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VII. THE ROLE OF LIBERIAN FORCES IN THE WEST

Government forces fighting in the west consisted of a large number of irregular forces: mercenaries from other African and European countries, Liberian fighters, many of them loosely linked to abusive Liberian rebel groups such as the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), Liberian refugees recruited locally and internationally from refugee camps, and Ivorian Gueré civilians, many of whom were traditionally pro-government and FPI and were recruited from an existing network of village self-defense committees and youth groups transformed into militias.

The rebel forces also collaborated with a number of irregular forces, the bulk of whom were Liberian and Sierra Leonean fighters, some of them linked to abusive Liberian government militias run by President Taylor.⁹¹ Some of the fighters were known veterans of the brutal wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone forces, such as indicted war criminal Sam “Mosquito” Bockarie, who was killed in May 2003 after spending several months in western Côte d’Ivoire. Others were more recent recruits from Liberia, including hundreds of child soldiers. As the war in the west intensified, the rebel groups also recruited significant numbers of local civilians, some by force. Others were drawn by the lure of loot or vengeance for the increasing cycle of ethnic abuses.

This array of irregular forces working with both sides, many of whom were recruited with the promise of payment but were then given more or less of a license to loot the civilian population, was responsible for a wide range of abuses against the civilian population.

Use of foreign mercenaries by the Ivorian government

According to numerous eyewitness testimonies, foreign mercenaries, including nationals from African and European countries, were used as supplemental forces by the government of Côte Ivoire as early as October 2002.⁹² Their use in offensives on Man, Toulepleu and other locations has been documented by Human Rights Watch and many international media reports from Côte d’Ivoire. Their continuing use, particularly for highly technical positions such as piloting the Mi-24 helicopter gunships, has been reported through April 2003, despite several public statements by President Gbagbo in which he committed to cease using mercenary forces.⁹³

The likely involvement of these mercenaries in several incidents constituting grave breaches of international humanitarian law, including the helicopter attacks on Mahapleu, the Vavoua area, and Zouan-Hounien is a matter of considerable concern and requires further investigation.

Recruitment of Liberian fighters by the Ivorian rebel groups

“In the beginning when the rebels arrived everyone was happy because the loyalists in Toulepleu were always bothering us. People danced in the streets, we said that the rebels who had come would save the world. Later we saw it wasn’t true. Later, we were not happy. We realized the Liberians were not nice.” Twenty-two-year-old Dioula woman from Bin Houyé⁹⁴

The MPCI was clearly an Ivorian movement with a domestic agenda, albeit with some support from Burkina Faso. The nature and aims of the two smaller rebel groups, particularly the MPIGO group, are far less straightforward, but it is clear that there were substantial differences between the MPCI and the two smaller groups, not only in terms of their records of abuses against civilians, but also in terms of their aims. The MJP appears to have been mixed Ivorian and Liberian, but largely coalesced around the supporters of Gen. Guei. MPIGO, the least Ivorian of the groups, had a nominal Ivorian leadership but was almost entirely composed of Liberian and Sierra Leonean mercenaries whose main interest in the war was economic. As time passed, the Liberian forces gained ascendancy within the group and challenged the nominal Ivorian leadership, causing serious rifts with the MPCI.

There were reportedly at least one thousand Liberian Gio fighters constituting the bulk of MPIGO’s force when it attacked Toulepleu at the end of November 2002,⁹⁵ a signal that a new and alarming phase of the Ivorian conflict had begun. While both the government and rebel forces later relied on Liberian mercenaries for their military campaigns in the west, all the information available to Human Rights Watch indicates that the Ivorian rebel groups were the first to introduce Liberian fighters into the Ivorian conflict.

After being initially repulsed by the loyalist forces, the MPIGO Liberians gained control of Toulepleu by December 2, 2002. Most of the civilian population fled the town. Capturing Toulepleu was significant because the town is in Gueré territory just south of an ethnic line dividing the Ivorian Yacouba and the Gueré. It also lies along the border between the Liberian counties of Nimba and Grand Gedeh, each of which has its version of the Yacouba and Gueré⁹⁶ ethnic groups: the Gio and Krahn, respectively.

According to information gathered by Human Rights Watch, the Liberian Gio forces in Toulepleu initially concentrated on looting everything possible, but were not systematically physically abusive to the civilian population. Acts of violence did occur, however, particularly in connection with the looting (see below, chapter VIII). The government attacked the town with helicopter gunships on December 2, targeting the transformers and knocking out the electricity, which displaced many people, but after a week, even some of the Gueré townspeople returned. For the Liberians, looting was the main activity, but “once the rebels had pillaged the houses, we could live in peace with them,” as one civilian summed it up.⁹⁷ The Liberian rebels in Toulepleu were initially all Gio from Nimba county, but were later joined by a contingent of Yacouba from Danané and two more contingents, including some Krahn from Grand Gedeh.⁹⁸ The Sierra Leonean forces were part of the MPIGO force.⁹⁹

By mid-December, there was a schism between the MPCI and the Liberian-backed MPIGO, which appears to have been related to the way the Liberians and Sierra Leoneans treated the civilian population. The problem apparently started in Danané, where the MPCI asked the Dioula population to help them by contributing money. The Dioula community apparently did so, pooling together a contribution to the MPCI. This angered the MPIGO, who began searching the Dioulas and killed two Dioula civilians, one after he refused to let MPIGO fighters rape his wife, the other for his money.¹⁰⁰ Apparently the MPCI tried to stop the MPIGO from stealing from and harassing the civilian population, at which point the MPIGO threatened to kill all the Dioula if the MPCI attacked them. Human Rights Watch learned that a deal was struck whereby the MPCI installed itself in Man and used that town as a regional base, leaving Danané and the western strip of towns along the border to the MPIGO.

The uneasy deal struck between the two rebel allies more or less held until early March 2003.¹⁰¹ By April, there was increasing friction between Felix Doh, the nominal Ivorian leader of MPIGO, and the Liberian and Sierra Leonean forces within the group. The friction may have been due to Doh’s efforts to curb the abuses of the mercenary fighters, or to internal power disputes between Doh and the Liberian and Sierra Leonean leaders. Regardless of the exact cause, this friction culminated in the death of Doh, reportedly at the hands of Sierra Leonean ex-RUF leader Sam Bockarie, at the end of April. Even prior to this event, however, the decision to let the MPIGO and their Liberians control the border strip had devastating consequences in the west, particularly after the government recruited its own Liberian mercenaries, turning the war into an extension of the Liberian conflict, with many terrible implications for civilians.

With help from its Liberian recruits, the government’s forces regained control of Blolékin, located between Toulepleu and Guiglo, by December 12. By early-January 2003, loyalist forces had regrouped with a full contingent of Liberian recruits. The government’s forces attacked Toulepleu, capturing the town on January 12, 2003.¹⁰² That day, four local Ivorian Red Cross volunteers disappeared in Toulepleu; their bodies were recovered weeks later.¹⁰³

In the following weeks, the rebels launched several counterattacks, and many villages around the town were burned and destroyed. By pitting Liberians against Liberians and reviving the Liberian ethnic feud between the Krahn and Gio on Ivorian soil, the government intensified the situation.¹⁰⁴ It is very likely at this point that the conflict changed dramatically in terms of the treatment of civilians as the Krahn-Gio feud fuelled an ethnic conflict between the Gueré and Yacouba in the west.

Recruitment of government-backed Liberian rebel fighters

The government also relied on Liberians to shore up its efforts, and recruited two pools of Liberian combatants. Firstly, it appears that in December the government recruited hundreds of Liberian Krahn fighters from the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) faction, who were reportedly preparing an Ivorian-based front for their war against Taylor even prior to the onset of the Ivorian conflict in September 2002.¹⁰⁵ As infighting increased within the LURD, these Krahn fighters coalesced in a new splinter Liberian faction called the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL), whose links with the Ivorian government has been documented in several recent reports.¹⁰⁶ The second group of Liberian fighters recruited by the Ivorian government were refugees, mainly recruited from Nicla refugee camp near Guiglo, but also from refugee transit centers in Abidjan. Reports of refugee recruitment later emerged from as far afield as Ghana.¹⁰⁷

Some of the Liberian recruits fighting with both the Ivorian government and rebel forces included former child soldiers¹⁰⁸ and other veterans of the first brutal Liberian war and the war in Sierra Leone. Human rights groups have documented an atrocious catalogue of abuses against civilians committed by the Liberian government and rebel groups not only in the first war in the 1990s, but also more recently in Monrovia and in Lofa, Liberia’s northern county.¹⁰⁹ The recruitment of Liberian mercenaries, including child soldiers, from groups with a well-established history of serious violations, was grossly irresponsible on the part on the part of the Ivorian government and an invitation to further atrocities, this time against Ivorian civilians and immigrants.

The first reports of the government using Liberian fighters dates to the counterattack on Blolékin in the second week of December 2002, after MPIGO’s advances in the west. Formalization of contacts between the Ivorian government and key Krahn members of LURD apparently took place in Abidjan in late-December 2002 and early January 2003.¹¹⁰ The precise terms and brokers of the deal struck between the Ivorian government and members of the Liberian rebel group remain unclear. However, it is certain that many were recruited with the promise of salaries and arms and an agreement that once successful in their mission on Ivorian soil, they could retain their weapons and return to Liberia. For instance, in February 2003, “child soldiers [were] told that if they liberate the area around Bin Houyé, then they will be allowed to keep their guns and return to Liberia to fight Taylor.”¹¹¹

Despite government denials, there were key Ivorian individuals, including some members of the government armed forces, who acted as nominal commanders of the Liberian contingent, and intermediaries brought supplies of petrol and bottled water from Guiglo and Duékoué to positions in the west such as Péhé and Toulepleu. Tensions rose when the recruits did not receive their promised payment from the government. Human Rights Watch was informed that some of the Liberians who were recruited with the lure of salaries turned to looting and other abuses when the Ivorian government did not deliver on its promises (see below, chapter VIII). An observer in the area told Human Rights Watch:

Mercenaries are recruited in Tobli [Liberia]. When they come, they don’t come along the main road, they arrive in Péhé. When they arrive in Péhé they discover that what they have been told about Gbagbo paying them is not true and they take it out on the population. They speak the same language, Gueré, as the local population, same ethnicity, but after some days and after drugs and drinking, they take it out on the local population.¹¹²

One disgruntled Liberian recruit at a checkpoint told a civilian passerby, “Oh, you’re from Abidjan, well the government brought us to defend your families, but we have not been given five francs. Gbagbo is not paying us, so we need your car and money.”¹¹³

The government-backed Liberian forces, later called the Grand West Liberation Front (Front de Liberation du Grand Ouest, FLGO) by Ivorians and the “LIMA forces” by the French military,¹¹⁴ were nominally led by an Ivorian sergeant named Jean Marie Touly.¹¹⁵ However, whether through policy or a lack of control, the Liberians became the de facto authorities in “their” areas, and they acted in collaboration with Gueré self-defense committee members who called themselves the Great West Liberation Fighters (Combatants pour Liberation de Grand-Ouest).¹¹⁶ There were apparently tensions between the regular armed forces, the FANCI, and the Liberian recruits, possibly due in part to the way the Liberians treated the Ivorian civilians. However another plausible explanation for the tension was that the decision to recruit Liberian rebel fighters was made by the Ministry of Defense, not the FANCI, and the FANCI lacked direct command over the Liberians.¹¹⁷ On this point, it must be noted that President Gbagbo himself assumed personal responsibility for the defense portfolio as of October 12, when he fired Defense Minister Moise Lida Kouassi.¹¹⁸

Gueré civilians from the Toulepleu area even complained to government officials in Abidjan about the way the government-allied Liberian fighters were treating civilians and were told “to be very careful, not to say that it was the mercenaries who did these things, instead to say it was the rebels.” By mid-February, however, it was clear that government-backed Liberian mercenaries, not the rebels, were in charge along the road to and in Toulepleu.¹¹⁹

Recruitment of Liberian refugees by government forces

More than 72,000 Liberian refugees were in western Côte d’Ivoire as of September 2003. Only one official refugee camp existed—Nicla peace camp—located just a few kilometers from Guiglo town, which held approximately 4,000 refugees. The vast majority lived in a so-called refugee assistance zone (Zone d’Accueil Refugié, ZAR) that included several towns in the west, such as Danané, Man, and Guiglo. Many of the Krahn refugees, originally from bordering Grand Gedeh county in Liberia, were comfortable in the Gueré territory around Toulepleu, Guiglo and Duékoué, given their historic, cultural and linguistic cross-border links to the Gueré. Most Liberian ethnic groups were represented in the ZAR, though, including individuals who had fled abuses by the Doe regime, Taylor’s regime and Liberian rebel groups.

Even before the western conflict began on November 28, Liberian refugees were vulnerable to harassment and intimidation from the Ivorian armed forces and civilian communities. After the government made statements accusing the MPCI rebels of being “foreign terrorists” and using English-speaking mercenaries, hostility to any foreigners was clearly on the rise. As early as October 2002, there were reports that refugees in transit sites in Abidjan were receiving disturbing visits from police and other armed men who threatened the refugees at night, during the curfew hours.¹²⁰ Days after the beginning of the conflict in the west, rumors of the involvement of English-speaking Liberian fighters were circulating, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) began warning that the Liberian refugee population in Côte d’Ivoire was vulnerable to abuses.¹²¹

MPIGO advanced on Toulepleu on November 30 and captured the town on December 2. As they continued to advance, capturing Blolékin on December 7, many feared that Guiglo, only 60 km east of Blolékin, would be the next target. Residents of Guiglo evacuated the town, including most of the humanitarian agency staff working in the Nicla refugee camp, about 12 kilometers from Guiglo. The first reports of Ivorian government recruitment in the refugee camp date to this period and attribute responsibility for the recruitment to the FANCIs in collaboration with local refugee contacts in Nicla.¹²² A Liberian refugee who was in the camp in this period said that on December 3, “the Ivorian soldiers came and started to beat all the people. They said that Liberians are guilty of supporting the rebels.”¹²³

As fighting intensified in December and January 2003, and the role of Liberian combatants on both sides increased, so too did the recruitment of the refugees. The UNHCR’s calls for relocation and protection of the refugees became desperate, but went unanswered by the government. As early as mid-December, a report from Guiglo in a local newspaper provided a revealing description of the situation. The headline was “Six rebels killed, Liberian refugees reinforce FANCIs,” and the article described how the Liberian refugees volunteered at Guiglo as part of a strategy to “fight fire with fire.”¹²⁴

While some refugees did volunteer out of boredom or were tempted by the thousands of CFA promised to recruits, others appear to have felt forced to join due to the increasing physical threats to their security. By late-December the vast majority of the Liberian refugee population faced not only the generalized hostility of indigenous Ivorian communities towards any foreigners, but also specific antagonism as Liberians, given that they were blamed for the proxy war being fought by Liberian forces in western Côte d’Ivoire. Refugees in Abidjan and in the southwest around Tabou faced increasing threats as the rebel groups launched a new offensive towards San Pedro from Liberia, attacking Grabo in January 2003.

In the absence of protection from the government in Côte d’Ivoire and offers for resettlement to another country, many refugees were forced to choose between two untenable options: return to Liberia or survival in an increasingly violent environment.

In a measure reflective of their desperation, thousands of refugees did return to Liberia in February 2003, despite having to pass through hostile checkpoints manned by Ivorian militias.¹²⁵ Many of these returnees then became trapped in Liberia’s spiraling insecurity, prompting some to later return to hostile areas they had fled.¹²⁶

Other refugees sought refuge in the UNHCR offices in the south and demonstrated at its office in Abidjan, calling for evacuation, a highly reasonable request given the persecution they faced in Côte d’Ivoire. Despite UNHCR’s pleas, no offers of resettlement were forthcoming from either regional or western states, a serious failure for refugee protection. The dilemma was summed up by one Liberian refugee who fled the west and succeeded in reaching Guinea, “[w]hat I don’t understand is why HCR didn’t help us, if they’re only there to feed us, what good does that do? We need security. The government kills us because we know the rebels, [the rebels] accuse us of supporting the government and the HCR abandons us, so it’s worthless.”¹²⁷

Given this background, it is hardly surprising that by late-March 2003, humanitarian agencies estimated that up to half of the Nicla camp population, including children as young as fourteen, were “involved directly or indirectly in the LIMA forces….” According to information received by Human Rights Watch, “recruitment is…induced by the government forces who have visited Nicla and held meetings with the youth to encourage them to join the LIMA forces ‘for their own security’.”¹²⁸