Senegal, Togo, Nigeria and Liberia first met in the northern Togolese city of Kara on how to find a lasting solution to the deepening crisis in Ivory Coast.

After the initial talks in Kara, the leaders flew to Abidjan to confer with the Ivorian leader, Laurent Gbagbo.

Foreign Minister, Hackman Owusu-Agyemang and Defence Minister, Dr. Kwame Addo-Kufuor accompanied the President.

An ECOWAS summit would be held in Dakar, Senegal, on Wednesday to find how to push forward the stalled peace process.

Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, who is also the ECOWAS chairman, said the Contact Group on Cote d'Ivoire would meet and present a report to the full summit. We cannot accept this situation for long any more. We should work out a plan to solve the problem, President Wade said.

He said West African leaders should come out strongly to implement the plan and prove to the world that the sub-region is capable of solving the Ivorian problem.

The ECOWAS efforts come as France sent in more troops into the troubled West African state with orders to intervene in the fighting between rebels and government soldiers.

The main rebel group, the Patriotic Movement of Cote d'Ivoire (MPCI), which occupies more than half the country to the north, has said it is not ready to take on French soldiers in Ivory Coast because they have taken sides in the conflict, but the French have warned that they are ready to fight them if attacked.

The fighting in Ivory Coast is creating a serious refugee situation in Ghana with internally displaced persons and refugees who fled the fighting in Liberia being at risk.

The UN refugee agency says it was considering moving the Liberian refugees to another location inside or outside the country.

The government in Cote d'Ivoire has been fighting rebels who took up arms on September 19 when some 750 soldiers mutinied over demobilization plans.

The mutiny turned into a full-scale coup attempt to oust President Laurent Gbagbo with the MPCI seizing a huge chunk of the country to the north. Initial attempts by the government to dislodge the rebels by taking their headquarters of Bouake failed as they were beaten back.

The situation has become more complicated over the past weeks with the emergence of two new rebel groups - the Popular Movement for the Great West and Movement for Justice and Peace (MJP) - in the west of the country, pledging allegiance to former military ruler, Robert Guei who was killed in the main city of Abidjan on the first day of the mutiny.