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VIII. ABUSES OF CIVILIANS BY LIBERIAN FORCES IN THE WEST

As mentioned above, Liberian fighters and other irregular forces employed by the government and the MPIGO and MJP rebel forces were responsible for a wide range of acts which violated international humanitarian law in western Côte d’Ivoire, particularly in the triangular area of operation between Danané, Toulepleu and Guiglo. These abuses included killings, rape and other forms of sexual violence, forced labor, systematic looting of civilian property, recruitment of child soldiers, attacks on humanitarian workers, destruction and removal of foodstuffs, and contamination of drinking water sources, a catalogue that echoes the abuses next door in Liberia.

Looting: the initial incentive

As soon as Liberian forces arrived in the west a pattern developed. Initially they began by systematically looting the property of those who had fled the area and sending much of the loot back to Liberia. When that resource had been exhausted, they moved on to the remaining civilian population. Then, when all available loot began to diminish, they used physical violence to threaten those who still had or were suspected of having remaining assets. A resident of Zouan-Hounien told Human Rights Watch, “The rebels came November 28. At the beginning they left people alone…. Then the Liberians came, and for the population things really worsened…. The population had to deal with the looting. First they started with the houses of those who had fled, the government officials, then they started attacking Guerés, then foreigners, and now even the Yacouba. For them, whether you’re Christian, Muslim or a cow, they’ll kill you.”¹²⁹

This pattern of stages of increasing abuses was echoed in scores of accounts gathered by Human Rights Watch. The incentive to loot was such that Liberian fighters within the same units even killed each other over particular items. Liberian fighters on both sides also extorted huge sums from desperate civilians trying to flee the conflict zone. Civilians trying to leave Toulepleu in late-January were forced to pay the government-backed Liberian forces between 95,000 and 200,000 CFA.¹³⁰ Human Rights Watch was told that a similar pattern developed in other areas of the west, for instance in the rebel-controlled area around Zouan-Hounien and Danané, where the Liberians forced civilians to pay 25,000 CFA or more to leave.¹³¹ People who refused to pay were trapped. If civilians refused to give money, or if the fighters discovered money after the person denied having any, there were often violent consequences.

Abuses linked to resources: forced labor

The promise of Ivorian riches was perhaps the main attraction for many coming from Liberia, where a devastated country and civilian population had already been stripped of most resources. Ivorian resources in the west were not limited to goods such as money, food, vehicles and other personal property, however, although the Liberians sent hundreds of tons of these items across the border. The west also held two key assets that were attractive to the Liberians: cocoa and gold.

The Iti gold mine, located fifteen kilometers from the town of Zouan-Hounien, quickly became a target for looting. A resident told Human Rights Watch, “the rebels are forcing people to work there. Some stocks are left, but when those are gone, then what?”¹³² Following the pattern established in Liberia, many young male civilians were forced to work for the Liberians, portering large quantities of personal goods, gold, and other resources across the border into Liberia. Young men were also forced to carry arms through the forest areas along the border. One young Ivorian who fled Danané for Guinea was captured by the Liberians near Mapleu. He was told by the Liberians, ‘You’re Ivorian, you must stay back there.’ They hit him with a gun and stole his bag and money, then forced him to carry arms from Mapleu to various checkpoints for two days.¹³³

The cocoa and coffee harvest, which usually takes place between October and January, was also ripe for the taking, and a portion was shuttled out of the country, apparently through Guinea, Mali and Ghana. While details of this operation remain unclear, this may have been a coordinated effort by all three rebel groups. Apparently over fifty thousand tons of cocoa were sent out of the country in a matter of weeks.¹³⁴ The triangle west of Zouan Hounien over the Cavally river and south of Zou town is one of the richest in Côte d’Ivoire. The crop was brought out, first on the backs of young men forced to carry it to Zouan Hounien. From there, trucks were organized to take it across the Ivorian border, partly to Guinea, a logical choice given Liberia’s lack of road infrastructure and markets.¹³⁵

Sexual violence by Liberian fighters on both sides

Rape and sexual slavery also occurred on a regular basis by Liberian fighters on both sides. In some cases it appears that rape was used specifically as a weapon of war, with the aim of terrorizing and humiliating the civilian population. Human Rights Watch was told that around rebel-occupied Zouan-Hounien, “there’s so much rape, it’s normal, we don’t even talk about it. The rebels rape in front of the husband, make him watch, and then force him to thank them on his knees.”¹³⁶ In areas occupied by the government-allied Liberian forces, there were also regular incidents of rape and sexual slavery by the MODEL Liberian fighters, who, “take your wives and rape them in front of you.”¹³⁷ Older women were often forced to cook and do other chores by the Liberians on both sides.¹³⁸

Recruitment of child soldiers by both sides

As in the Liberian conflict, children, particularly Liberian boys, were frequently used as fighters by the Liberian forces. Some of the child soldiers were Liberian children who may have been recruited from internally displaced camps in Liberia and refugee camps in Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire. Western observers of conditions in the rebel areas told Human Rights Watch that among every Liberian unit of five or six fighters linked to the MPIGO there would usually be at least one child soldier, often as young as ten to twelve-years-old, armed with machine guns. Among the fighters were also likely former members of Charles Taylor’s “Small Boy Units,”¹³⁹ as some of them described starting young in Liberia, fighting in Sierra Leone, then going back to Liberia, and having a contract to continue fighting in Togo.¹⁴⁰

As the conflict continued in the west, a growing number of Ivorian children were recruited.¹⁴¹ A number of young Yacouba reportedly joined the rebels after the ethnic reprisal attacks started, and were reportedly receiving training in a camp near Bin Houyé as of March 2003. The government-allied Liberians also apparently requested that the chiefs of the Gueré villages around Toulepleu give them children for training.¹⁴²

Killings of civilians

Liberian fighters allied to both the government and the rebel groups also killed numerous civilians, often in order to acquire money and loot. In some cases, civilians were targeted based on ethnic affiliation, especially where the Liberians worked in coordination with Ivorian Yacouba and Gueré militias.

Human Rights Watch documented a number of cases of violence accompanying looting activity. These incidents sometimes reflected extraordinary cruelty and wanton brutality, such as the following description of a Dioula family who was attacked in Toulepleu by looting Liberian fighters from the MPIGO faction in the first days of their occupation of the town. A seventy-year-old grandmother, two of her middle-aged daughters and her six-year-old grandson were killed in this attack. A third daughter was shot in the face. Another daughter survived and fled to Guinea.

The rebels had said they wouldn’t hurt civilians, so we were surprised when they came and broke the door down and asked for money…. My grandmother was coming out of the shower when the rebels came. One of them told her to “Get back,” and she said, “Get out with your noise of shooting.” He shot her. When they came in the house, my older sister said we were not FPI…. [She went to get money] but she was trembling so much that she was slow. When she gave him the money, he said it was not enough and shot her in the chest. My younger sister was shot in the legs, but she lost so much blood that she died.¹⁴³

Some of the abuses have also been characterized by the use of knives and machetes as well as automatic weapons. Victims were sometimes mutilated in ways that echoed the abuses of the Liberian war, with body parts cut off and eaten for ritualistic purposes.¹⁴⁴ Human Rights Watch received numerous accounts of abuses by both sides, in towns, villages and encampments throughout their western triangle of operation. The Liberian forces would enter the villages and tie up the chief, then demand food and money. If the villagers did not respond adequately, then they would kill some of the villagers.¹⁴⁵

Some of the abuses have occurred as part of a pattern of inter-ethnic clashes, as, once begun, the cycle of atrocities by Liberian fighters and their respective Gueré and Yacouba allies spiraled into a series of reprisals and counter-reprisals. “The Krahn-Gio enmity in Liberia has crossed the border,” Human Rights Watch was told. “While Houphouët-Boigny lived, he stopped it, but now this war has revived the old feud, the Doe-Quiwonkpah feud.”¹⁴⁶

There have no doubt been numerous victims whose killings have not been documented because they took place deep in the bush, and in small remote encampments. For instance, Human Rights Watch heard several credible accounts of dozens of villages raided and burned in the fighting around Toulepleu, but was not able to verify them. Compiling accurate figures on the total number of victims is therefore an impossible task at present.

The road to Toulepleu: creating a humanitarian crisis

With its new force of Liberian recruits, the government launched an offensive and regained control of Toulepleu in late-January 2003.¹⁴⁷ By February, the northern loop of the road from Blolékin to Toulepleu, and much of the area around Toulepleu, was under the control of Liberian fighters allied to the government. According to local observers, the presence of the Ivorian armed forces was minimal, ending at Blolékin, and even the Ivorian army acknowledged that the Liberians were the ones in control in the far western area around Toulepleu.¹⁴⁸

The Liberian fighters—in collaboration with local Gueré militia members—manned a series of checkpoints from Gueya, a village east of Blolékin through Péhé, the last town before Toulepleu, to Toulepleu itself. After Blolékin, the Liberian fighters and their Gueré partners were the de facto authorities along the road, called “the Road of Death” by some in Abidjan.¹⁴⁹ An eyewitness described his harrowing journey along the road to Human Rights Watch.

At Gueya there was maybe one man who was older, maybe eighteen. He was called Nene. Most were young kids, even girls. The mercenaries are children of nine to twelve years, they can’t even control the weight of their guns and they start firing at anything. I saw people shot in front of me…. From Blolékin to Péhé I walked. From Blolékin to Péhé it is all mercenary checkpoints and bodies, all along the way it was mercenary checkpoints and bodies along the road, new bodies and old bodies, maybe three to four weeks old. They force you to work, to bury the bodies…. At Doké, a chief of the mercenaries gives orders for people to bury the bodies. If you have luck they let you go, if not they make you bury the corpses. They use a Caterpillar bulldozer to dig holes, it gets filled with bodies, then they use the Caterpillar to cover the hole…. Me, I only had to bury bodies once, I was lucky. Others, they spend days burying. Me, I had some money so they let me go. For me the day it happened…. they asked me for 5,000. I only had 2,000 and they said, ‘since you don’t have money you have to work.’ I said ‘Okay’ and they said ‘Go over there and bury bodies over there.’

I picked up the bodies, they were all rotten and full of water. I put them in a hole and when we asked about covering them, I was told the Caterpillar would cover the hole. There were women, old people, and children’s bodies along the road…. The majority of the bodies are rebels who were killed. The villagers refused to bury them. There are also the bodies of children who walked and died, and sick people. Some of the children die because of the water they drink, which comes from places where there have been bodies. Adults, they can drink this and it takes longer to make them sick…. All the wells, the mercenaries put the bodies of the rebels in the wells and the well water is the only water for drinking. I saw the bodies in the wells. This water, when you drink it you have to filter it [he holds out his shirt to show how they pour the water through clothing]then you boil it. It always continues to smell. One of the women I was walking with, I was carrying her child on my shoulders. Finally we left it to die. I was crying but I left it. We saw other sick ones who couldn’t walk anymore.

Toulepleu itself is secure, the mercenaries surround it, the problem is water and food. The mercenaries don’t want people to leave because then WFP won’t come and give out food…. They said people can’t leave because they don’t want the region to be empty. ¹⁵⁰

In Péhé, the last town before Toulepleu, many displaced civilians gathered who had fled the rebel attacks on their villages. People were forced to pay the Liberians in order to eat, and “if you’re unlucky you pay and then the food is finished and you get nothing. The people coming from Toulepleu have to pay at checkpoints to go get wood and go to their fields.”¹⁵¹ This practice was very likely at least partly responsible—along with the disease provoked by the polluted water—for the levels of malnutrition witnessed by humanitarian aid workers among displaced who fled the area.¹⁵² One group of civilians who fled the area told Human Rights Watch, “[m]any children died along the way and here, maybe two to four children a day.”¹⁵³

The strategy of preventing civilians from fleeing and retaining the civilian population in a vulnerable state in order to obtain humanitarian assistance, is a classic tactic used by the warring parties in Liberia and elsewhere, and one that violates international humanitarian law.¹⁵⁴ By the time humanitarian agencies were able to access the area around Toulepleu in June 2003, much of the civilian population had suffered over five months of deprivation of health care, clean water and adequate food. Cases of malnutrition among children were rife in an area once considered a breadbasket for the country.

Ravaging the villages around Toulepleu: February 2003

After the MPIGO rebels were driven out of Toulepleu on January 12, the rebel-allied Liberian forces took the war to the small villages around the road, and the encampments among the plantations. Hundreds of displaced villagers, both Gueré and Burkinabé, fled the villages around Toulepleu and the area north of the road, and came to the government-controlled towns of Guiglo and Duékoué. A displaced Gueré from Glopleu described the attacks that devastated the region.

There are many bodies rotting in the villages…. We were forced to leave because the rebels ate everything. They ate all the cattle, burned the huts and the granaries, killed the elderly who couldn’t walk, burned people and used fire to burn scars on the bodies of their victims, and sometimes they write MPIGO or MPCI on the bodies with fire or with a knife…. It’s definitely the Liberians who are the worst. The MPCI are a bit better, but the MJP and the MPIGO are very bad. They don’t like the Gueré. They first came in December, but did not attack people.

In January they came the second time…. It was at this time, after their second attack, that everything started. They started attacking people…. The rebels demanded money. If you said you didn’t have any, they searched the whole house. If they found something, they would kill you because you lied. Sometimes they killed for no reason. Doué Kaoué, a sixty-year-old man, was shot February 18. He was sitting in his courtyard when they shot him.¹⁵⁵

Another displaced villager said, “we went from encampment to encampment. The rebels came in the camps to loot and burn the houses. They killed people and forbade others from burying them. The skeletons are in our villages.”¹⁵⁶

Although many of the killings by the rebels’ Liberian forces were wanton acts of violence, some of them were specifically targeted at Gueré. This was partly due to the fact that many of the Gueré had organized in civilian militias or self-defense committees and some were armed and resisted the attacks (see below, chapter IX). It was also due to the increasingly ethnic nature of the conflict. Once the government’s Liberian Krahn fighters became involved in the fighting, often in coordination with the Ivorian Gueré self-defense committees, it was a only a short step towards an ethnic war of Krahn/Gueré against Gio/Yacouba.

Abuses evolve into ethnic conflict

By February 2003, as Gueré and Yacouba civilian militias became increasingly involved in the conflict in the west, working with the government and rebels respectively, abuses took on an increasingly ethnic and horrific form, as Liberian mercenaries from both sides began deliberately slaughtering civilians based on ethnicity, without any pretense of targeting perceived opposition supporters. Based on the information gathered by Human Rights Watch, it appears that the development of an ethnic-based conflict in the west was motivated by two key factors. One was the introduction of the Liberian fighters on both sides, which rekindled a historic ethnic enmity. The second was the part played by Gueré civilian militias, who took on an increasingly visible role in the western war and participated in abuses against civilians in the west (see below, chapter IX). Human Rights Watch was told by several witnesses that the Liberian fighters allied to the government were led to some of the small remote encampments by local Gueré civilians who knew the area. In at least one case documented by Human Rights Watch, a Gueré civilian also helped the Liberians allied to the rebels by showing them the small Gueré encampments and villages deep in the bush.

The massacre at Bangolo: March 7, 2003

In the single largest known atrocity committed by the government’s Liberian mercenaries, at least sixty civilians, including men, women and children, were killed in Bangolo, a town located between Man and Duékoué, in early March, 2003. The massacre came to light after French troops from Operation Unicorn were alerted about clashes taking place in Bangolo town on March 7, and displaced civilians began fleeing the area. In the evening of March 7, the French forces disarmed and detained a large group of armed, government-allied Liberian combatants leaving the area on their way to their base in Guiglo, accompanied by a group of Gueré civilians. A reconnaissance flight flew over the town on March 8 and revealed at least sixty bodies on the ground outside, with more believed to be inside the houses. ¹⁵⁷

The Liberian fighters were English-speaking and also spoke Gueré (or the Liberian equivalent—Krahn). They were interviewed in detention and confirmed that they had been in the area for the past seven days, were working for the government, and had committed the massacre. Apparently they gained entrance to the town by pretending they were Dioula and saying that they wanted a meeting, but once there, proceeded to systematically kill the inhabitants and loot their homes.¹⁵⁸ The Dioula quarter in Bangolo was specifically targeted. Many of the victims suffered mutilations and had their throats slit, according to press reports.¹⁵⁹ An international observer who saw some of the bodies in Bangolo confirmed to Human Rights Watch that summary executions had taken place. Of the four bodies he saw, in at least one case the victim’s hands were tied behind the back and there were bullet wounds to the head at close range.¹⁶⁰

In the face of clear evidence of the LIMA force’s responsibility for the massacre and assertions that they were working for the Ivorian government and based in Guiglo, the government denied any link with the militia, stating, “no ‘supplemental Liberians’ are fighting with the FANCIs.”¹⁶¹ Instead, the government claimed that the massacre was committed by rebel forces and that the Liberian fighters were not, in fact, Liberians, but rather, Ivorian Guerés who had organized in self-defense committees. The claim that Ivorian Guerés were organized in self-defense committees was certainly true, but the fact that most of the detained combatants were Liberian and were working for the government, was established beyond a doubt. A recent report by the U.N. Panel of Experts on Liberia even noted that the weapons, ammunition and radio communication equipment used by the LIMA forces matched those used by the FANCIs.¹⁶²

Days later, the massacre at Bangolo was echoed by another massacre in nearby Dah, clearly a reprisal action for the Bangolo events. This time, the rebel forces were responsible, and the circle of ethnic violence was complete. For civilians in the west, these were days of terror.

The massacre at Dah: March 22, 2003

Dah, a small village in the Gueré area, just a few kilometers west of the road from Bangolo to Duékoué, was attacked by rebel forces on the night of March 22. This occurred just a few weeks after the Bangolo massacre and was most likely a reprisal attack. A civilian displaced by the fighting described events that night to Human Rights Watch:

It happened Saturday, March 22. After the news at 10 p.m. there was an electricity cut. I had a premonition. I said to myself that maybe the rebels would attack. Towards midnight, my wife heard a noise outside. She woke me up. I quietly opened the window and I saw people running outside in every direction. I heard a shot a few hundred meters from my courtyard. We ran all night. The next morning around 6 a.m. we returned to the village and it was then we discovered the horror. Bodies were sprawled all over the village. Among the bodies, my aunt Fatima, who was about seventy years old, my thirty-five-year-old nephew Zapele, my sixty-year-old uncle. All were killed by bullets.

It was mainly the Caien quarter that they ravaged the most. They did not target any particular type of person. Even the Burkinabé fled with us and they were also dead. They burned the houses, sometimes with people in them. They burned the house of a woman, the widow of Mwa Jean, while she was in the house with her two children. She managed to get out of the house, one of her children got out, severely burned, but the other one died. Many burned in their houses. They came in vehicles. They left their vehicles in an encampment about five hundred meters from the village. Three of them stayed to guard the vehicles.

The attackers were above all Liberians. While shooting on someone, they yelled terrible cries…. They spoke either in English or in Yacouba. We heard they had killed in other villages. It’s mostly Liberians and Yacouba who kill. We heard they have poisoned the salt, the bouillion cubes, even the cigarettes. All these things come from the Yacouba.¹⁶³

The description of the poisoning of food in this account, while unlikely, signaled the shift of community perceptions to a very dangerous level: the demonization of the opposing ethnic group. These perceptions were certainly fueled by the Ivorian press, which presented events in the west as a rebel “genocide” against the Wê (Gueré), but generally omitted the fact that abuses were being committed on both sides, and had evolved as a result of the involvement on both sides of Liberian fighters long known for their abuses against civilians. Another factor contributing to the rise of the ethnic conflict is the role played by the Gueré pro-government civilian self-defense committees in the western villages. Members of these militias participated in numerous abuses against civilians, particularly Burkinabé, both before and after the start of the internal conflict.