French soldiers in Ivory Coast said yesterday they had found the bodies of around 200 civilians massacred on Friday, as fresh violence in the divided west of the country jeopardised its stop-start peace process.
A rebel leader in western Ivory Coast yesterday blamed the massacre on Liberian mercenaries loyal to President Laurent Gbagbo’s besieged government. The victims were Muslim residents of the rebel-held town of Bangolo, suspected of being rebel sympathisers, said Ousmane Coulibaly, whose militia is one of three rebel groups which control most of the once prosperous west African country.
”I asked the French to come and see the dead. There is an entire neighbourhood that was decimated. All the houses are full of bodies. Only the Imam escaped alive,” Coulibaly told Reuters yester day. ”There are more than 200 bodies, maybe 300. And there are more corpses in the bush.”
A French army representative would not put a figure on the number of corpses seen littering Bangolo’s deserted streets by French soldiers on Saturday. But he said an estimate of 200 sounded accurate.
”The violence in Bangolo was very visible, including bodies,” said Colonel Philippe Perret, a representative for more than 3 000 French troops in Ivory Coast. ”It was clear the violence affected many people.”
With Coulibaly’s rebels later retaking Bangolo, and French foreign legionaries coming under attack in nearby Douekoue, the weekend saw the fiercest fighting in Ivory Coast since a ceasefire in late January.
It also saw a belated power-sharing agreement between the government and rebel leaders in neighbouring Ghana.
”We believe the political progress we have made will not be threatened by the fighting in the west, which is very localised,” said Albert Tevoedjre, the UN’s special representative for Ivory Coast yesterday.
But with seasoned fighters flocking from neighbouring Liberia to join the conflict – allegedly on both sides — and Mr Gbagbo having broken a similar agreement before, few analysts in Abidjan shared this view. – Guardian Unlimited Â