Human Rights abuses in Côte d’Ivoire

international | anti-war / imperialism | news report Wednesday February 15, 2006 00:22 by Liam Mullen - Freelance Journalist

Last year when I ran with a story and interviewed Leslie Laskow, a Dutch expert on the Darfur region of Sudan and human right’s activist for Human Rights Watch, Leslie spoke about the problem of “child soldiers” in Sudan, and she stressed that children as young as twelve years of age were being recruited for military purposes.
A year later, and the problems of child soldiers have resurfaced in yet another African country – the Côte d’Ivoire. According to a recent report put by the Human Rights watchdog security forces in the Côte d’Ivoire are robbing and extorting money from citizens at checkpoints, and that they have even progressed to extrajudicial executions.

The UN and African Union have so far refrained from holding abusers to account, fearful that it might damage the peace initiatives in operation, but the policy hasn’t gone down well with Peter Takirambudde, the Executive Director of the African division of Human Rights Watch.
He has been quoted as saying that “the strategy of putting justice on hold for an elusive peace settlement has emboldened human rights abusers on both sides of the conflict. This approach has fuelled a pervasive culture of impunity that has led to ever-increasing acts of violence against civilians.”
The Ivorian government has been linked with the recruitment of child soldiers from war torn Liberia, and such recruitment is a war crime as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and is also a breach of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The newly created Security Operations Command Centre which recruits from the army and police units has allegedly being involved in serious rights abuses, and somewhat like the tensions that surfaced in Rwanda back in the nineties, the country is infused with local militias, a “hate media” that incites racial hatred, and one human rights activist was even threatened at an International conference in Dublin.
Somewhat like Rwanda too, “ethnic” divisions ravage the country, and followers of President Gbagbo’s FPI party have been linked to “suppressing opposition demonstrations and anti-government unrest, stifling unfavourable press comment, and attacks on the rebel-held coffee and cocoa producing areas in the west.”