ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast - In an act of bold defiance, thousands of women converged Tuesday on the bloodstained pavement where seven of their sisters fell last week, even as the army backing this country's rogue leader killed four more civilians.
The brutal slayings last week occurred when soldiers in armored personnel carriers opened fire on a crowd of female demonstrators who were armed with nothing more than tree branches, symbolizing peace.
The attack has further galvanized the international community against strongman Laurent Gbagbo, who has refused to yield power three months after being declared the loser of his country's election.
The women had tried to march every day since the attack Thursday only to lose their nerve in the face of an army that has shown no restraint, including by breaking the long-standing code that has always protected women. They refused to be cowed on Tuesday, however, because it was International Women's Day.
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Hours after several hundred women marched in Treichville, a downtown neighborhood, the army burst in and killed at least four civilians. Reporters saw the bodies of three men and one women on the blood-splattered floor of a clinic.
Thousands of other women demonstrating near the site of last week's killings in the Abobo district were protected by men who had formed a wall across the mouth of a freeway by lining cars end-to-end.
Mariam Bamba, 32, picked up a limp branch Tuesday next to one of the bloodstains on pavement. "This leaf is all they were carrying," she said of the victims.
The seven women are just a fraction of the more than 400 people killed in the three months since this country's disputed election. Because they were unarmed women, their deaths have prompted international condemnation, including from the U.S. State Department which called Gbagbo "morally bankrupt."
A video obtained by The Associated Press shows the joyful crowd blowing whistles and waving branches moments before the women are mowed down.
The women marching Tuesday wore T-shirts bearing the smiling portrait of 'ADO' - Alassane Dramane Ouattara, the democratically elected president who has been prevented from governing the country by Gbagbo. He has spent the first three months of his term inside a resort hotel under day-and-night United Nations protection, and was to leave the grounds for the first time Tuesday night at the invitation of the African Union.
