By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Aid workers are reporting that at least 1,000 mostly Christians civilians were slaughtered this week at the Salesian Saint Therese of the Child Jesus mission in Duekoue, Ivory Coast, by Muslim troops loyal to president Alassane Ouattara, prompting many to ask if the conflict in this country is on the verge of becoming the “next Rwanda.”
News is slowly trickling out about an atrocity that occurred at the mission where charity workers found more than 800 bodies of mostly civilians who were taking refuge in the mission. All of the killings appear to have occurred in one day. The victims were mostly men who were said to have been shot while fleeing.
A Business Week report said the bodies were discovered by the International Committee for the Red Cross. Local citizens told the charity that intercommunal violence erupted soon after Mr Ouattara’s forces took control of the town last Monday, March 28. Apparently, Ouattara forces descended on the area wearing “magic” amulets, neckbands and masks. Thousands of people fled their homes to escape the fighting and an estimated 40,000 sought refuge in the Roman Catholic mission compound. The dead are thought to be those people who did not reach the sanctuary in time.
Caritas was also on the scene and said its workers reported seeing a neighborhood filled with bodies of people who had been shot and hacked to death with machetes.
This atrocity happened in spite of the fact that 200 United Nations troops are operating “robust” patrols from a based on the outskirts of the area to protect civilians in and around the church.
“The incident is particularly shocking by its size and its brutality,” said Dominique Liengme, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegation in Ivory Coast.
“Red Cross representatives themselves have seen a huge number of bodies [at the mission station],” said ICRC spokeswoman Dorothea Krimitsas in Geneva. “There is no doubt that something on a large scale took place in this city, on which the ICRC is continuing to gather information. Everything indicates that this was inter-ethnic violence.”
The conflict surrounds the refusal of former president, Lawrence Gbago, a Catholic, to accept the results of last November’s election in which Quattara won 54 percent of the nearly five million votes cast nationally. Fighting between the two sides touched off a new civil war in the country which had been enjoying a tenuous peace since 2005.
A spokesman for the Saint Teresa Salesians said so many refugees were arriving at mission compounds in the Ivory Coast it was impossible to provide them all with shelter from seasonal rains. They are also running out of food, clean water and medical equipment to treat those who are arriving with gunshot wounds.
© All Rights Reserved, Living His Life Abundantly®/Women of Grace® http://www.womenofgrace.com
