Paramilitaries set fire to immigrant shantytowns, rounding up young men and whipping them. Gangs armed with machetes chase down foreigners in the streets.
Ivory Coast’s bloodiest uprising yet has unleashed deadly regional, ethnic and religious hatreds in what was once the region’s most stable and prosperous country.
Much of the violence is directed at the country’s three million guest workers from neighboring Burkina Faso — welcomed in Ivory Coast’s heyday, when this city of skyscrapers and luxury boutiques was known as the Paris of West Africa.
But while French and American soldiers swooped in last week to pluck more than 2 000 people, most Westerners, from rebel-held cities under threat of government attack, no such help arrived for the far more numerous African nationals caught in Ivory Coast’s anti-outsider backlash.
”All we want to do is go home now,” said newly homeless mechanic Idrissa Ouedraogo. He now sleeps with his wife and four children on the charred peace of land where his shack stood until the paramilitary police burned it.
”But no one is coming to get us,” Ouedraogo said. In the years after independence from France in 1960, residents of arid and impoverished Burkina Faso poured into Ivory Coast, their labor on the country’s southern coffee and cocoa plantations helping to drive an economic boom that lasted two decades.
But when coffee and cocoa prices started to plummet, tensions built up between Ivorians in the predominantly Christian south and the mostly Muslim immigrants from countries to the north. Successive Ivory Coast leaders exploited these divides to secure their power bases in the south, traditionally the country’s centre of government.
President Laurent Gbagbo’s government has repeatedly accused unspecified foreign countries — widely assumed to include Burkina Faso — of fomenting the unrest that has overtaken the country since its first-ever coup in 1999.
The accusations have sparked waves of ethnic and religious attacks, causing thousands of Burkina Faso nationals to flee home in recent years.
When the first shots of a new coup attempt echoed across the lagoonside city of Abidjan on September 19, immigrant workers — particularly those from Burkina Faso — knew what to expect.
”Whenever anything happens here, they always blame us Burkinabes,” said waiter Harouna Morkana, thumbing a tear from his eye. ”We don’t know what they have against us.”
Government forces fought back the insurgents in Abidjan, the commercial capital. But as they struggle to regain control of cities to the north, they have repeatedly descended on immigrant neighborhoods here, searching for rebel sympathisers. Witnesses said on Monday that paramilitary police and civil servants burned down flimsy homes in a mainly immigrant neighborhood near the chic Riviera district in Abidjan, sending a column of smoke over the nearby lagoon.
”They just want all the foreigners to leave,” said a security guard from Burkina Faso, who lives nearby and whose own home was torched the week before.
Three times paramilitary police broke down Morkana’s door as they combed his neighborhood for weapons, taking money and cell phones, he said.
On the third visit, Morkana was dragged from the house, stripped and forced to lie naked in the street with other young men.
Paramilitary police then whipped them with belts, demanding information about the insurgents, he said. Gangs of the government’s mostly southern, Christian supporters roamed the streets, attacking people from Burkina Faso and other neighboring countries. Protesters later attacked the Burkina Faso Embassy, scaling the walls to tear down the flag.
Smoke rose over Morkana’s neighborhood — near a base where some of the worst fighting took place — as paramilitaries carted away residents’ belongings and set fire to their houses. The officers told some families they needed to clear the area because rebels had taken refuge there.
Surrounded by wailing family and friends, Alidou Ouedraogo — no relation to Idrissa — watched helplessly as armed officers burned his wooden shack. When neighbors tried to douse the flames, the paramilitaries threatened to shoot them.
”I built that house,” the aging mason in a flowing blue robe and torn black trousers said sorrowfully. ”I spent 32 years there.” Now, his two wives and 17 children are scattered among relatives while he struggles to find a way to send them back to Burkina Faso. Even if he could raise the money, though, he doesn’t dare face the many government checkpoints set up along the way.
Bewildered migrant workers struggle to explain the attacks. ”We came here looking for our bread, nothing else,” said a fearful security guard, who asked not to be named. ”We never looked for trouble with anyone.”
Ivory Coast Prime Minister Affi Nguessan has ordered security forces not to attack foreigners, who he said have ”nothing to fear from the Ivorians or from the Ivorian nation.” The government also denounced the attack on Burkina Faso’s embassy.
But most migrants say they have had enough. For Ganame Boukari, a security guard with more than 30 years in Ivory Coast, the final straw came when stray bullets ripped through the walls of his house last week and narrowly missed his sleeping children.
”We have seen everything here, and we are tired,” he said. ”We want to go home.” – Sapa-AP