The fighting raged so close that bullets whizzed through the jail yard. Locked in their cells, the prisoners grew frantic. They pounded and hacked at the doors. Some managed to break out, escape over the walls and hide in the bush. But instead of freedom, many met death, fellow inmates say.
Prisoners from the jail in Bouake, a city in the eye of a month long conflict between the government and insurgents in Ivory Coast, say around two dozen inmates who managed to escape at the peak of the fighting were killed by villagers who mistook them for rebels.
”We were dying in little bits. We preferred to escape,” said Souleymane Moloukou, one of the survivors. Then, drawing a hand across his throat in a slitting motion, he added: ”Out of 27 who left, 25 were killed.”
His and other prisoners’ accounts could not be verified independently. But they fit a pattern of killings and reprisals emerging from the war that has unleashed vicious racial, tribal and religious hatreds in the west African country. Both government and rebel forces or their supporters have been accused of atrocities.
In Daloa, a western cocoa-growing city of 160 000 people, residents this week said forces loyal to the largely Christian, southern-based government attacked members of the northern, Muslim Dioula tribe and migrants from Burkina Faso, a mainly Muslim country to the north.
Witnesses said uniformed troops dragged people from their homes and shot them, and burned down houses. Last week, villagers between Daloa and Yamoussoukro, the capital, yelled out to passing soldiers, saying they had found rebels sneaking around on their land. ”There’s one here, there’s one here!” they shouted. The soldiers said they would send people to deal with the captives.
In Bouake, which the insurgents have controlled since launching their uprising on September 19, fleeing residents have said that youths armed by the rebels burned alive people they suspected of backing the government. The killings were apparently reprisals for earlier attacks by pro-government youths who killed rebel fighters when the loyalist troops were trying to retake the city. No one knows how many have died, but the government said hundreds were killed just in the uprising’s first weeks.
Hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes — many because they feared ethnically motivated attacks. After ousting government forces from Bouake, the rebels freed all 300 inmates left in the city’s jail. But most are too frightened to return to their homes elsewhere in Ivory Coast or in neighboring countries. They have taken refuge in a church shelter for the mentally ill.
”We are scared to go on the road,” said Rasmane Wereme, from Burkina Faso, who was serving a 20-year sentence for dealing in cannabis. He was due for release in 2009. Gregoire Ahongbonon, who runs the shelter, is at his wits’ end. He says the former prisoners are disturbing the 155 mentally ill patients he cares for. They already were traumatized by the fighting that rocked Bouake. But Ahongbonon says the prisoners are too burly and many for him to chase away alone.
”It’s a real danger for my patients. They need to be calm and quiet. When the prisoners come back in the evening, they shout and fight,” he said.
The prisoners jostled and interrupted each other in their eagerness to tell their stories to a reporter. They said that when the uprising started, their guards locked them in their cells with just handfuls of dried maize and water to survive.
Because they had no stoves, they tried to cook the maize by burning their rubber flip-flops, prisoners said. They said 27 people died from inhaling the toxic smoke. As the rebels took Bouake, government troops hid in the prison grounds. Prisoners said they heard the whizz of bullets.
In the church yard, the prisoners cook rice and macaroni on homemade burners. A volunteer angrily told them to get off the church steps. Humbly, they moved away. The patients, meanwhile, stare vacantly into space or wander around talking to themselves. Some suffer from HIV/Aids. Inside the church, around the bare altar, former inmates lie inert in the crushing heat, some with open wounds, others trembling feverishly. Food is short. Prices have risen sharply since the rebels took over. Banks are closed and even when markets are stocked, people have no money.
Since rebels and the government accepted a truce last week, a few humanitarian convoys have reached Bouake. But many trucks are delayed at army or rebel checkpoints along the road from Yamoussoukro, 100 kilometres south.
”I don’t know what to do. I can’t cope,” Ahongbonon said. He said aid agencies have given sacks of rice, but it is not enough for all the hungry mouths. – Sapa-AP