COTE D IVOIRE: Civil war provokes ethnic conflict in southern cocoa villages

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

SULEYMANKRO, 2 Feb 2005 (IRIN) - During the day, the unpaved roads connecting dozens of villages in this cocoa-growing region of southern Cote d'Ivoire are full of farmers and cocoa buyers.

But at night, when the red dust has settled and the roads are deserted, the self defence committees come out to stand guard.

It is noon in the village of Suleymankro when a cocoa buyer arrives in a small white truck to pick up several sacks of cocoa and coffee beans.

The village is named after the local chief, Suleymane, who emigrated from Burkina Faso as a young man in the late 1970s.

As his hair turned grey and his hands callous from cocoa harvesting, the village population grew to 250 inhabitants. More migrants arrived from Burkina Faso to carve out farms in the surrounding bush and having settled, they produced families.

Most of the village's inhabitants today are young farmers who were born in Suleymankro, but they do not consider themselves Ivorian.

Almost all of them carry Burkinabe identity cards. They never bothered to apply for Ivorian citizenship - there was no need to.

The young cocoa buyer, whose name is Simplice, is Bete. He hails from the same ethnic group as President Laurent Gbagbo.

But Suleymankro is a Burkinabe settlement carved out of the Bete heartland. This is a region renowned for its forests, fertile soil, and abundant cocoa crops.

“These people are like my family,” Simplice said, drinking well water from a mug one of the women offered him as a welcome gesture. “I have known them since I was a child.”

The 'land of hospitality'

Suleymankro is a microcosm of the cocoa belt, a region where so many different ethnic groups and nationalities live together that political leaders once proudly nicknamed Côte d’Ivoire the ‘land of hospitality’.

For decades, the indigenous Bete people welcomed migrants from less fertile regions of northern Côte d’Ivoire and immigrants from Burkina Faso and Mali to cultivate the land alongside them.

But the settlers’ welcome wore out as cocoa prices fell and unused land grew sparse.

During the 1990s, nationalist politicians began to promote the notion of "Ivoirite" - Ivorian national identity - from which the immigrants and their descendents were excluded.

However, violent clashes between the two communities only began in September 2002 when rebels from northern Côte d’Ivoire tried to overthrow president Laurent Gbagbo in a coup d’état that presidential supporters say was sponsored by Burkina Faso.

The coup failed, but Cote d'Ivoire plunged into civil war. The country ended up split into a rebel-controlled north and a government-controlled south, with French and UN peacekeeping troops patrolling a buffer zone in between.

Since the conflict erupted two and a half years ago, angry Bete villagers have driven hundreds of settlers off their farms, accusing them of being a fifth column, sympathetic towards the rebels if not openly collaborating with them.

However, many residents of Suleymankro believe that the expulsions have little to do with politics or ethnicity. They say that the indigenous population is primarily interested in easy money.

"Whenever there is cocoa, there is trouble"

One Burkinabe farmhand pointed out that the expulsions always took place at the eve of the cocoa harvest.

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