Surviving Gbagbo: Escape from Ivory Coast

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By then, our expected weekend stay had already stretched into the new week. The Novotel manager fretted about food supplies as guests kept trickling in. Some people had been passing by the hotel with nothing more than a handbag when the fighting forced them to take refuge there. A French lawyer wore the same silver evening dress through the entire ordeal. One woman, Alexandra, turned up looking thin and haggard. For three days, she'd waited in her office building for the U.N. to rescue her, but the fighting was too fierce for them to reach her. When she had consumed her only sustenance — two cans of soda and a package of cookies — she ran a block to the hotel. "This place is paradise," Alexandra kept repeating. "This place is paradise."

Paradise almost immediately became hellish. Hours later, Alexandra found herself hiding in a dark cupboard as armed gunmen stormed our hotel, looking for hostages. When the invasion took place, Tim and I and the other journalists abandoned our carefully worked out emergency plan of proceeding to the roof to await the arrival of Licorne — a French word meaning "unicorn," the name for the French army in Ivory Coast. Instead, we all gathered in a room on the top floor. When shots rang out in the corridor, everybody dropped to the floor, crawling behind sofas or under desks. A colleague lifted the bed for his girlfriend to squeeze underneath. A mobile phone rang, piercing our attempt at stillness, the owner's fingers trembling too much to silence it. Someone made the sign of the cross three times. Eventually, a flurry of whispered phone calls resulted in the U.N.'s sending two helicopter gunships to circle overhead. The gunmen fled, taking the hotel manager and four guests with them.

While we were crouched on the floor, expecting the hotel-room door to burst open with gunmen spraying bullets all over, we received a call from a U.K. government official in Abidjan. (Tim and I carry British passports, and I also use a Nigerian one, which makes it easier to get around West Africa.) The official stated what we were learning all too well: "You are potential hostages in a combat zone. Licorne may not be able to evacuate you in time. You need to make your decisions on the basis of that knowledge." He was telling us the plain truth: we were all expendable pawns in the bigger game of two Presidents battling for power. For the next four days, I alternated between convincing myself we were not so important for Gbagbo's militiamen to come looking for us and arguing to myself that we were so unimportant that they would kill us just for sport.

The French army was our constant hope. But it never seemed to be able to break through the fighting around us, and we never knew when the next raid might occur — or if we would survive it. The ring of a phone became a terrifying sound. It might be someone saying, again, that Licorne couldn't yet reach us. Twice when I'd been in the bar downstairs, trying to feign a semblance of normality, frantic phone calls banished the calm: "Gunmen are in the building. Hide!"

I stopped leaving my room; I sat counting the seconds each time Tim disappeared for a cigarette in the corridor. Security cameras relayed his image downstairs — and to any would-be kidnapper drifting through the lobby. One night, the noise of shooting woke me from our cramped makeshift shelter under the bathroom sink. Unable to stop replaying images of gunmen bursting in while we slept, I decided to follow Alexandra's plan. I crawled into the tiny, airless cupboard and eventually fell asleep there.

Mass panic threatened to engulf us all. The 25 foreign journalists in the building were at loggerheads with the fervently pro-Gbagbo hotel staff, and the mutual suspicion eventually boiled over into open hostility. After another scare, the acting manager, close to hysteria, yelled, "The first time the gunmen came, they took money and rich businessmen. I have no more money or businessmen. Next time they come, I'll have only journalists to give them, and I will!"

Finally, on April 7, after days of pleading from us and colleagues overseas, Licorne made it through the chaos in the streets to pick us up. As we were driven to the army base camp, I realized once again we'd glimpsed only a small part of the travails of Abidjan. My driver Ouattara, who had lived his whole life in the area we were driving through, kept making a soft guttural noise as he looked into the streets. He was grieving. A nightmarish version of Abidjan had been imposed on our familiar city. Shops had been systematically looted. The roadside was littered with corpses. The woman I used to buy fried plantains from was splayed on a grassy verge. But for the crimson stains on her clothes, she would have looked peaceful. An old man nearby had been machine-gunned. He was naked from the waist down. Against a backdrop of high-rise buildings, people huddled around single taps to collect water.

At the French military base camp, thousands of displaced people like us slept in tents and on inflatable mattresses. There was no running water in the sweltering heat. The noise of attack helicopters constantly droned overhead. But as far as I was concerned, I was in paradise.

On the evening of April 8, we were evacuated via military plane to Lomé, the capital of Togo. We soon received a call from a friend who informed us that Gbagbo's militiamen were going on a door-to-door search for Nigerians in our old neighborhood in Abidjan. When I was fearfully scanning for the shadow of boots through the Novotel closet I had shuttered myself into, I never imagined I was lucky. But good fortune can come in different guises. Those of us who were at the hotel were rescued.

But Abidjan and Ivory Coast are out of luck. Though Gbagbo may now be under arrest, he has successfully diverted the anger and humiliation of a disempowered generation by unleashing his armed youth gangs and focusing them on weaker targets, releasing a force that will take years to quell. And on the side of his opponents, disturbing reports of pillaging and mass graves in the wake of the rebels' advance show a bloodthirsty lust for vengeance. With each day, the wounds grow deeper.