provoked by the polluted water—for the levels of malnutrition witnessed by humanitarian aid workers among displaced who fled the area.152 One group of civilians who fled the area told Human Rights Watch, “[m]any children died along the way and here, maybe two to four children a day.”153 The strategy of preventing civilians from fleeing and retaining the civilian population in a vulnerable state in order to obtain humanitarian assistance, is a classic tactic used by the warring parties in Liberia and elsewhere, and one that violates international humanitarian law.154 By the time humanitarian agencies were able to access the area around Toulepleu in June 2003, much of the civilian population had suffered over five months of deprivation of health care, clean water and adequate food. Cases of malnutrition among children were rife in an area once considered a breadbasket for the country. Ravaging the villages around Toulepleu: February 2003 After the MPIGO rebels were driven out of Toulepleu on January 12, the rebel-allied Liberian forces took the war to the small villages around the road, and the encampments among the plantations. Hundreds of displaced villagers, both Gueré and Burkinabé, fled the villages around Toulepleu and the area north of the road, and came to the government-controlled towns of Guiglo and Duékoué. A displaced Gueré from Glopleu described the attacks that devastated the region. There are many bodies rotting in the villages…. We were forced to leave because the rebels ate everything. They ate all the cattle, burned the huts and the granaries, killed the elderly who couldn’t walk, burned people and used fire to burn scars on the bodies of their victims, and sometimes they write MPIGO or MPCI on the bodies with fire or with a knife…. It’s definitely the Liberians who are the worst. The MPCI are a bit better, but the MJP and the MPIGO are very bad. They don’t like the Gueré. They first came in December, but did not attack people. In January they came the second time…. It was at this time, after their second attack, that everything started. They started attacking people…. The rebels demanded money. If you said you didn’t have any, they searched the whole house. If they found something, they would kill you because you lied. Sometimes they killed for no reason. Doué Kaoué, a sixty-year-old man, was shot February 18. He was sitting in his courtyard when they shot him.155 Another displaced villager said, “we went from encampment to encampment. The rebels came in the camps to loot and burn the houses. They killed people and forbade others from burying them. The skeletons are in our villages.”156 Although many of the killings by the rebels’ Liberian forces were wanton acts of violence, some of them were specifically targeted at Gueré. This was partly due to the fact that many of the Gueré had organized in civilian militias or self-defense committees and some were armed and resisted the attacks (see below, chapter IX). It was also due to the increasingly ethnic nature of the conflict. Once the government’s Liberian Krahn fighters became involved in the fighting, often in coordination with the Ivorian Gueré self-defense committees, it was a only a short step towards an ethnic war of Krahn/Gueré against Gio/Yacouba. Abuses evolve into ethnic conflict By February 2003, as Gueré and Yacouba civilian militias became increasingly involved in the conflict in the west, working with the government and rebels respectively, abuses took on an increasingly ethnic and horrific 152 Human Rights Watch interview, Abidjan, April 6, 2003. 153 Human Rights Watch interview, Guiglo, April 4, 2003. 154 Objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, crops, and drinking water installations, are entitled to protection. The rationale behind this provision is that it is prohibited to deliberately starve civilians as a method of combat. Article 14, Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts (Protocol II), 8 June 1977. 155 Human Rights Watch interview, Duékoué, April 3, 2003. 156 Human Rights Watch interview, Duékoué, April 3, 2003. Human Rights Watch 39 August 2003, Vol. 15, No. 14 (A)