[Debate] Fear and Loathing in the Ivory Coast

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

But the IMF is happy!

<http://bit.ly/I8h3JT>
Fear and Loathing in the Ivory Coast
A year on from the end of the country's post-electoral crisis,
political distrust, insecurity and anxiety are widespread.
ARTICLE | 24 APRIL 2012 - 2:47PM | BY BRAM POSTHUMUS

Duékoué, Ivory Coast:

The word in Abidjan is that no-one leaves town after dark, that the
road to the north becomes a bandits’ nest after 10pm.

The same story circulates in the central city of Bouaké. “Everyone
distrusts everybody else”, one inhabitant told Think Africa Press. A
graphic picture in the government newspaper Fraternité Matin shows a
minibus that has veered off the road; the torso of the lifeless driver
has slumped off the front seat and hangs suspended at an angle.
“Killed just like that,” reads part of the caption.

Around Bouaké, the criminals often do not even wait for nightfall; the
roads are so rarely frequented that they have plenty of time to set up
their ambushes. It happens five to six times per day.

There are no taxis in the Western town of Duékoué after 7.30pm.
“They’re afraid,” one hotel manager says, “there have been too many
robberies”. The evening restaurants are lively enough but all the
clients arrive on their own cheap Chinese motorbikes. Just ahead of a
large hotel that the new Ivorian army has turned into a base, all
entertainment stops. The rest of the street is dark and eerily quiet.

Hunters and soldiers

The Ivory Coast is in the grip of an unprecedented crime wave – or at
the very least, in the grip of a national psychosis about crime. But
who are these bandits? As so frequently is the case, interpretations
depend on one’s political affiliations. In Duékoué, the majority of
the Guéré, the people who consider themselves the original
inhabitants, point fingers at the country’s armed forces – Republican
Forces of Côte d’Ivoire (FRCI) – and the traditional hunters known as
“dozos”. “We are afraid of them,” says Bertine Monsio, who lives in
the Nahibly camp for displaced people just outside Duékoué.

The FRCI, accompanied the dozos, swept through the west in March 2011.
After they captured Duékoué, at least 800 people were massacred in the
town. Human Rights Watch wrote in a report dated September 30, 2011,
that the leader of those troops was Commander Losséni Fofana. No
action, judiciary or disciplinary, has been taken against him. The
villages in and around Duékoué still lie destroyed. The fear is
palpable.

And the media perpetuates this fear, especially when the outlet has
the same political hero as the people in the Nahibly camp: namely,
Laurent Gbagbo, the former president who had to be removed by the army
in 2011 after he refused to accept his defeat in the 2010 election to
current president Alassane Ouattara.

“In the West, the FRCI kills and steals cocoa,” says one headline.
Standard fare for Notre Voie, the most vociferous pro-Gbagbo newspaper
in the country.

Army reform
“The FRCI is not an army in the proper sense of the word,” says
Christophe Yaht, a senior researcher at Bouaké University. “There are
elements that have attached themselves to the FRCI but who are
untrained and ill-disciplined. The government needs to take firm
action to get rid of them.”

The government has promised to restructure the army but it is clear
that there are enough rogue elements that can strike fear in the heart
of local civilians. Not only that, the FRCI has taken to the habit of
fleecing transporters and travellers, just like Gbagbo's forces did
before them, rendering the Ivory Coast one the most expensive
transport sites in the world.

Meanwhile, the pro-Gbagbo media publish long lists of misdeeds by the
FRCI. They do this to score political points against President
Ouattara, and the FRCI continues to provide these campaigners with
ample ammunition.

Militias and mercenaries

But even if the army were to be cleaned up, there would still be
plenty of other options for a career in crime. After all, the
post-election conflict between Gbagbo and Ouattara was not fought
between two armies. All manner of local militias and self-defence
groups joined in, as did mercenaries from Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea
and Liberia. Long before the post-electoral crisis, Laurent Gbagbo had
armed local self-defence groups, especially in the west of the
country. It is an open secret in Duékoué that the authorities want to
close the Nahibly camp for the displaced, which they consider to be a
hiding place for robbers and highwaymen – and very likely former
members of those militias. Naturally, this is vehemently denied inside
the camp.

The same story is true for Bouaké. Local civilians point fingers at
ex-combatants, who deny the accusations. The denials wear thin,
however, when one realises that the robbers’ weapon of choice is a
tried and tested war gun, the AK-47.

Groups from Burkina Faso and Liberia also continue to cause problems.
Much to the chagrin of the local Guéré, a group of armed Burkinabe has
occupied a small national park, turning it into a cocoa plantation.
Nearby Bangolo is also notorious for highway robbery. Liberians, who
were used by both Gbagbo and Ouattara during the post-electoral
crisis, continue to cross the forest-covered border at will, hiding
arms on either side, attacking mining sites and villages and making
off with the loot.

Both Liberian and Ivorian police say there is a shortage of pretty
much everything that would be necessary to deal with the problem:
there are not enough personnel, not enough prison cells, and hardly
any vehicles or motorbikes for effective patrolling.

And the UN?

Surprisingly unmentioned in all of these fears and debates is the UN
peacekeeping force, ONUCI and, for that matter, the UN Mission in
Liberia (UNMIL), which has hundreds of idle 4x4s parked behind its
Monrovia headquarters. “No-one would miss them if they left,”
confesses Bamba, a driver who frequently does the 100 kilometre
stretch between Duékoué and Daloa.

Asked how the country’s security problems could be solved, Bamba
explained “it’s the FRCI that catch criminals. And I know transport
entrepreneurs who hire dozos for security”. No need to ask him which
party he supports.

Bram Posthumus is an independent press and radio journalist with more
than 20 years of experience living and working in West and Southern
Africa. Alternating between Dakar and Amsterdam, he reports on
political, cultural and economic events for a variety of radio, print
and internet media.

-- 
Yoshie Furuhashi
<http://mrzine.org/>