Market traders fear further brutal police raids

They are highly organized, relatively well-off and best friends with the local mayor, whose office is practically next door. Yet the 4,000 traders at Adjamé market, the largest market in Abidjan, are unable to protect themselves against Cote d'Ivoire's paramilitary police. “Don’t use my name,” said a 61-year-old cloth seller who was beaten with bamboo sticks and forced to do press-ups in a nearby military camp two weeks ago. “They can harm us again, and there is nothing we can do.” For years, the security forces have commited random acts of violence against immigrants from other West African countries and so-called northerners, people whose ancestors derive from the predominantly Muslim north of the country. The northerners are not considered full-blooded Ivorians and the security forces often use the perceived ‘foreignness’ of these people as an excuse to extort money from them. Many northerners have come to accept this, however grudgingly, as a fact of life. Cote d'Ivoire has been split between a rebel-held north and a government-controlled south since rebels failed to remove President Laurent Gbagbo from office, in an attempted coup in September 2002. The rebels claim to seek equality for all Ivorians. They also want controversial opposition leader Alassane Ouattara to be allowed to stand in the next presidential elections, due in October 2005. Although Ouattara served as prime minister under Cote d'Ivoire's first president, Felix Houphoet Boigny, he was excluded from the last presidential election in 2000 on the grounds that he was not a full-blooded Ivorian. Faces smeared with excrement But the rebellion has only made things worse for northerners living in Abidjan. Nowadays, the paramilitary gendarmerie often act with such brashness and impunity that they seem out of control. The frightened cloth seller described his own painful experience during a police raid on Adjame market on 29 September: “They arrived in armoured vehicles and four-wheel-drives and surrounded the market,” he said, sitting in the cool of a two-storey market building. “I ran down the stairs, but before I reached the exit, I was pushed into a goods van and taken to the Agban [military] camp.” “There were many people with me. They told us to hand over our identity papers and get undressed. We had to do press-ups and they started beating us.” “Some people had human excrement smeared on their faces,” he said, visibly embarrassed. “But I was lucky. When they got tired of beating, I pleaded with a gendarme to let me go. He had pity on me because I am old. So I put on my clothes and was allowed to leave.” Security forces rounded up and abused an estimated three hundred men that day, injuring 90 of them, said Soumahoro Farikou, the leader of the Adjamé market traders' association and the right-hand man of the local mayor. Two market traders went missing, he added. Farikou subsequently called a 24-hour strike in protest at the brutality of the police raid, which provoked an official protest from the UN Operation in Cote d'Ivoire (ONUCI). “We wrote to the minister of Interior Security and the minister of Defence. But of course, we never received a response," he told IRIN. "The strike was meant to say: we have had enough of this.” Whistling for help Farikou said the raid was probably triggered by the distribution of whistles among market traders. “Last month, one market trader was beaten up because he refused to give money to a gendarme. So we decided to use whistles to call for help whenever the police come and try to extort money from us. I think this made them angry,” he said. Farikou said the mayor of Adjame and the municipal police were unable to stop the constant cycle of extortion and violence. “The security forces are armed. They carry Kalashnikovs. What can do nothing,” he said. Ironically, a unit of the gendarmerie is now investigating complaints about the Adjame raid, which was carried out by its own men. IRIN tried repeatedly to get the gendarmerie's side of the story, but all the officials contacted said they were unable to comment. The feeling of being powerless to deal with violence by the security forces is shared by people of all ethnic groups in Abidjan, a port city of three million people that now suffers from rising unemployment. Many people believe that president Gbagbo is afraid to rein in the security forces because they supported his bid for power in the 2000 elections. In three unprecedented articles published in September, the government-owned newspaper Fraternité-Matin condemned what it called “shameless corruption” in the police and army. One police officer was quoted as saying: “At all costs, avoid police roadblocks at night. If they want you to pay something, pay up and leave as soon as you can. Some police officers are capable of killing you for your mobile phone.” Still, it is the northerners who bear the brunt of the repression. Even murder in broad daylight goes unpunished these days. Ouattara's gardener beaten and drowned A week after the raid on Adjamé market, on 4 October, four employees of opposition leader Alassane Ouattara were arrested by the gendarmerie. Three of them worked at Ouattara’s residence as watchmen. The fourth was his gardener. Ouattara, who lives in exile in Paris, had announced shortly beforehand that he would return to Ivory Coast “very soon”. The three survivors said they were beaten and taken to a barracks of the Republican Guard, where the gardener was thrown into the lagoon, around which Abidjan is built. He was then clubbed on the head until he drowned. The gardener’s name - Jean-Marc Badolo - indicated he came from neighbouring Burkina Faso, the country that has supplied most of the four million immigrants to Cote d'Ivoire. President Gbagbo openly accuses the Burkinabe government of supporting Cote d'Ivoire's rebel movement. The three watchmen said they were released after a senior officer at the Republican Guard intervened. Ouattara’s political party condemned the killing of Badolo and ONUCI, which has 6,000 peacekeeping troops in Cote d'Ivoire, again issued a public protest note. It stressed that "the fight against impunity is an important element in bringing Cote d'Ivoire out of crisis." But the government remained silent. “Impunity is like the plague of Côte d’Ivoire,” one western diplomat told IRIN. “Only when the security forces are held accountable for their acts, will we be able to say that this is a democratic country.”