The French Embassy in Ivory Coast announced on Monday that Ivory Coast security forces had arrested incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo, after major fighting that had torn apart the city of Abidjan since March 31. TIME reporter Monica Mark was caught up in the chaos. This is her report of a week of surviving the siege.
I should really have known better. But I’d lived in Ivory Coast for two years, working as a journalist out of Abidjan, as has my boyfriend Tim Cocks, a reporter for Reuters, and we were comfortable and perhaps too complacent. We certainly knew there was trouble ahead but we thought the war would be over quickly. But now, after one of the longest weeks of my life, I should have realized the reckoning was going to be bloody. The signs were everywhere.
It should have been evident from the stubbornness of Laurent Gbagbo. After delaying elections for five year delays, the incumbent president lost a United Nations certified run-off in November 2010 to his challenger, Alassane Ouattara. Gbagbo refused to relinquish power and, simultaneously, the killings began. In Abidjan, the commercial capital of the country and the fount of political power, hundreds of Ouattara
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