SUMMARY
MPCI (Mouvement Patriotique de Côte d'Ivoire, Ivory Coast Patriotic Movement) was widely held to be a comparatively well organized and disciplined rebel group. Compared to the behavior of the other Ivorian rebel groups that were fighting the Government of Ivory Coast in the western part of the country, MPCI carried out relatively little indiscriminate violence against the civilian population.
Nevertheless, targeted killings of specific civilians did occur in the context of the group’s conflict with the Ivorian government. This violence to some extent mirrored the logic in the intrastate conflict, as MPCI appears to have targeted northern members and supporters of the ruling FPI party. According to credible reports, this was partly done since the FPI members were seen as supporting the government side in the conflict, but also because of pre-existing political tensions, in the wake of substantial election-related violence between rival political parties before the war. Apart from the killing of FPI members, the rebels also targeted the families of gendarmes and police.
It should be noted that unlike the situation in the western Ivory Coast, the one-sided violence in the MPCI-controlled northern part of the country does not seem to have been ethnically motivated. Instead, the focus was on the role the victim had played before the war.
It soon became evident that the group would go to great length to keep the territory under its control in order. Thus, aside from the targeted political killings described above, MPCI also executed civilians suspected to have performed criminal acts.
As time progressed, the organized and disciplined surface of the movement cracked somewhat, which broadened the scope of the one-sided violence. Especially as MPCI became increasingly involved in the conflict in the western part of the country, there were reports of reprisal killings and executions carried out by the northern rebel group.
MPCI first became active as a one-sided actor in UCDP data in 2002, when the one-sided violence resulted in over 25 civilian deaths. The threshold was reached in October that year when MPCI rebels massacred over 60 relatives of gendarmes in Bouaké.
