Imagine an ethnic community run out of its villages, its fields, and its places of worship by a ruthless tribal army and a coldblooded ethnic militia supported by the government. Imagine thousands of children, youth, women, and elderly people from that autochthonous community mercilessly butchered by those ethnic legionnaires, who then occupy the homes, the lands, and the fields of their victims with the blessing of the government. Imagine the few remaining people from that persecuted community rounded up and parked in refugee camps by the United Nations, just a few yards from the places that used to be their villages, and which have now become the dwelling places of new settlers brought in by the tribal legionnaires. But even worse, imagine this: the brutal militias uncomfortable with facing the gazes of those they have deprived of their homes and lands decide to gradually get rid of them by undertaking unrestrained murderous incursions into the camps that shelter them, right under the incompetent watch of the UN forces that are theoretical protecting the banished populations.
This is no fiction. This is the lived reality of the Wê people of Cote d’Ivoire, natives of Duékoué, now strangers, evacuees, and refugees in their own land, since April 2011, under the tribal regime of Dramane Ouattara, this presumptive “savior” of the Ivorians, the man for whose cause the “International Community” ordered a global firepower on Cote d’Ivoire on April 11, 2011. Here, on this site, we have repeatedly denounced the Wê genocide, which reached its most feverish moment with the butchering on April 10, 2011, of more than 800 civilians by Ouattara’s army. Yet, the global powers that have supported Ouattara’s very problematic ascension still remain unmoved, as they have in Rwanda. To-day, more than 3000 Wê have been killed by Ouattara’s ethnic militias.
The latest occurrence of the programmatic extermination of the Wê took place on July 20, 2012, when Ouattara’s ethnic militias, escorted by Ouattara’s army (FRCI) and some traditional Malinke hunters (Dozos), forced their way into the 5000-people refugee camps of Nahibly, burnt down 90% of the camp’s infrastructures, massacred 13 refugees and wounded scores of others, right under the noses of the UN blue berets. The reason for this barbarous incursion? The Northern Malinke populations who had flocked to Duékoué on tacit invitation by Ouattara’s army to occupy the lands of the Wê community after the April 10, 2011 massacre, had decided to conduct a punitive expedition against Wê refugees whom they suspected of hiding a gang of robbers that had killed 4 innocent Malinke the previous night. So, escorted by Ouattara’s tribal armies, the Malinke raided the UN refugee camp in a killing frenzy.
Since the July 20 murderous incursion against the Wê refugees, the United Nations’ mission in Cote d’Ivoire (UNOCI) and Ouattara’s government have been engaged in accountability ping pong: For UNOCI number 2 officer Arnauld Akodjénou, the security of the Nahibly camp should be the responsibility of Ouattara’s army, the very tribal army that was repeatedly cited by several human right organizations for carrying out carnages on the Wê; the very army that escorted the barbarous throng into the camp on July 20. For Ouattara’s defense minister, Paul Koffi Koffi, the camp was to be secured by UNOCI, the organization that saw the necessity for its conception.
This apparent lack of responsibility elucidation between Ouattara’s government and the United Nations mission in Cote d’Ivoire is actually the well-thought pièce maîtresse of the logic of organized chaos which, under the guise of ignorance of clear directives, gives Ouattara carte blanche to implement his political program based on what he unapologetically names “rattrapage ethnique,” a sort of Hitlerian cleansing project meant to privilege people of a certain ethnic background and eliminate those who do not fit the criteria of ethnic selection. Ouattara’s privileged are the Malinke populations from Northern Cote d’Ivoire, from whose bosom he has been claiming appurtenance since the 1990s, despite evidence to the contrary. The sickening complicity between Ouattara and the UNOCI has been abundantly documented here and elsewhere. It is now no secret that the UNOCI has supplied weapons and logistics to Ouattara’s militias during the Ivorian crisis; some blue berets were even caught on camera fighting alongside Ouattara’s army. In the thrust of this repulsive collusion, the UNOCI has certainly conceded to Ouattara that time is not yet ripe for a full-fledged hands-on society; that a necessary level of human right abuse and praetorian violence would be needed to rid the country of remaining “pro-Gbagbo fanatics;” which explains the UNOCI’s participation in the various raids on the western countryside presumably targeting Liberian mercenaries still fighting for Gbagbo, raids that have actually served as pretexts for “disinfecting the West of its Wê population,” to use this imbecile allegory by Ouattara’s party leader Amadou Soumahoro.
So, this latest act of barbarity perpetrated against the Wê is not a chance occurrence. It is an act that fits within Ouattara’s Hitlerian scheme, the aim of which is to exterminate the Wê and colonize their lands with new populations. In doing so, Ouattara hopes to kill two birds with one stone. Firstly, he hopes to reward one of his greatest sponsors, Burkinabe dictator Blaise Compaoré, by making many Burkinabes the owners of the fertile cocoa belt of Cote d’Ivoire that has been the traditional dwelling place of the Wê people. Being the custodian of productive lands and a seaport has always been the reverie of delusional Compaoré, who has never hidden his desire to annex the Ivorian seaport of San Pédro as a war trophy in the early 2000s. It is against the promise made by Ouattara to supply his constituencies with fertile lands in Cote d’Ivoire and allow him privileged access to the San Pédro seaport that Compaoré sent carloads of Burkinabes to rebel-held northern towns of Cote d’Ivoire before the 2010 presidential election to inflate the electoral list in favor of Ouattara. It is these Burkinabe who, henceforward outfitted with forged Ivorian documents and mixed with the original Northern populations of Cote d’Ivoire living in Duekoue, carry now the convenient appellation of Malinké. It is these smuggled populations from Burkina Faso that, Ouattara hopes, will help him reach out to his second goal of ensuring a 2015 electoral victory, as lingers the prospect of the collapse of the sucker alliance he passed with Konan Bedie’s PDCI.
Indeed, only one year after the political crisis that saw the deaths of tens of thousands of Ivorians, Ouattara’s government announced in June 2012 that the Ivorian population, which was around 20 million before the war, has now increased to 26 millions: a six-million population increase in only one year. Unbelievable! In fact, this fanciful indicator reflects the millions of Burkinabe that Ouattara and Compaore have smuggled into Cote d’Ivoire before the 2010 presidential elections, elections that have witnessed the most flagrant cases of massive frauds ever recorded in the 21st Century. In some areas where Ouattara scored more than 98%, the number of voters surpassed the actual population counts. Having blatantly cheated against Gbagbo, Ouattara has later cheated during the 2011 legislative elections against the other parties of the RHDP bloc with whom he had hitherto passed an alliance to “defeat” Gbagbo. Those parties, and especially Bedie’s PDCI and Anaky’s MFA, are set to break the alliance in 2015 and present their own candidates against Ouattara. Ouattara knows it. And to counter them, he has started habituated the Ivorian people to the lie that the country’s population has increased by six million people. Six million Burkinabe set to vote for him in 2015. Six million Burkinabe that Ouattara must reward for their services. Six millions Burkinabe that must be found fertile lands on the territories of those who were among the most fervent supporters of Gbagbo, the Wê. Six million for whom the Wes must disappear from their ancestral lands. To accommodate the millions of Burkinabe who are progressively moving in to take the place of the Wê, In order to accommodate these substitutes, Ouattara’s parliament is considering a land reform whose language will stipulate that the land belongs to he who enhances it. A running Wê, a hiding Wê, a Wê that has surrendered his land for fear of being butchered is an absent Wê, and certainly not a Wê that is enhancing his land; whereas a present Burkinabe working on the Wê’s ancestral land is a Burkinabe, pardon, a Malinké that is enhancing the land. The land belongs to he who enhances it, not to he who flees from it. Ouattara’s programmatic extermination of the Wê people has only started, and it will carry on unless …
frindéthié 