ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast  At the Marcory market, iron shutters are pulled down tight over storefronts for block after block. In the Koumassi neighborhood, idle men drift up to a rare open vendor, cadging a lone cigarette. Fish and grain stalls on the road into another area, Abobo, are deserted, save the rats scurrying in a facing gutter. Lines of women, fleeing the violence in a single-file exodus, balance possessions on their heads and then scatter at the sound of nearby gunfire.

Abidjan, once West Africa’s most important city, is collapsing under the weight of Laurent Gbagbo’s armed fight to stay in power, three months after losing a presidential election.

Businesses are shutting, employees are being laid off by the dozen and families complain of going without meals. Traffic is minimal, and roadblocks operated by rock-wielding, pro-Gbagbo youth groups are everywhere. Amid the torrent of international sanctions against him, banks have closed, all A.T.M.’s have shut down and cash is rarer by the day.

But still Mr. Gbagbo refuses to yield. If anything, the world’s shift of focus to the uprisings in the Arab world appears to have emboldened him. Bloody incursions continue into neighborhoods that support the opposition. Xenophobic language airs nightly on the state television channel and from the mouths of government officials  “France, the United States and the United Nations are provoking civil war in Ivory Coast,” a Gbagbo spokesman, Alain Toussaint, said in a recent interview. And on Monday, Mr. Gbagbo’s forces fired on United Nations inspectors seeking to determine whether his government had imported attack helicopters from Belarus in violation of an arms embargo.