Civitas Maxima, a non-profit organisation of international lawyers and investigators, is working on cases relating to war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ivory Coast. . Most of the cases relate to the period after May 2011, the official end of the civil conflict, but Alain Werner, a Swiss Lawyer who established the group, believes they should still be characterised as war crimes because they occurred "under the guise of the war".
One such case occured in another district of Bouaké, one of Ouattara's militias 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. A very clear example of attacks against civilians when there could be no military advantage because, basically, they had won the war.
A document Werner's 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.
Adou Gnapi, the police captain in the town of Bouake, when asked why women frequently suffer sexual violence. "It's complicated," he said. "Nowadays women look too good."
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