Until a May 1, 2003 cease-fire was signed in the west, French and ECOWAS troops were reluctant to enter the west, where fighting was on-going and abuses were taking place on a daily basis. However, by late-May, as Liberian fighters were reportedly clearing out of the area, French and ECOWAS troops were preparing to assume monitoring positions and secure areas of the west, and by early June, most of the major towns in the west were stabilizing. XI. THE REGIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE The crisis in Côte d’Ivoire, once considered a pillar of regional stability, has highlighted the ever-increasing fragility of the West African sub-region. The eight months of armed conflict in Côte d’Ivoire, and in particular, the patterns of human rights abuses in the western part of the country, are a renewed reminder of the need to address the underlying causes of an ever-shifting regional crisis. While the conflict in Côte d’Ivoire has clear internal origins, the evolution of the conflict underlines the extent to which the states of the region are interlinked. The resurgence of the Liberian war is fundamental to the problems in the region, but it is only one element in what has clearly evolved into a regional crisis, with the responsibility for abuses shared by numerous regional actors. The flow of arms and combatants, including mercenaries, across porous borders paired with the willingness of regional governments to support insurgent groups against neighbors is a dangerous combination. Developments in the past year in Côte d’Ivoire highlight the serious potential for a constant regional cycle of conflict and destabilization as armed groups produce new cycles of human rights abuses, internally displaced persons and refugees, and child soldiers. Côte d’Ivoire’s neighbors: Liberia, Burkina Faso and Guinea Côte d’Ivoire’s war, while mainly spurred by internal grievances and movements, has been strongly influenced by regional dynamics, with Liberia, Burkina Faso and Guinea playing roles in its evolution and sharing some responsibility for the increasing overlap with the Liberian conflict. Questions remain regarding the precise roles of Liberian President Charles Taylor and Burkina Faso’s Blaise Compaoré in supporting the rebel groups. Taylor and Compaoré were allies through much of the 1990s,207 and each would have had interests in seeing a change of regime in Abidjan. Taylor’s historical links to Blaise Compaoré are clear, and the use of Burkina Faso as a transit point for illegal arms shipments to Liberia has been well documented by successive reports of the U.N. Panel of Experts.208 However, key questions regarding the extent of the links between the MPIGO and MPCI rebel groups and the neighboring governments, and whether or not they involved logistical support or took the form of direct orders from Monrovia and Ouagadougou—have not been answered and require further investigation. Guinea has long been hosting and supporting the LURD insurgency from Liberian refugee camps in the east of the country, and has contributed to the intensification of the Liberian conflict through this policy of support to 207 Personal relationships have dictated much of West African foreign policy throughout the past decades. Three key regional figures became allies of then-rebel Charles Taylor as he led the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) insurgency against Doe’s regime in the late-1980s. The first was the president of Burkina Faso, Blaise Compaoré, who provided military training and support to a group of Liberian exiles, including Taylor, after receiving their support in the1987 assassination of then-president Thomas Sankara. The second was Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi, whose dislike of Doe stemmed from hostility to the United States, and whose military support to Charles Taylor in his rebel days has continued throughout Taylor’s presidency, irrespective of the United Nations arms embargo on Liberia. The third was Felix Houphouet Boigny, who supported Taylor after Doe’s 1980 murder of Adolphus Tolbert, the husband of Houphouët-Boigny’s goddaughter. Houphouët-Boigny also had personal links to Blaise Compaoré, who had married one of his nieces. HouphouëtBoigny’s support for Taylor’s rebellion included allowing the fledgling NPFL to use western Côte d’Ivoire—in particular the town of Danané, which lies in a strategic position at the intersection of the Ivorian, Liberian and Guinean borders—as a staging base for Taylor’s attacks on Liberia. See Stephen Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy, (Hurst and Company, London), 1999, pp. 160-164. 208 See, for instance, the reports of the U.N. Panel of Experts on Liberia of October 25, 2002 (S/2002/1115) and April 24, 2003, (S/2003/498). Human Rights Watch 52 August 2003, Vol. 15, No. 14 (A)