Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by 10 weeks of violence that has effectively cut the West African nation of Cote d'Ivoire, or Ivory Coast, in two, according to human rights and Africa activists who said Wednesday that the fate of the entire region could be at risk unless peace talks make quick progress.

"This massive displacement is a man-made catastrophe fueled by bigotry," according to Salih Booker, executive director of Washington-based Africa Action. "Unless ECOWAS [the Economic Community of West African States] can deliver a settlement quickly, the future for West Africa will be very bleak indeed."

With signs that a French-monitored ceasefire is breaking down and reports that irregular troops from neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone are infiltrating the western part of the country, the pressure is on ECOWAS mediators in Lome, Togo, who are trying to negotiate a deal between northern-based rebels and the government of President Laurent Gbagbo.

"New fighting could rapidly overwhelm humanitarian capacities and sink Cote D'Ivoire and its neighbors into deeper crisis," according to the Global IDP Project, a Geneva-based group that monitors the plight of internally displaced people worldwide.

More than half a million people are already displaced due to conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the Project said. "Further population movements, both inside Cote d'Ivoire and to neighboring countries, would put a strain on already over-stretched humanitarian organizations and could ultimately wreck the socio-economic development of the entire sub-region."

The stakes are particularly high for West Africa because Cote d'Ivoire, unlike either Liberia or Sierra Leone, has been the sub-region's economic dynamo since independence in the 1960s. Its cocoa and coffee industries, as well as political stability underwritten by its close ties to France, attracted hundreds of thousands of mainly Muslim immigrants from poorer countries over the years. Of the country's 16 million people today, about four million are immigrants or descended from immigrants.

The country began edging towards the present crisis after the death of its historic leader, Felix Houphouet-Boigny in 1993. His successor, Henri Konan Bedie, introduced the concept of "Ivoirite" to deny citizenships to his main political rival, Alassane Ouattara, a Muslim from the northern part of the country who, according to Bedie, was really from Burkina Faso. From that moment, tensions over regional, ethnic, and religious differences have grown steadily.

Bedie was overthrown in the country's first coup d'etat in December, 1999, but his successor, General Robert Guei, also used "Ivoirite" to exclude Ouattara from October 2000 elections. Guei himself, however, was overthrown in the wake of widespread violence after he claimed victory in those elections, leaving Gbagbo as the winning candidate. Like his predecessors, however, Gbagbo has been accused of playing the ethnic and nationality card to maintain his position.

Matters came to a head in mid-September when northern soldiers launched an uprising in which they took control of the country's second largest city, Bouake.

As their forces took over much of the rest of the north in the days that followed, government forces raided northern-dominated shanty towns in southern cities, including Abidjan and Daloa, summarily executing dozens of northerners, arresting hundreds more, and razing entire neighborhoods, according to a report released last week by Human Rights Watch.

The violence resulted in the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of people in both parts of the country, despite a French-monitored truce that took effect in mid-October.

Peace talks in Lome have been bogged down for weeks over rebel demands that Gbagbo resign and new elections be held, and government demands that the rebels disarm. Both sides have accused the other of atrocities against civilians and of recruiting foreign mercenaries and importing arms in preparation for a new round of fighting.

"It is the horrific consequence of defining one's fellow citizens, one's neighbors, as 'others' for purely political reasons," according to Africa Action's Booker. "Bedie started it, Guei continued it, and Gbagbo has seized on it as well. Verbal violence begot physical violence and has now begot generalized violence on all sides, and, as always, it is the poor who suffer most."

Last week, fighting reportedly broke out in the cocoa-rich western part of the country amid claims that a new rebel group with loyalty to General Guei, who was killed in the early hours of the attempted coup in September, was taking control of the region.

Government forces claimed Monday that they had retaken much of the region, but reports that the rebels there included Liberians and Sierra Leoneans provided a "chilling 'deja vu' of the brutal civil wars that wrecked both of those countries," according to the Global IDP Project.