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“At the beginning the rebels were proper… They were more correct than the loyalists.”74
Human Rights Watch collected dozens of testimonies from civilians who lived in MPCI-controlled zones, including some who were unsympathetic to the rebels’ cause, which consistently confirmed that in the first few months the Ivorian rebels, in particular the MPCI, generally respected civilians in the towns they captured in the north. The MPCI conducted meetings with the civilian population in each town, explained their aims, and told civilians that they were not there to attack them. In Man, for instance, the rebels told civilians after the fighting was over, “Come out, we have liberated Man for you, do not be afraid of us,” and they “broke into the storehouse where the loyalist military had stored their food, which they had just been supplied. The rebels took the tins of sardines and gave them out to the people.”75
There are several credible motives for this pattern of behavior. One reason is that the MPCI’s occupation of towns and villages between September and November were mostly in the north, where the vast majority of the population shared the ethnicity and religious affiliation of the rebels, and had experienced discrimination under the southern-dominated security forces. The MPCI therefore viewed itself as a liberation movement and wanted to maintain its reputation as such among both the local and international community. A second plausible reason was that initially the MPCI had some financial resources and was able to pay for much of the food and other material consumed by their troops. Many northerners and foreign immigrants who lived in or passed through MPCI-held areas in this period noted that the MPCI were sympathetic to civilians and offered food, medicine and other aid to civilians in need. Numerous international aid workers and journalists, many of them experienced in other African conflicts where civilians are routinely targeted by rebel groups, remarked on the positive behavior of the MPCI troops towards civilians in the first months.
The key exception to this initial good behavior was the treatment of government officials, members of the FPI, and others perceived as supporting the government. It must also be noted that the population of Ivorians of southern ethnicities residing in rebel-controlled areas, who were generally perceived to be pro-government, was far smaller than the number of northerners residing in the government-controlled zone, which may have also reduced the scale of the abuses. A retired Dioula official told Human Rights Watch, “What happens in Abidjan is the same as what happens on the other side, it’s reciprocal. The only difference is that there were fewer southerners in the north than there are northerners and foreigners in Abidjan. Otherwise it would be the same.”76
In addition to government officials and perceived supporters, a number of thieves and looters—including some rebel fighters—were executed by the MPCI rebel group in various towns in the north. The rebels freed all the prisoners in the towns they captured, and some joined the rebel forces, while others resorted to looting once free. The MPCI claimed it was unable to expend the resources to administer the prisons, therefore many of the individuals accused of theft were executed rather than detained.
With the beginning of the western offensive and the introduction of not only the MPCI, but also the MJP and MPIGO troops into western towns and villages, abuses against civilians became far more systematic. Reprisal killings against civilians, particularly members of civilian self defense committees, increased dramatically following the re-capture of Man by the MPCI and MJP rebels in late-December. As the MPIGO rebel group moved into the Gueré areas around Toulepleu and Bangolo, which were generally pro-government and had substantial self-defense committee activity, there were also increasing accounts of reprisal killings. In addition, Human Rights Watch was told that as time passed and the salaries and provisions available to the Ivorian rebels dwindled, MPCI rebel troop behavior deteriorated even in the northern zone, with increasing incidents of looting and rape reported in MPCI-controlled territory by May 2003.
Abuses also clearly proliferated with the increased use of Liberian and Sierra Leonean fighters, particularly within the MPIGO rebel group. While the following sections focus on the abuses committed by members of the Ivorian rebel groups, the numerous abuses committed by the Liberian forces working with mainly the MPIGO rebel group are addressed separately in a later chapter (see below, chapter VIII).
From the start of the conflict on September 19, members of the MPCI were responsible for a number of attacks on gendarmes, police, and other members of the government armed forces who were “hors de combat” or non-combatants at the time of the attacks.77 The massacre of gendarmes in Bouaké is the worst such incident to come to light, but there may well have been others. In Bouaké, over fifty detained gendarmes and members of their families were systematically executed in early October by the MPCI forces.78 According to Amnesty International’s report on the massacre, the killings were apparently in reprisal for government attacks on northerners, and during the events there were several references made to the Youpougon massacre of October 2000.79
Human Rights Watch was told that initially “[o]nly the police and gendarmes were chased because it was they who harassed the northerners and foreigners with bribes and extortion prior to the war and in Abidjan. Therefore the rebels retaliated against them….The rebels announced in all the towns with megaphones that no one should help the police and gendarmes to leave.” 80
Human Rights Watch documented a number of cases of abuses against government officials and supporters in various northern and western towns controlled by the MPCI prior to November and by all three rebel groups after November 2003. Based on this research, it is does not appear that these attacks were part of a deliberate policy of ethnic targeting, however, further investigation is necessary to establish this beyond a doubt. Generally, targeting appeared to have been based on function rather than on ethnicity, and in some cases appears to have been based on the individuals’ behavior in their functions prior to the war. For instance, in at least two cases the rebels initially detained but later released government officials unharmed after questioning local residents about whether the official had been “kind.”81
Members of the rebel groups sometimes targeted people who had been politically active as members of the ruling FPI party. Many civilians in the north and west are RDR and UDPCI members and were openly sympathetic to the aims of the MPCI and the smaller groups. FPI members often fled the north and west, or hid among local communities when the rebels took control. The targeting of FPI members appears to have been partly linked to pre-existing political tension, as there had been considerable election-related violence between rival political parties prior to the war, and to suspicions that FPI members would support the government. An Ivorian Yacouba couple described their fears as members of the FPI, and the difficulties of disassociating political and ethnic affiliation in the charged environment.
We are Yacouba and members of the FPI. We were active in the electoral campaign for Laurent Gbagbo. The people of my village, who are mostly Yacouba, asked us ‘Why do you support Gbagbo? He’s a Bété.’ They didn’t understand that one could be Yacouba and support Gbagbo. When General Guei died, the FPI supporters were accused of having killed him…. The youths came and destroyed the FPI office and our house….Most FPI members went to Man….We stayed a month, then returned to the village and stayed with friends….Then the war began in Bouaké. Then Danané, Sanguiné, Man, Biankouma. The rebels came to us around December 15. They were Yacouba, in civilian clothes and uniforms, with red bandanas on their heads. There were also [other ethnicities]…. They said they came to avenge the death of General Guei….They told the village chief not to mistreat the FPI people. Then they asked the head of the village to give them young men for recruitment. The village chief gave them, he had to. My name was on the list. The men left and I hid. That night, the rebels came in a truck. I heard them say to the village chief, ‘Where are the FPI youths, we’ve come to kill them.’ I left through the window. I saw the rebels threaten the youth leader with a gun, saying, ‘show us where the FPI are, or we will kill you.’82
The rebels attacked Danané, a strategic town less than thirty kilometers from the Liberian border, between 8 and 9 a.m. on November 28, 2002. There was shooting for several hours until the rebels had captured the town. According to civilian accounts, civilian deaths in Danané appear to have been generally the result of stray bullets and shrapnel from the government’s helicopter attacks in mid-afternoon.83
In the following days, the rebels continued to search for gendarmes and other members of the government forces, as well as members of the FPI party, who were suspected of supporting the government. Not all of these gendarmes were killed in combat. It is clear that some were killed after being wounded and tortured. An Ivorian Yacouba man who fled Danané was horrified by what he witnessed:
When I was leaving Danané, there were bodies thrown in the water. [The rebels] had killed four gendarmes, we are not used to seeing bodies on the side of the road. One man, they had cut his tendons at the back of his foot and thrown him in the water. One gendarme they killed, they put his eyes out with a knife and broke his head….I also saw two thieves being beaten in front of the [bank]. It’s horrible when you see these things.
The rebels were mixed—Liberian Yacouba and Gio and native Ivorians. Even some of the Liberian refugees joined the rebels. The Liberians had their cocaine in white bottles, when they do that, they can do anything. The rebels said they had come to avenge Guei and that they would kill Gbagbo and eat him. They used to sing, ‘We will kill Gbagbo and drink water from his brain.’84
Government officials in the region were of mixed ethnicity, including from the indigenous Yacouba ethnicity. Still, fears of reprisals led even some Yacouba officials to leave. A young Ivorian woman described her family’s flight from a village in the west shortly after the rebels arrived in early December.
We saw the rebels arrive in a jeep and a four-by-four. They had soldiers and youths who did not seem to be there by choice. They asked where to find the customs office and the gendarmerie. They were after the forces of law and order. The youth…supported and helped the rebels triumphantly. They showed them where the corps-habillees were, their houses, the town hall. After ransacking the town hall, they organized a meeting with the population. ‘Don’t panic, we’re here to help you. We’re not after the people, only the administration and the corps-habillées.’ That night there was a curfew at 8 p.m. All the government officials had fled the days before. [The rebels] were looking for people who hid the weapons and ammunition of the escaped gendarmes. Some people were taken hostage and tortured. They shot them in the hand. They went to the house of the head of the military brigade, who lived near us. They turned on the lights, turned on the taps, broke the doors and totally ransacked the inside of the house. We were afraid and went to hide. [My father] didn’t feel too threatened because he’s Yacouba, but my mother couldn’t bear the tension. The next day, December 2, we took everything we could and fled….85
Man was captured by a mixed force of largely MPCI and MJP rebels on November 28, 2002, but they did not hold it for long. A government offensive attacked Man on the heels of a French operation to evacuate foreign Western nationals. Government forces proceeded to hold Man for more than two weeks, until the rebels re-took the town on December 19, 2002. Following the government occupation of Man, the rebels’ attitudes towards any suspected government sympathizers hardened considerably and many of the reports of abuses in the town date from this period.
Human Rights Watch was told that “when [the rebels] came the first time, they did not do any damage. They were almost kind. They explained to the people that they didn’t bear a grudge against the villagers, only against Gbagbo, and they had come to liberate the country. But this time when they came back on December 19, they totally changed. They were nastier and it was clear that that they came to commit crimes.”86 The most credible explanation for what was a marked change in the behavior of the rebels is that during the government occupation of Man, the government forces executed numerous civilians, often with the assistance of local civilians, particularly self-defense committee members. Once the rebels recaptured the town, they learned of these abuses and specifically targeted those civilians, many of them self-defense committee members, who had collaborated with the government forces in targeting civilians.
Many civilians in Man had fled to the churches for refuge during the days of heavy fighting that preceded the rebel’s re-entry into the town. Displaced civilians at one of Man’s churches, the Bethany center, witnessed the summary execution of two government officials there in late-December.
The rebels were mixed—Mandingoes [Liberians], Sierra Leoneans, Senaphous—all speaking their own languages, some speaking French or English. Many wore uniform. Some of them are wearing the uniforms of the corps-habillés, which they took from the bodies of the gendarmes they killed. When the rebels arrived, they said they would not hurt civilians, still, some went and tried to steal things, and sometimes these thieves would be killed by the other fighters.
While we were in the Bethany church, the rebels came all the time. They would come in groups of fifteen or so, they would shout and ask ‘Hey, are there any Angolans, and gendarmes, or corps-habillés here?’ The people in the church would say ‘No, no one like that here.’ The rebels wouldn’t bother you if you were a civilian. One day the rebels came and took away two men from the church. One of these men was a former director of primary education…. Someone else in the crowd at the church must have …gone out and informed the rebels that there were two corps-habillés in the church. The rebels came that night, they encircled the church, and they went straight to the room where the man was sleeping. They even knew which room number he was in. They took the two men out of the room and shot them both behind a flowerbed, in the courtyard of the church. I was sleeping when the rebels came, but one of my friends woke me up and told me, ‘The rebels have taken two men and [passes his forefinger across his throat].’
The next morning, everyone in the church went to see what had happened—the bodies of the two men were there on the ground, we saw them, shot in the chest from the front. After that, everyone was afraid to stay in the church and most people fled.87
Human Rights Watch documented several cases of rape committed by the rebel forces and believes that the actual incidence of rape was far higher given that rape tends to be underreported by victims due to the social stigma attached to the crime. In some instances, it is unclear which rebel group was responsible, but it is likely that members of all three rebel groups committed rape and other forms of sexual violence. For instance, when the rebels returned to the Man area in late-December, a number of young women were taken “as wives” by the rebels, probably by members of the MPCI and MJP groups. A family member of some of the victims told Human Rights Watch:
Among the people taken from my village were seven women from my family: my nieces, my cousins, and my little sister. They were taken between the 24th and 26th of December. The youngest were forced to be the wives of the rebels, the others had to cook. They stayed with the rebels for ten days. Then the rebels told them they were free to go because another group of rebels, those of MPIGO, would come to replace them.88
The incidence of rape appears to have increased when the three rebel groups moved into the traditionally pro-government Gueré territory around Toulepleu and Bangolo, where the rapes were sometimes, although not necessarily always, based on ethnic affiliation.
A Burkinabé woman told Human Rights Watch about the rape of her twelve-year-old niece by four Yacouba-speaking members of the rebel forces. The attack took place in a small village off the road between Bangolo and Duékoué—a largely Gueré area. Her aunt said, “They raped my niece, she was twelve years old—a little girl who didn’t even have breasts—she was crying and crying but still they took her. She couldn’t even walk afterwards.” 89
Human Rights Watch was also told of one case in which a group of young women and girls were held in sexual slavery by the Ivorian rebels. In this case, five girls and young women aged fourteen to twenty were taken from encampments around Toulepleu to a military camp on the border—from its location and the description, probably one run by the MPIGO group. The women described a small camp where approximately thirty Ivorian soldiers lived and Liberians came and went every day after receiving orders. The girls and women were held there for at least one week. During the days they washed clothes and cooked, and they were raped every night. They were threatened at gunpoint that they would be killed if they tried to escape. While the Liberian fighters clearly worked with the Ivorian rebels and even took instructions from them, they apparently lived elsewhere. 90
74 Human Rights Watch interview, Abidjan, March 24, 2003.
75 Human Rights Watch interview, Bobo-Dioulasso, February 8, 2003.
76 Human Rights Watch interview, Bobo-Dioulasso, February 9, 2003.
77 All parties to the conflict, including the rebel groups, are obliged to respect the fundamental guarantees established by international humanitarian law. The obligation to respect the provisions of Common Article 3 and Protocol II apply as much to the rebel groups as to the government. See chapter X on Côte d’Ivoire’s legal obligations.
78 Amnesty International, “Côte d’Ivoire: Une Suite de Crimes Impunis,” February 27, 2003.
79 Ibid.
80 Human Rights Watch interview, Bobo-Dioulasso, February 9, 2003.
81 Human Rights Watch interviews, Abidjan, March 24, 2003 and Guinea, March 2003.
82 Interviewed in Guinea, January 1, 2003, on file with Human Rights Watch.
83 According to Human Rights Watch research, this air attack appears to have focused on military objectives such as Danané’s military camp on the western side of the town, which was occupied by the rebel forces by midday. There were civilian casualties, but these were probably unintentional victims who happened to be in or around military objectives during the attacks.
84 Human Rights Watch interview, Guinea, March 1, 2003.
85 Interviewed in Guinea, January 29, 2003, on file with Human Rights Watch.
86 Human Rights Watch interview, Duékoué, April 2, 2003.
87 Human Rights Watch interview, Guinea, March 1, 2003.
88 Human Rights Watch interview, Duékoué, April 2, 2003.
89 Human Rights Watch interview, Duékoué, April 3, 2003.
90 Human Rights Watch telephone interview, New York, June 4, 2003.
