(Adds comment from French defence ministry, details) By Loucoumane Coulibaly ABIDJAN, March 22 (Reuters) - France will send home about 500 of its 3,500 peacekeepers in Ivory Coast over the next two months following a peace agreement between the country's warring factions, French officials said on Thursday. The French forces back up more than 7,000 U.N. troops who police a buffer zone separating the West African state's rebel-held north from the government-run south. President Laurent Gbagbo and rebel leader Guillaume Soro signed a peace deal in neighbouring Burkina Faso on March 4 which called for U.N. and French peacekeepers to dismantle the buffer zone. "It's a technical adaptation taking into account the positive evolution in Ivory Coast's security situation," Lieutenant Colonel Christian Rascle told reporters at the headquarters of the U.N. mission in the main city Abidjan. "I think it should happen within two months ... (The force) should go down to less than 3,000 men," he said. Rascle said peacekeepers would be withdrawn from the rebel-held western town of Man and redeployed to the centre of the former French colony, and troops no longer needed would be sent back to France. France deployed troops shortly after the start of a brief 2002-2003 civil war but has been keen to scale back costly peacekeeping commitments in what was once a prosperous haven of stability in turbulent West Africa. Their mission would still remain the same despite the reduction, French army spokesman Christophe Prazuck said. "It is still about having a rapid reaction force to back up the U.N. mission. It is still about being able to bring assistance to our nationals," he told a briefing in Paris. CALM PREVAILS The world's top cocoa producer has remained divided since the war ended and a string of foreign-brokered deals have foundered as the two sides bicker over details of their implementation. The latest accord, brokered by Burkina Faso's President Blaise Compaore and reached after nearly a month of talks, has been hailed as the first "home-grown" peace plan on which Gbagbo and Soro appear to agree. It envisages a line of observation posts staffed by "impartial forces" running through the centre of the current buffer zone which would be halved in number every two months. France has welcomed the deal, while the interim head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission said he believes it could succeed because all parties have backed it. The African Union has urged the U.N. to scale back its forces following the agreement. French defence ministry spokesman Jean-Francois Bureau said the French force was returning to the size it was before November 2004, when additional soldiers flew in to help evacuate thousands of French nationals during violent clashes in Abidjan. "Today we are in a situation where a calm, albeit a precarious one, prevails across the country, which allows us to return to the situation we were in before November 2004," he told a weekly briefing in Paris. (Additional reporting by Peter Murphy in Abidjan and Francois Murphy in Paris)
