Writing Human Rights and Getting it Wrong
New Historian and expert on the African Great Lakes region Charles Onana is facing a legal action in October in Paris launched by France-based NGOs, amongst which the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) and Survie. They are accusing him of genocide denial, taking him to court for his analyses of the Rwandan tragedy of 1990-94. Survie has also written an attack on Onana’s latest book on the Congolese genocide, Holocaust in the Congo, the international community’s omertà. This particularly imbecilic two-part article written by Survie President Odile Tobner, Negationism in the DRC Apocalypse Congo, published on line in February 2024, has a frankly incomprehensible title. Tobner’s reconstruction of Congolese history ignores geopolitics and decades of archival and investigative research by Congolese and non-Congolese writers; makes use of false equivalences; downplays the slaughter of Hutu refugees in Zaire for which today there are ample testimonies written by survivors and human rights activists; still pushes the Rwandan fabricated pretext of the FDLR (Rwandan Hutu refugees from the 1994 genocide living in exile in Congo since) danger in eastern Congo and a threat to Rwanda; blurs the lines between the international aggressor and the aggressed in eastern Congo. Tobner ends the article with this explanation for the on-going genocide in the DRC : “Onana's book stands out for its absence of anything that could shed even a little light on the tragedy of eastern DRC: the disastrous legacy of Mobutu, the multiplicity of actors and the opportunity for the rush for resources coveted, which makes human beings worse than the most bloodthirsty beast.” (the emphasis is mine)
What is perhaps most disturbing for Survie as a human rights organization is that its President, in this article, forgets to mention the Congolese genocide: nowhere is this now 28-year-old genocide, which has killed over 12 million civilians and displaced 7,3 million, mentioned.
Both Survie and the FIDH have been instrumental in whitewashing the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) crimes in Rwanda, as well as gaslighting French readers on the alleged role of the French army in the Rwandan tragedy: evidence today reveals that the alleged “ French role in aiding the genocide” narrative was most likely a US psyops to deflect attention from its own role in training, arming and sustaining the 1994 regime change in Rwanda, and the subsequent invasion of Congo (then Zaire).
Survie as an organization should at the very least provide a rebuttal of the accusations that one of its members, Jean Carbonare, played an unequivocal role as a pro-Kagame apologist, which French investigative journalist Pierre Péan exposed in his book Carnages. Carbonare subsequently became an advisor to President Paul Kagame.
An International Commission of Investigation on Human Rights Violations in Rwanda Since October 1, 1990 was published in 1993 by the FIDH as well as Africa Watch (a Human Rights Watch division), Burkina Faso based Interafrican Union of Human Rights and Canadian based International Center for human Rights and democratic development (CIDPPD/ICHRDD). Carbonare was also a part of the team of ten experts who spent a mere two weeks in the country, yet immediately accused the Habyarimana government of acts of genocide towards the Tutsi minority. It is astonishing to note that this 1993 International Commission report was discarded in 2003 by a Canadian tribunal for itsutter lack of professionalism and sound evidence, as well as impartiality. The 1993 report was also considered biased at the Arusha-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, since its inquiry had not even bothered to hear from the people it accused of crimes. Eric Gillet, working for the FIDH on the commission report, recently provided an awkward explanation to geopolitical analyst Patrick Mbeko, saying that he researched not as a judge or a historian would, but as an activist, hence his lack of rigor. Alex De Waal gives a similar description for his reporting in a 2016 article for the Boston Review, Writing Human Rights and Getting it Wrong.
Alex De Waal says that after leaving Human Rights Watch, he and Rakiya Omaar founded a small NGO, African Rights. On Rakiya Omaar ‘s work in Rwanda De Waal recalls: “After a few days, she traveled into Rwanda with an escort from the rebel RPF and conducted extraordinary on-the-spot documentation of the genocide as it unfolded.” Not really a premise for unbiased reporting, it’s like documenting human rights violations in Syria escorted by Daesch/ISIS.
De Waal recognized that while writing reports on Rwanda “we did not have anything resembling complete evidence.” De Waal states that his job was to craft a narrative that would “gain attention.” He should maybe have chosen marketing as a career option. De Waal does distance himself from his work on Rwanda since, he writes, “ I did not know enough about Rwanda” but does admit : “ In Rwanda, I was less sure of both my facts and my leverage, so I did not speak out, even as the narrative I helped to craft became a license for despotism.” (…) “By 1997, the RPF had spun the singular genocide narrative to justify its emergent dictatorship and its escalating military operations in Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo, which quickly went beyond securing the Rwandan border to wholesale hunting of Hutu refugees, installing a new government in Kinshasa, and maintaining a security perimeter deep inside Congo—where its army has been involved in smuggling gold, diamonds, and timber. The RPF began killing its own and forcing others into exile.” Yet nowhere in the text does De Waal regret having spun a biased, faulty, simplistic narrative which sanitized RPF crimes by gaslighting western readers, as his quest to gain “ attention”, as he himself writes, became a misleading driving force in his writings. De Waal more recently again use the word genocide in a wrong context concerning the crisis in Ethiopia.
Rwanda expert Judie Rever writes in Rwanda: the danger of a sanitized narrative that the article by De Waal Writing Human Rights and Getting it Wrong was written to protect himself as he was aware of an article on African Rights to be published by International criminal law and justice expert and Professor at Notre Dame University in the United States, Luc Reydams. Rever writes on Reydams’s article NGO Justice: African Rights as Pseudo Prosecutor of the Rwandan Genocide published in Human Rights Quarterly in 2016 that it “deconstructs the NGO’s murky operations and methods. Reydams also provides compelling evidence that African Rights became a RPF front organization and its account of the genocide was produced with the “full and active support of the RPF.” The RPF, under Paul Kagame, won the war and has been in power since 1994.”
Rever underlines how the book published by African Rights Death, Despair and Defiance “ primed public opinion on the conflict and shaped the way the world saw the RPF as moral victors and Hutus as perpetrators.” Rever also points to further articles by De Waal at the time where he is calling for an attack of the Hutu refugee camps in eastern Zaire as a solution to the refugee problem. Accounts today speak of 800,000 Hutu refugees that perished in 1996 as they were bombed in refugee camps, hunted down by the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL) and the Rwandan army or died while fleeing. What a humanitarian solution!
HRW’s overall independence was questioned in a May 2014 Open letter to Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth on behalf of Nobel Peace Prize laureates Adolfo Perez Esquivel and Mairead Maguire, former UN Assistant Secretary-General Hans von Sponeck, then UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Richard Falk as well as over 100 scholars, mainly deploring HRW’s revolving door policy with the US government.
The few above facts should at the very least warrant an investigation into the independence of these NGO vis a vis their reporting on the Rwandan and Congolese wars.
This article however wants to focus on another crisis, namely the one that began in Côte d'Ivoire in September 2002, and which lasts to this day. Many Ivorians call it the longest coup d’état…
NGOs as pro-Ouattara apologists
Laurent Gbagbo, a pan Africanist, history professor and socialist, fought against the one-party rule of Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Côte d'Ivoire for a multi-party system on several fronts: on the one hand by analyzing the mechanisms of the repressive regime through his books and through public debates, and on the other by working clandestinely to set up an opposition party, the Ivorian Popular Front (FPI), a party which opted for a non-violent transition to democracy. His wife at the time, a trade union leader and linguist specialized in African oral history, Simone Ehivet Gbagbo, while at university worked in the independent trade union movement, the National Union of Higher Education (SYNECI) and later headed the National Union of Research and Higher Education (SYNARES) before founding in 1982, together with four other comrades, the FPI party.
When Laurent Gbagbo was sworn in as President in 2000, he and his wife had spearheaded 30 years of non-violent struggle, which had achieved many democratic reforms, amongst which a multiparty system. As the Gbagbo’s were both pan Africanists, with a clear vision for their country to outdo neocolonialism, soon after coming to power various coup attempts against their government began, and the September 2002 coup ended up splitting the country in two. Former Italian ambassador to Côte d'Ivoire Paolo Sannella recalls those dramatic days in this video testimony.
Charles Onana in 2011 published a ground-breaking book, Côte d'Ivoire, le coup d’état (Côte d'Ivoire, a regime change) which reconstructed the events that led up to what political analyst Michel Galy coined a French-United Nations regime change in this west African country that same year. Cote d’Ivoire, a regime change was published in a moment when most journalists, university professors, political analysts and human rights activists were demonizing former President Laurent Gbagbo, and calling for his prosecution at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Gbagbo was transferred to the Hague-based ICC in November 2011 and remained there for nine years, before being acquitted of all crimes he had been charged with. Simone Ehivert Gbagbo was imprisoned in Côte d'Ivoire along with hundreds of FPI party members and sympathizers, yet in 2017, she was acquitted of all crimes she has been charged with.
Had Onana’s analysis been taken seriously at the time, a lot of time and money (the trial at the ICC against Laurent Gbagbo cost up to 8 million Euros a year according to French journalist Fanny Pigeaud ) would not have been wasted, in what was a clear case of lawfare. Furthermore, maybe today Côte d'Ivoire would not be living under a Alassane Ouattara dictatorship: Ouattara ran for a third illegal election term in 2020 boycotted by every party in the country., yet French politicians at the time recognized these sham elections, although 200 people had been killed while demonstrating peacefully. Today Ouattara may even run for a fourth illegal term in 2025.
What did the FIDH and Survie write on Côte d'Ivoire since the crisis began in September 2002 when the recently installed Gbagbo government faced the coup attempt by French-backed militias, known as the Forces Nouvelles, coming from Burkina Faso?
The headquarters of the coup d’état is the Quai d’Orsay
A demonization campaign was unleashed against Laurent Gbagbo the year he came to power in 2000. In 2001 a film, La Poudrière Identitaire (Explosive identity) by Belgian sociologist and Head of the NGO Preventing Genocide Benoit Scheuer, depicted Gbagbo as an ethnocentric dictator fomenting exclusionary identity politics. Nothing could be further from the truth. Gbgabo’s government, known as the government of “professors” for the many university professors it had, was the most multi-ethnic Côte d'Ivoire has ever had, and its reading of nationality went beyond ethnic or tribal affiliations, to include a strong state and an innovative decentralized administration that could guarantee citizenship rights across the board.
In 2006, President Gbagbo and his wife Simone Gbagbo won a defamation suit against French newspaper Le Monde which was condemned by the Paris Court of Appeal for saying the Presidential couple had used “death squads”, an accusation demonstrated to be unfounded.
Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Nigerian diplomat during the crisis and scholar, Ademola Araoye, in his 2012 book Côte d'Ivoire , The Conundrum of a Still Wretched of the Earth, writes that France, through RFI (Radio France International) and numerous other print and electronic news outlets, has deceptively determined and interpreted the facts of the Ivorian crisis to the world.
Survie participated in this demonization campaign by also attributing death squads to the Gbagbo couple. In a particularity disturbing article written by the NGO a little over one month after the 19 September 2002 coup attempt, on 24 October 2002, it does not focus its attention on the crime of aggression committed by the pro-Ouattara militias, which invaded Côte d'Ivoire from Burkina Faso, but instead focuses on demonizing the Gbagbo government: there are allusions to the use of hate speech, death squads, as well as a reference to the danger of repeating the Rwandan genocide!
For anyone not familiar with the Ivorian crisis, reading this brief Survie article, one can only think the worst of the Gbagbo government. Furthermore, the article states that xenophobic escalation is mainly observed in the “legitimate” camp. Survie places the word legitimate in brackets, thus underscoring the illegitimacy of the Gbagbo government. (go figure!)
Doing a quick internet search on FIDH articles in 2002 (1) one cannot help but notice that the NGO totally avoids analyzing the 19 September 2002 coup attempt. The only article found for this period is an open letter sent by FIHD to President Gbagbo, reprobating him for not having shed sufficient light on what is known as the Yopougon mass grave in 2000. (2)
In September 2002, when Côte d'Ivoire was attached, the French were supposed to come to Gbagbo’s help due to the 1961 Defense Accord that guaranteed the Presidents military protection by France in case of an invasion or attack, France refused, opting instead to create a buffer zone between the north and the south, a policy choice which ended up de facto splitting the country in two for years to come. This policy legitimated a ruthless rebellion which by 2006 had left some 750,000 people displaced, as they fled the Forces Nouvelles and moved to the southern part of the country still under the Gbagbo government control.
In a December 2002 appeal various NGOs, amongst which Survie and the FIHD, shield the French empire from all responsibility in the crisis: they do not criticize French talk of increasing its military presence in the country, nor do they point to the French-backed militias, the Forces Nouvelles, which ignited the crisis in the first place. A military aggression which split the country in two is totally eclipsed, as both these NGOs point to an “escalation of xenophobic propaganda “ on the part of the Gbagbo government. The misplaced ethnic reading of the crisis allows for the obfuscation of the international war of agression.
Prior to the French brokered peace agreement of Linas-Marcoussis/Kléber in January 2003, African leaders mediating the crisis thought the rebels could ask for their military grievances to be addressed, but had no right over political revendications. France’s diplomacy changed this. In fact, Laurent Gbagbo, after a day of discussions in Paris with the rebels, as well as then President Jacques Chirac and French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, tired and returning late at the Hotel Le Meurice on the 24 of January confined to his friend Guy Labertit, the evening before the official signing of the Marcoussis-Kléber peace accords: “ the headquarters of the coup d’état is the Quai d’Orsay”[3], the French Foreign Ministry. This peace accord forced Gbagbo to incorporate illegitimate, and often illiterate, rebels in his government. If France had been attacked by militias which split its country in two, would an open dialogue with these putschists be a viable policy option?
A 2003 Survie article, Côte d'Ivoire: Gbagbo armed to his teeth , again omits pointing out the illegal coup which the Forces Nouvelles pro-Ouattara militias attempted in September 2002, and instead says that President Gbagbo “continues to dream of revenge.” Revenge? Was it not a legitimate concern to reestablish the territorial integrity of the country of which he was the President.
In a brief article by Survie Côte d'Ivoire peace soon? from March 2004 the NGO again portrays Gbagbo as a politician fueling ethnic divisionism. Anyone with knowledge of Ivorian history is aware that the concept of ivoirité was not embraced by Gbagbo’s FPI party, which instead pushed for a full democratization process of the country’s institutions, as well as a move beyond political parties based on ethnic affiliations. The article also highlights Gbagbo’s reconciliatory arrangements with French multinational companies, without acknowledging the enormous French political pressure to enforce the acceptance of the Marcoussis peace agreement that accommodated unelected mercenaries in Gbagbo's government. Crisis communications consultant Georges Peillon, and former spokesperson for the French Licorne Force stationed in Côte d'Ivoire, Georges Peillon quit his job over this French policy. It is bizarre that an NGO such as Survie, always prepared to denounce the concept of françafrique, does not understand how difficult it was for a former French colony to move away from neocolonial control. The Gbagbo government is also considered a sociological phenomenon as it represented the birth of a nation-state and an intellectual middle class that had as its reference point Abidjan, and not Paris.
Both Survie and the FIDH instead pushed for a full implementation of the Linas-Marcoussis accords, which severely weakened Gbagbo’s government, and legitimized a militia which took up arms, thus destabilizing the country.
Survie in a April 2004 article, Ivory Coast: false problems and the real questions of peace writes: “The attitude of President Laurent Gbagbo, which consists of saying that he is “the only one to apply Marcoussis” leads to a dead end.” Really? Gbagbo was fulfilling all the Marcoussis requirements while the pro-Ouattara militia’s only requirement, to disarm, was never accomplished. This was the main reason also for the violence of the 2010 elections, were voting polls in the north were attacked by pro-Ouattara militias. Instead Survie, using false equivalence writes : “Doesn't accepting Marcoussis (as the Ivorian protagonists proclaim in every tone and almost daily) presuppose and imply that we begin by accepting the other, as they are and not as we would like it to be?” The faulty ethnic reading again deceptively omits the crime of aggression.
Bouaké 2004
Charles Onana in 2013 published France-Côte d'Ivoire: la Rupture (France-Côte d’Ivoire: the Rupture) on the 2004 events known as Bouaké, which was a French psyops aimed at criminalizing the Gbagbo government, which had decided, faced with the non-disarmament of the militias, to reestablish control, through military means, over the areas occupied by them.
In 2004, French journalist and media expert David Schneidermann analyzing the French press at the time, accused it of resembling war propaganda and guilty of diverting readers from the facts: nine French soldiers and an American aide worker were killed in an air strike in Bouaké, and France, without conducting any investigation, immediately retaliated, destroying the entire Ivorian air force. Ivorians took to the streets in protest. In the days following the incident, the French army reportedly fired on unarmed demonstrators, killing 67 Ivorian and wounding more than 2,000, 500 of which sustained lifelong injuries.
The FIDH spoke of “violent” demonstrations on the part of Ivorians, yet omitted to report that there had been a French coup attempt, as then French Ambassador in Côte d'Ivoire Gildas Le Lidec told me in an interview. Sixty French armored vehicles were suddenly stationed in front of the Presidential residence, and a likely French coup attempt was stopped only due to huge unarmed crowds of civilians guarding the place.
In Onana’s Côte d'Ivoire, a regime change we hear from French journalists who were on the ground and filmed the French shooting at civilians from helicopters; we also learn of a South African inquiry into the events which demonstrated, through ballistic evidence, that no shots were fired at the French soldiers from the crowds that were peacefully demonstrating in front of the Hotel Ivoire. Onana's France-Côte d'Ivoire: la Rupture developed further details on these tragic events as early as 2013.
A film shot by Ivorian actor and film director Sidiki Bakaba, La victoire au mains nues, plunges us into the days of these tragic events. Sidiki Bakaba was also a witness of the 2011 crisis which he tried to film, but he was shot and faced an execution by the Ouattara militias, luckily escaping death. Here is Sidiki Bakaba’s testimony of the 2011 events.
A 30 November 2004 press release by the FIDH, three weeks after the Bouaké incident of 6 November 2004, the NGO already accuses the Gbagbo government of having attacked the French military base which killed the nine French soldiers and a US aid worker. No investigations had taken place at that point in time.
The facts sourrounding these tragic events have still not been elucidated to this day "The trial held in France in 2021 about the initial Bouaké bombing – in which the French soldiers were killed - did little to dispel suspicions, as it neither identified who ordered that attack nor clarified the numerous contradictions and lies from the French political and military authorities - who twice allowed the Belarusian pilots of the two planes involved to get away," writes journalist Fanny Pigeaud in a four part series published in August 2024. Although a collective has formed in Côte d'Ivoire which has documented 90 deaths and more than 2,500 injured, France has to this day provided no compensation for the victims.
A French-UN coup d'état
Following the 2010 contested election between incumbent President Gbagbo and western backed puppet Alassane Ouattara, Gbagbo, as early as December 2010, was calling for a supervised recount of the votes. Yet the brief reports from news agencies worldwide repeated only one story: Gbagbo lost the elections in November 2010, but was reportedly clinging to power.
Although Gbagbo was sworn in as President by all the country’s main intuitions, both the FIDH, as well as Survie, repeated ad nauseum in all their press releases and reports that the reason for the crisis was Gbagbo’s “refusal to step down” and hand over power to his adversary Alassane Ouattara. This biased stance did not only hinder a simple recount of the votes, but also ended up legitimizing a power grab of Ouattara’s militia, which killed thousands of civilians while they advanced to conquer the capital Abidjan. The FIDH or Survie didn’t provide an analysis of the sequence of events during the 2010 elections. In a recent interview on French national television Lawyer and political advisor Robert Bourgi said that Laurent Gbagbo had won the elections, yet then President Nicolas Sarkozy, after offering Gbagbo a lucrative retirement that he refused, said he would vitrify him.
As a filmmaker I followed the Ivorian crisis from 2011 to 2019 and had the occasion to film many first-hand witnesses on the crisis: one can watch my documentary film, Simone & Laurent Gbagbo, the right to difference, on the 2010 elections.
Onana in his 2011 book Côte d'Ivoire, le coup d’état republished as a preface the excellent article by former South African President Thabo Mbeki What the World Got Wrong in Côte d'Ivoire, written on 29 April 2011 for Foreign Policy. Mbeki had been a mediator in the Ivorian crisis and thus had key insights into the crisis the country faced since the attempted coup in 2002. Yet this insightful paper was ignored, drowned by the cacophony that main stream media and NGOs such as Survie and the FIDH spewed.
From December 2010 to March 2011, the UN, the EU, France and the United States carried out a policy of diplomatic and financial asphyxia against the Gbagbo government – which included an embargo on medicinal supplies, cocoa, international mandates, freezing of private funds and property and the closure of the local branches of French and American banks – followed in April 2011 by the French-United Nations coup d’état. The FIDH also accused Laurent Gbagbo of crimes against humanity in March 2011, when the African Union was still seeking a peaceful resolution to the crisis, thus exasperating an already tense political situation.
Eventually the Presidential Palace, where Gbagbo was residing, was bombed for ten days by the United Nations, as well as the pro-Ouattara militia, and Gbagbo, together with hundreds of Ivorians, was taken captive.
Gbagbo’s incarceration is due to his decades’ long non-violent struggle for a more political self-determination from France, Pan African solidarity and economic self-reliance, to be achieved through socialist principles against neo-colonialism.
The images of torture carried out by the Forces Nouvelle militia at the Hotel Ivoire, in the presence of UN personnel, circulated widely on the internet, yet both Survie and the FIDH remained silent.
Simone Ehivet Gbagbo humiliated by the pro-Ouattara Forces Nouvelles militias, April 2011.
NGOs Aiding and abetting lawfare
Once Gbagbo was deported to the International Criminal Court, and his wife Simone Ehivet Gbagbo imprisoned in Cote d Ivoire, together with hundreds of party members and sympathizers of the FPI party, the FIDH and Survie did not focus on the growing human rights abuses under Alassane Ouattara’s regime, but instead praised the ICC for Gbagbo’s deportation.
Eventually Survie changed its position on how it reported on the Ivorian crisis, I am told by Ivorian activists also due to factual evidence they provided to the NGO, yet the ten years of criminilization of the Gbagbo government, had alreday done the damage. The FIDH instead has remained entrenched in its anti-Gbagbo bias, despite glaring evidence which surfaced at the ICC trail, and numerous other testimonies, that exonerated him and his government from all criminal activities.
In a 27 January 2016 press release the FIHD writes about the ongoing imprisonment of FPI members and sympathizers: “ Several of our organizations are supporting nearly 300 victims in these legal proceedings and FIDH, MIDH and LIDHO are civil parties.” Thus the NGO still took sides against the Gbagbo government while the case at the ICC was collapsing.
In their press releases reporting on the ICC proceedings, the FIDH also left out a crucial moment in 2013 when two out of three Judges ordered Gbagbo’s release due to a lack of incriminating evidence to confirm the charges. Former President Thabo Mbeki on this incident, during the launch of the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute (TMALI) Alumnae Forum in 2015, reprobated the ICC for its unlawful behavior, which breached due process.
In Côte d'Ivoire Simone Ehivet Gbagbo was acquitted for crimes against humanity but had also been accused of “destabilizing the state” (while she was a part of the officially recognized government) and sentenced to 20 years in prison. When Ouattara decided in 2018 to grant an amnesty to her and other political prisoners (who in seven years had not even had the chance of a trial proceeding), FIDH together with HRW and other NGOs wrote an open letter on 7 May 2018 to President Alassane Ouattara stating that, in the name of justice, they should not be granted an amnesty.
One key moment, revealed by journalist Fanny Pigeaud, which happened during the ICC trial was the disclosure of the Ocampo leaks in 2017 : leaked French diplomatic documents showed that on the 11 April 2011, five months before the opening of an ICC investigation and hours before Laurent Gbagbo’s arrest, the ICC Prosecutor at the time, Louis Moreno Ocampo, had requested that Laurent Gbagbo be kept imprisoned until a country refers the case to the ICC. Survie and the FIDH avoided this utter lack of due process on the part of the ICC, which should have immediately halted the proceedings.
When Laurent Gbagbo and Charles Blé Goudé, the co-accused non-violent activist and Youth Minister in this trial, were eventually acquitted, after what many saw as a clear-cut example of lawfare, the FIDH called on the Prosecutor to appeal the decision, in the name of “justice for the victims.” Freeing them would amount to, according to the FIDH, allowing for impunity.
Exceptional weakness, doubtful authenticity and/or containing significant anonymous hearsay, flimsy, caricatured, one-sided, inconsistent or otherwise inadequate, lacking in probative value, these are some of the words used by the majority Hague-based International Criminal Court Judges’ Cuno Tarfusser and Geoffrey Henderson to dismiss, at mid-trial, the ICC Prosecutor’s evidence in the case against Laurent Gbagbo and youth Minister Charles Blé Goudé. FIHD ignores this Judgement.
One cannot help but wonder how these NGOs still have credibility after all the propaganda they have published throughout the years, propaganda which has had grave consequences for the countries targeted for regime change by powerful neocolonial western countries.
Luckily today thousands of books written by Ivorians and non-Ivorians, as well as a victory over lawfare at the ICC, also due to a relentless decade-long resistance on the part of the Ivorian diaspora, has written a different history, discarting the deceptive NGOs narrative. But at what cost?
When will these irresponsible, to say the least, NGOs be held accountable for gaslighting human rights sympathizers who rely on their reports to stay informed?
NOTES
(1) Articles may have been removed from the internet, so thorough archival research would be needed to confirm this.
(2) In 2000, when long-time opposition leader Laurent Gbagbo became President one day after he was sworn in, on October 27, a mass grave of fifty-seven people was discovered in Yopougon. The FIDH wrote a report describing various possible scenarios for who could be responsible. If we turn to Charles Onana’s book Côte d'Ivoire, a regime change, we can read the report by then French ambassador to Côte d'Ivoire, Renaud Vignal, which underscored at the time that President Gbagbo had nothing to do with this mass grave. The FIDH report on this incident, although not directly accusing the Gbagbo government, outlines possible scenarios for responsibilities, with two out of three explanations given pointing to the newly elected FPI government.
(3) Guy Labertit, Adieu, Abidjan-sur-Seine, Les Coulisse du conflit Ivorien, Autres Temps Edition, Paris, 2008. p 31
Comentarios