Ivory Coast Soldiers Mutiny, Blockading a City<br />By REUTERSMAY 13, 2017<br />ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — Mutinous soldiers in Ivory Coast shot three people on Saturday<br />and cut off access to the second-largest city, Bouaké, as a revolt escalated over demands for bonus payments.<br />They stepped up the pressure on Saturday, blocking roads out of Bouaké, the center of January’s uprising,<br />and protesting in several other locations, including the northern city of Korhogo, where two men on a motorcycle were shot in the legs as they tried to force their way through a roadblock set up by the mutineers.<br />The government has already paid 8,400 soldiers — most of them former rebels who helped lift President Alassane Ouattara<br />to power — bonuses of 5 million francs each, or about $8,400, as part of a deal to end the January mutiny.<br />Seydou Kone, a spokesman for the mutineers, said the former rebels, who went through a disarmament program after the country’s<br />2011 civil war, were planning their own protest, as they did earlier in the week, and his men had opened fire to stop them.<br />Mutineers also took control of the northern city of Odienné<br />and there was sporadic gunfire in Daloa, the main cocoa growing hub in southwestern Ivory Coast and the world’s top producer of the crop.<br />The revolt began in Bouaké early on Friday and spread quickly, following a pattern similar<br />to a mutiny by the same group in January that paralyzed parts of Ivory Coast.
