More than eleven years after nine French soldiers and an American humanitarian worker were killed in a bombing raid at Bouaké in the Ivory Coast, the judicial investigation is finally coming to a climax. After a decade of probes, the involvement of four examining magistrates, and the declassification of a whole raft of secret defence documents, a French judge wants three senior ministers who served under President Jacques Chirac to stand trial for their alleged role in hampering the initial investigation.
Sabine Kheris, the judge who has handled the case since 2012, wants the then-minister of the interior Dominique de Villepin, defence minister Michèle Alliot-Marie and foreign minister Michel Barnier to be tried before the Cour de Justice de la République (CJR), the only court that can try government ministers accused of offences carried out as part of their official duties. In her report dated February 2nd, 2016, the judge accuses the three senior ministers – Villepin later became Chirac's prime minister – of knowingly obstructing the probe into the deaths in November 2004. In particular they are said to have prevented the foreign mercenaries from Belarus who are suspected of carrying out the raid from being interrogated over the deadly bombing.
“It is apparent right through the case that everything was orchestrated so that it was not possible to arrest, question or try the Belarusian authors of the bombing,” the judge concludes after 12 pages of argument in her final report, a copy of which has been seen by Mediapart. Her report says that the three ministers had taken their decision to act in this way after “consultation at a high level of State”. If tried and found guilty, all three potentially face a three-year jail term and a 45,000 euro fine for having “provided to a person who carried out or who was an accomplice to a crime or an act of terrorism punishable by at least ten years' imprisonment, accommodation, a hideaway place, subsistence, financial resources or any other means of shielding them from search” under article 434-6 of the French criminal code.
The affair goes back to Saturday November 6th, 2004. For several days the army loyal to Laurent Gbagbo, who had been president of the Ivory Coast since 2000, had been pounding positions held by rebels who had been based in the north of the war-torn country since 2002. At around 1.30pm on that Saturday two Soviet-made Sukhoi Su-25 aeroplanes flown by Belarusian mercenaries targeted the Descartes secondary school in the country's second city Bouaké. It was here that troops from France's Operation Unicorn, which was supporting UN peacekeeping missions in the country, had established a base. Nine French soldiers and an American development worker were killed in the attack.
The French army responded quickly and destroyed the small Ivory Coast air force at air bases at Yamoussoukro and the capital Abidjan. Back in Paris Gbagbo was quickly denounced as the person behind the bombing raid, but on the ground the initial investigation soon ran into some suspicious obstacles for a tragedy of this scale. Though they had been clearly identified by the French intelligence services – who had been keeping watch on them even before the bombing – the Belarusian pilots and their teams miraculously escaped even questioning by the French justice system.
Yet the opportunities to interrogate them had been there. Hours after the attack 15 Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian aircraft technicians were intercepted at Abidjan airport. Paris gave the order for them to be handed over to the Russian ambassador, even though the French military had little doubt as to the usefulness of the information they could have possessed.
Then, ten days following the bombing, eight Belarusian nationals accompanied by two Ivory Coast nationals were arrested on board a bus at the border between neighbouring Ghana and Togo. “We had the deep conviction that they had bombed the French position,” says François Boko, Togo's interior minister at the time. The French external intelligence agency the DGSE also identified at least one of the pilots. But Paris did not react, leading to the automatic freeing of the airmen.
At the heart of the Ivory Coast affair was the then-minister of the interior Dominique de Villepin, who as France's foreign minister the year before had been the architect of the so-called Linas-Marcoussis peace accords in the Ivory Coast conflict. He insisted to the investigating judge he had not been informed of the decisions not to question the men, decisions which had no basis in law.
Yet several witness statements and diplomatic messages show that his office was at the centre of the decision-making chain. The defence attaché to Togo told the judge that the fate of the eight Belarusians questioned on November 16th, 2004 “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. Diplomatic telegrams sent by the French foreign ministry and the defence ministry were also addressed to the interior ministry at the time the Togolese authorities were holding the mercenaries at France's disposal.
The then-French defence minister Michèle Alliot-Marie was questioned at length on the subject by investigating magistrate judge Florence Michon. The minister used a series of highly questionable legal arguments to justify Paris's refusal to interrogate the pilots.
Who gave the orders for the bombing?
Michèle Alliot-Marie told the judge that having considered the question of “whether the Belarusians arrested at the airport could be questioned”, she abandoned the idea after her office had told her “there was no legal basis” for doing so. This version of events, however, is disputed by David Sénat, a former advisor in the defence minister's office, who told the judge that no legal analysis had been carried out at the time. “In this case, as in all others, minister Alliot-Marie always complied with the law,” a spokesperson for the former minister told Mediapart. But lawyer Jean Balan, who represents the French soldiers' families, takes a very different line. “The minister lied under oath even though at the time [editor's note, that she gave evidence] she was the justice minister!” he says.
Michèle Alliot-Marie also sought to justify her inaction over the freeing of the pilots arrested on the Ghana-Togo border “because it involved people and not the institution”. The implication here is that the ministry had no standing to intervene and ensure these foreign nationals were questioned. However, in her written ruling the examining magistrate Sabine Kheris says the procedures to do so existed. “It would have been possible to have informed the [French] Republic's prosecutor of the facts as a matter of urgency or to advise them of the presence of these pilots in Togo. An investigating magistrate would have taken up the case and would have issued international arrest warrants that would have allowed these pilots to be apprehended in all legality,” the judge writes in her report. She also notes wryly that the former minister is “a doctor of law and has a professional qualification as a barrister”.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
It was the foreign minister at the time of the bombing, Michel Barnier, who was not heard by the investigating judges, who gave the order to hand over the Belarusian technicians arrested at Abidjan airport to the Russian authorities, according to the former French ambassador to the Ivory Coast, Gildas Le Lidec. Barnier was also informed in real time of the situation involving the eight mercenaries in Togo. Contacted by Mediapart, Michel Barnier said he “did not know the contents of the investigation report” and had “no memory of any decision taken under [his] authority along the lines mentioned”. He added: “The events are old [going back] twelve years.”
The conclusions reached by judge Sabine Kheris, however, seem clear: the decision to do nothing to get the pilots questioned was “taken identically at the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs” who knew that this meant the Belarusians would escape justice. The judge's ruling points clearly to the possibility of a political decision. It says that the investigations “allow one to imagine the existence of a dialogue at the highest level of State, and not that junior or 'technical' services had managed the situation”.
The question remains: why would senior French figures have wanted to obstruct the investigation? The judge's report highlights, with some insistence, the issue of who ordered the bombing, something which still remains unknown more than eleven years after the tragedy. “It follows from all the information stated that there exists no information that allows one to implicate high state authorities in the killing of the French soldiers and Americans at the Descartes camp,” writes judge Sabine Kheris.
Lawyer Jean Balan, who has been involved with the case since 2004, has no doubt about what was behind the tragedy. “The bombing of Bouaké was a failed attempt at a coup d'État. In France a small clique wanted to get rid of Gbagbo by making [people] believe that he had attacked the French army,” says Balan. The lawyer says that Paris sought to hide its responsibility in the death of nine soldiers. “What was yesterday just an hypothesis is today corroborated by the facts,” he insists.
However, this is pure conspiracy theory maintains someone who knows the case well. This person, who asked to remain anonymous, has told Mediapart that the bombing occurred at a moment when the president of the Gabon, Omar Bongo, and the president of the Republic of Congo Denis Sassou-Nguesso “were asking [President] Chirac to be more conciliatory with Gbagbo”. The source, who was well aware of the balance of power in play at the time, says the obstacles placed in the way of questioning the mercenaries resulted from a desire not to lift the lid on certain arms trafficking networks in Africa.
The official report by judge Sabine Kheris is now with the Paris prosecutor, who can decide whether to refer the case to the Cour de Justice de la République. Alongside the request to send the ex-ministers for trial, the judge's report suggests that the Belarusian pilots, who have been free for eleven years, could be formally indicted. If these court cases take place, the true story of events surrounding the bombing at Bouaké may finally start to emerge.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter