The Center for War/Peace Studies† requests the NGO Community to calls upon the authorities of Ivory Coast for the prompt release of the courageous Ivorian peace campaigner Mr. Modeste Seri. He has been held at the MACA prison in Abidjan for almost eight months now. No charges have been laid. No trial is scheduled. MACA is notorious for its poor conditions: overcrowded, dilapidated, and unhealthy.

Mr. Seri’s case is a good example of the multiple violations of human rights and basic freedoms of which the current Ivorian regime is guilty. It also illustrates the ongoing degradation and arbitrariness of the country’s judiciary system. 

Modeste Seri has been an irritant of the regime, criticizing it for corruption, mismanagement and duplicity. He has openly expressed his doubts, shared by many Ivorians, concerning the current peace accords.  Faced with the fact that little has been done to address the fundamental grievances that produced the 2002 Ivory Coast rebellion, he has expressed his skepticism that the planned November 2008 elections will bring genuine peace. In his view, shared by many, quite the opposite could well be the outcome of a sham exercise.  Since last year he has also repeatedly questioned whether these elections will really take place as scheduled. His doubts are starting to be confirmed as more and more observers have begun to question the feasibility of this election date.

Considering the failure of the country’s current political class, as he frequently expressed in his past statements (see www.cwps.org ), Mr. Seri sees the road to sustainable peace in Ivory Coast as passing through a period of transitional governance by a team of competent technocrats of good morality. Once the current process of degradation of state institutions, of the economy, and of civic and moral values has been reversed,  meaningful elections, able to usher in a period of genuine peace, will be possible.  Not before.

To show the genuineness of their commitment to peace, the Ivorian authorities would do well to quickly release Modeste Seri, together with so many others unjustly detained in the country.  CW/PS asks for the support of human rights and democracy defenders abroad to assist in bringing this message to the Ivorian authorities.

Background Mr. Seri is in detention, being wrongly implicated in an alleged 27 December 2007 coup attempt. He had voluntarily gone to the security police (DST) to explain that he was not involved in this affair, and why he was seen in a video at a December meeting with the alleged coup mastermind, shown on internet. Mr. Seri wished to clarify to DST that his meeting was in the context of his work for peace for his country which has led him to seek contact with all major actors in the current conflict. After 12 days incommunicado at DST (during which time his home was thoroughly searched without anything being found) he was transferred to MACA where he has been kept  in preventive detention ever since.