SUMMARY
MFDC (Mouvement des forces démocratiques de Casamance; Movement of the Democratic Forces of the Casamance) was a rebel group fighting the Senegalese government for independence for the Casamance region throughout the 1990s and well into the 2000s (see Senegal: Casamance). During the intrastate conflict, the group intermittently carried out one-sided violence against the region’s population.
The movement’s fighters targeted the civilian population under a wide range of circumstances, with different aims. One of the most common situations in which MFDC carried out one-sided violence was when they toured villages, looking for donations from the inhabitants. Usually the villagers were given the choice between giving the rebels food and money or being beaten and sometimes killed. For young men, the choice often came down to joining the rebellion or being killed. People who attempted to resist or escape were generally beaten or shot. A more extreme form of exaction, was when the rebels instead of demanding food or money, simply evicted the entire population of some villages so that they could use their fuel, food and livestock. People who refused to leave their homes were beaten or even killed.
Another frequent occurrence was the targeting of people perceived to be opposed to the struggle in general and persons suspected of collusion with the government in particular. An example of the former was when, on the night of 9 September 1997, MFDC fighters burst into a dance at Djibanar, a village that had declared itself opposed to the rebellion. After chiding the youths for partying while they were fighting for independence they fired into the crowd, killing nine. Regarding suspected collaborators, MFDC tended to target traditional leaders or people from other areas of Senegal who had recently settled in Casamance.
The targeting of newcomers to the region ties in with a tendency among the movement to separate between the Diola, an ethnic group considering itself native to the region and other ethnic groups. Non-Diola has on occasion been targeted in more deliberate ethnic-cleansing, where the rebels’ intentions have not been completely clear. While the official discourse of MFDC holds that it represents all groups in the region, denying any Diola bias, the movement is overwhelmingly Diola in composition. One often-cited reason for the targeting of members of the Manjak, Mandingo, Balante, and Mancagne ethnic groups was that the rebels reportedly felt that these non-Diola populations were not involving themselves enough in the struggle for the independence of Casamance.
Throughout the conflict the question of the degree of control the political leadership wielded over the fighters on the filed was a matter of debate. With regard to the one-sided violence, MFDC's political branch on numerous occasions undertook to respect the civilian population, but either failed to or never intended to pass this message on to its fighters. In fact, the same political branch that made these undertakings at times implicitly acknowledged one-sided killings carried out by MFDC. For instance, after two fishermen of the Toucouleur ethnic group were tortured and shot dead by armed men claiming to be MFDC members, MFDC in a statement explained that the two men were killed because they were suspected "of being agents in the service of the Senegalese authorities".
While MFDC fighters occasionally carried out large-scale massacres, the most common form of one-sided violence took the form of intermittent killings of one or two people at the time. Typically killings were committed in front of the victim's family, which has been interpreted as though the MFDC fighters wanted to set an example and warn people that anyone suspected of being a traitor to the cause would suffer the same fate.
MFDC first became active as a one-sided actor in UCDP data in 1992, when one-sided violence resulted in over 25 civilian deaths. The threshold was reached in October that year, when MFDC rebels attacked a fishing village, close to the tourist destination Cap Skirring, killing around 30 people, the majority of which were from northern Senegal.
