E/CN.4/2005/18/Add.3 page 15 of birth in Côte d’Ivoire, the court must “establish the place of birth of the applicant’s parent or parents where [the court] has reason to believe, for example on the basis of the names given on the applicant’s birth certificate, that the parents are foreign”.8 Names made out to be suspect in this way will in times of real crisis become names judged to be criminal, an important indicator of a dynamic of xenophobia. Eligibility for the presidency 47. Under article 35 of the 2002 Constitution, to be eligible to stand for the presidency, candidates must be Ivorian-born, of Ivorian-born parents. It was on the basis of this provision, one whose adoption had given rise to much discussion among Ivorians, that the Supreme Court rejected the candidacies of 14 political figures who failed to meet the new conditions during the 2002 presidential elections. The role effectively heightened the feeling of exclusion experienced by a large section of the Ivorian population, who believe they are being denied their democratic right to participate in public life in their country. The rule, which conveniently barred certain candidates from a political contest already vitiated by heightened ethnic sensitivities, quickly became the main political element of the Ivorian crisis. Rural land tenure 48. The law governing rural land ownership dates from 1998 and stipulates that only the State, public authorities and Ivorian nationals may own such land.9 This Act represented a departure from the policy of President Houphouët-Boigny, according to which “whoever tills the land owns the land”, engendering feelings of injustice and exclusion among non-Ivorian owners, some of whom had been cultivating their lands for several generations. The legislation means that non-Ivorians may no longer purchase rural land or hand it down to their heirs. Thus the legal and political exclusion resulting from the laws on nationality and eligibility for the presidency would appear to be compounded by economic exclusion. War: a boost for the dynamic of xenophobia 49. War broke out in Côte d’Ivoire in September 2002, pitting government troops against several rebel movements, which later combined to form the Forces Nouvelles now occupying the north of the country. Exact figures for civilian deaths in the clashes are hard to come by, but reliable estimates put them at between 1,000 and 2,000.10 50. The outbreak of war in a context so dominated by this heightening of ethnic sensitivities by ideological, political, legal and administrative means helped push the dynamic of xenophobia into a higher gear. Representing as it did a shift from words to action, the war paved the way for pent-up feelings of frustration, fear and exclusion to spill over into acts of violence and other clearly xenophobic behaviours, some committed by the forces of law and order, the police, the armed forces and gendarmerie, or paramilitary groups, others by rebel groups. The next stage was that the various political rivals, appealing now to ethnic rather than democratic legitimacy, began acting and speaking in such a way as to effectively take the population hostage, giving the groups and communities whose interests they claimed to be defending the impression that they had no choice but to go along with their proposals and give them, if not their active support, at least a degree of approval.