Ivory Coast Soldiers Mutiny, Blockading a City
By REUTERSMAY 13, 2017
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — Mutinous soldiers in Ivory Coast shot three people on Saturday
and cut off access to the second-largest city, Bouaké, as a revolt escalated over demands for bonus payments.
They stepped up the pressure on Saturday, blocking roads out of Bouaké, the center of January’s uprising,
and protesting in several other locations, including the northern city of Korhogo, where two men on a motorcycle were shot in the legs as they tried to force their way through a roadblock set up by the mutineers.
The government has already paid 8,400 soldiers — most of them former rebels who helped lift President Alassane Ouattara
to power — bonuses of 5 million francs each, or about $8,400, as part of a deal to end the January mutiny.
Seydou Kone, a spokesman for the mutineers, said the former rebels, who went through a disarmament program after the country’s
2011 civil war, were planning their own protest, as they did earlier in the week, and his men had opened fire to stop them.
Mutineers also took control of the northern city of Odienné
and there was sporadic gunfire in Daloa, the main cocoa growing hub in southwestern Ivory Coast and the world’s top producer of the crop.
The revolt began in Bouaké early on Friday and spread quickly, following a pattern similar
to a mutiny by the same group in January that paralyzed parts of Ivory Coast.
