UN highlights tide of human rights abuse in run-up to peace summit

The UN peacekeeping force in Cote d'Ivoire has published a detailed and scathing report on recent human rights abuses in Cote d'Ivoire as President Laurent Gbagbo prepares for a face-to-face meeting with rebel leader Guillaume Soro at fresh peace talks in South Africa on Sunday.

"Despite some encouraging improvements in the human rights situation observed during the months of January and February, the overall situation remained worrying," the report concluded.

It noted with alarm "an intensification of the activities of militias and armed groups responsible for acts of violence and revenge" in Abidjan, the de facto capital, and government-controlled areas of central and western Cote d'Ivoire.

Earlier this week, Human Rights Watch accused the Ivorian government of recently recruiting hundreds of demobilised combatants in Liberia, including child soldiers to join its militia forces in the West.

The New York-based organisation said the recruitment of Liberian mercenaries had intensified in March and it had interviewed 13 of them who said the process was being coordinated by a colonel and a sergeant of the Ivorian army.

The army issued a statement on Friday strongly denying this allegation.

The report by the human rights division of the UN Operation in Cote d'Ivoire (ONUCI) chronicled a series of human rights abuses committed during the first two months of this year.

These took place in the government-controlled south and the rebel-held north of the country, as well as the lawless buffer zone patrolled by UN and French peacekeepers that lies in between.

The report, published on Thursday night, cited a long list of extra-judicial killings and disappearances and instances of torture, beatings and extortion by gunmen supporting both sides in Cote d'Ivoire's three-year-old civil war.

It was issued as Gbagbo, Soro and the leaders of Cote d'Ivoire's main opposition parties prepared for a round-table meeting with South African President Thabo Mbeki in Pretoria.

Mbeki, who has been seeking to end the impasse in Cote d'Ivoire's peace process for the past five months, is the latest in a long line of international mediators to seek a negotiated solution to the conflict.

But there are few signs so far that he has made much progress.
Britain announced on Thursday that it was once more closing its embassy in Abidjan in anticipation of fresh trouble in the country. The Foreign Office in London urged the 150 or so remaining UK passport-holders in the country to leave.

British ambassador David Coates told IRIN that the decision was motivated by “a combination of rising insecurity, heightened political rhetoric and also the possibility that the political crisis is not near to being resolved which could result in violence.”

The ONUCI human rights report said that in the government-run south of Cote d'Ivoire, “summary and extra-judicial executions and excessive use of force continue to be regularly perpetrated.”

It highlighted the execution-style killing of 18 alleged “gangsters” by the security forces in the Abidjan suburb of Yopougon in broad daylight on January 18.

The rebel-held north is not much safer.

The report said at least four civilians were found summarily executed in rebel territory during the two-month period.

It accused the rebels of arbitrarily detaining civilians suspected of sympathising with or working for government forces.

Several detainees in rebel custody had ‘disappeared,’ while others had been subjected to torture in the homes of rebel leaders, notably at the Bouake residence of Mobido Drabo, a rebel commander known as "Mobio".

He died shortly afterwards in suspicious circumstances. The ONUCI human rights investigators said they had been unable to verify allegations that he had simply become the latest troublesome commander to suffer rough justice at the hands of the rebel leadership.

In the government zone as well as in the rebel-controlled north, “the climate of suspicion and fear of conspiracies […] have provoked arbitrary arrests and acts of intimidation targeting individuals suspected by the rebels to be a supporter or a sympathizer of ‘the enemy’”, the report said.

UN and French peacekeeping troops patrol the Zone of Confidence, which runs as a dividing belt through the centre of the country. But the report said this no-man's-land was equally cause for concern because “the judicial system and the administration do not function according to required norms, which leaves much room for impunity”.

It said the Zone of Confidence had become infested with bands of robbers, who blocked roads with tree trunks and stripped passers-by of their money and possessions at gunpoint.

The report highlighted an “increase of cases of theft, racketeering and violence committed by military elements, bandits or militias against civilians who live in the confidence zone or who are crossing it.”

The report said crime had risen sharply in Abidjan since 3,858 prisoners escaped from the city's main jail during anti-French rioting in early November. It noted that only 153 of the escaped prisoners had been recaptured.

Every day, Abidjan newspapers publish reports about burglaries, armed robberies and random killings. Many of the thugs appear to be carrying AK47 automatic rifles, the standard weapon used by all the armed groups in the Ivorian conflict.

The UN human rights division warned that militia activity had intensified since January and that armed groups were active in at least seven neighbourhoods of Abidjan, which hosts a quarter of Cote d'Ivoire's 16 million population.

According to the report, one such militia group, which guards a TV mast on the outskirts of the city, appeared to have been responsible for the murder of a mechanic from northern Cote d’Ivoire, whose body was found nearby.

The researchers highlighted dreadful living conditions in two severely overcrowded government prisons in the towns of Daloa and Bouafle in central Cote d'Ivoire.

In Daloa, which lies at the heart of an important cocoa-growing area 400 km northwest of Abidjan, the prisoners lived on one meal per day of rice or yam and were forced to sleep on the floor in unventilated cells, it said.

Conditions were so bad there that on average two prisoners died per week of diseases caused by malnutrition, untreated infections and AIDS, the report said.

It pointed out that the normal mortality rate in prisons was 0.9 percent for 10,000 people, while the mortality rate in Daloa was estimated to bet 6.2 per 10,000 “which is enormous”.

Other worrying developments, highlighted by the report were continuing ethnic tensions in western Cote d’Ivoire, racketeering by security forces, which frequently extort money from passers by at roadblocks, and an attempt by Gbagbo to reassert full control over state radio and television. This technically comes under the authority of Soro, the rebel leader, who is Minister of Communications in Cote d'Ivoire's dysfunctional government of national reconciliation.