'This is for Yopougon!'

Benoit Scheuer* looks back on the origins of the violence in Ivory Coast, which he was among the first external analysts to predict

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The rebellion that erupted in Ivory Coast on 19 September 2002 was something new, even after two years of mounting violence. For this time, the violence came from the North -- from the people who throughout the 1990s had been progressively excluded from power by the regime in Abidjan.

For ten years, the Ivorian state had used all the tools at its disposal to stir up hatred against northerners and Muslims. "These people are invading our country!" was the refrain. They were 40 per cent of the population, and they were Ivorian citizens just like anyone else, but they were demonised by the media. At the same time, the constitution was changed to ensure that the only candidate who represented these people -- Alassane Ouattara -- could no longer stand for election as president

The result was a general climate of discrimination against people who were not "pure Ivorians". Half the country was stripped of its moral dignity. Policemen would take the identity cards of citizens who were not "sufficiently Ivorian" and tear them up in front of them, in the middle of the street. Then they would tell them, "So you think you're an Ivorian? Now try and prove it!"

This verbal and moral onslaught inevitably turned to physical violence. The first act of the tragedy came in October 2000, when the police at Yopougon in the suburbs of Abidjan rounded up 59 ethnic Dioulas. Two of them escaped; the rest were shot dead in cold blood.

The Yopougon massacre was not an isolated incident, a mistake, a moment of collective madness: it was part of a deliberate strategy of terror orchestrated by the state. The murderers could easily have hidden the bodies. But instead, just as the Serbian militias did in ex-Yugoslavia, they left them on display, turning their deaths into theatre. The aim was to instil fear into people. The corpses were meant as a message to all northerners: "You should get out of here, because if you don't, this is what will happen to you!"

There have been massacres on both sides, of course. But they are not the same kinds of massacre. In September 2002, for example, the rebels rounded up a group of Ivorian policemen and killed them. As they were firing on them, their executioners shouted: "This is for Yopougon!" For no one was ever brought to justice for Yopougon. The military policemen who were tried were all acquitted, even though the ballistic evidence pointed incontrovertibly to the members of one specific regiment. So the massacre of September 2002 has to be understood in relation to this climate of impunity. It was not the theatre of terror; it was simply an act of revenge.

I have no wish to justify such massacres; but the violence of the rebels is not spontaneous, it is reactive. The original violence is that of President Laurent Gbagbo and his Young Patriot militias. It is Gbagbo who has organised and instrumentalised the use of physical force for political ends in Ivory Coast, so as to strengthen his own hold on power.

If the rebels chose to take up arms, it was because violence was the only way in which they could make themselves heard. There are not just two sides in Ivory Coast today, each as bad as the other: there is an aggressor, and a victim.

* The writer is a Belgian sociologist, and director of the Prévention Génocides research centre: www.preventions-genocides.org .