“I’m against the war, but please don’t quote me”

As the two camps in Cote d’Ivoire’s simmering civil war dig in their heels refusing to budge for peace, members of the country’s silent majority are laying their lives on the line by refusing to take sides.

In an unprecedented incident in the Abidjan suburb of Adjame last week, local residents openly took on members of a powerful militia group that supports President Laurent Gbagbo.

Complaining of bullying and extortion, they came to blows with members of the Patriotic Grouping for Peace (GPP), a hard-line group of several hundred militants that has requisitioned a local school as a military training camp.

Georges Essan, a 42-year-old schoolteacher who lives in Adjame, didn’t take part in the skirmishing, but told IRIN he firmly supported the protest.

“When they set up camp in the school near here they said they wanted to defend us against dangerous individuals hiding in the city. They didn’t ask us first. We saw them checking people out in front of the school. I always avoided going by there.”

But Essan’s lingering fears about the GPP’s bully-boy tactics spiralled after November 4, when fresh violence erupted across Cote d’Ivoire following a failed attempt by President Gbagbo to re-conquer the northern half of the country, now in rebel hands.

“A woman who lives in my suburb who’s a ‘patriot’ (the name given to militant Gbagbo supporters) said she was going to tell the GPP I was a suspect individual because I never go out on their demonstrations,” he said, referring to pro-government rallies and marches.

Because of his past and because of his apparent lack of patriotic fervour, Essan believes he has a lot to fear.

He was living in the northern town of Korhogo when war broke out on 19 September 2002, but fled to Abidjan under threat of reprisals from the rebels who took control there, because he was born a southerner.

“But here in Abidjan, whenever I refuse to take part in a march, my colleagues as well as youngsters in the suburb accuse me of backing the rebels.

“I tell them this is not the case, that it’s just that I’m not at war with anyone. What I want is peace for everyone in this country, not a peace that favours some and not others.

“But people who think the same way I do can’t really speak their minds, neither here in Abidjan nor anywhere else in the country. There’s no-one to protect us.”

Ever since Cote d'Ivoire was split in half by conflict more than two years ago, the powers-that-be, whether in the loyalist south or rebel north, consider Ivorians to be either unconditionally on their side, or with the enemy.

“You’re either with the rebels or with the republic. You can’t sit on the fence in this war,” Mamadou Koulibaly, the speaker of parliament and an influential leader of Gbagbo's Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) party, said last year.

Pro-Gbagbo newspapers are banned in the rebel-held north, where local radio stations dare not speak ill of the rebel cause or discuss the deadly infighting that takes place regularly between rival rebel factions.

In the south, meanwhile, private radio stations are banned from broadcasting news and the offices of opposition newspapers have occasionally been trashed by pro-Gbagbo mobs.

Whenever tension rises, gangs of Young Patriots roam the streets tearing up any opposition titles they find on news stands.

So when it comes to broadcasts on state radio, there is no room for people who sit uncomfortably in the middle.

“I’ve been taken off the air because I’m not on anyone’s side, I just want peace in Cote d’Ivoire,” said a well-known preacher whose sermons were taken off the air after the war broke out. “But don’t quote my name if you mention me because Jesus said not to throw pearls to swine.”

“I sent a dozen letters to the president to warn him off the false prophets who predict victory against the rebels and France by encouraging a suicidal war,” the preacher said, referring to other religious leaders who have become popular with the government and the loyalist media.

“But I cannot speak out this way in public because of the youths,” he told IRIN.

“Some of them asked me how I thought the crisis could be resolved. When I said through negotiations, they said 'no way.’ If you knew how well they were organised, you’d understand why I’ve stopped speaking publicly.”

A few days before President Gbagbo’s air force launched a bombing campaign against rebel targets in the north in early November, the preacher did manage to broadcast a warning against war-mongering on state television, but he was allowed very little air time.

“I went on TV to assist people who are in danger,” the preacher said. “False prophets are encouraging the president, leading him to chaos.”

The south had become as bad as the north, he added. “They all want to win peace with arms. They have become the law on the streets. I’m against all that, but don’t write that I said so. All they want here are people ready to fight the enemy.”

In the economic capital Abidjan, several non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have sprung up to help the authorities triumph over “impostors and destabilising influences”.

Like-minded organisations from civil society were also launched in the north at the beginning of hostilities to support “the noble combat against exclusion.”

But a few brave Ivorians have decided to bring the silent majority out of the cold.

“If you fail to come out in favour of one or the other political camp, and make impartial appeals for peace and the respect of the peace agreements, your organisation will be attacked. But we’re ready to take on this risk because that’s our choice,” said Salimata Porquet, who heads a women’s group called Eburnie pour la Paix (Ivory for Peace).

“The only groups that go out and march in the streets of Cote d’Ivoire nowadays are ’10,000 girls in favour of X’ or “20,000 women in favour of Y’”, she said.

Porquet said her group aims to promote dialogue between the government and rebels. The two sides signed a peace agreement in January 2003, but it has never been fully implemented and two years on the country remains as divided as ever.

“We need to think Cote d’Ivoire first and not one group or the other, because the people who are being silenced and who are suffering from the troubles are the majority of the people. We are mothers and wives and we know what we’re talking about,” Porquet said.