I. Torture, Mistreatment, Inhuman Conditions at the Adjamé Military Police Camp

Even now, I haven’t found myself. I wake up at night and think that I’m still in the cell, that I’m still being questioned and beaten.

—Soldier detained at Adjamé military police camp, August 2012[54]

In the aftermath of the early August attacks, in particular the August 6 attack on the Akouédo military camp, Ivorian security forces arrested hundreds of young men alleged to have been involved in or have knowledge about the attacks. More than 100 of those arrested were detained at the Adjamé military police base, under the command of the former Forces Nouvelles commander Koné Zakaria.[55] The military police was reactivated by President Ouattara in December 2011 and tasked primarily with tracking down “fake” members of the Republican Forces—in effect, fighters who were not to be incorporated into the army but yet remained armed and active in security functions.[56] While the military police base may have been an appropriate place to question and detain soldiers believed to have been involved in the attacks,[57] many of those held there were civilians—in contravention of Ivorian and international law.

Human Rights Watch interviewed eight former detainees at the military police camp, five of whom provided detailed evidence suggesting that they had been victims of torture. They described how military personnel subjected them to beatings, flogging, and other extreme forms of physical mistreatment generally with the purpose of demanding answers to questions about the location of guns or alleged suspects, or in order to pressure the detainee to sign a confession of involvement in an attack against state security. Many former detainees described experiencing severe physical injuries, including one who, a week after his release, continued to have blood in his urine from the beatings. They also described seeing other detainees come back to the cell with bruised faces, severe swelling, and open wounds.

Detainees at the military police camp also described suffering grossly inadequate detention conditions, including severe overcrowding, near complete denial of food and water, and humiliating practices like being placed in a room filled with excrement. Many were forced to pay the soldiers guarding them to secure their release.

The former detainees interviewed by Human Rights Watch were all young men from ethnic groups perceived to support Laurent Gbagbo. They described their detention rooms as being full with people from the same ethnic groups, including the Bété, Guéré, Ebrié, Oubi, and Adioukrou—though, if the government is correct in stating that pro-Gbagbo militants carried out the attacks, the ethnic breakdown of detainees is perhaps unsurprising. According to former detainees as well as representatives from international organizations who have monitored the government’s response to the August attacks, some of those arrested were picked up in the immediate aftermath of the specific attacks, as security forces pursued the attackers. Others were arrested based on some measure of evidence, for example a neighbor saying that the person had housed militiamen. Finally, many young men were picked up during mass arrests in areas with a concentration of perceived Gbagbo supporters (the mass arrests will be discussed in Chapter II).

Once in detention at the military police base in Adjamé, many individuals were held for extended periods without being charged or appearing before a judge. Ivorian law stipulates that a civilian should be charged or released within 48 hours of being arrested or detained.[58] Military personnel are likewise to be brought before the competent judicial authority within 48 hours.[59] Yet one former detainee at the Adjamé camp was held and routinely beaten for two weeks before being released without charges; another was held and beaten for more than 20 days before being released without charges. Detentions of at least a week without being charged or appearing before a judge were common.

Human Rights Watch wrote the Ivorian government on October 8 requesting an official response to the main findings from our field work (see Annex I). In responding to a question on prolonged detention without appearing before a judge, Ivorian Minister of Human Rights and Public Liberties Gnénéma Coulibaly wrote:

The slowness documented in the judicial procedures predates the current government. For several decades there has been an obstruction of the courts, too much rigidity in the Penal Code in the face of evolutions in Ivorian society, and, above all, a lack of resources given to judges—all of which has made it difficult, at present, to strictly respect the period for appearing before a judge for all detainees.

Moreover, the gravity of the crimes that those arrested have been implicated in demands that the investigations are done thoroughly, which requires some time.[60]

Human Rights Watch agrees that previous governments in Côte d’Ivoire likewise failed to respect Ivorian and international human rights law regarding detainees’ right to a prompt appearance before a judge in order to hear the charges against them. However, abuses that occurred under the Gbagbo government should be avoided, not replicated, in restoring the rule of law. The minister’s response also seems to overstate the difficulty of meeting this requirement. It does not demand a trial within 48 hours, but merely that there should be sufficient evidence to keep a person in detention and that the person be informed of the charges against him or her. People are innocent until proven guilty under Ivorian and human rights law, and should not be held in confinement when authorities are unable to gather sufficient evidence linking the person to a crime grave enough to warrant pre-trial detention. The apparent lack of individualized evidence that authorities relied on during the mass roundups makes this all the more urgent.

Mr. Coulibaly also responded to a question on the legal basis for detaining civilians in military camps, including the Adjamé military police camp and two other military camps discussed in Chapter II of this report. The minister justified the practice in part on account of prison escapes that had occurred at two of the main prison facilities in and around Abidjan prior to and during the period of the August attacks. He continued:

In the face of these events, although the law states that preventative detentions are to occur in prisons, it was inconceivable to detain individuals suspected of involvement in attacks against state security without taking a minimum of precautions. The military sites were at that point the most secure places to avoid likely escapes.

In addition, it is important to note that we are not speaking of ordinary citizens, but combatants and militiamen who do not hesitate to kill Ivorian soldiers in cold blood. Whatever the cause, the Ivorian government is working to find solutions to these problems by renovating the prisons.[61]

Human Rights Watch welcomes the government’s commitment to renovate the prisons and use them as the sole detention sites going forward, as stipulated under Ivorian law. However, Human Rights Watch is concerned with the rest of the government’s response to the question on detaining civilians in military camps. Although a serious security threat may exist, this is not a situation of armed conflict and international humanitarian law does not apply—meaning that normal rules on the use of force in policing situations apply, and the attackers cannot be considered “combatants” under humanitarian law.

Moreover, as described above and detailed more fully in the next chapter, the vast majority of individuals detained were arrested in mass sweeps—neither in hot pursuit after attacks nor on the basis of individualized suspicion connecting a person to specific attacks. Human Rights Watch is concerned by the government’s apparent characterization of all the dozens of young men rounded up en masse in August as combatants or militiamen. This characterization supports the contention of pro-Gbagbo youth that they are treated as guilty, or as militiamen, until proven otherwise, rather than the other way around.

Regarding the minister’s assertion that prison escapes made military camps necessary as detention sites, it is disingenuous at best to pretend that all of those detained in August were high-profile suspects. The vast majority of former detainees interviewed by Human Rights Watch merely belonged to ethnic groups perceived as pro-Gbagbo and found themselves in the wrong place—namely Yopougon neighborhood—at the wrong time. The fact that hundreds of these young men were released further calls into question the minister’s statement that it was “inconceivable” to hold them in legally authorized detention sites. For those detained less than 48 hours, police or gendarme stations would have worked adequately; for those detained longer, the main Abidjan prison continued to house detainees during this period. More fundamentally, the military has no role under Ivorian law in arresting, questioning, or detaining civilians.

Torture and Inhuman Treatment

Of particular concern at the Adjamé military police base was the physical mistreatment of detainees that, in some cases, appeared to reach the level of torture. Torture is defined under the Convention against Torture as:

any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed … when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.[62]

In the cases documented by Human Rights Watch, severe physical pain appeared to be inflicted by state agents, namely military personnel, in order to pressure people into a confession or to divulge information about the location of weapons. Torture did not appear to be systematic, as other detainees described only minimal physical abuse. However, the cases documented by Human Rights Watch raise concerns about the total number of potential victims.

Three of the five torture victims interviewed by Human Rights Watch were civilians who, according to Ivorian and international law, should not be detained at the military camp. A 36-year-old civilian described his arrest and detention at the Adjamé military camp, which included the infliction of severe physical pain in an attempt to extract information:

Several weeks ago [around August 20], I was leaving Adzopé around 7:30 p.m. It was too late to take a minibus, so I got aboard a big [commercial transport] truck. When passing through the corridor of Anyama to enter N’Dotré, the FRCI had a checkpoint there and stopped the truck. They said that I was a militiaman, that’s why I was in a transport truck and not a minibus or Gbaka. They immediately started hitting me, saying that I was hiding a gun…. They put me in a 4x4 and took me to the Adjamé military base, [Koné] Zakaria’s [the head of the military police] base. They put me in a cell there. There were four rooms that I saw where they were holding people, but it’s a big camp, there could have been other cells. We were about 20 in each of those cells….

I was there for a week, and they questioned me every day but the last one. Each day they pulled me out and took me to another room for questioning. They would say, “We know you’re a militiaman, and that you’re hiding guns in the bush. You’re trying to destroy the country. Where are your guns?” They’d demand this over and over, “Where are your guns hidden?” And when I’d say that I didn’t know, that I didn’t have any guns, they’d strike me. They’d strike me over and over, hard. “Where are the guns?” “I don’t own a gun, I’ve never held a gun.” Whack! They’d wrap their belt around their hand and hit me in the head, the face, the side. The metal [ring] of the belt was on the end they hit you with, [I think] to inflict the most pain. It wore me out…. I had a lot of wounds, from when they’d strike you just right with the metal ring. Other people in my cell also had wounds—people would come back with swollen faces, bleeding from open wounds. The interrogations would last about 30 minutes, and after enough times of saying you didn’t know anything, and getting hit, they’d take you back to the cell.

After a week of beating me, they said that I had to pay 100,000 CFA ($200) or I would be sent elsewhere and killed. I used one of their phones to call my parents, who brought the money to get me out.[63]

Another civilian detainee informed Human Rights Watch that he suffered similar physical mistreatment as his military interrogators demanded he provide information about the whereabouts of specific individuals the interrogators alleged to have been involved in carrying out or supporting the attacks. He also described hearing fellow detainees scream out in pain from nearby interrogation rooms, wondering if others suffered even worse cruelty.[64]

Two of the torture victims interviewed by Human Rights Watch were soldiers still formally in the Ivorian military, but who were from typically pro-Gbagbo ethnic groups and had remained in Gbagbo’s security forces (often called ex-FANCI, for the former army name, Forces Armées Nationales de Côte d’Ivoire) during the post-election crisis. Both were arrested within two days of the Akouédo attack. Although specific details have been omitted to protect his identity, one such soldier, who appeared severely distressed when interviewed by Human Rights Watch several days after his release, described:

I was beaten repeatedly. They were trying to get me to sign a confession, saying that I [had played a role in the attacks]. They would put the paper in front of me, telling me to sign it. And when I refused, they’d beat me. They beat me with clubs, with their belts, with fists…. A couple days they were particularly rough. During one questioning, one guy took the back of his Kalash[nikov] and kept slamming it into my [leg bone]. It hurt so bad that I thought it was broken…. A couple of them would say things like, “You the old military men, we’re going to be finished with all of you.”

We were held in a little building inside the camp without any light. There was just a small hole we could see out. People were sleeping on top of each other, or sitting up because there wasn’t room…. We got a small thing of bread every two days. And they would toss in a couple one-and-a-half liter bottles of water, and all of us in the room—at least 50 people—would have to share it. We got so hungry and thirsty…. One day we saw the Red Cross come. We could see their people, but they weren’t allowed to speak to us.

Later it was the gendarmes who questioned me. They didn’t rough you up like [the FRCI], they just asked questions. [I think] they decided I wasn’t involved, because the questioning stopped after a couple days with them. But I did more than three weeks in detention before being released.

I became delirious from the beatings, the lack of food and water…. Even now, I haven’t found myself. I wake up at night and think that I’m still in the cell, that I’m still being questioned and beaten. I bleed sometimes when I [go to the bathroom]. And the worst wounds are inside, in my head…. I don’t know what to do, I’m free now, but I feel like I could be picked up again at any moment. All of us who aren’t ex-FN [Forces Nouvelles], who are from certain [perceived pro-Gbagbo] ethnic groups, that’s who they’re going after. They don’t trust us.[65]

Of those detained in the same ad hoc cell as the soldier, he said there were both civilians and military men—but that the civilians were more numerous than the military. He indicated that some people were taken out for questioning more than others and that he was one of the most frequently questioned. He described other detainees coming back after questioning with bruised faces, swelling throughout their body, and in extreme pain.[66]

Another soldier who had been in Gbagbo’s military during the war described similar physical mistreatment following his arrest in the days after the Akouédo attack. Moreover, he said that during several interrogations the military police in charge of his questioning threatened to rape and kill his wife if he did not confess to supporting those trying to attack Côte d’Ivoire. He was ultimately released after more than 10 days in detention.[67]

In addition to the severe physical abuse, several detainees described inhuman and degrading conditions of confinement. A civilian described how soldiers used a specific cell to further punish certain detainees:

One of the cells was used for people to piss and shit. It was the only room with a hole for a toilet, but there were so many of us that soon the whole room was just covered with urine and shit. One day, I guess [the soldiers who interrogated me] decided they didn’t like my answers. I think it was the second day. At the end of questioning, they put me in the toilet room; there were a couple other people in there already. The smell was horrible, and I had open wounds from being beaten. You couldn’t sit anywhere without being in [excrement]…. They did this to people every day, it only happened to me once. If they weren’t happy with your answers, or thought you were acting up, they threw you in the shit room for hours, sometimes all night…. By the time I was released, I’d developed these skin infections [seen by Human Rights Watch, though the cause could not be confirmed] on my arm and leg.[68]

Human Rights Watch also interviewed several family members of people who had been held at the Adjamé military camp prior to a transfer to another detention facility. The family members had been able to speak with the detainee at a new facility (either the Plateau police station or the main Abidjan prison, known as MACA), and reported descriptions of severe physical abuse prior to the transfer.[69] A sister who had recently visited her brother at the MACA reported that he remained bruised and swollen in the face, saying he described being struck repeatedly above the ear with the back of soldiers’ guns. She told Human Rights Watch that her brother had spent several days at the MACA infirmary to recover from his mistreatment.[70] Human Rights Watch was not able to interview the victim directly to confirm the story of abuse and where it took place, as he remained in detention.

Other detainees at the military police camp did not report torture. Human Rights Watch interviewed three former detainees at the military camp who described experiencing only minimal physical abuse. They were forced to pay money for their release, similar to what is described in the following chapter on mass arrests.

The commander of the military police and the military camp in Adjamé is Koné Zakaria—a longtime Forces Nouvelles commander and one of the most powerful military leaders in Côte d’Ivoire. None of the former detainees interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that Zakaria himself was involved in his mistreatment. Only one of the detainees said that they ever saw Zakaria personally at the camp, and it was through an eyehole in the detainee’s cell.[71] However, even if not directly overseeing torture and other inhuman treatment at the Adjamé military camp, Zakaria is the commander in charge of the camp and of the soldiers in his military police unit who are based at the camp. Moreover, given the large number of detainees held at his camp, the length of some people’s detention there, and the pervasive nature of the abuses, it is likely that Zakaria knew or should have known about the mistreatment. Military commanders have a responsibility to take reasonable and necessary steps to prevent abuses by those under their command and to punish those responsible for abuses.[72]

In addition, Human Rights Watch received credible information about recent cases of torture against detainees held in a Republican Forces military base in San Pedro, a town in southwestern Côte d’Ivoire about 350 kilometers from Abidjan.[73] On October 4, the Associated Press reported that soldiers at the San Pedro military camp had subjected at least four civilian detainees to electric shock, finding that “long wires were attached to their feet, midsections and necks before electrical shocks were administered.”[74] The Associated Press described the beating of detainees and inhuman conditions more generally in the camp.[75]

As a State Party to the Convention against Torture, Côte d’Ivoire has a responsibility to take all necessary measures to prevent torture within its territory.[76] The Convention makes clear that “[n]o exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”[77]

Minister Coulibaly’s response to Human Rights Watch addressed the findings of torture:

In regards to the allegations of torture, be assured that the authors of these crimes, if they are identified, will be brought to justice…. President Ouattara has never wavered in affirming his strong will to fight against impunity, and this has been seen in recent days with the investigation into soldiers in the Republican Forces suspected of having participated in the killings that happened at Nahibly [an internally displaced camp outside Duékoué] in July.[78]

Human Rights Watch appreciates the government’s commitment to ensure justice for victims of torture and welcomes recent progress toward prosecutions for murders committed during the Nahibly camp attack in July.[79] The reality remains, however, that there has been minimal progress in addressing impunity among the Republican Forces, particularly at the command level. No member of the Republican Forces has been arrested for crimes committed during the post-election violence, and soldiers and commanders implicated in serious crimes in response to the August attacks appear to have been similarly protected from accountability. For the Ivorian government to fulfill its promise to fight against impunity, credible investigations and prosecutions for human rights abuses must become the norm—rather than for isolated incidents.