18 reported killed in ethnic clashes in southern cocoa belt

Eighteen people were reported killed this week in a fresh outbreak of violence between villagers from President Laurent Gbagbo's Bete ethnic group and settlers from other parts of Cote d'Ivoire and West Africa near the southern town of Gagnoa. The security forces in a statement on Friday that 11 people died during an attack on the Bete village of Siegouekou, 35 km north of Gagnoa, in the small hours of Thursday morning. The Burkinabe consul in Gagnoa said seven Burkinabe immigrants in the area were subsequently shot and hacked to death in a nearby town in reprisal killings. The military statement said 10 local people were killed and seven were wounded when a band of men armed with hunting rifles and knives attacked Siekouekou under cover of darkness. One attacker of Burkinabe nationality was also killed and another was captured, the statement said. One paramilitary gendarme was injured after the security forces arrived on the scene to engage the attackers, it added. The statement said police and military reinforcements had been sent to the area to try and apprehend the rest of the gang. Mamadou Grabo, the Burkinabe consul in Gagnoa, said that seven Burkinabe immigrants in Ouragahio, the nearest large town to Siegouekou, were subsequently killed in reprisal killings by gangs of Bete youths armed with machetes and automatic rifles. "They were even more heavily armed than the army," he told IRIN by telephone. Two other Burkinabes in Ouragahio had been seriously wounded, he added. Grabo said there were several hundred Burkinabe residents in the town, who were now mostly in hiding. He said local people in the district were blaming the attack of Siegouekou on people from the Senoufo ethnic group of rebel leader Guillaume Soro. The Senoufo live in both northern Cote d'Ivoire and southern Burkina Faso. Since Cote d'Ivoire plunged into civil war in September 2002 the Gagnoa area has seen repeated clashes between Bete villagers and settlers who have established cocoa plantations in the densely forested area over the past 40 years. Thousands of these incomers have been driven off their farms since the conflict began and bands of dispossessed cocoa planters from Burkina Faso have been blamed for several earlier attacks on Bete villages in the area. In a clear warning against further reprisal killings, Friday's armed forces statement said: "The security and defence force ask all the different communities throughout Cote d'Ivoire to avoid actions which would weaken the fabric of society." A military source pointed out that Siegouekou was only five km from Gbagbo's home village of Mama and that the local Bete population was seething with anger at the attack. The statement added that Colonel Philippe Mangou, the chief of staff of the armed forces, had visited Siegouekou following Thursday's attack to reassure the local population and peace had now been restored in the area. The civil war has split Cote d'Ivoire, the world's largest cocoa producer, between a government-controlled south and a rebel-controlled north. There has been an uneasy truce between the two sides since May 2003, but that was broken last month when Gbagbo's forces launched an abortive attempt to invade the north. The offensive was stopped in its tracks after French peacekeeping forces destroyed Gbagbo's small air force on the ground to prevent it from staging further bombing raids. Outrage by the president's supporters following the French action triggered several days of riots throughout the government-held south. Six people were reported killed and 29 injured in disturbances in Gagnoa at the time. One of the underlying causes of the Ivorian conflict is a feeling by people from the north of the country and immigrants from Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea that they have been marginalised and deprived of their nationality and property rights by people from southern Cote d'Ivoire who control the government in Abidjan. President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa is currently engaged in mediation to persuade Gbagbo and the rebels to implement in full a January 2003 peace agreement so that disarmament can take place rapidly in order to allow the holding of fresh elections to take place in October 2005.