SUMMARY
When the Ivorian rebel group MPIGO (Mouvement Populaire Ivoirien du Grand Ouest, Ivorian Popular Movement for the Great West) surfaced it claimed that it was fighting to avenge the death of former military ruler Guei, to overthrow the government and to defend the rights of the Yacouba ethnic group. In its struggle to these ends, the group committed grave human rights abuses, including one-sided violence.
The one-sided violence occurred in the context of the intrastate conflict played out in the country in 2002-2004. The conflict had distinct ethnic dimensions and MPIGO claimed to represent the western Yacouba ethnic group. The President of Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo, an ethnic Bete, was perceived to have the support of his own group, as well as of other, closely related ones. In the area where MPIGO was active, along the Liberian border, the group viewed as supporting the government was the Gueré. The perception that the Gueré was the enemy appears to have intensified as the conflict in the west became increasingly complex, with different Liberian forces becoming embroiled. While MPIGO included many Liberians from the Gio ethnic group (the Liberian counterpart of Yacouba), the Ivorian government supported the Liberian rebel group MODEL (Movement for Democracy in Liberia), consisting of fighters from the Krahn ethnic group (the Liberian counterpart of Gueré). In Liberia, relations between Gio and Krahn have traditionally been bad and as this ethnic feud was exported across the border, Yacouba – Gueré relations deteriorated. Furthermore, fighting between MPIGO and MODEL broke out.
The targeting of the civilian population appears to have evolved along the same pattern as the intrastate conflict. The ethnic dimension was always an important aspect, initially because MPIGO perceived the Gueré civilians as government supporters. Thus, the Gueré population was especially targeted by MPIGO's fighters and killings in reprisal for e.g. alleged cooperation with the government side were common. It has been pointed out that when the Liberian ethnic feud started to play an important role in the dynamics of the Ivorian conflict, the targeting of Gueré civilians became more indiscriminate. The majority of these killings appear to have been carried out by the Liberian elements in MPIGO.
Apart from the specific targeting of the Gueré population, another common feature in MPIGO's violence against civilians had to do with the war economy. Many of the Liberians and Sierra Leoneans fighting for MPIGO had been promised economic rewards for taking part in the fighting. In general, they were given a carte blanche for looting, and analysts have suggested that this was a way for MPIGO backer, then-Liberian President Charles Taylor, to let his men pay themselves. The result was a behavioral pattern on the part of the Liberians that became common in the west: they first systematically looted the abandoned homes of the ones who had fled the fighting, then moved on to focus on the ones who still remained in their villages, and, lastly, when the available loot began to diminish, they began using physical violence to try to force people suspected of having remaining assets to give them up. In the last phase many civilians were killed.
Human rights organizations mapping the violence in the western part of Ivory Coast tell a tale of grave human rights abuses by all sides in the conflict. MPIGO, with its many Liberian and Sierra Leonean fighters, was known as one of the most ruthless movements in the conflict. In the lawless so-called “wild west” the group wreaked havoc by abducting girls and using them as sex slaves, recruiting child soldiers, burning down villages, cutting off the limbs of people and, as recounted above, by killing civilians. The killings were conducted in ways ranging from shooting or burning the victims to death to mutilating victims in ways echoing the abuses in the Liberian and Sierra Leonean conflicts. Furthermore, the scope of the violence included everything from the killing of one or two people to massacres of entire villages.
MPIGO first became active as a one-sided actor in UCDP data in 2003, when the one-sided violence resulted in over 25 civilian deaths. The threshold was reached on 22 March that year when MPIGO rebels attacked a village called Dah, killing at least 40 civilians.
