French helicopters on an evacuation mission were fired upon by forces supporting the country's strongman as they tried to retain power in Ivory Coast's largest city, a military spokesman said Saturday.Their report documents a trail of death and destruction carried out by rebel forces who have swept through the country and are now fighting on the streets of Abidjan to secure the presidency for Alassane Ouattara.
As Ouattara, backed by the UN and the international community, edges closer to victory, the Guardian has uncovered evidence of atrocities committed by the forces acting in his name. Refugees who scrambled through the rainforest to safety in neighbouring Liberia have described children being burned alive during rebel attacks and bodies littering the streets.And as Gbagbo’s enemies seek bloodily and, so far, unsuccessfully to winkle him out of the bunker at his residence in Abidjan, the country’s main city, French troops and UN peacekeepers find themselves reluctantly drawn into combat.
Their reluctance and that of the wider international community stands in stark contrast to events in another African state on the far side of the Sahara, where Nato planners plot against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. For a country that in the 1970s and 1980s was praised for its “Ivorian miracle’’ in avoiding the chaos that plagued the rest of Africa, the question is: what on earth went wrong?
The answer has its roots in the country’s colonial past and, most importantly, its development after the supposed end of French rule. When the “wind of change” blew through Africa ending European power in the 1950s and 1960s, Paris was mealy-mouthed in granting independence. Anxious to retain ties, it gave its former territories a choice when setting them “free”: either accept, after independence, continued de facto French control with Paris-appointed administrators still in place and France still profiting, or be cut adrift.
said. The attack came the same night that France's embassy was hit by two mortars and a rocket fired by forces for Laurent Gbagbo, who refuses to cede power or emerge from a bunker at his residence.
U.N. peacekeeping director Alain Le Roy said Friday that Gbagbo and his military have used negotiations with the U.N. this week as a ploy to consolidate power and reinforce his position. He said that an offer by Gbagbo's top three generals to surrender was evidently a "trick" to buy time.
Guinea went for the latter option and, many would argue, is still paying the price for the economic disaster heaped upon it for what France regard as an insufferable snub. Ivory Coast went the other way thanks, almost entirely, to the efforts of its compliant Francophile political leader, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the sort of dictator many western nations dream of.
On independence in 1960, he did economically exactly what he was told, allowing French companies to benefit from the country’s burgeoning cocoa and coffee sectors. And diplomatically he could be relied on to do the West’s bidding, holding the line in the Cold War by, for example, helping conspirators who ousted Kwame Nkrumah from power in neighbouring Ghana when he went off-message.
For his loyalty to Paris, Houphouët-Boigny was repaid handsomely. France happily accepted one-party rule in Ivory Coast – as long as Houphouët-Boigny ran that party – and it tolerated his Big Man affectations.
He frittered away billions on a tropical 1970s Versailles, transforming the dusty nothing-of-a-place where he was born, Yamoussoukro, into a brand new capital city.
The scale both of the project and its folly really must be seen to be believed. The largest church in the world, the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, was designed to outdo St Peter’s in Rome, looming skywards out of the tropical heat like some sort of messianic architect’s fantasy.
Nearby, six-lane highways cut through the same jungle, connecting nothing to nowhere. I once took a photograph of myself walking in the fast lane: it was quite safe as there was no traffic.
The Guardian spent a week travelling in the border region between Ivory Coast and Liberia, hearing tales of savage attacks on civilians. It also encountered what is emerging as a recurrent aspect of the violence in Ivory Coast: the use of mercenaries from Liberia, believed to have been recruited by both sides in the conflict.
Crouching in the bushes along the banks of the river that separates Liberia from Ivory Coast, two young Liberian men in filthy clothes and flip-flops agreed to a recorded interview after a small payment was made. They described how they had just returned home from a nine-day operation with pro-Ouattara rebels, where they said they were told to kill "anyone and everyone".
They described barbaric scenes in which they surrounded villages in the west of Ivory Coast and, armed with machetes, killed everyone they saw. "The town we entered first, most of the people were on the road. We killed them, just cutting them with our machetes," they said.
One of the towns they claim to have attacked was Blolequin. UN investigators said yesterday they had found more than 100 bodies in Blolequin and surrounding towns. Some appeared to have been burned alive and others had been thrown into a well. The UN believes Liberian mercenaries may have been responsible.
Toulépleu is another town the two mercenaries say they attacked, and where HRW has uncovered evidence of mass killings. One mercenary said: "There are so many bodies in Toulépleu. A digger came from Danane to bury the bodies. There was no way for cars to go over there because of the bodies on the ground. It stank."
Now in the safety of a transit camp in Liberia, refugees fleeing from Toulépleu spoke of the horrors they witnessed there. They described how they grabbed family members and escaped from their homes in a hail of bullets. Whoever and whatever were left behind were burned.
Cradling his five children in the red dust outside the UNHCR tent that is now all he has, Kuide Pehe Ferdinand described the chaos when the attack began. "I had too many children to save when the rebels hit. We tried to pick them all up, but one of my baby girls is disabled and we had to leave her. When I went back, they had burned the house with my baby inside."
The Audgines were also grieving for a loved one killed after the rebels set fire to their home. "I can't even eat, I feel such sadness now," said Rosaline, mother of nine, whose elderly father was burned alive. She said she could do nothing to help him, as he shouted to them from within the flames. She and her children are a few of the many people in the camp who have shaved their heads in a traditional gesture of mourning.
The International Red Cross recently reached Toulépleu, and said it found a town almost completely razed to the ground.
HRW has documented the executions of elderly people who were unable to escape rebel attacks. It says they were held captive in their villages by the pro-Ouattara rebels, and has evidence that more than 30 were executed. One 67-year-old woman from the village of Doké told HRW that pro-Ouattara fighters had taken several captives out each day – often men and women between 60 and 80 years old – and executed them at point-blank range.
The pro-Ouattara forces have denied killing civilians in their advance upon Abidjan, blaming any deaths on Gbagbo's soldiers. Those standing guard at the border crossing with Ivory Coast near Toe Town, eastern Liberia, were in victorious mood when interviewed by the Guardian. In their smart camouflage gear and with AK47s slung around their necks, they swaggered up to the barrier across the bridge between the two countries.
"I pray for democracy in Ivory Coast and that the will of the people will be respected," said "Angelou", their commander, gripping his gun. As he talked, the sound of gunfire cracked from the forest behind him and his troops. "We don't have problem with civilians. If you see someone's died, it's because he's taken up a gun. If he's taken up arms, he is not a civilian, he is my enemy."
The conflict threatens to cause a wider humanitarian crisis in the region. More than a million people have been internally displaced within Ivory Coast, while more than 125,000 have crossed the border into Liberia, a country that itself has been devastated by 14 years of civil war. Many Liberian communities are sheltering refugees, but barely have enough food for themselves, and there are fears the crisis will destabilise Liberia's fragile peace.
On independence in 1960, he did economically exactly what he was told, allowing French companies to benefit from the country’s burgeoning cocoa and coffee sectors. And diplomatically he could be relied on to do the West’s bidding, holding the line in the Cold War by, for example, helping conspirators who ousted Kwame Nkrumah from power in neighbouring Ghana when he went off-message.
For his loyalty to Paris, Houphouët-Boigny was repaid handsomely. France happily accepted one-party rule in Ivory Coast – as long as Houphouët-Boigny ran that party – and it tolerated his Big Man affectations.
He frittered away billions on a tropical 1970s Versailles, transforming the dusty nothing-of-a-place where he was born, Yamoussoukro, into a brand new capital city.
The scale both of the project and its folly really must be seen to be believed. The largest church in the world, the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, was designed to outdo St Peter’s in Rome, looming skywards out of the tropical heat like some sort of messianic architect’s fantasy.
Nearby, six-lane highways cut through the same jungle, connecting nothing to nowhere. I once took a photograph of myself walking in the fast lane: it was quite safe as there was no traffic.
Houphouët-Boigny’s obsession with Mother France meant he copied almost everything. The city has rugby pitches, although they are seldom used. The one I visited had elephant grass reaching up almost to the crossbar between the posts. The Grandes Écoles of France were replicated in clearings hacked out of the bush near Yamoussoukro, supposedly to produce a new generation of technocrats, administrators and functionaries. In reality, they produced little except for a perpetual headache for caretakers struggling, in vain, to keep at bay tropical rain damage, rust and decay.
The vanity did not end when Houphouët-Boigny died in 1993. His body was laid to rest, as he had instructed, in a mausoleum surrounded by a moat guarded by large crocodiles. If only the same attention to detail had been paid to his political legacy.
Without any heir-apparent, and with a body politic atrophied after so many years of one-man rule, succession became a bitter business. The first coup came in 1999.
Cocoa, the agricultural product that had underwritten the country’s economic growth and attracted millions of foreign workers, suffered a collapse and with it the national economy. Foreigners became an easy target for small-minded politicians playing the race card. Suddenly, Ivorian-ness became an issue and foreigners were explicitly banned from running for election.
Under Houphouët-Boigny, Alassane Ouattara, a politician from the north, home of many itinerant workers, was enough of an Ivorian to serve as Prime Minister. In the xenophobia of the late 1990s, he was not.
Ivory Coast followed the route of political chaos made all too familiar by its war-torn neighbours in West Africa: economic collapse, military takeover, disputed elections and, ultimately, civil war.
It broke out in September 2002 when soldiers and people in the north rose against the rule of Gbagbo who, with great irony given the current situation, had come to power after an election victory his rival had refused to recognise.
Although not as cataclysmic as the chaos in Liberia, the war rumbled on, doing irreparable damage to the Ivory Coast’s economy and standing. Journalists based in Abidjan to cover West Africa, in part because it provided the best coffee, pastries and life support in the region, upped and left. The African Investment Bank, supposedly the underwriter of development in the continent, had to move from Abidjan because of the security situation. Gbagbo clung to power, establishing his reputation for diplomatic stonewalling and manipulation.
“They called him the baker because, figuratively speaking, he would blind you with clouds of flour and bend you to his will,’’ a top UN diplomat told me. “It was a worthy name – in all my years of dealing with difficult, manipulative negotiators, I have never met his equal.’’
The conflict, in effect, split the country in two, with Gbagbo loyalists holding the coast and the south, while rebels held the north, French troops occasionally wedged in between. Any chance of regaining Paris backing was blown by Gbagbo in 2004 when his air force bombed a French military position in the de facto rebel capital of Bouaké, killing nine French personnel. Retribution was swift, but the ramifications serious.
Within hours French warplanes had destroyed much of Gbagbo’s air force but, in retaliation, Gbagbo supporters attacked any white person found on the streets of Abidjan and in their zone of control.
Attempts at peace-building drew in luminaries such as Didier Drogba, the Ivorian footballer who plays for Chelsea. In 2007, Drogba suggested, and took part in, a match in Bouaké involving the national team, Les Éléphants, as a gesture of reconciliation between the two halves of the country.
It worked and is widely credited with helping to lead to a slow (made all the slower by the baker’s manipulations) move towards elections intended to end the civil war for good. Delayed for five years, they finally took place last November and resulted in a 54 per cent to 46 per cent victory for Ouattara over Gbagbo – a result accepted by almost everyone except the incumbent and his supporters. Emboldened by international support for their man, Ouattara’s supporters have in recent weeks launched attacks far into Abidjan, forcing Gbagbo deep inside his bunker.
There is no doubt the baker will seek to throw up more flour to screen his eventual departure but, in reality, the mess in the Ivory Coast today goes far beyond one man. It dates from the era when the world turned a blind eye to corrupt, unrepresentative, dictatorial regimes; when stability counted more than transparency.
But as the people of Ivory Coast, along with those in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and elsewhere have shown in recent months, short-term stability is, eventually, no stability at all.
Tim Butcher’s new book on West Africa, `Chasing the Devil’ is published by Chatto & Windus. It was last week long-listed for the 2011 Orwell Prize for political writing.
In power for a decade, Gbagbo refuses to step aside even though the U.N. has ruled that he lost the November presidential election to his political rival Alassane Ouattara.
After four months of diplomacy, Ouattara gave the go-ahead for a military intervention led by fighters from a former rebel group. Forces first attempted to bomb Gbagbo out. When that failed, they tried a ground assault on the bunker. On Friday, internationally recognized president Ouattara imposed a blockade around Gbagbo's presidential residence, and said he'll focus on normalizing life in the corpse-strewn, terrorized city.
Ouattara said the goal is to wait for Gbagbo to run out of food and water. He said his troops will work to secure Abidjan, where people have hidden inside their homes this week amid heavy fighting between troops loyal to Ouattara and those who are with Gbagbo.
Ouattara's forces have stopped short of trying to kill the entrenched leader, a move that could stoke the rage of his supporters. Some 46% of Ivorians voted for Gbagbo.
French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet estimates that Gbagbo has some 1,000 troops, compared to the 2,000-strong force that has been fighting to install Ouattara.
As the military standoff dragged on in Abidjan, there are new concerns about tensions erupting into deadly violence in the country's west. The U.N. said Friday more than 100 bodies have been found in the last 24 hours, and some of the victims had been burned alive.
Military vehicles had to negotiate around bodies lying in the streets. An untold number of fighters and civilians have been killed in Abidjan in the past week.
The International Rescue Committee is warning that chaos is permeating this West African nation once split in two by a 2002-2003 civil wa
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