The powerful stench of death hung over the Ivory Coast village of Monoko-Zohi on Saturday where a mass grave was discovered with the bodies of 200 more victims of the country’s 11-week conflict.
The western village, which is normally home to about 1 200 residents, was half-deserted. Many shops had been looted and several homes had been torched.
The stench of decomposing bodies permeated the air as locals told horror stories of the carnage they said government troops had wreaked.
Boureima Ouedraogo, the leader of the Burkina Faso immigrant community in Monoko-Zohi, said ”men in uniform” killed about 120 west African immigrants in the area on November 29 and dumped their bodies in the grave, which was uncovered on Thursday by French soldiers.
The grave — two round mounds, each measuring roughly four metres in diameter — was hidden in the undergrowth on the southern outskirts of the village, some 70 kilometres from the key cocoa-growing town of Daloa.
The red soil piled on top of the grave barely covered the swollen bodies. Villagers said the victims were killed by government troops when they briefly captured the village from rebels.
There were few direct witnesses to the events because the families of victims fled to the bush, fearing further attacks. But several residents claimed to have seen the killings.
”They were tied up and then shot with kalashnikovs before their bodies were thrown into the pits,” Arouna Ouedraogo, an immigrant from Burkina Faso, said.
”I fled. I couldn’t stay,” he said. ”Twenty-five corpses, including that of my younger brother, were thrown into the hole. That’s what I saw but maybe there are more.”
A journalist saw one deformed body half protruding from one of the pits.
Salifou Zongo, a Burkinabe cocoa planter in his fifties, said eyewitnesses had told him Ivorian soldiers stormed into the homes and shops of immigrants and killed them.
”The soldiers were in uniform and arrived in eight trucks and a tank. Some youths from the village led them (to the foreigners),” Gambian national Antoine Mende reported witnesses as saying.
Saidou Laru (32) said he had had a lucky escape.
”A soldier came up me and two of my friends and said ‘What are you doing here?’ He started firing on us. I saw my friend fall but I escaped into the bush.”
Koumassi Bangola said the soldiers then ordered local youths to dig a pit and bury the bodies, which littered the streets.
”Corporal” Charles Bruno, the regional rebel commander, said his men re-took the village on November 30, the day after the killings reportedly took place.
Many west African immigrants live in the village, located in the cocoa belt of Ivory Coast, the world’s largest producer of the bean.
Ivory Coast’s founder president Felix Houphouet-Boigny welcomed foreign workers into the country and their labour was largely responsible for turning the country into a regional economic powerhouse.
But after Houphouet-Boigny’s death in 1993, his successor adopted an Ivorians-first policy that triggered a wave of xenophobia against immigrants.
Troops and rebels have been fighting each other since September 19. The rebels now control the Muslim-dominated northern of the country.
The conflict has triggered a resurgence of xenophobia and hate attacks on northerners and immigrants, especially Burkinabes, whose country is accused by Abidjan of masterminding the rebellion.
The Ivorian army on Friday denied responsibility for the mass killings in Monoko-Zohi, saying the grave was found in a rebel zone.
The insurgents, meanwhile, have demanded an international investigation into the killings. – Sapa-AFP