THE HAGUE/ABIDJAN: The International Criminal Court acquitted former Ivorian leader Laurent Gbagbo of war crimes on Tuesday and ordered his immediate release to the joy of dancing supporters and frustration of victims of atrocities.
His freedom and possible return home may shake up the 2020 presidential poll in francophone west Africa’s largest economy and the world’s biggest cocoa producer.
President Alassane Ouattara’s camp has said he may reconsider a decision not to run if long-time rivals Gbagbo and former president Henri Konan Bedie were to stand.
In the latest high-profile defeat for ICC prosecutors at the Hague, presiding Judge Cuno Tarfusser said they failed to prove accusations against Gbagbo and co-defendant Charles Blé Goudé, a former political youth leader.
Gbagbo, 73, and Goudé, 46, hugged when the decision was announced. In custody for seven years after French troops flushed him out of a presidential bunker, Gbagbo could be freed as soon as Wednesday.
“It is too soon right now to comment on the future and where he will go, but you can imagine he is very attached to Ivory Coast,” said defence lawyer Emmanuel Altit.
Rights groups said the verdict denied justice to victims of Ivory Coast’s December 2010-April 2011 post-election conflict, when Gbagbo refused to accept defeat by rival Alassane Ouattara and about 3,000 people died in violence.
“How can you free someone who has killed our children and our husbands?” 33-year-old shopkeeper Salimata Cisse said, surrounded by a crowd of women in the Ivorian commercial capital Abidjan who were all unhappy at the verdict.
Outside the courthouse, dozens of Gbagbo supporters, many who travelled to The Hague by bus from Paris, broke into cheers and dancing at the verdict. In Abidjan people gathered in Gbagbo shirts to watch the proceedings on big screens.
Some threw themselves to the ground or burst into tears, while taxis passing through a pro-Gbagbo enclave tooted horns. Gbagbo was the first former head of state tried at the ICC.
It was another defeat for prosecutors, who also lost cases against Jean-Pierre Bemba, the Congolese ex-vice president released last year after his war crimes conviction was overturned, and Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, who had charges dropped in 2015. — Reuters
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