U.N. To Investigate Rights Violations In Ivory Coast Crackdown

Friday, April 2, 2004

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights is setting up an inquiry into the deadly violence that shook Ivory Coast's main city of Abidjan last week, an agency spokesman said today in Geneva.

"Our office has engaged in preparatory work to put in place an international committee of inquiry on the subject of the state having committed serious human rights violations during and after the events of March 25 in Abidjan," spokesman Jose Diaz said.

Diaz said Ivory Coast is accused of committing summary and extrajudicial executions, rape and sexual violence and arbitrary arrests and detentions during a government crackdown on opposition supporters staging a public demonstration. He said the United Nations wished to convene the commission of inquiry "as quickly as possible" (Agence France-Presse/Voila, April 2, U.N. Wire translation).

Ivorian Security Minister Martin Bleou yesterday blamed "parallel forces" dressed like government soldiers and police for the deaths, beatings and other atrocities reported in Abidjan since last Thursday's march.

"Several reliable witnesses have said that individuals in combat uniform and armed with automatic handguns and Kalashnikovs travel around at night and wreak terror on some neighborhoods by committing all sorts of atrocities against the people," Bleou said, adding, "the combat uniform is no longer the distinctive mark of the defense and security forces."

Muslims, immigrants and ethnic minorities have reportedly been the targets of the violence. A Malian official said that at least 10 Malians had been killed in Abidjan in the past eight days, among them a Muslim cleric.

"These people were shot dead because they were foreigners, and more specifically Malians," said the source, referring to the Ivorian xenophobia that gave rise to civil war in September 2002 as rebel groups fought Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo in defense of Muslims and ethnic minorities after the concept of "Ivorianness" arose.

According to AFP, ethnic tensions began brewing in 1993 with the death of Ivory Coast's first president, Felix Houphouet-Boigny, who had, over the course of his 33-year rule, welcomed the West African immigrants who labored in the nation's lucrative cocoa fields. By the time civil war broke out, immigrants comprised roughly one-third of Ivory Coast's population of 16 million.

Many immigrants fled the fighting and have not returned (AFP/Yahoo! News, April 2).