More Than 3,000 Dead in Côte d'Ivoire, and International Justice Still Drags Its Feet

Three thousand dead. Three thousand families who buried a father, a son, a sister, sometimes without ever knowing where their loved ones lay. That is the toll the UN and several NGOs attribute to Côte d'Ivoire's 2010-2011 post-election crisis. Fifteen years later, how many of those families have heard a court pronounce the word "responsible"? Almost none.

We Africans have learned to live with a phrase we repeat like an excuse: "it's complicated." It is not complicated. A man loses an election, refuses to leave, and his country plunges into violence. Another man wins, but his troops also killed, raped and burned. In both cases, the rule should be the same for everyone: whoever kills must answer to the law.

The Ivorian Human Rights Observatory (OIDH) has just reminded the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court of this. In a letter, the organisation demands an "updated status report" on the proceedings opened in October 2011, and insists that "all crimes" falling within the Court's mandate in Côte d'Ivoire be investigated, and that justice be done. The demand is just. It is also overdue.

Let us start with what has been done. On 28 November 2010, the Independent Electoral Commission proclaimed Alassane Ouattara the winner of the runoff. The Constitutional Council, for its part, annulled that result and proclaimed Laurent Gbagbo the winner. Two powers, two presidents, one country on fire. The international community recognised Ouattara. Gbagbo refused to give way. Militias and security forces loyal to Gbagbo fired on demonstrators in Abidjan's neighbourhoods. Forces loyal to Ouattara advanced south and in turn committed abuses. In March 2011, in Duékoué in the west of the country, hundreds of civilians were massacred. Human Rights Watch puts the death toll from this single episode at nearly 800.

Gbagbo was arrested in April 2011 and transferred to The Hague that November, charged with crimes against humanity: murder, rape, persecution. The trial opened in 2016. In January 2019, the Trial Chamber acquitted Gbagbo and Charles Blé Goudé, his former leader of the militant youth, for lack of sufficient evidence. The Appeals Chamber upheld the acquittal in March 2021. The judges found that the prosecution had failed to prove the common plan it claimed to establish. Fine. But this verdict leaves a gaping question: who, then, killed the three thousand?

Because the answer has never been given. Simone Gbagbo, subject to an ICC warrant, was tried in Côte d'Ivoire, where she was convicted in 2015 before benefiting from an amnesty law in 2018. On the pro-Ouattara side, no senior official has been prosecuted before the Court for the abuses of 2011, despite documented reports of summary executions, enforced disappearances and sexual violence. Justice that strikes on only one side is not justice. It is a political victory dressed up as procedure.

And the scope of the inquiry goes well beyond 2010. The Court's jurisdiction also covers crimes committed from September 2002, the date of the rebellion that split the country in two and entrenched war in the north for years. Twenty-three years of crimes, forced displacement, and families scattered between Bouaké, Abidjan and refugee camps across the subregion. An entire generation has grown up without ever seeing a judge rule on what happened to it.

Why does this concern all of us, far beyond Côte d'Ivoire? Because impunity is a contagious disease. When a leader knows he can lose power, kill part of his people and wait for forgetting to do its work, he will do it again. We saw it in Burundi in 2015, in Kenya in 2007-2008, in Guinea in 2009. Each time, those responsible invoked reconciliation to avoid the courtroom. Each time, reconciliation looked like organised forgetting, and the violence came back.

Yet Côte d'Ivoire could be the proof that another path exists. Since 2011, the country has enjoyed some of the continent's most robust economic growth, driven by reforms and an investment climate that has attracted foreign capital. But prosperity is not enough. A country can build roads, ports and industrial zones while leaving its victims waiting. The Dialogue, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, created in 2011, produced a report in 2014 recommending impartial prosecutions. Those recommendations have only been half-implemented.

We know what must be done. The first requirement is genuine judicial independence: magistrates who answer to no party in power and who investigate without regard to camp. The second is transparency: the Ivorian state and the ICC must publish a full accounting of proceedings, with figures, closed cases and open cases. The third is respect for the principle of complementarity: when national justice cannot or will not try a case, the ICC must act without being intimidated by diplomatic alliances. Botswana, Mauritius and Senegal, which handed over power after contested but peaceful elections in 2024, show that a transfer of power can happen without bloodshed when institutions are stronger than the men who run them.

And now we want answers. To the International Criminal Court, we say: publish the status report the OIDH is demanding, specify which cases involving pro-Ouattara forces are under review and why none has resulted in a conviction, and give the victims of Duékoué the certainty that they are not being sacrificed on the altar of realpolitik. To the Ivorian government, we say: stop confusing justice with vengeance, but stop confusing silence with peace too. To African states that are members of the African Union, we say: publicly back the demand for truth, because every unpunished crime in Côte d'Ivoire is an invitation extended to the next tyrant.

And you, Ivorian citizen, African citizen, reader of this article: demand accountability from your deputies, your judges, your journalists. Insist that the word "reconciliation" no longer be used to close files. The three thousand dead of 2010-2011 do not ask for hatred. They ask for one thing, the same for everyone: that whoever killed be tried, no matter what flag he fought under.

Based on reporting by ACSS-EMAIL