In our village committee, we have three Guérés, three Burkinabés, one Baoulé, and one Yacouba. In other villages around here, it’s only Guérés. How can we know what [non-natives] are thinking, what they need, without including them? … It’s not easy for a Guéré to tell a Burkinabé, “You’re wrong.” But if his brother on the committee does so, it goes smoother. It’s the same for the Guérés, we can tell them they’re wrong.… People are more content [with decisions] this way.197 Yet in a number of villages where Human Rights Watch asked about the composition of village land committees, the response was some form of, “Why would immigrants be included, we are the guardians of the land.”198 The inflexibility negatively impacts both communities. Non-natives are less likely to appear when summoned and to trust or respect decisions. And Guérés with legitimate claims of land restitution therefore often cannot have their complaint properly heard or enforced. Some villages likewise refuse to meaningfully include women on land committees, despite their regular involvement in working rural land. Women in western Côte d’Ivoire face particular vulnerabilities in terms of their access to land, magnifying the importance of their participation in resolving land disputes and in debating reforms to laws and decrees on rural land tenure. In 2012, the Norwegian Refugee Council reported finding that: [W]omen’s status in the family, and particularly her marital status, made her vulnerable to land disputes and decreased her land tenure security during the post-election crisis. Our research confirms that women are much less likely than men to have documents for their land on both sides of the [Liberian-Ivorian] border. We find that unmarried women, such as widows, report more land disputes than married women. Widows may be especially vulnerable when it comes to land disputes and, especially in Côte d’Ivoire, they were more likely to state that they feared losing their land in the future during interviews.199 197 Human Rights Watch interview with village elder, Bloléquin department, February 9, 2013. 198 Human Rights Watch interviews with village chiefs, western Côte d’Ivoire, February and June 2013. 199 NRC, “Land Conflict and Food Security in the Liberian-Ivoirian Border Region,” December 2012, p. 27. 67 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | OCTOBER 2013