Ivory Coast to address peace plan

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast -- Loyalist mobs opposing a French effort to end Ivory Coast's civil war returned to downtown streets Monday, charging foreigners, building checkpoints with burning debris and gathering outside the U.S. and French embassies.\nStun grenades could be heard popping outside the embassies as security forces tried to disperse the crowds.\nPresident Laurent Gbagbo sought to calm those supporters who believe the French-brokered peace deal yields too much to the West African nation's rebels.\n"I ask them to go home. I ask them to go to work," the president said Monday on state TV.\nGbagbo planned to brief the nation Monday night on the peace plan.\nThe accord reached Friday in Paris calls for power-sharing between Gbagbo's government and the rebels behind a 4-month-old insurgency in the world's largest cocoa-producing nation. That power-sharing would stay in place until 2005 elections.\nOn Sunday, government supporters went on a rampage through the city of 3 million, laying siege to France's embassy and army base and looting French-affiliated businesses and agencies.\nFrench forces in the former French colony responded with tear gas, stun grenades and water cannon. Gbagbo urged them to accept the French deal.\nOn Monday, mobs of young men returned to Abidjan's streets, waving sticks and charging the few foreigners who ventured out. The mobs manned makeshift checkpoints thrown together from burning car tires and wood and the hulks of cars.\nYouth movement leader Ble Goude said Monday he was trying to postpone what he said would be a "peaceful" afternoon demonstration at the U.S. Embassy, but said the large numbers of protesters already out were proving hard to manage.\nFervent pro-government protesters hope to persuade Washington to come out against the peace deal. However, the United States already has said it supports the peace plan and has urged all sides to abide by it.\nThe U.S. Embassy closed Monday as what it called a precaution in the wake of the weekend's rioting, but embassy officials expected no violence if Monday's march took place, a spokeswoman said.\n"This is not anything against America, not anti-American," spokeswoman Erghibe Boyd said. "On the contrary, they want to ask America to intervene."\nThe violence led Gbagbo to cut short his trip to Paris and return late Sunday to Abidjan. Hundreds broke military curfew for a second night to line the route of the presidential motorcade and welcome him.\nWitnesses at the airport awaiting the president's arrival reported hearing shots and smelling tear gas around midnight from the direction of the main French army base, where some protesters reportedly lingered. There was no immediate word from French military officials.