Nearly 200 killed in Ivory Coast violence

Nearly 200 people have been killed in post-election violence in Ivory Coast, a U.S. has told a meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva.

"We have credible reports that almost 200 people may have already been killed, with dozens more tortured or mistreated, and others have been snatched from their homes in the middle of the night," U.S. ambassador Betty E. King said.

Forces loyal to incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo are in a tense standoff with supporters of the internationally recognized winner of last month's election, Alassane Ouattara.

Gbagbo, 64, has rejected calls from the U.N., the U.S. and the African Union to step down after the electoral commission said Ouattara won 54.1 percent of the vote in the Nov. 28 presidential runoff. Ouattara, 68, is attempting to run the country from the Golf Hotel in downtown Abidjan.

Both men have hardened their positions amid increasing accounts of political killings and abductions, writes GlobalPost's Marco Chown Oved, and UN experts say Ivory Coast is edging closer to a return to the civil war that split the country in 2002.

The United States is looking at ways to strengthen the 9,000 U.N. troops currently in Ivory Coast and themselves a target of forces loyal to Gbagbo.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday expressed concern for the fate of the peacekeepers protecting Ouattara, and U.N. personnel claim to have been the target of gunfire and intimidation in their homes.

The U.S. is discussing ways to increase pressure on Gbagbo with neighboring African countries and France, the former colonial power, said U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley in Washington on Wednesday.

But Gbagbo is defiant. "I'm the president of Ivory Coast,” he said on state broadcasting Tuesday night in his first address to the nation since he had himself sworn in as president earlier this month.

France on Wednesday urged its citizens to leave Ivory Coast after the U.N. warned the former French colony in West Africa faced "a real risk" of return to civil war.

The State Department has already recalled its personnel.