They may not get the full truth, but it looks as if the families of the victims of a bombing raid that killed nine French soldiers and an American humanitarian worker in the Ivory Coast 14 years ago will see the alleged perpetrators face trial. The vice-prosecutor of Paris, Michel Guedes, has officially called for three pilots who are suspected of carrying out the raid in Bouaké in November 2004 to be tried. It could also help pave the way for three senior French government ministers at the time - Dominique de Villepin, Michèle Alliot-Marie and Michel Barnier – to stand trial one day too. The ministers face claims – which they deny – that they hindered the initial investigation into the killings.
The prosecutor's call is contained in his 140-page indictment report, of which Mediapart has seen a copy. The report, issued on June 25th, 2018, goes into detail about the circumstances leading up to and immediately following the killing of the French troops, who were part of Operation Licorne – Unicorn in English – a United Nations-backed peacekeeping operation to provide a buffer zone between the warring factions in the North and South of the country.
At the time the southern part of the West African country was under the control of forces loyal to President Laurent Gbagbo, while the north was in the hands of the New Forces rebel group. Gbagbo's forces had launched Operation Dignity in an attempt to regain control of the whole of the country. But this military initiative turned to disaster at 1.10pm on Saturday November 6th, 2004, when two Soviet-made Sukhoi Su-25 aircraft from the Ivory Coast airforce deliberately bombed a French military camp at the Descartes lycée or secondary school in Bouaké. Exactly who gave the orders for the attack and the motives for it remain unclear to this day.
However, the involvement of the three pilots – two Ivorian military pilots Patrice Ouei and Ange Gnanduillet and the Belarusian mercenary Yuri Sushkin, who are the subject of arrest warrants – is in absolutely “no doubt”, according to the prosecutor. His report calls for them to be tried for murder, attempted murder and criminal damage, this last crime being aggravated by two factors – the fact that it was a joint action and was directed at someone in public authority. However, the vice-prosecutor Michel Guedes calls for the case to be dismissed against another Belarusian mercenary Barys Smahin. It has been suggested for a long time that he was one of the pilots involved, but the report says that despite evidence of the pilot's presence in the area at this time his involvement in the bombing had not been “established”.
Following the prosecution report, the examining magistrate investigating the affair since 2012, Sabine Kheris, could in the next few weeks sign the order sending the three pilots to be tried at a special court that handles military issues. If so, it will mark the partial denouement of an affair which has only reached this stage thanks to the doggedness of a small handful of judges, representatives of the families of victims and anonymous whistleblowers inside the military.
“Fourteen years of investigation, as well as the detailed and obstinate work of some investigating magistrates and counsel [representing families' victims] have enabled some of the inner workings to be pieced together, without always benefiting from the swiftness and the spontaneity … that the victims, who served their country, could legitimately have excepted from the national institutions,” the vice-prosecutor noted in a report that is scathing about the French authorities.
During the investigation of this explosive case, the judiciary have constantly faced administrative hurdles under successive presidents – Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande. The government claimed that the interests of the state were at stake to justify its refusal to declassify a number of secret defence documents that would have allowed several key points of the investigation to be clarified.
The number of hurdles has grown since the start of the investigation, even though the deliberate nature of the bombing raid and its target were never doubted in the highest echelons of state. The blatantness of attempts to put obstacles in the way become even more apparent when one considers that the cream of French intelligence – the military intelligence department DRM, the overseas intelligence agency the DGSE and the Ministry of Defence security agency the DPSD – all knew perfectly well and virtually from the start the identity of the group of pilots, co-pilots and mechanics who were working at the Yamoussoukro base from where the two Sukhoi aircraft took off.
Indeed, the judicial investigation has shown that France's intelligence agencies had photos, audio and video recordings, and detailed accounts. Moreover, it was because of this “painstaking work of cross-checking carried out by French intelligence” that eventually allowed the investigation to establish the involvement of the attackers.
In simple terms, if they had wanted to, the French authorities could have sent the justice system the identity of the pilots responsible for the death of nine of their soldiers from as early as 2005. Yet they took no action. Worse still, as Judge Sabine Kheris said in her report in February 2016 calling for the ministers to stand trial, France actively refused to question the suspected pilots and their entourage.
For in the hours following the attack fifteen Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian technicians were intercepted by French forces at the airport at Abidjan in the Ivory Coast. Though they had not come straight from the base at Yamoussoukro, there was every reason to think that they could have been in contact with the soldiers' killers. Yet on the orders of the French chief of defence staff, General Henri Bentegeat, who said he had consulted with the private office of the minister of defence at the time, Michèle Alliot-Marie, the technical staff were handed over to the Russian Embassy without even being questioned.
Ten days later, eight Belarusians were arrested on board a bus on the border between neighbouring Ghana and Togo. “We were quite convinced that they had bombed the French position,” François Boko, the Togolese minister of the interior at the time, later told French investigators. The French intelligence agency, the DGSE, also identified at least one of the pilots in that group. And diplomatic telegrams marked “restricted circulation” were sent from the French Embassy to the offices of the foreign affairs and defence ministers. But once again Paris did not react, leading to the automatic release of the pilots, who immediately made for Benin.
Villepin saw nothing, Alliot-Marie knew nothing
Enlargement : Illustration 2
None of the French ministers in office at that time was able to give a rational explanation for their reluctance to take action. The minister of the interior Dominique de Villepin – who as foreign minister previously had been responsible for the 2003 Marcoussis peace accords in the Ivory Coast, something the prosecution points out in its report – told investigators that he had not been kept informed of developments in the Bouaké case. “This affair was never referred to me in the context of my official duties, nor even outside of my duties … the Ministry of the Interior … was not the lead in this case,” he said during questioning.
Yet several accounts and diplomatic messages show that Villepin's office was closely involved in the issue. For example, Togo's defence attaché explained that the fate of the eight people arrested in Togo “had to be dealt with at Ministry of the Interior level” via its international police technical co-operation service known as the SCTIP, which is part of the French interior ministry in Paris. Villepin's former advisor on African affairs, Nathalie Delapalme, who worked with the new foreign affairs minister Michel Barnier during the Bouaké crisis, also confirmed that Villepin had kept a lot of intermediaries following his involvement in African events. “In addition,” she added, to underline the involvement of the state in the issue, “it was the biggest crisis France had known since the one at Drakkar in Lebanon [in 1983].” This was a reference to the killing of 58 French peacekeeping troops and 241 American peacekeeping troops in a suicide attack at barracks in Beirut.
Meanwhile, though the 2004 Bouaké bombing attack was leading the news bulletins in France at the time, another minister claimed they were as badly informed of events as Dominique de Villepin. Michèle Alliot-Marie, then minister of defence and as such head of the armed forces, later told the investigation that she only received the diplomatic telegrams “24, even 48 hours after they were sent, the time it took for them to go on their 'official route'”. Justifying the freeing of the pilots in Togo, Alliot-Marie, who as the prosecutor points out in his report has a “doctorate in law”, produced another explanation for it. A “member of my office had indicated to me that there was no legal basis, as there was no international arrest warrant”. The problem with this explanation is that when he was questioned by judges, Michèle Alliot-Marie's former legal advisor, David Sénat, himself a magistrate, said that he was never asked to produce any legal analysis of the case.
“The handling of the arrests and freeing of the Slav citizens at Abidjan airport and even more so that of the eight Belorusians at the Togo-Ghana border, raises questions,” says prosecutor Michel Guedes in his report. He recalls that “this information in the possession of the intelligence services and passed on to different French political authorities should, at the very least, have led to requests for additional checks”.
Michel Guedes also points out that when in 2016 the judge in charge of the investigation, Sabine Kheris, had called for Dominique de Villepin, Michèle Alliot-Marie and Michel Barnier to be tried by the Cour de Justice de la République – the only court that has the power to try ministers or former ministers over actions they took as part of their ministerial brief – she considered that “the decision to do nothing concerning the pilots … was taken identically at the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which allows one to think there was some consultation at a high level of state and not that junior or 'technical' services had managed the situation”.
The prosecution report notes that at the very least it was “permissible” for any authority to report the facts to France's prosecution service. “Such an action would have allowed for an emergency referral to an examining magistrate quite capable of issuing international arrest warrants enabling the pilots to have been apprehended quite legally,” the report says. As things stand, says the prosecutor, it is now down to the Commission des Requêtes – the body that has the final say on whether ministers should stand trial at the Cour de Justice de la République - to “weigh up the hypothetical responsibilities” of the ministers involved.
The lawyer acting for the families of the French soldiers who died, Jean Balan, says: “There was real sabotage of the investigation. All of this could have been brought to a close as soon as 2005, the justice system could have got its hands on all the pilots, the accomplices, the guides, the financier, etc.” he adds: “And we'd even then have had a chance of knowing who was behind it.” For as the investigation into the Bouaké bombing comes to a close there is a sense of unfinished business. For the investigation has not unearthed the motive for the bombing raid, nor ultimately the identity of those who were behind it. The prosecutor admits in his report that this issue remains “unresolved”.
Over the years many rumours and theories have been put forward to explain the attack and subsequently denied. President Laurent Gbagbo of the Ivory Coast was initially accused of having been behind the attack, though this was rejected by several key officials including the French ambassador to the country at the time, Gildas Le Lidec. Another theory was that it was planned behind Gbagbo's back by hardliners in his own camp. Yet another suggestion, that it was part of a political “manipulation” involving elements of the French authorities, has also been dismissed, as have widely-attacked claims that the French industrialist Vincent Bolloré had a hand in the affair.
As a wall of silence continues to surround this case, one figure who may know some of the affair's secrets looks set to escape any proceedings. Robert Montoya, a former French gendarme who was convicted in 1992 over a phone-tapping scandal at the Élysée, and who later became involved in arms sales in Africa, became the focus of attention of the judges investigating the Bouaké affair. “Investigations by United Nations experts and the reports by the intelligence services established a delivery of two Sukhois involved in the the attack on the French position” via offshore accounts controlled by Montoya, the prosecution report says.
The reports also notes that “these same companies provided logistical and financial support” to members of the Belorusian team likely to have been involved in the bombing. However, the prosecution says that it was “not established that Robert Montoya knew that this weaponry was going to be used for such acts against French citizens”. As a result prosecutors felt that there was no offence of which he could be deemed guilty.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter