ABIDJAN/GENEVA, (Reuters) – A senior United Nations official warned incumbent Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo and other senior officials yesterday they may be held criminally accountable for human rights violations.
A dispute between Gbagbo and rival candidate Alassane Ouattara over who won the presidential election on Nov. 28 has plunged the West African state into turmoil and U.N. experts have reported killings, disappearances and arbitrary detentions.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, said yesterday she had written to Gbagbo and other senior officials “to remind them … that they will be held personally responsible and accountable for human rights violations resulting from their actions and/or omissions, according to international human rights and humanitarian law.”
The international criminal justice system developed in the past 15 or so years had provided a means of accountability that did not exist before, she said in a statement issued in Geneva.
“No longer can heads of state, and other actors, be sure that they can commit atrocious violations and get away with it.”
A Gbagbo spokesman said he could not immediately comment.
Gbagbo has defied almost unanimous pressure from world leaders to had over power to Ouattara, widely recognised to have won the election. Gbagbo’s camp has rejected U.N.-certified electoral commission results that declared Ouattara winner, sparking a standoff in which scores of people have been killed.
In a New Year address broadcast on television late yesterday, Gbagbo accused world powers of an “attempted coup d’etat” by backing his rival.
“I will stay where Ivorians have placed me with their votes. We will not concede,” he said.
State accounts
“When committed in certain circumstances, enforced disappearances amount to a crime against humanity,” a U.N. working group on enforced or involuntary disappearances said of attacks by gunmen on pro-Ouattara neighbourhoods.
As uncertainty grew over which of the rival governments set up by the two claimants was in charge of state accounts, Ivory Coast appeared likely to have missed an international debt payment due on Friday.
Ouattara’s government said the cash had run out and Gbagbo’s offered no guarantees.
Gbagbo’s newly hired French lawyer Roland Dumas, a socialist politician, former foreign minister and ex-head of France’s Constitutional Council, told journalists said they would “re-establish the truth about the elections”.
The Constitutional Coun-cil, run by an ally of Gbagbo, reversed Ouattara’s victory by cancelling hundreds of thousands of votes in Ouattara strongholds, alleging fraud. The U.N. mission chief has rejected this as “not based on facts”.
“We have a president-elect named by the Constitutional Council, which is an institution that respects the law,” Dumas told journalists at the Council, after meeting officials there. “Everything that was done, was done before the law.”
Addressing journalists in the Golf Hotel, where Ouattara’s officials are holed up under the guard of U.N. peacekeepers, his Prime Minister Guillaume Soro called for swift international action to remove Gbagbo by force.
“Ivory Coast is already in a state of civil war,” he said.
The West African regional bloc ECOWAS has threatened to use force to oust Gbagbo if he does not leave quietly. Rebels still running the north of Ivory Coast since the civil war in 2002 and 2003 have said they would join any intervention.
