The massacre at Dah: March 22, 2003 Dah, a small village in the Gueré area, just a few kilometers west of the road from Bangolo to Duékoué, was attacked by rebel forces on the night of March 22. This occurred just a few weeks after the Bangolo massacre and was most likely a reprisal attack. A civilian displaced by the fighting described events that night to Human Rights Watch: It happened Saturday, March 22. After the news at 10 p.m. there was an electricity cut. I had a premonition. I said to myself that maybe the rebels would attack. Towards midnight, my wife heard a noise outside. She woke me up. I quietly opened the window and I saw people running outside in every direction. I heard a shot a few hundred meters from my courtyard. We ran all night. The next morning around 6 a.m. we returned to the village and it was then we discovered the horror. Bodies were sprawled all over the village. Among the bodies, my aunt Fatima, who was about seventy years old, my thirty-fiveyear-old nephew Zapele, my sixty-year-old uncle. All were killed by bullets. It was mainly the Caien quarter that they ravaged the most. They did not target any particular type of person. Even the Burkinabé fled with us and they were also dead. They burned the houses, sometimes with people in them. They burned the house of a woman, the widow of Mwa Jean, while she was in the house with her two children. She managed to get out of the house, one of her children got out, severely burned, but the other one died. Many burned in their houses. They came in vehicles. They left their vehicles in an encampment about five hundred meters from the village. Three of them stayed to guard the vehicles. The attackers were above all Liberians. While shooting on someone, they yelled terrible cries…. They spoke either in English or in Yacouba. We heard they had killed in other villages. It’s mostly Liberians and Yacouba who kill. We heard they have poisoned the salt, the bouillion cubes, even the cigarettes. All these things come from the Yacouba.163 The description of the poisoning of food in this account, while unlikely, signaled the shift of community perceptions to a very dangerous level: the demonization of the opposing ethnic group. These perceptions were certainly fueled by the Ivorian press, which presented events in the west as a rebel “genocide” against the Wê (Gueré), but generally omitted the fact that abuses were being committed on both sides, and had evolved as a result of the involvement on both sides of Liberian fighters long known for their abuses against civilians. Another factor contributing to the rise of the ethnic conflict is the role played by the Gueré pro-government civilian selfdefense committees in the western villages. Members of these militias participated in numerous abuses against civilians, particularly Burkinabé, both before and after the start of the internal conflict. IX. THE ROLE OF CIVILIAN MILITIAS IN THE WEST The conflict in Côte d’Ivoire has unveiled major schisms in Ivorian society. The tensions between north and south, between the largely Muslim Dioula and the largely Christian southerners, and between native Ivorians and immigrants are the most evident symptoms of the crisis shaking the fabric of the society. In the west, where hundreds of villages have been gripped by increased tensions between the indigenous Ivorian groups and immigrant communities, this development has had particularly brutal repercussions for the large Burkinabé community. The rise of youth groups and civilian militias The economic and political turbulence of the past decade has bred a generation of educated but unemployed and disenchanted youth. They were seen demonstrating—and sometimes rioting—in the streets of Abidjan in October and December 2000. For thousands of youths, membership in the university student association in Abidjan was a critical step in political involvement. The student movement became increasingly politicized during the Bédié 163 Human Rights Watch interview, Duékoué, April 3, 2003. Human Rights Watch 41 August 2003, Vol. 15, No. 14 (A)