Global Policy Forum

A Violent Feud Pits Indigenous Tribes and Newer Settlers for Rights to Land in Ivory Coast

By Daniel Balint Kurti

As music blares through a stereo, Konan Kouakou keeps time with his bare feet, treading through fermenting cocoa and mixing up the sticky beans spread out on a plastic sheet in the scorching afternoon sun in Yaokro, Ivory Coast. Kouakou and others in this small settlement of mud huts make their living farming cocoa - the main ingredient in chocolate - in a country that produces 40 percent of the world's total supply of the crop. But the land used to grow the droopy-leaved trees, with their green and bright yellow, football-shaped pods, has become the object of increasingly bitter competition, threatening the livelihoods of Kouakou and fellow residents of Yaokro.

Who Has Ownership?

Yaokro is one of thousands of villages where tensions are being played out between indigenous tribes and newer settler groups. Members of the tribes, established for centuries in southern Ivory Coast, are determined to take control of their land - through legal means or by force. The settlers arrived mostly after Ivory Coast's independence from France in 1960. And the land disputes, which often turn violent, are linked to the wider conflict that, since 2002, has pitted northern, mainly Muslim rebels against southern, majority-Christian loyalists. The rebels say they are fighting ethnic discrimination and point to the disappropriation of non-indigenous farmers in Ivory Coast's cocoa belt - the home of President Laurent Gbagbo - as one of the most serious injustices.

In May and June, an estimated 162 people were killed in tit-for-tat violence between settlers and the indigenous Guere ethnic group in an area of western Ivory Coast controlled partly by government troops and partly by some of the 10,000 UN and French peacekeepers. A UN human rights report said the violence, primarily over cocoa land, raised the "risk of widespread conflict" among villagers whose favored weapons are machetes and rifles.

Communities Clash

The developing tension between Yaokro - established in 1967 by 30 families who had immigrated from central Ivory Coast - and the nearby indigenous Bete community of Brihoa is an example of how such conflict begins. For the past three years, the two communities have bitterly disputed who owns the land. In August, youths from Brihoa dispossessed Yaokro's farmers of large chunks of their farms. On Oct. 8, they chopped down cocoa trees on a farm belonging to Yao Brou to demarcate the land that they would take for themselves. "We said enough is enough and opposed them. There was a fight," said villager Stefan Kouassi. The fight was between unarmed groups of villagers and there were no serious injuries, but relations since have deteriorated further.

Celine Koukou Ahou, 28, says she can no longer trade in Brihoa's market. "When we go and sell food there, the Betes take it away from us by force," she says. "If you are selling a banana, they'll peel it, eat it and throw it back at you. They say the land is theirs and that we should go back to where we came from. They have been behaving like this ever since Gbagbo came to power."

Gbagbo is a Bete and supports traditional land rights where indigenous groups can claim land along centuries-old ancestral lines. Such land rights were recognized in a 1998 law still not fully implemented. The law marked a U-turn in Ivory Coast's open-door immigration policy, which allowed massive immigration into Ivory Coast's cocoa-growing regions, building the nation into the world's largest cocoa exporter and the most successful economy in West Africa.

Independence leader Felix Houphouet-Boigny, who ruled Ivory Coast from 1960 to 1993, decreed that "land belongs to the person who cultivates it," encouraging millions of people to farm in the fertile southwest. The two major migrant groups were people from Burkina Faso and Houphouet-Boigny's own Baoule group. "This policy of Houphouet-Boigny's accentuated conflict," said Mamadou Koulibaly, head of Ivory Coast's legislature and a leading member of Gbagbo's Ivorian Popular Front.

The population of western and southwestern Ivory Coast "saw an extraordinary growth because people from all over ... swarmed to the new El Dorado and its available forest land." Swathes of virgin rainforest were slashed and burned to grow cocoa, which thrives in newly deforested areas. When Ivory Coast saw an economic downturn in the 1980s due to falling prices for its main exports - cocoa and coffee - many youths left the main Ivorian city Abidjan to return to their villages, only to find there was not enough farmland to go around.

Law of the Land

Gbagbo came to power after violence-marred elections in 2000, and made implementation of the land law a priority. Village committees were set up to map out who owns rural land, but the process stalled after the war broke out. "The idea is not to expropriate or chase out people, but rather to identify the landowners," Koulibaly said. The people of Yaokro are not convinced. The Betes "talk of land, they are claiming the land," says Kouakou Kouakou, 65, a cocoa farmer in the settlement. "We are not going anywhere. We will stay here to fight, even if we die here."

"We like foreigners here," said Georges Kessie, a Bete cocoa farmer in Gbagbo's home village of Mama. "When they came, they behaved as if they had nothing ... so we gave them everything." Now, he says, the "foreigners" - referring to all migrants, including other Ivorians - are not giving their "masters" anything in return. "Right now, they don't care about anyone." Last year, Mama summoned nearby Baoules to a meeting and demanded 50,000 CFA francs (the equivalent of $90) per year for every 2.5 acres they occupy. The Baoules bargained it down to 50,000 CFA per head but "since then, they haven't sent anything." Are these demands in line with the law? Kessie's brother, Bernard, said, "The law? We are the law."

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