Raids on Opposition Stir Fears in Ivory Coast

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast – The uniformed men came in the morning, while the youths in the opposition neighborhood were sleeping. Some wore masks.

They broke down metal doors, grabbed the young men from their beds and, yelling insults, beat them with truncheons. They took the youths away; one later died from the beatings, residents said. Within minutes, the dusty street was packed with angry mothers.

“Right in front of us, they severely mistreated our young ones!” lamented Mariam Diarra, after the young men had been hauled away early this week. Around her, dozens of distraught women milled about.

“They took away our children!” the women yelled, gesturing at the police standing only 20 yards away.

Another season of political violence is breaking on this troubled country, after years of coups, unrest, civil war and an election that was meant to put it all to rights. But the voting seems to have done the opposite. Two presidents, backed by two armies, now stare at each other warily. Diplomats say the risk of a return to civil war is real.

And an ominous warning, unheard since the aftermath of the previous civil war six years ago, is being whispered on the streets: the government death squads are back.

A secret United Nations report detailed their activities in 2003-4. Never made public, it was suppressed, former United Nations officials say, for fear of upsetting the government of President Laurent Gbagbo and the fragile peace process that has now apparently ended in failure.

Though the nation’s election commission said he was defeated and governments around the world have called on him to step down, Mr. Gbagbo appears entrenched, swearing himself in, forming a new cabinet and refusing to leave the presidential palace. The government television station, protected by soldiers, salutes his “Olympian calm,” mocks foreign powers and is the only news broadcaster permitted here.

Mr. Gbagbo has publicly dismissed talk of war, but at night or early morning, during the curfew he has imposed, a parallel combat is waged. Witnesses and human rights advocates say the government’s security agents, often wearing hoods, have beaten, shot and killed opposition activists and residents in neighborhoods known to support the man who election officials and the United Nations say won the Nov. 28 election, Alassane Ouattara. He is now holed up in a hotel, guarded by international peacekeepers.

These muscular tactics were a hallmark of government methods six years ago, according to the United Nations report, wielded to confine the rebellion to the north, which is still held by rebels. The latter-day revival of these methods suggests that Mr. Gbagbo is intent on consolidating his power, even as international pressure on him to leave rises.

In a seeming snub to the United Nations, Mr. Gbagbo appointed to his new government a man under United Nations sanctions for human rights violations, Charles Blé Goudé.

“We are going to carry on, because we know we are acting within the law,” said Pascal Affi N’Guessan, Mr. Gbagbo’s spokesman. “We don’t have the right to retreat. We would be sacrificing the sovereignty of our country.”

In the last week, dozens of opposition supporters have been beaten or wounded by bullets, and at least 20 have been killed around the country, including nine in Abidjan alone, according to Amnesty International. On at least three occasions, residents say, masked, uniformed men have struck with guns and truncheons in opposition territory, mostly Muslim and poor, in this sprawling metropolis.

“They broke down my door to get in,” said Abiba Ouattara, 21, who was sleeping Monday morning at his home in the Treichville neighborhood. “`We’ve come here to kill,’” the men yelled, according to Mr. Ouattara, who is not related to the candidate and was released after two days in detention.

As he spoke, others crowded in to show bruises and bandages. Women were beaten as well by the squad of about 30 officers and state security agents, residents said.

In another pro-Ouattara part of town, Abobo, residents said they blew on whistles and banged on pots one night this week, the signal a raid was about to occur and that everyone should assemble in the street for safety. But the hooded gunmen in military uniform fired into the crowd anyway, they said.

Two days later, Issouf Diabaté, 47, an agent for the phone company, still carried a bullet in his leg. Others in the warren of cinder-block courtyards revealed bullet wounds as well.

“They come in, and they assault people,” Mr. Diabaté said. The reason? “That’s easy,” Mr. Diabaté said. “This is RHDP territory,” the initials for the opposition.

The deadliest raid was on an opposition outpost last week in Wassakara, in an otherwise pro-Gbagbo neighborhood. On the night of Dec. 1, uniformed gunmen scaled a wall of the one-story edifice and opened fire on Ouattara supporters with semi-automatic weapons, killing at least five, human rights advocates say. The next morning, patches of fresh blood punctuated the courtyard’s white walls.

“They are using the same methods” of the 2003-2004 dirty war, said Drissa Traoré, a lawyer. “Nobody’s safety is certain today. We are not going to get out of this without more deaths,” Mr. Traoré said, adding that he was no longer sleeping in his own home.

In language that could describe the current situation, the United Nations report of 2004 delineated a force of killers that it said were known as “death squads.”

“Groups of soldiers, police, security agents or armed civilians, often in uniform, designated for special missions to kill or kidnap people bothersome to the regime,” the report said. “They sometimes act during the day, but they generally operate at night.”

Mr. N’Guessan, the Gbagbo spokesman, rejected claims that the government used death squads: “I don’t know what those are. We have never used political violence. From the beginning, we have chose a peaceful transition to democracy.”

Northerners, or those deemed to be of foreign origin, were the principal victims, the report said, “because they are taken to be with the rebels.”

The same victims appear to be singled out today, six years after the report was drafted. “The Security Council did not release it, because they were afraid it would hurt the peace process,” said Pierre Schori, the United Nations special representative here in the mid-2000s.

His deputy, Alan Doss, said the report was suppressed at the insistence of South Africa’s former president, Thabo Mbeki, who was heavily involved in peace negotiations here and has recently returned in the same role.

Mr. Mbeki’s spokesman, Mukoni Ratshitanga, said Thursday: “The appropriate people to respond to something like that is the Security Council.”

A senior United Nations official said Mr. Mbeki has encouraged Mr. Gbagbo to step aside, but that Mr. Gbagbo seemed uninterested. “He just looked at him and smiled and ended the meeting,” the official said.

Meanwhile, resentment mounts. “It’s not by killing our children that Gbagbo will govern another 5 years,” Ms. Diarra said. “We’re fed up.”

Neil MacFarquhar contributed from the United Nations

nytimes.com