Word: yamoussoukro
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...months of fighting between the administration of President Laurent Gbagbo and rebel groups. The main opposition group, called the Rally for Republicans, and three rebel factions that control the country's north and parts of the west, said that security concerns prevented them from traveling to the capital, Yamoussoukro. Nuclear Fears NORTH KOREA Tensions over Pyongyang's nuclear program remained high as the U.S. resumed spy-plane flights near North Korea and announced that the country could be only months away from producing weapons-grade uranium. Amid concerns that Pyongyang was preparing to test a ballistic missile capable of reaching...
...turned into a civil war. The children, including 100 Americans, were trapped for a week inside their boarding school in the country's second-biggest city, Bouake, by heavy fighting between government and rebel troops. French soldiers drove the children to their base at an airport near the capital, Yamoussoukro, 65 km to the south. U.S. special forces in C-130 cargo planes had arrived hours earlier to evacuate the children and other Westerners to neighboring Ghana. MIDDLE EAST Siege of Ramallah Israel defied U.S. criticism and a U.N. resolution calling for an immediate end to its siege of Yasser...
...symbol of the Ivory Coast's profound cultural disjunction is a huge edifice that rises from flat green fields at Yamoussoukro, Houphouet's native village: the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, which cost some $175 million, a gesture of lifeless grandiosity. Amid the grazing goats and the lagoons, the basilica looks like an ill-shapen mushroom, massive from a distance and strangely sterile up close. Ismail Serageldin, director of the technical department at the World Bank, observed during a recent Cairo lecture dealing with culture shock that there were "certain symbols of a society dissociated from its own people...
When Pope John Paul II concludes his 10-day tour of Africa this week with a stop in the Ivory Coast to visit the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace in Yamoussoukro, he will be consecrating the biggest church on the African continent. But critics of the structure, which cost more than $200 million, charge that the Pope will also be giving his blessing to the monumental extravagance of Ivorian President Felix Houphouet-Boigny. In response to questions about where the funds came from, the President insists that he used his own fortune to finance the basilica...
Despite the overall similarity, the Yamoussoukro structure is not really an enlarged replica of St. Peter's. Designed by architect Pierre Fakhoury, 45, an Ivory Coaster of Lebanese ancestry, the basilica has no paintings, statues, wooden paneling, tapestries or carvings. Instead, the building, buttressed by 60 interior columns, serves as a gallery for 36 immense, hand-blown stained- glass windows. In a brilliant conception, hundreds of colors splash across the nave in patterns that change throughout the day. "It is the church of light," says a mason at the site, "the light of God." The basilica, which is entered from...