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IX. THE ROLE OF CIVILIAN MILITIAS IN THE WEST

The conflict in Côte d’Ivoire has unveiled major schisms in Ivorian society. The tensions between north and south, between the largely Muslim Dioula and the largely Christian southerners, and between native Ivorians and immigrants are the most evident symptoms of the crisis shaking the fabric of the society. In the west, where hundreds of villages have been gripped by increased tensions between the indigenous Ivorian groups and immigrant communities, this development has had particularly brutal repercussions for the large Burkinabé community.

The rise of youth groups and civilian militias

The economic and political turbulence of the past decade has bred a generation of educated but unemployed and disenchanted youth. They were seen demonstrating—and sometimes rioting—in the streets of Abidjan in October and December 2000. For thousands of youths, membership in the university student association in Abidjan was a critical step in political involvement. The student movement became increasingly politicized during the Bédié years, often with clear links to the main opposition parties of that period, such as the RDR and the FPI.164For others, membership in the youth wings of political parties was a defining moment.

With the onset of the war, these youth groups took a new prominence. Figures like Charles Blé Goudé and Guillaume Soro, both former leaders of the national university student network (FESCI), both charismatic, populist figures to their constituencies, command a vital constituency of young, educated and angry youth. Soro quickly became internationally known as the spokesperson for the MPCI during the conflict, and was later appointed as Minister of Communications in the new government of reconciliation. Blé Goudé played a crucial role in mobilizing the “young patriots” in Abidjan during the war, reportedly with full backing of the Gbagbo administration. The demonstrations against the Linas-Marcoussis accords, which paralyzed Abidjan for four days and resulted in attacks on several French buildings, with little or no response from the government armed forces, was one clear example of the power held by the youth mobilizers and their links with state security forces. As one observer in Abidjan remarked on Blé Goudé, “[Gbagbo] made the demonstrations, he made Blé Goudé. That creature is out of the box, how do you stuff it back in?”165 The role of the FESCI student movement and the student leaders in Abidjan in inciting violence has grown clearer over the past eight months. One of the Abidjan-based leaders of the “young patriots,” Eugene Djué, recently said, “Since the beginning of the war, we have organized, we were trained by our military friends and we have the most fearful weapon of war: the determination to win and the will to defend our country.” In the same interview he claimed to head “some 55,000 young patriots grouped in self-defense committees.”166

The transition from student groups and youth associations into self-defense committees required little effort and probably used the existing FPI political party and youth association network. Certainly hundreds of self-defense committees of “young patriots” quickly became operational throughout the country with the onset of the conflict. They controlled hundreds of checkpoints in and around towns and villages under government control, checking identity cards and taking over other duties traditionally accorded to the forces of law and order. In many cases they equipped themselves with clubs, batons and other types of weapons and subjected civilians traveling along the roads to harassment, extortion and assault. In at least one case reported by the local press, a group of the “young patriots,” who were armed with twelve caliber guns, even killed a police officer in a village near Gagnoa, the home area of President Gbagbo. In that case, the journalist’s description of the vigilante groups was apt: “under the complicit eye of power, these forces, which have sprouted like mushrooms, particularly in the west, reign as the real masters.”167

While there has been some insight into the role of the “young patriots” and their leaders in Abidjan, understanding the role played by these groups in the rural areas, even prior to the war, is critical in the context of the western conflict.

Urban and rural violence in the west before the war

There was considerable violence before the war in the western towns and villages, particularly in and around Daloa, Duékoué, Vavua and Blolékin, which are the Bété and Gueré heartlands. Much of the violence began in June 2002 or during the October 2000 elections, and it took two forms: in the towns, such as Abidjan and Daloa, it was represented by political violence between mobs of young FPI and RDR supporters. In the villages around Daloa, Duékoué and Blolékin, it took the form of targeting of the immigrant population, mainly the Burkinabé. Each theatre of conflict was intertwined with a specific issue: in the towns, it was the issue of political power. In the villages, it was land.

Political violence in Daloa town in the election campaign: June 2002

The municipal elections of March 2001 brought the RDR into power in Daloa town. This resulted in a split administration, where the elected mayor of the town was RDR, but the government-appointed prefect of the district was FPI. The RDR win was perceived by the local Bété population, who are largely FPI supporters, as a victory for outsiders or foreigners. In Duékoué, a bastion of the Gueré population, the mayor and other local authorities were FPI, but a substantial part of the rural population was Burkinabé and other immigrants from the sub-region.

During the election campaign, this tension exploded, echoing the election violence in 2000. In Daloa itself, young FPI and RDR members clashed on June 25, 2002 as the political parties started campaigning prior to the elections on July 7, 2002. It appears to have begun when a group of young Bété FPI supporters began harassing Dioula merchants near the RDR office, where RDR members were preparing their campaign.168 Apparently the local gendarmes and police either did not intervene or were too late to prevent the escalation of the violence. At least four people were killed, seven were injured from gunshot wounds, and two mosques and a church were burned.169 In Daloa itself, a curfew was imposed throughout early July, and the situation calmed down somewhat, but tension was just below the surface when the conflict ignited on September 19, 2002.

The pattern of violence in Daloa in June 2002, in which groups of FPI supporters acted either together with paramilitary groups from the state security forces or were tolerated by the forces of law and order, clearly echoed the types of violence that took place in Abidjan during the October and December elections of 2000. It also established a pattern for the type of violence that took place after the conflict began in September 2002, in which FPI supporters organized into self-defense committees and acting in complicity with state security forces, assaulted and executed foreigners and RDR supporters in several towns in the west.

Village violence in June 2002: the targeting of the Burkinabé

Burkinabé are the majority of the immigrant population in the west and southwest of Côte d’Ivoire, alongside significant communities of Baoulé internal migrants. Many villages were created and almost entirely populated by Burkinabé, who were mostly responsible for the clearing of the forest and the extension of the vast Ivorian cocoa plantations. For more than thirty years, land ownership and use remained largely unregulated by the Ivorian state, with local villagers, migrants, and traditional authorities pursuing local agreements based on traditional customary law. For most, this consisted of a homemade contract reflecting the purchase of the land, and the creation of a long-term relationship between the immigrant buyer and the seller, his “tuteur” or Ivorian “father” or “patron.”170

Amidst the dismal economic situation of the 1980s and 1990s, the return of many educated Ivorian youth from the towns created considerable tension between indigenous villagers and the largely Burkinabé plantation owners and workers, but also between generations of Ivorians within the same family. In the past few years, President Gbagbo’s FPI party has specifically called for urban youth to “return to the land” in an effort to address rising urban problems such as unemployment, crime and over-population. Many of the educated Ivoiran youth who did indeed return to their rural villages of origin felt disenfranchised in multiple ways, first by an economic climate characterized by a lack of opportunity, second by a state system which provided few options, and third by their own families, who had sold the land to immigrants decades earlier.

In the already politically charged atmosphere of the late 1990s, the introduction of the rural land reform law in 1998 by the government of Henri Konan Bédié became one of the catalysts for intercommunal strife. The law provided that only Ivorians could own land. This was a stunning blow to the thousands of resident Burkinabé and other West Africans who had spent years, and sometimes decades, clearing and cultivating the land. Non-Ivorians who had bought land through customary law could maintain full usage rights throughout their lifetime, however, within three years of the buyer’s death, the land would revert to the state without compensation.171 Against the backdrop of growing dissatisfaction with the Bédié regime and increasing political friction, the political and media discourse accompanying the law provoked outright violence, including deaths, between the indigenous ethnic groups and the largely Burkinabé immigrant community.172 A Burkinabé farmer who lived in the Vavoua area for fifty years said, “[The war began] first of all because of the social exclusion and hatred of foreigners. It started bit by bit, before Gbagbo, but it’s an explosion now. Before the war, I heard the young people saying things about how the Burkinabé should leave, how they had stolen land…. The old ones, the ones who sold the land to the Burkinabé, they didn’t say these things.”173

Tensions over the law surfaced throughout the west, but particularly in the rural areas around Daloa and Duékoué, where the Bété and Gueré are considered the indigenous population and are generally supportive of the Laurent Gbagbo’s FPI. While linked to the political violence in the towns, the rural violence that took place in June 2002 had a different target. The increasingly militancy of the rural Gueré, Bété, and Niédéboua youths translated into associations, youth groups, and political party membership. Resentment of the Burkinabé settlers in the plantations intermingled with anti-RDR sentiment and led to mutual attacks of Bété or Gueré against Dioula and Burkinabé, with dozens of deaths and wounded, and scores of villages burned in June and July 2002. Some of the Gueré youths specifically linked the violence to the electoral campaign. Human Rights Watch was told, “During Gbagbo’s electoral campaign, he said would chase the foreigners away. The youths talked of that, of Gbagbo’s electoral promises.”174

Human Rights Watch documented at least eight deaths and more than sixty wounded from the villages north of Duékoué in June and July 2002, and considers this figure a gross underestimation of the actual toll from the violence. Over six thousand people, mainly Burkinabé families, but also northern Ivorians, Guerés and Bétés, fled their encampments in the plantations. Many came into Duékoué and Daloa in July 2002.175

Many people interviewed by Human Rights Watch blamed the pronouncements of high-level politicians, carried and inflamed by the local media, for feeding both the rural and the urban violence, and exacerbating the situation. In late-June 2002, a meeting of traditional leaders in Abidjan warned political parties and their leaders of the dangers of the increasingly contentious political discourse.176 However, few serious attempts were made to reduce the tension. Indeed, after the July 2002 elections, President Gbagbo congratulated the nation for the “largely successful and peaceful elections.”177 Local authorities did not address the real causes of the violence—the increasingly uncontrolled militancy of youth groups inflamed by their leaders and the lack of reaction by the forces of law and order. Instead, in a telling move, the traditional chiefs from several villages around Daloa signed a series of recommendations which included, as point one, a call for the exclusion of any non-indigenous candidates (including Ivorians from other regions) in any future elections in Daloa.178

State-tolerated violence by civilian self-defense committees

Against this volatile background, the outbreak of the civil war in September 2002 provoked a new wave of violence in the villages of the west. As the rebels moved into the west, the allegations made by some journalists and government figures about Burkina Faso’s support to the MPCI and the television images of captured Burkinabé “rebels” had immediate repercussions in the villages around Daloa and Duékoué, which were highly populated by Burkinabé settlers. The fact that government officials at various levels encouraged civilians to mobilize into self-defense committees and protect access routes into towns from the rebels exacerbated the situation.179 The transition from the existing youth groups and associations into self-defense committees was an obvious step.

The MPCI rebels captured Vavoua on October 7, 2002. This event brought the war into the west for the first time and prompted fears among the local population of further advances. Reports that the MPCI had killed a number of gendarmes in Bouaké, combined with the fact that the television and print media continued to show images of Burkinabé and northerners as “captured assailants,” caused groups of young Gueré militants, armed with machetes, hunting rifles and other weapons, to storm Burkinabé villages and encampments north of Duekoué. According to witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch, each village had its bands of young Gueré militants who were part of an organized network of self-defense committees and youth groups with links to Abidjan. Iruzon,180 a village north of Duekoué was the epicenter of the problem, which spread to Blodi, Diahouin, Tuazeo and other villages between Duékoué and Kouiblie in the first week of October.

One young Burkinabé described the October events as “the Burkinabé hunt” and told Human Rights Watch about the escalation of events in Blodi, a village near Iruzon.

When the rebels started in Vavoua, people said the Burkinabé were with the rebels. The young Guerés started to attack. The mayor came and told them to put up checkpoints to defend the village. Then, at the checkpoints they started to harass the Burkinabé, asking for money and if someone doesn’t have money then they take your bike. This continued until they were organized with weapons. On October 8 they went and attacked a encampment and killed three young Burkinabé. After this, they started to burn everything so we had to leave. At night they would come and search our houses for weapons. Sometimes people had hunting rifles—this made things worse. They said that the president of Burkina Faso was responsible for the war.181

Thousands of Burkinabé fled without any of their possessions, sometimes even losing children in their panicked flight. Their homes were burned and destroyed, their livestock and crops were looted. Many fled to Duékoué. Displaced Burkinabé told Human Rights Watch that in many instances, the Gueré militias deliberately destroyed their documents, including the local receipts of their land purchases and the state documents attesting to their official usage of the land. Several Burkinabé said, “When the Guerés started attacking the houses, they destroyed the papers. They ripped up our identity cards and papers for the fields.”182 In addition to the destruction of documents, homes and villages, Human Rights Watch documented several killings of Burkinabé by Gueré youths, who stopped them at the checkpoints erected around each village and at the road junctions.183

Burkinabé were also targeted in other locations of the country, such as the south-west and in Abidjan. Older Burkinabé are physically identifiable and thus easily targeted due to the patterns of facial scarring used by the Mossi ethnic group. The custom of facial scarification has been decreasing over the past decades. A number of younger Burkinabé who escaped violence and lacked these facial scars told Human Rights Watch that they had been able to pass as members of other ethnic groups while in government controlled territory and believed that they would have been killed had they had the traditional facial scars.

While there are unconfirmed reports that some Burkinabé armed and joined the rebel forces, and some may have been responsible for attacks on Gueré civilians, Human Rights Watch research indicates that the vast majority of attacks on civilians were initiated by Gueré militias against Burkinabé civilians.

Reaction from the Gueré communities in the villages to the militia youths differed, often by generation and by village. In some villages, Gueré chiefs did little to quell the militancy of their youth, but there were several instances where the local authorities, including village chiefs and sometimes the gendarmes from Duékoué, attempted to intervene, with little effect. In one village, where an older Gueré chief insisted on protecting the Burkinabé, the Gueré youth of the village refused to listen to him.184 In late-October, when the cocoa and coffee crops were ready for harvesting, most of the Burkinabé had been chased out of the surrounding villages and were sheltering in Duékoué. A delegation of Gueré chiefs—all elders—requested the Burkinabé to return. However, as one observer noted, those who requested the return of the Burkinabé “were all old, not a single young one….[and] the youths mocked the elders and said the Burkinabé would not return.”185 While some Burkinabé did return to the villages, many left their wives and children in Duékoué.

After the western rebels launched their offensives in the west in December, a number of these villages and others around Toulepleu and Bangolo were captured by the rebels, causing a new wave of displacement, as the Guerés fled the rebels and sought refuge in the government-held towns. This led to new abuses, as members of all three rebel groups retaliated against some of the Gueré members of the self-defense committees who had been responsible for killing and harassing the Burkinabé and other suspected “assailants.” The displacement of the Gueré villagers to Duékoué then widened the cycle of abuses, as Gueré youths began terrorizing the displaced Burkinabé in the government-held towns with total impunity, particularly following rebel attacks on government-held locations.

Abuses by government forces in collaboration with civilian militias

Numerous witnesses described serious abuses committed by Ivorian armed forces working in complicity or in coordination with the Gueré youth groups and with other groups of government-supporting civilians. For instance, in many of the attacks on civilians by paramilitary groups in Daloa, Duékoué, Guiglo, and Monoko-Zohi, local villager from ethnic groups linked to the government helped provide lists of names of foreigners, RDR members, northerners and other alleged rebel supporters to the security forces. Self-defense committees also manned checkpoints with the acquiescence—if not the encouragement—of the state security forces. One person said, “the young Guerés are the worst, they are working with the military. If they see a Burkinabé they recognize, then they beat you and beat you with a brick. Once they say you’re an ‘assailant,’ you’re finished.”186 Attacks on the displaced Burkinabé in Duékoué and other government-controlled towns heightened after each rebel attack. Government forces sometimes executed Burkinabé and other suspected assailants in the middle of the town, in front of many eye-witnesses. Gueré civilian militias sometimes burned their bodies after they were executed.

Human Rights Watch documented at least ten such killings, including one incident in Duékoué on December 20, 2002, in which a group of young Gueré participated with the armed forces in the summary executions of two Burkinabé men.

I was waiting to cross the street to get home, and they killed two Burkinabé in front of me, on the street. There were young Gueré men going around looking for foreigners, and they captured two young Burkinabé men from houses in Duékoué. The two captured men had scars on the side of their noses, showing they were Mossi.187 They were on the street I was going to cross; so I hid and watched.

The young Guerés belonged to the FPI; everyone was FPI in Duékoué. They claimed that foreigners had come to attack president Gbagbo. The Gueré men who held the two Burkinabé called to the military, who were constantly patrolling the town in their four-by-four. They gave out war cries as they patrolled, such as ‘haut les coeurs’ in French.

A military vehicle stopped at the request of the crowd, who told the military that they had captured two foreigners. Two military got down from the four-by-four and motioned for the crowd to get away from the two foreigners. The two men kept begging for their lives, saying ‘Forgive me, I’m not a rebel.’ The soldiers told the two men to run. When they started to run, the military shot them both in the back and in the back of their heads, which broke their heads and caused their brains to fly out in pieces. I was traumatized. I couldn’t sleep. I saw it again and again.188

The direct targeting of Burkinabé by government forces supported by civilian militias increased as the conflict’s ethnic dimension intensified in the west. The increasing manipulation of this ethnic conflict through government statements and press reports in the media focusing on the so-called genocide against the Wê (Gueré), only worsened the situation, inciting more violence. By early April 2003, any semblance of the rule of law was gone from certain government-controlled towns such as Duékoué, and the rule of civilian militias was at its peak.

Mob violence in total impunity in Duékoué: March-April 2003

The collaboration of government forces and civilian militias created a climate of fear and total impunity in Duékoué in April 2003, when Human Rights Watch visited the town. Being accused of being an ‘assailant’ could be a death sentence not only for Burkinabé, but for any individual from an ethnic group viewed as allied to the rebels, and indeed, any hapless individual caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Local authorities completely abdicated their responsibility for maintaining law and order. Instead, they permitted mob violence and civilian militias to act with impunity, and state security forces made little or no attempt to control them, much less hold them accountable.

Two incidents reported to Human Rights Watch by credible sources demonstrated this trend of mob violence completely tolerated by local authorities. In one case in early March, 2003:

A Yacouba man went to the mayor’s office [in Duékoué] to request a laissez-passé. He was accused by someone in the crowd of being an ‘assailant.’ The crowd threw themselves on him and beat him with bricks, shoes and other items. After being taken, badly injured, to the local hospital, some of the members of the crowd came to the hospital, dragged him outside, killed him and burned his body, and left it in the courtyard. Finally the surgeon from the hospital requested that the body be buried because the nurses in the hospital were refusing to work there. 189

In another incident in early March, a young Gueré was beaten to death by a crowd twenty-five meters from a gendarmerie post after another Gueré man accused him of being an ‘assailant.’190

Reprisal killings of self-defense committee members

In reaction to the increasingly active role in the conflict played by the Gueré self-defense committees, the rebel forces increasingly targeted Gueré self-defense committee members after capturing areas previously held by the government, particularly in and around Man and Bangolo. Human Rights Watch documented several cases where self-defense committee members were specifically targeted, probably in reprisal for their collaboration with government forces in abuses against Dioula and Burkinabé civilians.

In one such case the rebel forces targeted local villagers in the Man vicinity.

They came through Siabli towards 4 a.m. on the way to Man. The next morning we found the bodies of three villagers from Siabli. They had been tied up, including their hands, then tied to a vehicle with a rope, then dragged behind the vehicle, which drove at full speed for three kilometers. Then the rebels slit the throat of one of them, decapitated another and shot the third. One of the three was called ‘Antonio,’ he belonged to a village self-defense committee. Later we found three more bodies, two youths from the village and a woman who was not from the village.191



164 See Yacouba Konate, “Les enfants de la balle: De la FESCI aux mouvements de patriotes,” Politique Africaine: La Côte d’Ivoire en guerre, No. 89, March 2003, pp. 49-70.

165 Human Rights Watch interview, Abidjan, March 26, 2003.

166 “La multiplication des milices patriotiques inquiète le gouvernment ivoirien,” Agence France Presse, April 27, 2003.

167 Jean-Roche Kouamé, “Des ‘patriotes’ battent un agent de police à mort,’ le jour, February 28, 2003.

168 “Elections des conseils généraux Daloa: La campagne tourne à l'affrontement entre le FPI et le RDR,” Le Patriote, June 26, 2002, at www.lepatriote.net/lepatriote2.asp

169 Timothé Dro, “Mosquée et Eglise incendiées,” Soir Info, June 26, 2002, p.5.

170 The term “tuteur” is used to describe the traditional relationship between the original owner of the land and the person who buys or uses the land. This relationship, which passed from generation to generation, required immigrants to make regular contributions—of money or in kind—to their tuteurs.

171 Law no. 98-750 of December 23, 1998 set out the law on rural land ownership. This was followed by Decrees no. 99-594 and no. 99-595 of October 13, 1999, which provided implementing legislation for the law, including procedures for application and registration of land ownership.

172 Clashes between Burkinabé and local Krou villagers around Tabou led to a number of deaths and the flight of over 12,000 Burkinabé in November 1999. The primary cause of these clashes was friction over land.

173 Human Rights Watch interview, Banfora, February 7, 2003.

174 Human Rights Watch interview, Duékoué, April 2, 2003.

175 Many of the Burkinabé sought refuge in the Catholic church in Duékoué, a pattern that was to be repeated several times in the coming months.

176 Simplice Allard, “Les rois et les chefs traditionnels appellent les acteurs politiques au calme et à la retenue,” L’Inter, June 29, 2002, at www.presseci.com/linter/archive/1243.html (accessed June 28, 2003).

177 Charles Trabi, “Gbagbo se réjouit du triomphe de la loi sur le désordre,”L'Inter, July 13, 2002, at www.presseci.com/linter/archive/2365.html (accessed June 28, 2003).

178 Minutes of a meeting of traditional chiefs of Daloa, held August 30, 2003, on file with Human Rights Watch.

179 Statement by Jules Yao Yao, armed forces spokesperson, transcribed from RTI and reported in Notre Voie, October 18, 2002.

180 Iruzon is the home village of Matthias Doué, a Gueré and the Chief of Staff for President Gbagbo.

181 Human Rights Watch interview, Duékoué, April 2, 2003.

182 Human Rights Watch interviews, Duékoué, April 2, 2003.

183 Human Rights Watch interviews, Duékoué, April 2, 2003.

184 Human Rights Watch interview, Duékoué, April 2, 2003.

185 Human Rights Watch interview, Duékoué, April 4, 2003.

186 Human Rights Watch interview, Duékoué, April 2, 2003.

187 The Mossi are one of the largest ethnic groups in Burkina Faso and dominate the Burkinabé community in Côte d’Ivoire.

188 Human Rights Watch interview, Bobo-Dioulasso, February 8, 2003.

189 Human Rights Watch interview, Duékoué, April 4, 2003.

190 Human Rights Watch interview, Duékoué, April 4, 2003.

191 Human Rights Watch interview, Duékoué, April 2, 2003.


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August 2003