television station. In these cases, culpability by the officers or direct command responsibility of superior officers over their subordinates can be easily assumed. The commanding officer from the Gendarme Camp of Koumassi was the only commander identified who made a concerted effort to ensure the rights of detainees were respected, which he did particularly in December. Numerous other victims and witnesses confirmed indirect command responsibility. Scores of detainees interviewed by Human Rights Watch described the presence of people whom they assumed were senior if not commanding officers in the police, gendarme and military installations in which serious abuses including torture and, in the case of the Gendarme Camp of Abobo, extrajudicial execution, were documented. In all of these installations, detainees were being held and mistreated in open areas. While, according to victims, few officers participated in the violations, they did nothing to stop them. In these cases, in which commanders witnessed the crimes or where the offenses were so numerous or notorious that a reasonable person could come to no other conclusion then that the officer must have known of their commission, indirect command responsibility could clearly be established. Commanders are required to apply particular care when leading forces with the capacity to use lethal force. The failure of a superior to take appropriate measures to control and thereby prevent his subordinates from committing atrocities is another element of showing command responsibility. The failure to prevent the numerous atrocities committed by gendarmes in both October and December, apparently in retaliation for the deaths of other gendarmes, is a clear example of this. Yet another form of indirect command responsibility is when an officer should have known of the offenses, but displayed such serious negligence as to constitute willful and wanton disregard of the possible consequences. Officers who stood by while subordinates committed serious violations would be equally culpable for the offences. Similarly a superior would be culpable if he failed to punish the subordinate in question. Lastly, subordinates may not be absolved of responsibility for having obeyed illegal orders by their commanders to commit atrocities. The victims also described numerous incidents of insubordination by police and gendarmes during which low ranking personnel argued, even physically fought, with officers over how to treat and whether or not to kill detainees. The incidents occurred on the street at the time of detention and within police and gendarme bases. They described subordinates outright ignoring the orders of their officers or waiting until they had departed before continuing with practices the officers had ordered them to stop. In all of these cases superior officers were attempting to intervene to stop abuses by their subordinates. Some government officials and diplomats interviewed by Human Rights Watch blamed the violence by state security forces in October on the slightly more than twenty-four-hour power vacuum between the flight of General Guei, on the afternoon of October 25, 2000, and the swearing in of Laurent Gbagbo as president, on the evening of October 26, 2000. It was in fact during this twenty-four hour period that the most serious abuses, including the killing of the fifty-seven youths in the Charnier de Yopougon took place. At the same time there were serious abuses both before and afterward, indicating both that senior commanders exerted some control over the forces involved, and that they must share in responsibility for what happened. A detainee being held within the Agban Gendarme Base in October described the confused line of command and the disrespect shown by lower ranking gendarmes towards their commanding officer.112 I couldn’t tell who was in charge. Most of those beating us were corporals or sergeants. All but one of them participated in the beatings. They were all walking around clobbering us, each gendarme beating us as he pleased. No one seemed to be giving orders. It was all crazy. Sometimes it seemed like they were drunk or on drugs. At one point it was like a few of them got the idea to burn us so they found clothes and shoes with plastic, set it on fire and started burning 112 Human Rights Watch interview, Abidjan, November 14, 2001. Human Rights Watch 57 August 2001, Vol. 13, No. 6(A)