IVORY COAST’S DEMOCRATICALLY elected leader said his forces will starve out the entrenched strongman Laurent Gbagbo who remains holed up underground at the presidential residence in the capital of Abidjan.

Alassane Ouattara said that he will also focus on normalising life in this corpse-strewn, terrorised city as the UN said more than 100 bodies have been found in the last 24 hours, and some of the victims had been burned alive.

As the military standoff dragged on in Abidjan, there were new concerns Friday about tensions erupting into deadly violence in the country’s west.

The International Rescue Committee is warning that chaos is permeating this West African nation once split in two by a 2002-2003 civil war, citing an “explosive mix of political, economic and ethnic tension.”

Alassane Ouattara, the internationally recognized winner of November elections, said on TV late Thursday that his forces are setting up a security perimeter around the presidential compound where Laurent Gbagbo is staying with his family.

Ouattara said the goal is to wait for Gbagbo, who insists he won the vote, to run out of food and water.

Ouattara said his troops will work to secure Abidjan, where people have hidden inside their homes this week amid heavy fighting between troops loyal to Ouattara and those who are with Gbagbo.

The streets of Ivory Coast’s biggest city and commercial center were deserted on Friday. Military vehicles had to negotiate around bodies lying in the streets. An untold number of fighters and civilians have been killed in Abidjan in the past week.

UN and French forces have been attacking Gbagbo’s weapons arsenal, which has been used against civilians during the four-month-long political standoff.

In his speech, Ouattara also sought to jump-start the economy of the world’s largest cocoa producer, calling for banks to reopen Monday and for the European Union to lift sanctions so that cocoa exports can resume, even as UN and French forces continue evacuating thousands of foreigners from Abidjan neighborhoods to guarded camps.

The U.N. said peacekeepers and human rights officials discovered about 60 bodies in the western town of Guiglo.

Another 40 corpses were found lying the street in Blolequin, and many of them had been shot.

Fifteen other bodies were found in Duekoue, where violence already has left at least 229 dead in recent weeks.

Mercenaries from neighboring Liberia appear to have committed some of the killings according to a report.

Liberia is still recovering from its own devastating civil war and human rights groups have expressed concern that Liberian ex-combatants were going to Ivory Coast as hired guns.

On Thursday, Gbagbo continued to insist he’d won the elections and stressed he would never leave the West African country he has ruled for the past 10 years. Even before the November elections, he had overstayed his mandate by five years by continually postponing the vote.

His adviser Toussaint Alain said:

It’s a question of principle. President Gbagbo is not a monarch. He is not a king. He is not an emperor. He is a president elected by his people.

Gbagbo was declared the loser both by his country’s electoral body and by international observers including the United Nations.

After four months of diplomacy, Ouattara gave the go-ahead for a military intervention led by fighters from a former rebel group. UN and French forces joined the effort this week.

Ouattara’s forces stormed the gates of Gbagbo’s home on Wednesday. But the group has stopped short of killing the entrenched leader, a move that could stoke the rage of his supporters.

Some 46 percent of Ivorians voted for Gbagbo.

- AP