just opened up on us with live bullets. I saw that one youth died on the spot. Many of us were wounded with bullets. We saw there were some FPI youths with the gendarmes as well. They just opened up firing on us with no warning.70 At least one opposition supporter, a treasury official working with the Treichville mayor’s office, an ethnic Baoule, and member of the Democratic Party of Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI), was murdered by an RDR mob as a large group of RDR supporters marched into the city center on the morning of December 4, 2000, to participate in the meeting at the stadium. According to witnesses he was brutalized and later had his throat slashed.71 Detention and Torture After breaking up concentrations of RDR supporters on their way to the stadium in the morning, and to the national television station in the afternoon, police and gendarmes rounded up hundreds of demonstrators and detained them in several bases including the National Police Academy, Agban Gendarme Camp, National Gendarme Academy, Gendarme Camp of Koumassi, and the Gendarme Camp of Yopougon. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Abidjan, 814 people were arrested during the month of December violence.72 According to witnesses and victims interviewed by Human Rights Watch, several hundred more people were detained around the December parliamentary elections than during the October presidential elections. Detainees were subjected to severe physical and psychological torture similar to reported treatment in October. Indeed, in many cases the treatment was worse. At least one RDR supporter died and scores more were wounded as a result of torture and ill-treatment. Hospital and clinic workers treated hundreds of victims for lacerations, broken bones, fractures, and burns sustained while in custody. In addition to the forms of torture used in October, police and gendarmes burned detainees with irons and scalding pot lids, scorched their testicles with cigarettes, and forced them to drink their own blood and eat excrement. As in October, the two most notorious places of detention both in terms of severity of treatment and numbers detained were the National Police Academy and the Agban Gendarme Camp. Many of the some thirty detainees held within the National Gendarme Academy were also severely tortured. On December 6 and 7, 2000, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and international and local human rights groups including Amnesty International, and the Ivorian Movement for Human Rights (Mouvement Ivorien des Droits de l’Homme, MIDH), visited the National Police Academy, Agban Gendarme Camp, and other places of detention. Following the visits, conditions in detention improved considerably. There were few subsequent reports of abuse, and cadets and officers alike appeared to have received orders to desist from illtreating the detainees. The ICRC treated the wounded and registered the names and phone numbers of detainees to notify their family members.73 A twenty-two-year-old driver’s apprentice, arrested within his house in Yopougon, described physical torture during his ten-day detention within the National Police Academy. His back and arms were scarred with at least nine small burns and numerous deep welts:74 Arriving at the Police Academy they asked us to take off all our clothes. Then they took our IDs, mobile phones, jewelry, and made us walk through a formation of police—one on each side about a meter apart—who beat us severely with everything; batons, wood, chains, belts, electrical wire. The line was about thirty meters long and they told us to walk very slowly. Most of them seemed to be cadets. Then they made us walk on our knees; they told us to form groups of seven and race back and forth five times. 70 Human Rights Watch interview, Abidjan, February 7, 2001. Human Rights Watch interviews, Abidjan, February 10, 2001. 72 “Gbagbo Orders Investigation of Torture Allegations,” Panafrican News Agency, December 15, 2001. 73 Human Rights Watch interviews with former detainees, Abidjan, February 5-11, 2001. 74 Human Rights Watch interview, Abidjan, February 7, 2001. 71 Human Rights Watch 38 August 2001, Vol. 13, No. 6(A)