COTE D IVOIRE: Militia fighters from Logouale attack handed over to Ivorian police

ABIDJAN, 4 Mar 2005 (IRIN) - UN peacekeepers in Cote d'Ivoire have handed over to the government 85 fighters of a hard-line militia group that supports President Laurent Gbagbo after capturing them when they attacked the rebel-held town of Logouale earlier this week.

The UN Mission in Cote d'Ivoire (ONUCI) said in a statement that the 85 men were handed over to government police in the western town of Guiglo on Thursday for judicial proceedings to be taken against them.

The Abidjan newspaper Les Echos du Matin reported that the militiamen were feted as heroes by government officials and the local population after being flown in to Guiglo on UN helicopters from the rebel-held city of Man.

General Abdoulaye Fall, the commander of the 6,000-strong UN peacekeeping force in Cote d'Ivoire, said some of those arrested after the pre-dawn attack on Logouale last Monday said they had been sent from Abidjan by Charles Ble Goude, the leader of the Young Patriots, a militia-style pro-Gbagbo youth movement.

"There was a large representation of different ethnic groups," the Senegalese general told reporters on Thursday. "We have questioned them and some of them said they were Young Patriots acting for Ble Goude who set out from Abidjan."

"Others came from Douekoue and others still from Guiglo," he added. Both are government-held towns in western Cote d'Ivoire where pro-Gbagbo militia movements have been active since the country plunged into civil war in September 2002.

Ble Goude undertook a tour of the volatile west of Cote d'Ivoire in February shortly before the attack on Logouale, a rebel outpost on the frontline, 520 km northwest of Abidjan.

ONUCI said two minors captured after the attack on Logouale were handed over to the care of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). A foreign military eyewitness to the battle scene told IRIN earlier this week that the two children were boys aged 10 and 12 and were led away crying for their parents.

The eyewitness reported seeing 15 dead bodies at the scene of the fighting. The rebel New Forces movement said 32 people were killed altogether.

The attack on Logouale was the first serious breach of the ceasefire between pro-government forces and rebels controlling the north of Cote d'Ivoire since Gbagbo's air force launched a series of bombing raids against rebel targets on November 4.

The bombardment, designed to soften up rebel targets ahead of a ground offensive, halted abruptly after French peacekeepers disabled the government's small fleet of jet bombers and helicopter gunships on the ground two days later.

New militia claims responsibility

Responsibility for the attack on Logouale was claimed by the Ivorian Movement for the Liberation of the West of Cote d’Ivoire (MILOCI), a new militia headed by a man known as Pastor Gammi.

Gammi has accused French troops of blocking his fighters' advance at Logouale and has threatened to make the 4,000 French peacekeeping troops in Cote d'Ivoire MILOCI's next target.

This threat was repeated on Friday by Mao Glofiei, the leader of the Front for the Liberation of the Great West (FLGO), another more established pro-Gbagbo militia group in western Cote d'Ivoire.

“The FLGO reserves the right to administer a forceful response to France and its interests and symbols on the entire Ivorian territory commensurate with the enormous wrong done to Cote d’Ivoire by [French President] Jacques Chirac and his murderous soldiers,” Glofiei said in a statement published in several newspapers.

Government supporters see the French as having stopped the militia’s advance northwards from Logouale to Man, a key rebel stronghold 40 km to the northwest.

ONUCI says the French only assisted Bangladeshi UN troops in Logouale. Colonel Henri Aussavy, the French military spokesman in Cote d'Ivoire has categorically denied allegations that French troops opened fire on the MILOCI gunmen.

Speaking publicly for the first time about the clash at Logouale, Ble Goude denied having any links with the gunmen captured there by UN troops. However, he announced a rally of Young Patriots on 13 March to discuss plans for more anti-French demonstrations in the near future.

“The French troops of the Unicorn Force should leave Cote d’Ivoire by 4 April. That has to very clear," Ble Goude told reporters. "We are going to demand the departure of the French army and we will use all necessary means.”

The current mandate of the UN and French peacekeeping forces in Cote d'Ivoire runs out on 3 April. France has said it will not retain its troops in the country beyond then without the explicit support of Gbagbo, the African Union and the United Nations.

It recently tabled a draft resolution in the UN Security Council backing a request by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for 1,200 extra UN troops to be sent to Cote d'Ivoire.

Meanwhile, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, who has been mediating between the government and rebels for the past four months, announced on Thursday that he would be sending his Defence Minister, Mosiua Lekota, back to Cote d'Ivoire next week.

Mbeki said after talks in Cape Town with Ivorian Prime Minister Seydou Diarra that Lekota would lead a delegation that would seek to review a series of laws to bring them in line with the terms of the 2003 Linas-Marcoussis peace agreement, which is still regarded by the international community as the blueprint for a political settlement in Cote d'Ivoire.

The rebel movement initially reacted to the attack on Logouale by declaring that the South African mediation effort was now dead. But it back peddled on Thursday.

"The New Forces are still signed up to the different mediation initiatives, notably the South African mediation," rebel spokesman Sidiki Konate told reporters in the rebel capital Bouake.

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