DAKAR/GENEVA – United Nations staff in western Ivory Coast have found more than 100 bodies in the past 24 hours, some burned alive and others thrown down a well, in a further sign of the ethnic violence gripping the country.
The grim discovery came a week after the International Committee of the Red Cross said at least 800 bodies had been found in the town of Duekoue after an explosion of inter-communal violence. United Nations human rights spokesman Rupert Colville said on Friday that UN workers had found 15 more bodies in Duekoue, where the burnings took place, and had discovered more than 60 in Guiglo and 40 in Blolequin — all on Thursday.
He said it was hard to say who was responsible as long-running ethnic tensions in the region have grown alongside fighting between forces loyal to presidential claimant Alassane Ouattara and those of his rival Laurent Gbagbo. “With these very ugly tit-for-tat killings in Duekoue … (and) 100 more bodies found just yesterday, you’re talking about quite an escalation,” he told a news briefing in Geneva.
The bodies found in Guiglo and in Blolequin were mostly lying in the streets. Most appeared to have been shot while running away and were wearing civilian clothes. The three towns lie at the heart of the cocoa-growing region in the world’s biggest producer, near the border with Liberia. The area long has been prey to deep ethnic rivalries that have fuelled feuding between local Guere tribes and the immigrant farmers from neighbouring West African countries, mostly Mali and Burkina Faso.
Religious and tribal fault lines in the region mirror the divide between Gbagbo, whose traditional power base is in the Christian and animist south, and Ouattara’s Muslim, northern-based forces. Ethnic loyalties straddle the border with Liberia, and both camps have recruited Liberian mercenaries who have at times taken part in reprisal killings, human rights groups say.
Brutal massacres, exacerbated by festering land disputes, have bloodied western Ivory Coast for over a decade and pose a huge challenge for Ouattara, who is seeking to assert his authority after forcing Gbagbo to hole up in a bunker in the commercial capital Abidjan.
