Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders Annual Report 2002 - Cote d'Ivoire

Smear campaign against Mr. Epiphane Zoro Bi Ballo26

The Ivorian government Website has been running a smear campaign against Mr. Epiphane Zoro Bi Ballo, magistrate and Chairman of the Ivorian Movement of Human Rights (Mouvement ivoirien des droits de l'Homme – MIDH), who lives in exile in Belgium. It takes the form of a supposed interview, on line since 6th October 2002, with an unidentified "Burkinabe intelligence officer".

In the interview, the "officer" accuses Mr. Bi Ballo of being the "Communications director responsible for external relations" for the Côte d'Ivoire Patriotic Movement (Mouvement patriotique de Côte d'Ivoire – MPCI), political arm of the rebellion against the loyalist Ivorian forces. In particular, it reports on a telephone conversation Mr. Bi Ballo supposedly had on 17th September 2002 at the Hôtel Pacifique in Ouagadougou, in which he would have received the order to "get it done as planned", i.e. to "kill the Ministers of Defence and Security, the Minister of the Interior and the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces". These allegations were also published in a leaflet distributed in Abidjan in early November.

The allegations are clearly false (on 17th September 2002 Mr. Bi Ballo was in Brussels, not Ouagadougou) and have been circulated in order to portray Mr. Bi Ballo as an enemy of the State and a member of the rebel movement. Mr. Bi Ballo supports victims of the serious violence committed by the armed forces in October and December 2000, by means of legal proceedings in Brussels against the Ivorian leadership. He is also in the firing line as Chairman of the MIDH, an organisation which, since its creation, has run numerous campaigns against impunity in Côte d'Ivoire.


[Refworld note: This report as posted on the FIDH website (www.fidh.org) was in pdf format with country chapters run together by region. Footnote numbers have been retained here, so do not necessarily begin at 1.]

26. See Urgent Appeal CIV 001/1102/OBS 065.

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