Ivory Coast new regime hunts old
2011-08-12 10:59
Abidjan - Ivory Coast charged 58 former army officers on Thursday, pressing on with its crackdown on Laurent Gbagbo's ousted regime even as the UN revealed a string of killings attributed to allies of his successor Alassane Ouattara.
The tough measures by the new strongman over violence committed during the west African country's deadly post-election crisis come days after Gbagbo allies met Ouattara's reconciliation offers with scepticism.
Ange Kessi, the west African country's military prosecutor, told AFP that 58 army officers from Gbagbo's regime had been charged and about 40 of them detained.
Among the top pro-Gbagbo officers detained is Brunot Dogbo Ble, former commander of the feared Republican Guard.
The detained officers are being held in Abidjan and in the northern town of Korhogo. Some of them were arrested several weeks ago and have been detained in military camps, Kessi said.
They face a raft of charges, including "illegal arrest, murder, concealing corpses, rape, theft, insubordination, arbitrary detention, embezzlement, recruiting mercenaries..."
The indictments follow the charging of 37 political figures close to Gbagbo, including his son Michel.
Form of torture
At celebrations last weekend of the 51st anniversary of independence from France, Ouattara extended a hand to supporters of Gbagbo, especially those who fled to Ghana, saying "their place is with us" and calling for unity.
But his statement was met with suspicion.
Ouattara's actions are "unlikely to reassure us on his sincerity", Adou Assoa, spokesperson for the exiled branch of the former ruling Ivorian Popular Front, said in a statement earlier this week.
Assoa said a pre-requisite to any return of senior FPI officials to Ivory Coast was "the release of all brothers who are unjustly imprisoned", including the former president and his wife.
Gbagbo's lawyer claimed on Wednesday that his client was being held incommunicado and without charges in a dimly-lit, shuttered room, arguing that the conditions of his detention amounted to "a form of torture".
The UN mission acknowledged some concern over Gbagbo's detention and said without elaborating it would submit recommendations to Ouattara's government.
Ivory Coast is still fragile and unstable, with work under way to form a new army including by integrating the former rebel fighters who supported Ouattara, who was also backed by UN and French forces.
Illegal detention
But on Thursday the UN mission in Ivory Coast reported that there had been 26 extrajudicial killings in the country in the past four weeks, mostly blamed on fighters who helped the Western-backed Ouattara to power.
The killings were reported between July 11 and August 10, the rights representative for the UN's Ivory Coast mission, Guillaume Ngefa, said at a press conference.
There were "26 cases of extrajudicial execution, summary or arbitrary" and "85 cases of arbitrary arrest and illegal detention", he said.
Most often implicated in the "numerous violations of human rights" being recorded were men whom locals and victims identified as belonging to the Republican Forces of Ivory Coast (FRCI), he said.
The FRCI helped Ouattara take power in May after an election dispute with ex-president Laurent Gbagbo, who refused to step down after losing elections in November.
Communal graves
Gbagbo's position led to a four-month conflict in which 3 000 people were killed and both sides were accused of serious abuses.
It ended when the FRCI, backed by French forces, arrested Gbagbo on April 11, also rounding up dozens of his supporters who remain under house arrest.
The 26 people killed in the past month included a 17-month-old child and were shot dead in the western village of Duekoue and central-western Daloa, areas populated by supporters of Gbagbo, Ngefa said.
The killings were blamed mostly on "elements of the FRCI" as well as locals who support them, but also sometimes on pro-Gbagbo fighters, Ngefa said.
Eight communal graves had also been discovered near the economic capital Abidjan, he said, without giving details.
Establishing security remains a major challenge in the world's leading cocoa producer after the election dispute, which culminated in a nearly two-week battle in Abidjan.