refused to cede power to him until forced to do so by violent public protests in which 206 people were killed and 1,207 injured. In the violence, FPI supporters reportedly targeted not only Guéï's forces but also supporters of Ouattara's RDR, as well as northerners and immigrants whom they assumed supported RDR. President Gbagbo took up the mantle of Ivoirité and further entrenched it in state institutions. According to Human Rights Watch, Gbagbo's security forces committed abuses against civilians, targeting – on the basis of their nationality, ethnicity, or religion – immigrants, their descendants, and Ivorians from the north. Moreover, in 2001, the FPI government introduced a new national identification system, under which residents applying for official identity documents were required to prove their nationality, including the locality of their place of birth, to a new National Identification Office (ONI, Office national d'identification). This policy affected the voting rights not only of immigrants but also of many northern Ivorians. Thus the political transition to Gbago's government did little to ease ethnic tensions. For related reasons, and as throughout Guéï's rule, the mood in the military remained generally mutinous, and Gbagbo faced opposition from both Guéï loyalists and Ouattara sympathisers within the army. An attempted coup in January 2001, which Gbagbo blamed on the interference of Burkina Faso, led to renewed attacks on Burkinabé residents by FPI supporters. Belligerents Rebel forces The primary rebel force in the civil war was the New Forces of Ivory Coast (FNCI, Forces nouvelles de Côte d'Ivoire), created in December 2002 as a coalition between the Patriotic Movement of Ivory Coast (MPCI, Mouvement patriotique de Côte d'Ivoire), the Ivorian Popular Movement of the Great West (MPIGO, Mouvement populaire ivoirien du Grand Ouest), and the Movement for Justice and Peace (MJP, Mouvement pour la justice et la paix). Guillaume Soro led the MPCI, whose insurgency began the war, and he became the general secretary of FNCI. At least a significant portion of MPCI was aligned or sympathetic to the Rally of the Republicans (RDR, Rassemblement des républicains), Alassane Ouattara's opposition party, while MPIGO and MJP claimed allegiance to Ivory Coast's former military leader, Robert Guéï, who died at the beginning of the war. The Ivorian government claimed that MPCI was supported by Burkina Faso, an allegation which Burkinabé President Blaise Compaore repeatedly denied. The International Crisis Group, however, regarded the allegation as plausible: sources in the Burkinabé