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April 6, 2011
Exclusive: UN investigators have discovered a third possible massacre site in western Côte d’Ivoire, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights has revealed.
Head of UN panel investigating massacre Ivory Coast It was confirmed to Channel 4 News that reports based on “credible information” have prompted the investigative team to investigate a third site in Blorequin, in addition to the two mass graves discovered in Duékoué in March.
Ivan Simonovich, UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, told Channel 4 News Abidjan. He had just returned from Duékoué, where he was on a week-long mission to oversee an investigation into reports of mass killings.
He said: “In the second half of March, 100 people DuekoueMarch 28, 230 people were killed.”
Although Ivan Simonovich did not specifically use the term “ethnic cleansing,” he told Channel 4 News: “Here are the hard facts: In the first incident, 100 victims were from the same ethnic group, the Dioua, who traditionally supported Ouattara, and they were killed after Gbagbo supporters came to power. In the second incident, 230 people from the Gerla were killed, and the Gerla, who traditionally supported Gbagbo, were killed after Ouattara supporters came to power.”
On 31 March Channel 4 News first learned of unverified reports of mass killings in the 'wild west' region of Ivory Coast.Read More: Ouattara forces deny 'mass killing' claims.
He added that his team was “still counting the bodies scattered around town”.
“The victims in the first incident were both male and female, while the victims in the second incident were mostly men in plain clothes,” Simonovic said.
He could not verify whether any children had been killed in Douai, but confirmed that there had been incidents of “sexual violence”, although he could not verify the extent of such incidents.
In Abidjan, he told Channel 4 News: “We have heard of cases where people have been burned alive, but we cannot verify how many people have been burned alive.”
On Wednesday, ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said he planned to ask the court for authorization to open an investigation into the massacres in the west of the country. “The office will continue to gather information on crimes committed there by all parties to the conflict,” he said in a statement.
Abidjan
Simonovic told Channel 4 News that even before the unrest of the past few days, “400 people were killed in Abidjan alone.”
“The chief doctor of UNOCI told me that before the recent unrest, between 100 and 200 civilians had been deliberately targeted by heavy artillery in Abidjan alone, mostly by pro-Gbagbo forces,” he added
Simonovic said he was very concerned about the political and security vacuum in Abidjan and that “common criminal gangs and large-scale robberies are common there.”
We have heard of cases where people were burned alive. Ivan Simonovich, Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, United Nations
Asked if he was concerned that Ouattara’s forces would carry out revenge killings for Gbagbo’s atrocities in Abidjan, he said: “This is a major problem and the government must do everything to prevent retaliation by its forces.”
He welcomed the establishment by the United Nations Human Rights Council of an independent international commission of inquiry to investigate alleged abuses and human rights violations, but regretted that no such measure had been set up after the last civil war in 2002.
“We never really got to the bottom of it after 2002, and we never held people accountable for war crimes, and if we had done that, maybe what’s happening now could have been avoided.”
Asked why no such measures were taken after the 2002 war, Simonovic said it was “probably because of a political compromise” but he would not give details.
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