ALASSANE OUATTARA, Ivory Coast’s would-be president, says he can prove that Laurent Gbagbo, the incumbent, ordered post-election violence and called for him to face justice.
Mr Ouattara’s accusation that his rival ordered the assassination of Ivorians by foreign “mercenaries” and others is the latest twist in a six-week stand-off that has left the world’s biggest cocoa producer at risk of returning to civil war.
“Laurent Gbagbo has blood on his hands,” Mr Ouattara told French radio on Thursday. “We have proof.”
Mr Gbagbo lost November’s presidential run-off election, according to results certified by the UN but has refused to quit the office he has held for 10 years, in spite of near unanimous international condemnation and sanctions against him.
The UN on Thursday raised the toll of confirmed deaths during the crisis to 210. Human rights groups and the UN have documented killings of Ouattara supporters and hundreds of disappearances. The violence has been concentrated in Abidjan, the commercial capital, and the west, long the scene of bitter land disputes.
The UN said on Wednesday that the number of Ivorian refugees fleeing across the Liberian border had passed 22,000. The military has remained loyal to Mr Gbagbo, as have youth militias.
Diplomats and security experts said mercenaries from Liberia had been recruited to Mr Gbagbo’s cause – a charge that his camp has denied.
Attention has focused on the Movement for Democracy in Liberia, a group of an estimated 2,000 militiamen that played a role in that country’s civil war and has operated from Ivorian territory for years.
Mr Ouattara, confined with his parallel government at an Abidjan hotel under the protection of UN peacekeepers, said: “I have already written to the secretary-general of the United Nations to ask that the International Criminal Court send a team of investigators to Ivory Coast and I am told that this will be done in coming days.” The court said it was monitoring the situation in Ivory Coast.
The crisis has reopened a rift that runs across the Ivory Coast. Southerners, largely Christian, tend to back Mr Gbagbo, who has whipped up feeling against predominantly Muslim northerners, who are often styled as foreigners. Mr Ouattara is supported by rebels who have controlled much of the north since a brief civil war in 2002.
African leaders have united against Mr Gbagbo, with the latest mediation team holding inconclusive meetings in Abidjan this week. Ecowas, the west African regional trading bloc, has acknowledged Mr Ouattara’s call for threats to be backed with military intervention if necessary. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011