Death squads linked to Ivory Coast’s government are murdering opposition leaders and supporters in Abidjan, where rising ethnic tensions are drawing comparisons with Rwanda on the eve of its 1994 genocide, investigators for the UN’s high commissioner for human rights have warned.
”Death squads and militias made up of autonomous elements have been sowing terror and carrying out executions and abductions,” they said in a report to the security council.
”[They] appear to be made up of elements close to the government, the presidential guard, and of a tribal militia of President Laurent Gbagbo’s ethnic Bete group.”
Ethnic tension has grown since the rebellion in the north begun by disaffected troops in September.
The UN team said television and radio stations were broadcasting ”messages of incitement to hatred [which] have been compared to the xenophobic radio broadcasts which transmitted messages of hatred in Rwanda”.
According to the Ivorian Human Rights Movement, at least 300 people, including many migrants from neighbouring Burkino Faso and Mali, have been murdered in Abidjan since the war began.
At least 50 of them were killed by specially trained death squads, including one commanded by a paramilitary police chief ”very close” to Simone Gbagbo, the president’s wife, it said.
”The death squads are very close to the heart of power,” its director, Ibrahima Doumbia, said yesterday. ”We have witnesses who have given us names of their members, but they are unable to testify because they’re too terrified.”
Doumbia, a northerner, was preparing to flee Ivory Coast yesterday after receiving death threats. ”We are all terrified for our lives,” he said. ”If the death squads are not being organised by the government, they are being protected by the government.”
The justice minister, Desiré Tagro, has admitted that death squads exist, but has denied that the government is involved. ”These cases are being investigated and the perpetrators will be dealt with,” he said.
Drawing another parallel with the genocide in Rwanda, the UN investigators said: ”The death squads are quite well organised and have lists of people to execute.”
Their victims have included General Robert Guei, the former former military ruler, and 18 members of his family; Emile Tehe, leader of a small opposition party; several ethnically northern business leaders, including the owner of the main supermarket chain; a Muslim cleric and Yerefe Kamara, a popular comedian with a weekly television show. – Guardian Unlimited Â