ABIDJAN, Aug 8 — Ivory Coast’s former first lady, Simone Gbagbo, who is serving a 20-year jail term, will be freed today after President Alassane Ouattara granted her an amnesty, her lawyer said yesterday.
But Ouattara’s amnesty of around 800 people, including Simone Gbagbo, was slammed by rights groups as “unacceptable” and disrespectful to their victims.
The wife of former president Laurent Gbagbo has spent seven years behind bars for her role in a wave of political violence that claimed several thousand lives in 2010-11.
On the eve of independence day, Ouattara had on Monday announced an amnesty for Simone Gbagbo, 69, and around 800 others in the name of national reconciliation.
Her attorney, Rodrigue Dadje, told AFP she would be “released tomorrow, after the judicial formalities have been completed”.
She was “delighted to learn the news of her release,” Dadje said.
But a group of 11 national and international rights groups on Tuesday described the mass amnesty as “unacceptable”.
“There should be no amnesty for those responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity and other serious human rights violations,” said the statement by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Federation for Human Rights and eight other groups.
“To decide, after seven years of judicial proceedings involving hundreds of victims and alleged perpetrators, that only 60 people will face justice is not only an arbitrary decision but will be an act of disrespect to victims,” their statement added.
Lack of national reconciliation
About 3,000 people died in the turmoil that erupted in Abidjan — once one of Africa’s most cosmopolitan cities — after presidential elections in November 2010 when Laurent Gbagbo refused to accept defeat to Ouattara, his bitter rival, after a decade in power.
The conflict left a legacy of political friction that endures today. The lack of national reconciliation has been seen by many observers as the biggest mark against Ouattara’s record.
Simone Gbagbo, who was first detained without trial after her arrest in 2011, was convicted for “endangering state security” and sentenced in 2015.
She had been implicated in the 2011 shelling of a market in an Abidjan district that supported Ouattara and for belonging to a “crisis cell” that allegedly coordinated attacks by the armed forces and militias in support of her husband.
Laurent Gbagbo has been in detention at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague for seven years. He has been on trial since 2016 for alleged crimes against humanity.
In February 2012, the ICC also issued a warrant for Simone Gbagbo’s arrest. But in 2016, Ouattara said he would “no longer send” Ivorian nationals to the court, as the country now had a “functioning justice system.”
Electoral commission reform welcomed
The Gbagbos remain well-liked within the Ivorian Popular Front, the party they co-founded in the 1980s which has since split into two factions.
“This is a big step towards reconciliation. But we should go further with the release of soldiers and Laurent Gbagbo, who remains the crucial element for reconciliation,” said Georges Armand Ouegnin, president of the opposition coalition Together for Democracy and Sovereignty.
The president also announced a reform of the Independent Electoral Commission, which has come under fire for being unequal.
The commission is currently made up of eight members representing the government and four representing the opposition.
Civil society organisations welcomed the move which they said would ease political tensions, with local polls due in October and a presidential election in 2020.
Ouattara said he hoped “the next elections would be inclusive and without violence”.
Among others granted amnesties were former defence minister Lida Kouassi — a key Gbagbo ally — who was sentenced this year to 15 years for conspiracy, and former construction minister Assoa Adou, jailed in 2017 for four years.
Around 500 of those named have already been released provisionally from detention, the president said. They will have their criminal records erased.
The other 300 will be released “soon”, he added, without giving any dates. — AFP
