More Beheadings? Say it's not so!

After reading this account of Ivory Coast atrocities linked by Glenn Reynolds, I began to wonder whether there might be other atrocities which haven't managed to find their way into the MSM.

What I want to know is: did French troops behead demonstrators in the Ivory Coast?

The news seems to be disappearing as fast as it appears, so I'll provide the link to the Google cache of the story I found (with another version here):

IVORY COAST LEADER CLAIMS FRENCH TROOPS DECAPITATED DEMONSTRATORS
Received Saturday, 20 November 2004 22:16:00 GMT

PARIS, Nov 20 (AFP) - Ivory Coast leader Laurent Gbagbo said Saturday he believed reports were true that French troops had decapitated local demonstrators during anti-French riots in the west African state this month.

"I wasn't in the hospitals myself but everyone who went there said so: you may take it that the evidence provided by several people is true," he responded online from Abidjan to a website discussion in Paris.

Asked by AFP, French army information services in Paris would say only: "We have no comment to make on this kind of statement."

Cardinal Bernard Agre, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Abidjan, first made the decapitation charge, saying November 11 on Radio Vatican: "I have just come from the hospitals. It's unbearable, these young people decapitated by the French army."

Read the whole thing. The French deny beheading anyone, of course.

[BBC on French denial here.]

I don't know quite what to make of it, but surely such grotesque allegations of prisoner abuse -- by an Archbishop, to the Vatican -- will be investigated by the International Red Cross . . . (Commenters at this anti-French blog are suggesting that someone should call the UN as well.)

MORE: There's an atrocity video here apparently showing that heads were shot off, not cut off:

....the French are making the point that no one had their head intentionally lopped off… like with a sword. Apparently it doesn’t count as a beheading if it is a bullet that releives you of it.
In all fairness to the French, shooting off someone's head in combat is not the same thing as deliberately cutting off a prisoner's head with a sword. But should French statements of denial always be accepted on their face?

UPDATE: That last video was pretty tough to watch. It's quite obvious that a number of civilians were shot to death by French soldiers; I lost count of the number of dead and dying women. The headless corpse is pretty gruesome too, so if you download the (long) video, consider yourself warned.

But why isn't it being widely reported? Because it's French soldiers shooting civilians in the Ivory Coast? Had Israelis or Americans been involved in anything remotely like this, there'd have been front page headlines all over the world.

posted by Eric on 11.30.04 at 10:02 AM





TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://classicalvalues.com/cgi-bin/pings.cgi/1771






Comments

The French have always been cruel and sadistic, distinctively so even. That's one of the things that has always made them so interesting to me.



March 2007
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
        1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31

ANCIENT (AND MODERN)
WORLD-WIDE CALENDAR


Search the Site


E-mail




Classics To Go

Classical Values PDA Link



Archives




Recent Entries



Links



Site Credits