Political violence in Daloa town in the election campaign: June 2002 The municipal elections of March 2001 brought the RDR into power in Daloa town. This resulted in a split administration, where the elected mayor of the town was RDR, but the government-appointed prefect of the district was FPI. The RDR win was perceived by the local Bété population, who are largely FPI supporters, as a victory for outsiders or foreigners. In Duékoué, a bastion of the Gueré population, the mayor and other local authorities were FPI, but a substantial part of the rural population was Burkinabé and other immigrants from the sub-region. During the election campaign, this tension exploded, echoing the election violence in 2000. In Daloa itself, young FPI and RDR members clashed on June 25, 2002 as the political parties started campaigning prior to the elections on July 7, 2002. It appears to have begun when a group of young Bété FPI supporters began harassing Dioula merchants near the RDR office, where RDR members were preparing their campaign.168 Apparently the local gendarmes and police either did not intervene or were too late to prevent the escalation of the violence. At least four people were killed, seven were injured from gunshot wounds, and two mosques and a church were burned.169 In Daloa itself, a curfew was imposed throughout early July, and the situation calmed down somewhat, but tension was just below the surface when the conflict ignited on September 19, 2002. The pattern of violence in Daloa in June 2002, in which groups of FPI supporters acted either together with paramilitary groups from the state security forces or were tolerated by the forces of law and order, clearly echoed the types of violence that took place in Abidjan during the October and December elections of 2000. It also established a pattern for the type of violence that took place after the conflict began in September 2002, in which FPI supporters organized into self-defense committees and acting in complicity with state security forces, assaulted and executed foreigners and RDR supporters in several towns in the west. Village violence in June 2002: the targeting of the Burkinabé Burkinabé are the majority of the immigrant population in the west and southwest of Côte d’Ivoire, alongside significant communities of Baoulé internal migrants. Many villages were created and almost entirely populated by Burkinabé, who were mostly responsible for the clearing of the forest and the extension of the vast Ivorian cocoa plantations. For more than thirty years, land ownership and use remained largely unregulated by the Ivorian state, with local villagers, migrants, and traditional authorities pursuing local agreements based on traditional customary law. For most, this consisted of a homemade contract reflecting the purchase of the land, and the creation of a long-term relationship between the immigrant buyer and the seller, his “tuteur” or Ivorian “father” or “patron.”170 Amidst the dismal economic situation of the 1980s and 1990s, the return of many educated Ivorian youth from the towns created considerable tension between indigenous villagers and the largely Burkinabé plantation owners and workers, but also between generations of Ivorians within the same family. In the past few years, President Gbagbo’s FPI party has specifically called for urban youth to “return to the land” in an effort to address rising urban problems such as unemployment, crime and over-population. Many of the educated Ivoiran youth who did indeed return to their rural villages of origin felt disenfranchised in multiple ways, first by an economic climate characterized by a lack of opportunity, second by a state system which provided few options, and third by their own families, who had sold the land to immigrants decades earlier. In the already politically charged atmosphere of the late 1990s, the introduction of the rural land reform law in 1998 by the government of Henri Konan Bédié became one of the catalysts for intercommunal strife. The law provided that only Ivorians could own land. This was a stunning blow to the thousands of resident Burkinabé and other West Africans who had spent years, and sometimes decades, clearing and cultivating the land. Non-Ivorians who had bought land through customary law could maintain full usage rights throughout their lifetime, however, 168 “Elections des conseils généraux Daloa: La campagne tourne à l'affrontement entre le FPI et le RDR,” Le Patriote, June 26, 2002, at www.lepatriote.net/lepatriote2.asp 169 Timothé Dro, “Mosquée et Eglise incendiées,” Soir Info, June 26, 2002, p.5. 170 The term “tuteur” is used to describe the traditional relationship between the original owner of the land and the person who buys or uses the land. This relationship, which passed from generation to generation, required immigrants to make regular contributions—of money or in kind—to their tuteurs. Human Rights Watch 43 August 2003, Vol. 15, No. 14 (A)