Ivory Coast rebel leader Guillaume Soro on Wednesday denied accusations by Amnesty International that his armed group carried out summary executions after a rebellion broke out last September. Soro, general secretary of the Ivory Coast Patriotic Movement (MPCI), the main rebel group, told the France 3 television channel here that the fatalities occurred during fighting.
In a report entitled ”Ivory Coast: a follow-up of unpunished crimes”, London-based human rights watchdog Amnesty International said the MPCI executed about 60 gendarmes and their children in cold blood around two weeks after the rebellion broke out.
The victims were forced out of gendarmerie barracks in the central city of Bouake and taken to a nearby military camp where they were shot dead, according to the Amnesty report.
Bouake has served as the rebels’ headquarters since the start of a military uprising on September 19.
The report said the victims were hauled out of their barracks despite the fact that they had put up a white flag of surrender. The killers were ”armed elements of the MPCI,” the report said. Soro denied the charges. ”At Bouake there was fighting, there were deaths on one side and the other. For sanitary and humanitarian reasons some bodies were buried swiftly. The population knew, the world knew, it’s
verifiable in Bouake,” Soro argued.
He added that the Amnesty report had been published as Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo named the humanitarian group’s head in the country as justice minister in a government of reconciliation. Since war broke out in Ivory Coast more than five months ago, there have been reports of sweeping rights abuses committed by all
parties to the conflict and the discovery of at least two mass graves thought to contain up to 200 bodies. The international community has stepped up warnings about the rights abuses and killings by what they claim are state-backed ”death squads” saying these crimes could be liable for prosecution in international courts.
In December, the MPCI confirmed the existence of a mass grave of soldiers and gendarmes — police under the defence ministry — in its stronghold of Bouake. Amnesty said the MPCI on February 10 expressed its ”surprise” at several points in the report.
Amnesty said its report was based on several ”witness accounts”, including those from some gendarmes who survived the mass execution, gathered in December by a mission sent by the international rights group to Bouake.
The survivors said the victims were killed by ”three rounds of fire.” Those who managed to escape the bullets were made to ”transport the bodies and bury them in mass graves” and ”wash off all traces of blood from the walls” of the military camp where the executions were staged.
”Not all traces of the massacre were erased, however, as the Amnesty International delegation saw several holes from bullets which literally went through the prison walls,” the report said. An AFP journalist who was in Bouake on that day, reported seeing about 100 gendarmes rounded up by the rebels. – Sapa-AFP