COTE D IVOIRE: Ethnic clashes in cocoa town of Guiglo kill at least one

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

ABIDJAN, 26 Apr 2005 (IRIN) - At least one person was killed and seven injured on Tuesday in ethnic clashes in Guiglo, a town in western Cote d'Ivoire surrounded by lucrative cocoa plantations, UN officials said.

Residents said Tuesday morning's attack against immigrants came in revenge for the apparent killing of a farmer from the local Guere ethnic group over the weekend.

Tfeil Ould Zeidane, security officer for the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) in Guiglo, said that an elderly immigrant shopkeeper from Niger had been beaten to death by youths and seven people were in hospital with machete wounds.

But some residents in the town, which lies around 500 km northwest of the de facto capital Abidjan, put the death toll higher.

The representative of the immigrant Burkinabe community in Guiglo, Jacques Ki, said at least three people had been hacked to death, two of them immigrants.

"The attackers came from villages," Ki told IRIN. "They said they wanted to revenge the killing of one of them on Sunday. They blame the killing on us, the foreigners."

Tuesday's attack was not the first incident of unrest. UN official Ould Zeidane said that the day before Guere youths had marched on a nearby UNHCR camp, which is home to 7,000 displaced farmers who hail originally from Burkina Faso and have been seeking refuge at the camp since the outbreak of the Ivorian civil war.

"The security forces prevented them from storming the camp and sent them away," Ould Zeidane told IRIN. "But the crowd returned to the town this morning and started to attack foreigners."

The cocoa plantations around the town of Guiglo have long been at the heart of a dispute between local Guere landowners and immigrant farmers who have cultivated the fertile land for decades.

Shortly after rebels tried to topple Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo in September 2002 and seized the northern half of the country, thousands of immigrant farmers were chased from their plantations by locals who accused them of sympathising with the New Forces rebel movement.

A government army officer said the assailants have been rounded up and returned to their villages. Residents said security forces had restored calm to the town by Tuesday afternoon, but tension remained high and most shops were closed.

"We're all staying indoors," one inhabitant told IRIN on condition of anonymity.

The clashes come after a spate of incidents in the west, not only in the government-controlled south, but also in the so-called Zone of Confidence, the no man's land between rebel and government lines that is patrolled by UN and French peacekeepers.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that last Thursday a group of armed men had killed all four members of a family belonging to the Yacouba ethnic group, who lived in a village along the Bangolo-Logouale road which runs to the north of Guiglo.

And on 17 April, OCHA said, bandits attacked passengers travelling on a bus along that road. Two Guinean girls were raped but passengers belonging to the Guere ethnic group were unharmed, officials quoted witnesses as saying.

[ENDS]