In Abidjan, tens of thousands of lives turned upside down in the name of "development"

In a government information leaflet, a smiling forty-year-old man stands next to a moving truck, surrounded by piles of boxes.

The brochure boasts of rehousing assistance measures and support for "evicted" populations.

But from Gesco to Banco 1, via Adjamé-Village and Abattoir, entire neighborhoods have been razed to the ground. The stories collected by AFP are far from a peaceful move.

Neighborhoods were cordoned off, excavators were in operation from dawn, tear gas was fired, and thefts accompanied the district's operations, and the belongings of thousands of families were buried under the rubble in just a few minutes.

Bertin Gnangon Aba was woken by the noise of excavators attacking his house in his Banco 1 neighborhood, north of the city.

"They destroyed all my belongings, right down to my ID. They didn't give me time to take anything. Everything was crushed," says the sixty-year-old, who fled his home in "underpants and a tank top."

On the other side of town, in Abattoir, nothing remains of this popular and cosmopolitan neighborhood, wedged between an open-air tannery, a crowded cattle park and the Ébrié lagoon.

"I like development!" says Philippe Kouamé, 44, without irony, sitting on a patched-up chair surrounded by pools of rubbish, pointing across the lagoon to Zone 4, a booming upscale neighbourhood that is inaccessible to him.

A painter now without income and without a home, Mr. Kouamé cannot afford to find a new home—like many of his former neighbors. So he stays, just a stone's throw from the ruins of his family home, because he was "born here."

"How do we live? It's difficult... the authorities need to lean in a little towards us. We understand them, but they need to understand us too," he sighs.

"Dirty work"

Like everyone interviewed in the area, he claims to have received neither compensation nor an offer of rehousing.

"We don't know where to go, we have to stay here," says Hamed, an upholsterer who sleeps in the nearby cemetery.

Here, a teacher slaloms through the rubble. In his leather briefcase, a math book with which he visits his former students since their school was destroyed. Further on, an elderly woman is keen to show off her shelter, in which she can barely sit up.

"Missioned" by the president to do "the dirty work," as he himself described it during a press conference in mid-January, the governor of the district of Abidjan, Ibrahim Cissé Bacongo, wants to make the city the showcase of a prosperous and modern Ivory Coast.

The Ivorian economic capital has undergone a spectacular transformation over the past ten years with the construction of numerous roads, bridges and buildings, but working-class neighborhoods, sometimes unsanitary, remain.

Initially, the eviction campaign was supposed to raze neighborhoods built in dangerous areas to avoid the "heavy loss of life" caused by landslides and floods that kill at least 30 people in the city each year during the rainy season in June.

Today, on the ruins of Abattoir - as on those of other razed neighborhoods - the district of Abidjan has projects: an economic zone, a "high-end" housing zone and a zone for "restaurants, play areas for children, recreational spaces."

Around Philippe Kouamé and his comrades huddled under their tarpaulins of misfortune, dump trucks, workers and contractors are already busy erecting fences and perimeter walls.

"Humanitarian disaster"

The National Human Rights Council (CNDH) accused the authorities of carrying out these demolitions "in disregard of fundamental rights" and "without consultation."

Pulchérie Gbalet, a leading figure in the fight for human rights in Ivory Coast and close to the opposition, speaks of a "humanitarian disaster created by the state."

According to his organization, the Coalition of Victims and Those Threatened with Eviction in Côte d'Ivoire (Covimed-CI), "at least 20.000 households have been affected."

Although operations were suspended at the end of November, the question of rehousing still remains.

In Abattoir, Governor Bacongo assures that a comprehensive biometric census has been carried out - something that local residents dispute - and that the rehousing of residents will take place "in a few months."

The government has announced a "rehousing" program for 3.000 households in the city's remote northern suburbs.

On Friday, Amnesty, which had already condemned "excessive use of force," deplored the lack of compensation for farmers in the Gesco neighborhood, and deemed it "essential" that all those affected "who have not received compensation should receive it without delay."

The "monitoring unit for the development of precarious neighborhoods" met for the first time, a week after the suspension of operations, while many residents had long since left the area.

Only a portion of the victims in two neighborhoods (Gesco and Boribana), out of the thirty or so razed sites, claim to have received sums of 250.000 CFA francs (around 381 euros) per destroyed home, less than 10% of the victims according to Covimed-CI.

"My mission is not an easy one," says Ibrahim Cissé Bacongo. "I accepted it consciously, knowing that I would harm many people," admits the man who dreams of the spectacular Dubai, the cleanliness of Kigali, and wants to see his "Pearl of the Lagoons" emerge, whatever the cost.