Charnier de Yopougon In a bid to restore calm following a day of shocking violence, two high-ranking officials from the RDR and FPI appeared together on state television in the evening of October 26, 2000, and called on their activists to desist from protests and stop the violence.52 On October 27, 2000, Ouattara recognized Gbagbo as president and met with him in a further bid to calm tensions. Ouattara refused however, to participate in the new government, insisting that “our priority is to bury our dead.”53 All thought of reconciliation was in any event set aside by the discovery of the victims of a security force massacre later that day. In the late afternoon of October 27, the bullet-ridden bodies of fifty-seven young men were found dumped in two piles in a forest clearing on the outskirts of Yopougon. After speaking with two survivors of and several witnesses to events surrounding the massacre, Human Rights Watch researchers established that paramilitary gendarmes based at the Gendarme Camp of Abobo were directly responsible for the killings. This incident was the single worst atrocity of the election period. The massacre took place on October 26, 2000 in two stages. The first involved the shooting of detainees at the Gendarme Camp of Abobo, where young men rounded up from Abobo neighborhood were taken during the morning and early afternoon of October 26, 2000. Prior to the shooting detainees were subject to similar forms of brutality and torture to those reported by detainees in the National Police Academy and Agban Gendarme Camp. At approximately 3:00 p.m., as an ambulance carrying the body of Lt. Nyobo N’Guessan drove into the camp, at least two gendarmes opened fire on the detainees held there, killing some thirty to forty. The second stage showed the signs of being a well-planned operation. Well-armed gendarmes deployed into a neighborhood bordering the Gendarme Camp of Abobo and rounded up between eight and thirteen young men who were used as porters to load the dead onto a truck and later dispose of the bodies in the forest. The porters and all other survivors were then gunned down, though some were not killed. These survivors described the presence of one truck, two jeeps, and the involvement of some thirty gendarmes in this operation. At the time the Gendarme Camp of Abobo was under the command of Captain Victor Be Kpan. While it does not appear that he ordered his men to shoot the detainees inside the camp, he must take responsibility for failing to halt the initial killings or to take action against the gendarmes involved, and for the second part of the massacre which necessitated planning and logistical support. A twenty-one-year-old man detained by paramilitary gendarmes on October 26 and later taken to the Gendarme Camp of Abobo tells how he witnessed the killing of some thirty to forty other detainees inside the camp. He was later taken to a forest on the outskirts of Abidjan where approximately fifteen men were killed. He told his story:54 I'm an RDR party member and activist. On Thursday morning, October 26, at around 8:00 a.m. I left my home in Abobo to participate in a pro-RDR march to protest the results of the elections. But near the Abobo Cultural Center we met up with a group of gendarmes who detained me with about twenty other RDR militants. They didn't ask for our ID's. We were beaten really severely right there and we then taken to Camp Commando of Abobo. As we entered at around l0:00 a.m. one of the gendarmes said ‘Say your last prayers.’ When we arrived, there were already eight or nine other people detained. I could see they'd been beaten, badly beaten. Over the next minutes and hours several more groups were brought in. Almost all of us were Dioula. 52 Norimitsu Onishi, “Dictator Gone, Ivory Coast Splits Into Ethnic and Political Violence,” New York Times, October 26, 2000. 53 “Gbagbo to Form Ivorian Government Without Ouattara,” Reuters, October 27, 2000. 54 Human Rights Watch interview, Abidjan, November 10, 2000. Human Rights Watch 29 August 2001, Vol. 13, No. 6(A)