Women in the Ivory Coast (Courtesy of Creative Commons)

Protesters were shot by riot police loyal to the nation’s strongman, Laurent Gbagbo.

Gbagbo refused to give up power after losing a presidential election last November to Alassane Ouattara, the internationally recognized winner.

Since the election, nearly 400 people have died, according to the United Nations. That figure includes the seven female protestors who were shot last week in the Abobo district of Abidjan by Gbagbo’s security forces.

In protest of those deaths, hundred of women in Treichville, a neighborhood near downtown Abidjan, marched Tuesday in celebration of International Women’s Day, wearing T-shirts with Ouattara’s portrait. At the end of the march many of the neighborhood youth formed a security cordon around the women, according to The New York Times.

The women walked what was meant to be the final stretch of the protest, when riot police launched tear-gas canisters and fired into the crowd.

The shootings are being blamed on rogue army officers, according to the BBC.

The violence against the all-women march last week led to an international outcry.

"Gbagbo and his forces have shown a callous disregard for human life," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said to The Guardian.

The violence was called "a deplorable and cowardly act against unarmed protesters, calling for the results of the presidential elections to be respected" by Britain’s minister for Africa, Henry Bellingham in The Guardian.

Members of last week’s protest were armed only with tree branches symbolizing peace.

After the violence last week, nearly 200,000 people have fled Abobo, the UN peacekeeping mission told The Guardian.

Fighting also spread to the western portion of the Ivory Coast, where rebels allied with Ouattara seized a 30-mile corridor along the border shared with Liberia.

Even though Ouattara was elected in November, he has spent his term in a resort hotel under United Nations protection and was going to leave for the first time Tuesday night, according to MSNBC.

Ouattara and Gbagbo were invited to Ethiopia to hear the verdict of the African Union’s Peace and Security Council on the crisis and Ouattara’s calls to oust Gbagbo.

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