ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast – France, America, and other nations launched one of the largest evacuations of Africa’s post-independence era yesterday, requisitioning commercial jets to fly out thousands of foreigners following attacks on civilians and peacekeeping troops.

French soldiers in boats plucked some of their trapped citizens from the banks of Abidjan’s lagoons.

Long convoys sent out by the American Embassy and other nations rounded up foreigners from their homes for evacuation as Ivory Coast’s state TV alternately appealed for calm and for a mass uprising against the French, the country’s former colonial rulers.

Roscoa Howard and about 20 other Americans arrived in Accra, capital of neighboring Ghana, on a Canada-organized evacuation flight Wednesday night. Howard, a Washington D.C. resident, had come to Abidjan on a church trip.

When gunfire erupted Saturday, “we had to fly out of hotel room. …At that point our lives were in danger,” he said. “It was traumatizing, and I’ll continue to pray for that country.”

More Americans are expected in Ghana today. Only a few hundred Americans remain in Ivory Coast, many of them missionaries and aid workers.

By late afternoon, much of Ivory Coast’s largest city was quiet – the first break from violence since Saturday.

President Chirac sternly demanded that President Gbagbo rein in thousands of hard-line supporters, whose looting and arson attacks often have failed to discriminate among foreigners.

Ivory Coast’s “government is pushing to kill white people – not just the French, all white people,” said Marie Noelle Mion, rescued in a wooden boat at daybreak and waiting with hundreds of others at Abidjan’s airport, some camped in tents on the floor of the terminal.

The mayhem, checked only intermittently by Mr. Gbagbo’s government, has been condemned by other African leaders and has drawn moves toward U.N. sanctions. It threatens lasting harm to the economy and stability of Ivory Coast, the world’s top cocoa producer and once West Africa’s most peaceful and prosperous nation.

Violence erupted Saturday when Ivory Coast warplanes killed nine French peacekeepers and an American aid worker in an air strike on the rebel held north in three days of government air attacks that violated a more than year-old cease-fire in the country’s civil war. France wiped out the nation’s new air force on the tarmac within hours.