BOUAKE—Renegade soldiers in Ivory Coast on Monday rejected a proposed deal to end their mutiny over unpaid bonuses just minutes after the defense minister announced on state-owned television that an agreement had been reached.
President Alassane Ouattara’s government has been trying to restore order for four days after 8,400 mutineers took control of the second-biggest city, Bouake, and spread their revolt to cities and towns across the country.
Heavy gunfire on Monday paralyzed much of Abidjan, the commercial capital, and the western port city of San Pedro, echoing another mutiny earlier in the year and further threatening Ivory Coast’s emergence from a 2011 civil war as one of the world’s fastest growing economies.
Ivory Coast is the world’s largest producer of cocoa and London futures climbed to a five-week high on Monday due to the unrest.
Ouattara, 75, secured a second term in a landslide victory in 2015, but has struggled to heal deep divisions that have made the country’s own military, cobbled together from rival rebel and loyalist factions, its greatest security threat.
