Security forces loyal to Ivory Coast’s incumbent leader, who refuses to cede power, have fired volleys of gunshots, leaving at least four people dead after they cordoned off a large section of a neighborhood known to be his rival’s stronghold.
UN peacekeepers arriving in a convoy of 13 vehicles were forced by a mob to make a U-turn as they attempted to enter the area on Tuesday. Young men allied with incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo amassed on the highway, wielding sticks and throwing large objects in their path.
PK 18, where the early morning raid occurred, is part of Abobo, an Abidjan district that supported Alassane Ouattara, who won the Nov. 28 election with a margin of over half a million votes, according to results verified by the UN.
He has been recognized as the president-elect by the UN, the EU, the African Union and the US, but international pressure has not been able to dislodge the 65-year-old Gbagbo. He accuses the UN of bias after it endorsed Ouattara’s victory and is refusing to leave office. He is backed by the army as well as a militant youth group that has been organizing daily rallies to warn the international community against interfering in Ivory Coast.
Residents and the mayor of the area say police awoke them between 4am and 5am and began conducting house-to-house searches, accusing them of hiding arms.
Habiba Traore, a 39-year-old mother of five, said the soldiers burst in and told her and her children to lie down on the floor. One of them placed his boot on her back, as the others opened her suitcase and went through her belongings. They made off with cash, her husband’s pants and two shirts, she said.
Shots rang out for several hours and journalists were blocked from entering by police trucks that had been lined up to create a fence across the highway leading to PK 18. Reporters able to enter the area after calm returned found four bodies lying on the ground, all dressed in civilian clothes. One was lying in a sandy alley, his arm flung back. There was a hole in his neck, where the bullet had gone through.
Another man had been placed under a sheet and the blood had seeped through, attracting a blanket of flies.
“Our neighborhood is in their crosshairs ever since the march,” said Issouf Ouraga, referring to a march last month in which Ouattara supporters attempted to grab control of the state TV station, which since the election has been used to air pro-Gbagbo propaganda. “We are a target.”
Residents say they retaliated by killing two policemen, said Marco Boubacar, who heads the local unit of the New Forces, a rebel group allied with Ouattara. The deaths could not immediately be confirmed, and calls to a government spokesman went unanswered.
Rights groups have criticized the UN for bowing to Gbagbo’s security forces and allowing abuses to occur. The head of the UN human rights section in the country received reports of two mass graves containing as many as 80 bodies of people shot or killed after the election, but his convoy was turned back at gunpoint when he tried to enter one of the sites in a suburb of Abidjan.
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