Zwedru, Liberia - Four years after Alassane Ouattara took power in Ivory Coast amid post-election violence that left thousands dead, exiles who fought him tooth and nail yearn to return but fear bloody reprisals.
Hundreds of fighters once loyal to ousted ex-president Laurent Gbabgo have been refugees in Liberia since fleeing Abidjan and the far west, where long-simmering ethnic tensions exploded into massacres in 2011.
"I have not seen my children (since 2011). Each time I make an attempt to go back friends who are close to the current regime will advise me not to," said former militia leader Maho Pohoulou Syprien.
After Gbagbo postponed presidential elections for years, Ivorians went to the polls on November 28, 2010 to vote in a run-off between the incumbent and former prime minister Ouattara.
The challenger won but Gbagbo refused to step down and six months of violence followed in which at least 3,000 civilians were killed and more than 150 women raped, according to rights campaigners and the United Nations.
Gbagbo's troops hacked and burned to death opponents, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), while pro-Ouattara forces massacred, dismembered, immolated and raped their way across the far west.
In one horrific incident, hundreds of ethnic Guere civilians perceived as supporting Gbagbo were butchered in Duekoue town by pro-Ouattara groups, various rights organisations reported.
They also documented the killing of northern Ivorians and foreigners in the nearby town of Guiglo on March 29, 2011, when it was controlled by pro-Gbagbo forces.
Witnesses said the perpetrators tied the victims together, then slit their throats.
Gbagbo's loyalists fled Guiglo on March 30, hours before Ouattara's Republican Forces moved in, and joined an exodus of Ivorian refugees that would swell to more than 200,000 in eastern Liberia.
AFP
