IMPUNITY OF OUATTARA'S REGIME

Sexual violence cases in Ivory Coast a challenge to justice

In an area of Bouaké, a former rebel stronghold, a teenage girl recalls the night she visited a maquis, an open-air restaurant, with her school friends after the official end of the conflict. Two "military men" wearing "green camouflage clothes and carrying guns" approached the group and told her she had to go with them. They put her in a car, took her to a house and raped her. She was 16 at the time. She told her parents, and they went to the hospital and then to the police. After investigating, the police told them the two soldiers had been moved to a neighbouring city beyond their jurisdiction. "It is not normal that the police did nothing," she said. "Maybe if I meet these men again in the town, they will do it again."

Alain Werner, the Swiss lawyer who established the group, said heinous acts of sexual violence took place during and after the country's recent conflict, but identified a lack of "impartial willingness from the Ivorian [government] to try or investigate these crimes".
Werner believes the case - a "very clear example of attacks against civilians when there could be no military advantage because, basically, they had won the war" – could be characterised as a war crime. A document his team is compiling to take to the international criminal court, which contains evidence from almost 200 witnesses, outlines grave acts of postwar violence committed by supporters of Ouattara. They include cases of gang rape, often stretching over days or even weeks, in which armed soldiers took dozens of women to their barracks. One involves an 11-year-old girl abducted by a soldier and forced to live with him as his wife; three years on, she is still living with him.

In Ivory Coast, the chances of getting the cases of rape by Ouattara's soldiers to court are slim, even with documented evidence. Adou Gnapi, the police captain, when asked why women frequently suffer sexual violence, answered. "It's complicated," he said. "Nowadays women look too good."


The Guardian ( UK)  6/11/2014