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Questions Marks Over Another IOC member
Monday October 19th, 2009
The Ekstra Bladet newspaper published two articles about IOC member General Lassana Palenfo. They have been freely translated.
For the first report, they sent a reporter to Cote Ivoire in West Africa to investigate Palenfo’s troubled history. Because of risks to informants, the reporter’s name has been with held. I talked with him in the Ekstra Bladet office in Copenhagen about his trip.
Beneath that story is another by two more reporters.
(If the reports are correct and General Palenfo has made his home in Paris he may be in breach of the rule in the Olympic Charter (Page 33-3.5) that requires IOC Members to live in their own country.)
EVERYONE was afraid of him: ‘Lassana Palenfo ordered violence and homicide,’ said a military source close to him in Ivory Coast.
We leave our grey Isuzu-SUV and walk across the dusty street in the smog covered metropolis Abidjan in southern Ivory Coast. A white man in this area is not an everyday occurrence. Everybody stares. Our local help is smiling gently to the passers-by. He seems slightly nervous.
‘You should know that nobody wants to talk about our bloody past, and certainly not with white people,’ he explains.
Still great power
We have waited five days for this meeting. It took countless phone calls and meetings with men in the military to find a person who dares to talk to us. Before we visited two other senior military people who still dared not give interviews. They feared for their lives.
We sit at an outdoor bar in a discreet corner and look out on the street, where a jumble of people are swarming around dusk. A man dressed in white shirt, white jeans and a white cap pops up among the booths, looking over at us from the other side of the street.
‘I think it's him,’ says our guide. The dark, muscular man in white says hello, but looks carefully at Ekstra Bladet’s reporter. He has agreed to meet us if we do not mention his name or show his face. So we call him Konan.
‘Palenfo still has great power and many friends in the military in Ivory Coast, and he will arrange to get me away,’ said Konan. He is a former senior member of the junta and was quite close to Lassana Palenfo in the year, when the general was prevailing in the country.
Konan knows - more than anyone else - the truth about the former general of the junta in Ivory Coast, and current IOC member Lassana Palenfo.
Innocent people killed
‘General Palenfo was chief executive responsible for the PC Crise (The Crisis Patrol). The Patrol went out and ordered the problems for the junta solved,’ said Konan. He stops his sentence for a moment and looks over his shoulder. He lowers his voice. Sweat appears on his upper lip.
‘PC Crise was a kind of death squad like the Gestapo. Everyone was afraid of them. They punished or killed innocent people. Just like that.’
- Did you ever hear Palenfo ordering murders?
Konan staring out in front of himself is clearly affected, although he has more than 20 years experience in the military.
‘Palenfo was General ... Do you understand? He determined, we obeyed orders. There were things ...,’ said Konan, who for nine years have been living with the knowledge of the killing of innocent compatriots.
‘I think of it every day. I am sad and crying. Criminal acts should always be punished, but that maybe never happens in this case,’ Konan says.
He leaves the bar and disappears into the bustle. Back to his military base somewhere in the Ivory Coast. For the sake of our sources in Ivory Coast, we have chosen to conceal their names and the names of Ekstra Bladet’s reporter because our sources may be exposed to unpleasant reprisals. Ekstra Bladet knows the identity of our sources.
Read the second story by Sverre Qvist and Bo Elkjaer on the next page