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Subject: COTE D'IVOIRE: IRIN Focus on communal clashes in the southwest
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COTE D'IVOIRE: IRIN Focus on communal clashes in the southwest

[This report does not necessarily represent the views of the United Nations]

ABIDJAN, 12 September 2000 (IRIN) - Clashes that broke out on 8 September in
the village of Heke 19, about 400 km west of Abidjan, marked the fourth such
incident between migrants from Burkina Faso and indigenous people in
southwestern Cote d'Ivoire in less than a year.

Whatever the dispute that triggered each upheaval, various sources told
IRIN, the troubles that have plagued the southwest in recent times are,
generally, expressions of the same general conflict.

"The origin of the conflict is simply a sort of anxiety among the Kru
population," Gosso told IRIN. "They are worried that they may not have any
land tomorrow for themselves, for their children. Will they be foreigners in
their own area? That's the origin of the conflict."

The incidents

In November 1999, two Burkinabe and one Kru were repatriated after a dispute
between tenant farmers and locals in Grabo, near the border with Liberia.
According to Kru customs, anyone who spills blood is banished from the area
for a number of years and, at the insistence of the locals, about 12,000
Burkinabe were repatriated. 

This led Burkinabe from other ethnic groups, most of them Mossi, to start
leaving another village with a high concentration of migrants, Trahe, east
of Grabo and some 400 km west of the capital, Abidjan. Initially, the
traditional chief and the village headman told the estimated 2,000 Burkinabe
in Trahe that the measure did not affect them and asked them to return.
However, according to the mayor of Grand Bereby, the nearest town to Trahe,
the chief later recanted and accused the headman of favouring the Burkinabe.
After the headman refused to bow to pressure to send the migrants away, he
was deposed and banished from the area along with his 17-member household,
Mayor Gosso Yabayou Alphonse, himself a Kru, told IRIN.

What triggered the events that were later to lead the regional authorities
to evacuate all non-Kru from Trahe - a village of 250 to 300 inhabitants -
is unclear, but many Burkinabes have had to be accomodated at two road
transport terminals in the town of San Pedro.  A team from the local and
international Red Cross, which has been supplying the displaced persons with
about 250 kg of rice and 11 litres of oil per day since 3 September,
estimated their number at 1,040.

One of the displaced Burkinabes told IRIN they attacked and burned the Kru
village after two of their number were found dead. Regional administration
officials confirmed that the villagers had attacked first. They also
confirmed that an eight-year-old Kru girl was killed when the migrants
attacked the village.

The prefect of San Pedro, Assi Abaka Moise, told IRIN that he and other
regional officials had been meeting with the chiefs of the area in a bid to
resolve the issue. However, on Friday, a number of Burkinabe were killed in
Heke 19, a village fairly close to Trahe, and one Kru was killed when the
migrants retaliated two days later.

In another incident in July/August, about 300 Burkinabe were displaced from
an area northeast of Trahe and forced to seek refuge in the town of Soubre,
north of San Pedro, humanitarian sources told IRIN.

The background to the conflict

Southwestern Cote d'Ivoire used to be a thinly populated, heavily forested
area. Over the years, however, farmers and farm workers displaced by the
construction of a hydroelectric dam in the centre of the country and by the
exhaustion of agricultural lands in other areas flocked to the region, a
sociologist in Abidjan told IRIN.

While there had been migration to the area since the end of French colonial
rule four decades ago, the movement really took off in the 1970s "as
infrastructure improved because it was a virgin region good for agriculture
and we were not many," Gosso said. Some of the Ivoirian, Burkinabe and
Malian migrants were given land by the locals, some bought it, while others
received plots in return for services such as preparing land for farming, he
said.

This continued until the mid-1990s, he said.

Now, however, area youths who want to go into farming, including those
unable to land jobs after leaving school, find that much of the land around
the villages is already occupied by non-Kru, and this has created
frustration among them.

It is this malaise in the rural southwest that has made the region prone to
the outbursts that have erupted in the past 10 months. "The incident in
Tabou in November 1999 was ... an argument that enabled them to express that
anger and, generally, that is what has led to the incidents," Gosso said. 

Partly as a result of the large number of Burkinabe reported to be in the
area and partly because Burkinabes had been involved in the Tabou incident,
it is this community that has felt the brunt of the animosity. A source told
IRIN that villagers from Trahe demanded that the management of an adjoining
rubber and oil palm plantation, the Societe d'Hevea de Grand Bereby (SOGB)
dismiss its Burkinabe workers who, along with their families, reportedly
number about 5,000. 

However, villagers from Trahe initially demanded the departure not only of
foreigners but also of Ivoirians from other parts of the country.

The villagers, who were themselves displaced from Trahe, agreed to allow the
return of some 400 non-Kru Ivoirians who had been living among the Burkinabe
in a camp about 50 metres from the indigenous village. They returned on
Thursday, San Pedro Prefect Assi said.

He told IRIN on 8 September that his aim was to get the Kru villagers to
return to Trahe, rebuild the roofs of their homes, and later allow the
migrants to go back. He admitted that this would be no easy task, and that
was before the weekend clash in Heke 19.

Finding a lasting solution to the issue in the southwest and in other parts
of western Cote d'Ivoire where the availability of virgin forests has
attracted migrants over the years is likely to be even more difficult.

[ENDS]

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Desk): +225-22-41-9339; e-mail: irin-wa@irin.ci]


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