Ivory Coast’s slide into civil war took a grim turn on Friday when French troops reported finding a mass grave with protruding limbs, and refugees from another part of the country described seeing corpses rotting in the streets.
The French soldiers discovered bodies poking from a mound 30 metres long and two metres high near Dania, a village 70 miles north-west of Daloa, Lieutenent-Colonel Ange-Antoine Leccia said.
The government and the rebels accused each other of trying to hide evidence of atrocities, three months into the conflict, which has ravaged what was once considered the most stable country in west Africa.
”We do not know how many bodies are there, who killed these people, or when,” said Col Leccia.
”It is not our mission to exhume the bodies and we are simply reporting what we have found.”
The site straddled a fluid frontline which has seen heavy fighting between President Laurent Gbagbo’s forces and the rebels of the Patriotic Movement of Ivory Coast (MPCI). The government, which was fighting in the area last week, said it had nothing to do with the grave.
”The president has been informed and he is profoundly shocked by this macabre discovery. This can only be a crime committed by the rebellion,” its representative, Alain Toussaint, said.
Zacharias Kone, the rebel commander who controls the area, blamed government soldiers and said he thought more than 100 bodies were in the grave and in two nearby wells.
”They killed everybody in the village. I am inviting the whole world to come and see what Gbagbo’s people have done,” he said.
The UN said recently that the International Criminal Court could investigate alleged war crimes in Ivory Coast.
What started as a mutiny by disgruntled soldiers in September has widened into a three-sided war in which the MPCI controls much of the Muslim north, a new rebel group is operating in the west and the government is holding on to the mainly Christian south, which includes the commercial and administrative capitals.
France sent troops to its former colony to evacuate expatriates.
A ceasefire collapsed last week when government troops and foreign mercenaries clashed with the rebels, who say they want the president to resign, elections held, and greater rights for the northerners.
A separate rebel group, apparently based in Liberia, entered the fray last week by attacking three towns in the west. Government forces re-took the biggest town, Man.
Refugees who fled Man earlier this week said that hundreds of bodies littered the streets. ”There are too many dead. You can’t even count them,” said Germaine Gahie.
A woman named only as Laure said most of the dead had yellow or black headbands and appeared to be rebels.
The UN estimates that more than 30 000 refugees have headed for the Cestos river in an effort to enter Liberia.
The new rebel group says it is fighting to avenge the former Ivory Coast military leader Robert Guei, a native of the Man area, who was killed at the outset of the conflict. He had links with Liberia and its warlord ruler Charles Taylor, who denies that his forces are backing the new group. – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001