dirtying their floors and ordered us to lick our own blood from the ground; ‘you’re leaving our place dirty, clean it up, clean it.’ A few of them had a clothes iron which they pressed on us. Here also I was asked for information about the survivors of Yopougon and about one of our student leaders who’s president of the International Forum. One of the gendarmes said, ‘We know you manage the files at the RDR, you know where they are.’ On Tuesday at around 12:00 midnight, Babou Coulibaly, who’s a private secretary to Alassane, was brought into Agban in a guard car. As soon as he arrived the gendarmes started pointing at him and accusing him of infiltrating Gbagbo’s people and of wanting to kill the president. I don’t know where they got this information. They dragged him out of the car and started beating him so hard he couldn’t move. They went mad and behaved like animals; they jumped on him, kicked him in the gut and sides with their boots and thumped him with pieces of wood and the butts of their rifles. He was beaten unconscious and at around 2:00 a.m., perhaps afraid that he was going to die, they took him away. I later heard he died in hospital. Violence Escalates Following a Presidential Speech In the evening of December 4, 2000, President Gbagbo held a nationally televised address in which he imposed a curfew and state of emergency to run until the morning of December 12. In the address he ordered the security forces to act without restraint against the demonstrators whom he indirectly accused of trying to topple him through a coup d’état. He said, “police, gendarmes and soldiers from all branches of the armed forces are ordered to use all means throughout the country to oppose troublemakers.… Power is not acquired through putsches. I do not want to let Côte d’Ivoire become a country that goes from putsch to putsch. All troublemakers will be punished.”91 Many RDR supporters later told Human Rights Watch that they believed the address had given the security forces a carte blanche for repression of the opposition. It is difficult to ascertain the degree to which the gendarmes and police felt protected by the president’s statement or whether the impunity they had thus far enjoyed was enough to influence their actions. Nonetheless, according to statements overheard by several victims, the police and gendarmes did indeed use the president’s speech as an excuse to commit serious human rights violations. From the early morning of December 5, 2000, the gendarmes and police deployed in force in the neighborhoods which had the previous day been flashpoints of RDR protest. The security forces blocked roads and then fired indiscriminately into crowds of demonstrators, rounded up and detained RDR supporters, and broke into the homes of foreigners, northerners, and Muslims. Victims and witnesses often described FPI supporters accompanying and in some cases collaborating with security forces as they perpetrated many of these attacks. Human Rights Watch documented the deaths of twenty-three civilians on December 5, 2000, all at the hands of the security forces. The neighborhoods most affected by the December 5, 2000, violence were the RDR strongholds of Abobo and Yopougon. As in October, the violence perpetrated by security forces in Yopougon appeared to escalate following the killing of a gendarme during clashes with RDR supporters. A twenty-two-year-old driver seriously tortured during ten days of detention in the National Police Academy, described how the president’s declaration helped the police cadets justify their actions:92 On several occasions we were threatened with death. One of them said they’d received orders directly from the president to do anything and everything to defend themselves, and that we should be careful because this meant they could easily kill us if they wanted. They said their pity for us was the only thing stopping them from doing so. They clearly said the president’s edict meant that no one would intervene if they killed us. We were at their mercy. 91 92 “Ivory Coast in State of Emergency After Bloody Pre-election Violence,” www.cnn.com, December 4, 2001. Human Rights Watch interview, Abidjan, February 7, 2001. Human Rights Watch 49 August 2001, Vol. 13, No. 6(A)