WUNRN
IVORY COAST - WOMEN MARCH TO PROTEST
KILLINGS
Rebecca Blackwell / AP
Women carry a banner reading 'Don't shoot'
as they participate in a march 'of mourning' for all the victims of
post-election violence, in the Treichville neighborhood of
The Associated Press - 3/8/2011
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — In an act of bold defiance, thousands of women converged
Tuesday on the bloodstained pavement where seven of their sisters fell last week,
even as the army backing this country's rogue leader killed four more
civilians.
The brutal slayings last week occurred when
soldiers in armored personnel carriers opened fire on a crowd of female
demonstrators who were armed with nothing more than tree branches, symbolizing
peace.
The
attack has further galvanized the international community against strongman
Laurent Gbagbo, who has refused to yield power three months after being
declared the loser of his country's election.
The women had tried to march everyday since
the attack Thursday only to lose their nerve in the face of an army that has
shown no restraint, including by breaking the long-standing code that has
always protected women. They refused to be cowed on Tuesday, however, because
it was International Women's Day.
Hours after several hundred women marched
in Treichville, a downtown neighborhood, the army burst in and killed at least
four civilians. Reporters saw the bodies of three men and one women on the
blood-splattered floor of a clinic.
Thousands of other women demonstrating near
the site of last week's killings in the Abobo district were protected by men
who had formed a wall across the mouth of a freeway by lining cars end-to-end.
Mariam Bamba, 32, picked up a limp branch
Tuesday next to one of the blood stains on pavement. "This leaf is all
they were carrying," she said of the victims.
The
seven women are just a fraction of the more than 400 people killed in the three
months since this country's disputed election. Because they were unarmed women,
their deaths have prompted international condemnation, including from the U.S.
State Department which called Gbagbo "morally bankrupt."
A video obtained by The Associated Press
shows the joyful crowd blowing whistles and waving branches moments before the
women are mowed down.
When Sako Bamara arrived at the hospital
last Thursday, his relatives told him not to lift the cloth covering his wife's
body. At least not above the shoulders. "They wouldn't let me look at her
face," he said. "So I had to identify her feet," he said. Then
he broke down.
The video's grainy footage clearly shows
that the 34-year-old had been decapitated. Her brother-in-law was the first to
arrive and recognized her by the color of her T-shirt. Bones were protruding
from her neck. Beyond there was nothing. The survivors brought wooden carts
from the nearby market and used them to transport the dead to the
hospital.
Bamara had encouraged her to go to the
march, just as so many other husbands and fathers had. "That morning she
asked my permission to go. I said, 'Be careful.' Since they are women, I
thought they would never shoot."
At the hospital, the dead women were laid
side by side, and at one point a mobile phone started ringing inside the pocket
of one of the other lifeless women.
Bamara's brother lifted the cloth covering
her body and retrieved it out of her pocket. On the other end was the dead
girl's frantic father, Gnelle Gnon Ouattara, who could not reach his
21-year-old daughter Rokiya. He rushed to the hospital and saw his child, part
of her neck sheared off by the large-caliber bullet.
"In Africa we say that it's the child
that must bury the father," said Ouattara. "When it's the father that
buries the child, something isn't right."
The women marching Tuesday wore T-shirts
bearing the smiling portrait of 'ADO' — Alassane Dramane Ouattara, the
democratically elected president who has been prevented from governing the
country by Gbagbo. He has spent the first three months of his term inside a
resort hotel under day-and-night United Nations protection, and was to leave
the grounds for the first time Tuesday night at the invitation of the African
Union.
Both
Ouattara and Gbagbo have been invited to travel to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to
hear the verdict of the AU's Peace and Security Council, which was attempting
to find a solution to the crisis. Ouattara has called on the international
community to launch an armed intervention in order to oust Gbagbo, who appeared
on state television last week to say that he is "hanging in there."