At least four demonstrators, including a 19-year-old woman, were shot dead by riot police officers on Tuesday as they protested the shooting deaths of women who marched last week, witnesses said.
Volleys of bullets fired by the security forces of the nation’s strongman, Laurent Gbagbo, continued to sound around the clinic where the dead were taken Tuesday afternoon, as relatives and others pressed for cover inside the tiny building in the Treichville district. Three of the bodies lay on the floor under bloodied sheets, while a wounded man gasped in pain in the hall.
Mr. Gbagbo’s refusal to give up power after losing a presidential election last November is yielding a mounting toll of death, lawlessness and economic collapse here in this sprawling commercial capital of nearly four million people.
Gunfire sounds across the city every day, and youths with machetes and pistols staff impromptu checkpoints. Nearly 400 have died in all, according to the United Nations, including at least seven women last week who were cut down while protesting in the rebellious Abobo neighborhood by large-caliber machine-gun fire from Mr. Gbagbo’s security forces.
It was to protest those earlier deaths that the women in Treichville, a bustling neighborhood just across a lagoon from downtown Abidjan’s tattered high-rises, came out to march Tuesday, several people at the clinic said. “We came to cry for our dead,” said Marie-Louise Diby, a teacher.
The march was just ending, and neighborhood youths had formed a security cordon around the women, Ms. Diby said. The women tried to walk a final stretch to the headquarters of the political party whose standard-bearer, Alassane Ouattara, won last November’s election. The riot police then launched tear-gas canisters and fired into the crowd, Ms. Diby said. “They didn’t want to let us finish,” Ms. Diby said. “It’s then they started firing.” Three of the dead were men from the neighborhood. “It was the C.R.S. that started firing,” said Saly Cissé, an official of Mr. Ouattara’s party who was at the march on Tuesday, referring to Mr. Gbagbo’s Republican Security Units. “We had finished the march.”
Protests against Mr. Gbagbo’s rule, often ending in bloodshed, have been multiplying here. An assortment of abandoned flip-flops jettisoned by panicked women still marked the spot where the seven women were killed in the Abobo district last week.
While Mr. Gbagbo maintains an iron grip on much of this once prosperous port city, the Abobo neighborhood, home to over a million people, appears to be slipping from his grasp. Entering it on Tuesday required passing through heavy checkpoints of burnt-out vehicles staffed by young men bearing pistols and grenades.
When Mr. Gbagbo’s security forces penetrate here, they do so only in armored vehicles, often spraying bullets on either side as they go through, residents said. Many civilians have been killed in this rough Ouattara-supporting neighborhood of Muslim immigrants from northern Ivory Coast, but so have some of Mr. Gbagbo’s security forces. It is the one neighborhood that has taken up arms against him.
On Tuesday, the shabby main road through Abobo was taken over by hundreds of angry marchers, mostly women. Chanting in Dioula, a local language, they said “Gbagbo needs to leave,” alternating between mocking laughter and cries against the strongman who refuses to step down. Residents here insisted that Abobo is now autonomous, thanks to the shadowy young men with stolen Kalashnikov rifles who have waged an armed campaign against Mr. Gbagbo — the Invisible Commando, as the group is known in the neighborhood. “It’s not under the authority of Gbagbo now, not at all,” said Idrissa Tolo, a chauffeur, who was watching the women march. “Have you seen Gbagbo’s army here?” asked Fousseny Doumia, a truck driver. “We are the ones who provide security around here.”
Several members of the Invisible Commando — brusque, stocky young men carrying weapons and giving orders — were in evidence at the checkpoints Tuesday. They wore amulets, bracelets or trinkets that residents here said carried magic powers to protect them from Mr. Gbagbo’s bullets. One such young man appeared behind a group of shacks off a main road peppered with bullet holes to calmly explain the group’s position. He refused to give his name or age, or acknowledge his membership, but the telltale bulge under his shirt indicated the presence of a protective amulet, and residents said he was a ranking member of the Invisible Commando. They called him “Captain Fongnon,” which means “wind” in Dioula. “The ex-president,” he said, referring to Mr. Gbagbo, “is not capable of managing the situation. He’s killing us, and he’s killing our women. We, the young Ivorians, have banded together to protect our families and our possessions.”
Mr. Gbagbo’s men, he said, do not dare walk the streets of Abobo anymore, “because they are scared. But they shoot when they come through. And we’re sick of it. So we’re defending ourselves.”
“We are proud,” he added. “And we know this can’t last. This man has got to go.”
Source: New York Times
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