The smell of decaying bodies is a tough one to forget. I’d seen dead bodies before, but not in the number that they littered the battle zones of Ivory Coast. My colleague Andrew advised me to breath through the mouth – easier said than done.
The town of Duekoue had just fallen into the hands of the troops backing the elected President of Ivory Coast Alassane Ouattara – a masscare followed. It’s hard to say exactly who killed who and why. All sides have been pointing fingers and no one can decide how many bodies have actually been found. I arrived with my team a few days after the event, the first foreign journalists to make it this far west, past the dozens of check points that line the road from Yamoussoukro. Luckily there was a big UN presence and as soon as we arrived in our beaten up Toyota 4×4 the Moroccan UN troops took us to see the bodies being collected for burial.
The dead were everywhere, covered in black plastic by the side of the road. I jumped out of the car and began to film. I worked on instinct, trying to not to think too much about what I was seeing. The sound of the bodies being loaded onto a flat bed truck seemed incredibly loud in the heavy, eerie silence. They were handed up from the ground and then slid across the metal floor before bumping to a standstill.
A Moroccan Officer reprimanded a group of Ouattara soldiers at a nearby check-point – “No more killing” he told them angrily. They looked sullen, denying any responsibility. I just kept filming, sucking the images into the camera, hoping that by documenting this I was somehow making a difference, telling a story that needed to be told.
That night the Moroccan troops allowed us to use there officers mess in the UN base as an edit suite and a place to sleep. They looked after us well, bringing us coffee, bread and even a plate of Arabic sweets. They were good guys, eager to help and not upset by us taking over the one place where they could come to watch the football and forget where they were.
This was my fourth trip to Ivory Coast in the space of a year. My first had been fun, a football film in the run up to the World Cup. But quickly things had deteriorated and the last few trips had all been to document the countries gradual journey towards war. Abidjan had been a terrifying place for foreign journalists since the incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo had refused to recognize his election defeat and in January my team were stopped and threatened with death at a particularly nasty check point.
In recent weeks the forces of Alassane Ouattara had swept through much of the country and had advanced deep into Abidjan itself. Just getting in to the country to cover the story had been a huge effort. We had flown to Bamako in Mali and driven for nineteen hours to get to Bouake, the capital of the northern portion of the country.
- Filming Soldiers in Abidjan, April 2011
After filing our film on the massacre in Duekoue we headed towards the front line in Abidjan. The road towards the city was deserted, market stalls that would normally be sprinkled along the route, abandoned. Finally we came across the main staging point for Ouattaras soldiers at a Shell Garage in an area called Gesco. We found hundreds of fighters exhausted and sprawled in any shade they could find as they tried to sleep. We advanced further along the road, more bodies littered the route, rotting and covered in maggots. Civilians brave enough to venture out looking for food and water were so terrified they had they hands raised in surrender the whole time – even when being interviewed by my team.
That night the film that we made was the lead story on the BBC Ten o’clock News – we’d finally helped people notice this story and how important it was.
Abidjan was so dangerous that it was impossible to go any further into the city. In a deeply cynical move Laurent Gbagbo and his surviving die-head fighters had turned the city into a charnel house, a place of death, where everybody was a legitimate target. We tried to arrange a military convoy to take us to the Golf Hotel where President Ouattara had been based for months, protected by the UN. Thirty seconds after we left, we were forced to turn back when the fighters with us reported seeing wounded on the road and said it was to dangerous too proceed.
We spent five days on the edge of town filing stories. We stayed at a Bar/Guesthouse about twenty kilometers from the frontlines. It was basic, I shared a room with Correspondent Andrew Harding. The toilet stank, forcing me to hold my breath every time I went inside and the bed sheets were crawling with insects. But they cooked us an evening meal every night and had cold drinks – a welcome moral booster after filming in the sticky humidity of West Africa. Unfortunately one of my kit bags hadn’t arrived when we flew from Johannesburg to Bamako in Mali – it was the bag with my survival equipment. As the week wore on I missed not having a decent travel towel and sleeping bag and regretted the loss of my solar phone charger and water purification tablets.
Equipment was beginning to suffer from the heat and rough treatment. One of our BGAN’s stopped working, meaning we only had one to file both radio and TV. As I was filming one afternoon I noticed my lens was moving around in its mount. I kept tightening it with no improvement. Then the back focus started to slip substantially. In a panic I removed the lens and discovered that all the screws holding it together had worked there way loose and it was coming apart. I didn’t have time to fix it then and there and was forced to shoot one of our pieces on my Canon 5D Mark II. The picture quality of the 5D is fantastic but it was a relief when I was able to fix the lens with a screwdriver later that night. Returning to the ergonomics and ease of use I have with my Sony DSR 500.
Eventually on 12th April, Laurent Gbagbo was captured. We were in a town well north of Abidjan and were able to capture the amazing spontaneous celebrations. School children flooded into the street waving branches and singing while adults danced and pounded on car horns filling the town with a cacophony of noise. It was a brilliant ending to two challenging weeks. It’s been a hard time for Ivory Coast but I hope now things can slowly start to return to normal and that the healing can begin.
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