Persons in Africa (“Kampala Convention”) and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights likewise protect property rights—including land that was owned according to customary rights. These rights have been violated in cases of illegal sales. To investigate land conflict related to the post-election crisis, Human Rights Watch undertook a week-long mission to Liberia in December 2012 to speak with Ivorian refugees; and two three-week missions to Côte d’Ivoire, in February and June 2013. Human Rights Watch visited 49 towns and villages in Côte d’Ivoire’s western administrative regions of Guémon, Cavally, and Tonkpi and interviewed 168 people involved in land conflicts related to the post-election crisis—seeking out evidence from the various ethnic and immigrant populations involved in land disputes. Human Rights Watch confirmed many of its observations in dozens of additional interviews with people working closely on land issues in the West, including customary authorities and local government officials involved in resolving land disputes; and representatives of humanitarian organizations and the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Côte d’Ivoire. In the 1960s and 1970s, President Houphouët-Boigny favored policies that promoted largescale migration from neighboring countries and northern and central Côte d’Ivoire to the country’s lush western forest regions—where cocoa and coffee production helped create what became known as the “Ivorian miracle” of strong economic growth and political stability. An economic downturn in the 1980s and 1990s, combined with quickly diminishing cultivable land, led to a change in politics that focused on Ivorian nationality, culminating in a 1998 land law that said only Ivorian citizens could own rural land. Encouraged by certain politicians, some Guérés in western Côte d’Ivoire used this as a license to try to seize plantations that they had sold or ceded to West African immigrants; immigrants, for their part, were outraged that transactions they believed were outright land sales—sometimes reasonably, sometimes not—were now characterized as long-term leases or rental agreements. Rising land tensions in subsequent years played a role in the political and military violence that would follow, culminating in the post-election crisis. The massive displacement in western Côte d’Ivoire caused by the post-election crisis ushered in chaos around land rights and acquisition. Some Guérés who returned while a true landowner remained displaced sold land fraudulently that they had no claim to, often including enormous amounts of virgin forest, particularly around Bloléquin. While some Burkinabé buyers purchased in good faith, others were complicit—clandestinely buying 3 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | OCTOBER 2013