IVORY COAST: A series of cross-border attacks earlier this month that killed at least 23 people highlights the lingering threat posed by exiled fighters still loyal to former Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo

Record ID: 182221

  • Title: IVORY COAST: A series of cross-border attacks earlier this month that killed at least 23 people highlights the lingering threat posed by exiled fighters still loyal to former Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo
  • Date: 23rd June 2012
  • Summary: (SOUNDBITE) (French) REFUGEE FROM PARA, ANGELINE TOKLAON, SAYING: "When we left the village, our sisters stayed behind in the house. The foreigners came and killed them. They killed an aunt, my younger sister with her two children and my younger brother. Five people in all." ZAKRE, (PARA AREA ) WESTERN IVORY COAST (RECENT - JUNE 16, 2012) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF BURNT HOUSES IN VILLAGE TAI, WESTERN IVORY COAST (RECENT - JUNE 17, 2012) ( REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (French) REFUGEE FROM PARA, ANGELINE TOKLAON SAYING : "They're doing this because of our land. They want to chase us away and then take our land to settle on our land. They should just to go to the forest. That's the whole problem, they want to take our land." PARA, IVORY COAST (RECENT - MARCH 16, 2012) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF IVORIAN ARMY SOLDIERS STANDING IN VILLAGE, U.N. PATROL ON ROAD
  • Embargoed: 8th July 2012 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Cote d'Ivoire
  • Country: Ivory Coast
  • Topics: Conflict,International Relations,Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVA4KNA7QVTA51D52B19FK1VYCHS
  • Story Text: A series of cross-border attacks on Ivory Coast's western border earlier this month has highlighted the lingering threat posed by the now-exiled former regime.
    Former President Laurent Gbagbo was brought down in last year's civil conflict and now awaits trial at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.
    The militias and foreign mercenaries he used to spread terror in the cocoa-rich west fled to neighbouring Liberia by the thousands.
    Now an upsurge in violence in the west of the country has been blamed by the Ivorian government on those same exiled fighters.
    In one small village in western Ivory Coast, gunmen knew exactly who they were looking for when they launched an attack. They called people by name and fired rockets through their front doors.
    "We were sleeping when they started to shoot their guns and we went out to try and run away, run into the bush, When they started to shoot everyone was afraid and we went into our fields to sleep there, but we were in the rain until the morning," said cocoa farmer Guillaume Amidou Guigimbde.
    Many believe it was their former neighbours who came to attack them.
    A decade of north-south partition and simmering political crisis in the country ended last year with a brief but brutal civil war which was sparked by Gbagbo's refusal to acknowledge defeat in 2010 polls.
    Around 3,000 died before Gbagbo was captured and his forces routed by troops loyal to his presidential rival, Alassane Ouattara. While the fighting has ended, efforts under Ouattara's new government to heal the wounds in Ivorian society have been faltering.
    Some 200,000 refugees, many fearing reprisals at the hands of Ouattara's supporters for backing Gbagbo, fled into Liberia in the company of Gbagbo's fighters and their Liberian mercenary allies. Around 60,000 Ivorians remain there today.
    "When power changed hands, those who were in power before saw themselves as threatened and left. There are many who have left. Those who were for the former party in power left when they saw the republican forces arrive," said Tere Tehe, the deputy mayor of the border town of Tai, only around 40 kilometres from Para, where the most recent attacks took place.
    The Ivorian government alleges the fighters are bankrolled by Gbagbo allies still at large in the region.
    "We have taken fighters on the ground, and this is palpable proof which makes us say that the attacks are coming from Liberia. In the questioning of these fighters who were taken on the ground, they confirmed to us that the recruitment happens in refugee camps in Liberia," said Losseni Fofana, the Ivorian army's top commander in the west.
    Human Rights Watch, in a report released just days before the June 8 attack on U.N. peacekeepers, warned that Ivorian and Liberian fighters were behind a series of raids that had killed 40 people, most of them foreigners, since last July.
    Home to some of the world's richest cocoa farmland, the west has long been the centre of tensions between native ethnicities and migrant farmers from elsewhere in Ivory Coast and Mali and Burkina Faso to the north.
    Gbagbo used those tensions to solidify his political base and mobilise the youth militias used to intimidate the opposition. It was a policy that regularly sparked tit-for-tat killings and left the region perpetually teetering on the brink of a conflict along ethnic faultlines.
    Now immigrants are accused of chasing native ethnic groups from a number of villages along the border zone in retaliation for nearly a year of increasingly brutal cross-border incursions by suspected Gbagbo loyalists.
    "When we left the village, our sisters stayed behind in the house. The foreigners came and killed them. They killed an aunt, my younger sister with her two children and my younger brother. Five people in all," said 34-year-old Angelique Toklaon, who fled the village of Ziriglo for the relative safety of Tai with her four children in September.
    "They're doing this because of our land. They want to chase us away and then take our land to settle on our land. They should just to go to the forest. That's the whole problem, they want to take our land," Toklaon said.
    Ouattara has launched a "truth and reconciliation" process to get communities in the west and elsewhere to come to terms with last year's violence. The thorny issue of land ownership is due to go before parliament later this year.
    In the meantime, the U.N. mission is reinforcing its positions along the border and the Ivorian army has deployed hundreds of troops for what it says is an operation to "mop up" any fighters on the loose.
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