Bitter Chocolate (27 page)

Not all Ivorians wanted the immigrants gone. Many of the indigenous farmers needed the
allogènes
and hopefully waited for their return from the displaced persons camps—they couldn't produce a cocoa crop without them. On at least one occasion, Ivorians had gun battles with each other over immigrant labour.

Some of the
allogènes
didn't flee but fought back. There were many reprisal killings. In a deadly game of tit for tat, opposing groups ambushed each other's villages at night. As village-level violence became commonplace, the militias from the Liberian border area pursued more ruthless means to drive the immigrants from the land. International aid workers, who continued to work in the area, reported hideous scenes of carnage: headless corpses, houses full of women and children set alight, women raped, livestock slaughtered, fields burned, widespread looting. The UN peacekeeping forces rarely ventured into this chaotic environment, leaving only aid workers and missionaries to try to protect people. The NGOs and religious orders offered refuge in their own compounds, but even these were raided.

Jacques Seurt, a passionate human rights worker with the International Organization for Migration was among the last Europeans to leave the area near Blolekin. Seurt has lived in Côte d'Ivoire for years, and he has come to regard it as home. I met him in Abidjan, shortly after he had fled southwest Côte d'Ivoire for his own safety. As a Frenchman in the region and a protector of the immigrants, he knew he was a potential target of the paramilitaries. But he stood his ground until it became suicidal to stay. He has a look of fear stamped on his face as he tells of the relentless attacks he witnessed.

Seurt remembers a time, not so long ago, when Côte d'Ivoire was the most peaceful and prosperous country in Africa. It was more than that, Seurt insists, on further reflection. There was a generosity of spirit in the country, a sophistication and gentility. Seurt speaks of a distressing shift in Côte d'Ivoire since the war that he describes as “a rupture”—a break with the codes of civil society, where Ivorians had coexisted with
allogènes
and the French lived almost as natives. That was the old Côte d'Ivoire he loved. But everything has changed, and Seurt talks ominously of what he sees around him now: “ferocious faces where the anger is palpable.”

Was Côte d'Ivoire to become another Rwanda? The next Liberia? Sierra Leone? Congo? Most observers play the macabre game of trying to guess which type of hell Ivorians might be heading for. Jacques Seurt wonders if Côte d'Ivoire isn't an African version of Yugoslavia, a country that was once the model for the region, prosperous and educated and multi-ethnic, but shattered in a few short years by poverty, racism and greed.

The Frenchman's fear is surpassed only by his fascination at one intriguing development: No matter how fierce the fighting, the trucks that transport the cocoa beans always seem to get their cargo to the port of San-Pédro and then onward to the candy counters of the Western world. “I don't know if it was bribes, or pre-arrangements with the rebels. But the path was always clear
for the cocoa transporters.” Nothing, not even war, seems to interfere with the availability of the developed world's favourite treat.

Rumours circulated that the big cocoa trading companies were making a financial killing, thanks to the war. The London-based company Armajaro purchased 204,308 tons of cocoa beans in July 2002, gambling that the price of beans was on a rising trend that could only accelerate in the event of conflict. Even before the war broke out, a scant two months later, industry watchers speculated that the firm was trying to “squeeze” the market in anticipation that prices would go even higher. Armajaro dismissed the timing as coincidence, but it still managed to make an estimated US$90 million profit on the transaction.

Gbagbo's government increased taxes on cocoa in the areas over which he still had control, the southeast and central areas of the cocoa belt. His enemies did the same in the west, through the unofficial tax system of bribes and extortion. Much of the income from cocoa went to weapons dealers and corrupt government leaders. Gbagbo's government negotiated ceasefires while diverting cocoa profits to weapons merchants in Israel, Ukraine and Germany. Even though the United States was officially urging Gbagbo to stop the fighting, the involvement of Charles Taylor was enough to persuade the Bush administration to permit deliveries of firepower to the Ivorian government.

Meanwhile, the big cocoa companies got their product to market while they encouraged other equatorial countries to consider boosting their own cocoa production lest Côte d'Ivoire continue the freefall into chaos. As history has illustrated, countries and cocoa groves come and go, but the appetite for chocolate is forever.

In January 2003, France brokered a peace plan called the Linas-Marcoussis Agreement (named after the rugby training centre outside Paris where it was signed), an agreement many believe was
forced on Gbagbo and his Front Populaire Ivoirien (FPI) party. It was a power-sharing arrangement between the north and the south, but it actually gave extraordinary influence over the entire country to France. Everything that affected French interests—industry, business and investments—would be protected, while northern rebels would get control of key ministries in the government.

France was accused of engineering a “constitutional
coup d'état,”
an argument hard to refute since France was hardly a disinterested negotiator in the process. Youth organizations in Abidjan launched anti-French rallies, calling on the United States to protect Côte d'Ivoire from “French terrorism.” While the president was compelled to sign the agreement, his wife, Simone Gbagbo, the Lady Macbeth figure in the presidential court, made ominous suggestions that the French would be better off if they simply left the country, sooner rather than later. Foreign companies started pulling out as the political temperature rose. Presidential reassurances were not enough when the first lady and the increasingly aggressive youth gangs were sending out ominous signals that contradicted them.

International news agencies moved their West African bureaus to Senegal. Human rights organizations and relief agencies closed up shop as aid money was diverted to countries with more stable regimes. Philanthropy loves security, and Côte d'Ivoire was becoming dangerous. People with the courage to stay on, such as Jacques Seurt, found it increasingly difficult to get to the rural communities affected by the violence.

Reports of child slavery in cocoa persisted but were now explained as part of a campaign by France to blackmail Côte d'Ivoire with threats of possible boycotts. It was a twisted argument, but all problems in Côte d'Ivoire were now blamed on the French. Gbagbo accused Western journalists and the NGOs of trying to destabilize the price of cocoa by “feeding” stories to the media about child labour. The best evidence Gbagbo had of this was alleged indifference by the media to child slavery in cotton,
which many human rights workers inside the country thought to be more pernicious and widespread than child slavery in cocoa. It was further proof of Western efforts to manipulate cocoa prices so speculators could make even bigger profits on the futures markets, for which therre was some evidence. All of the rumour and innuendo fed into a climate of paranoia towards outsiders—an outsider being anyone the Gbagbo regime didn't like.

Child trafficking did become less of an issue in West Africa during the war, not because it was a fiction of journalists or because police had stemmed the tide, but because it became more dangerous to smuggle children into the cocoa belt of Côte d'Ivoire. The traffickers would have to cross the front line of a civil war, heavily guarded by two armies and two international military forces. One of the attractions of child smuggling in West Africa, according to UNICEF, had been that it carried so little risk. Crime loves easy targets, and Côte d'Ivoire had become a minefield of perils.

Despite the peace agreement, Gbagbo was emboldened by all his new cocoa-financed weaponry—bold enough finally to bomb the northern rebel stronghold of Bouaké in an aerial attack on November 5, 2004. It was a blatant violation of the ceasefire, and Gbagbo delivered it right in the heart of what the Linas-Marcoussis Agreement called the “conciliation zone.” The French were not looking for a fight, and Gbagbo might have got away with it had he not managed to kill nine French soldiers and an American aid worker. Within twenty minutes, France retaliated with its own aerial attack and wiped out Côte d'Ivoire's entire air force—a tiny but impressive fighting fleet, purchased from the proceeds of cocoa sales.

Within days, a spontaneous but clearly orchestrated wave of violence swept the country. The epicentre was among the skyscrapers and corporate offices of Abidjan. Blé Goudé's Young Patriots group had been holding weekly “parliaments” in the city, where he indoctrinated gangs of disenfranchised young men
with the notion that all foreigners were enemies who were stealing their jobs. Following the destruction of the air force, The General turned his wrath against the French. He went on state television and called all young Ivorians to action. Following his appeal, armed gangs of youth roamed the streets hunting for French citizens. Even Ivorians were terrified.

In a week-long campaign of looting and arson, during which businesses and homes were destroyed and a number of women claimed to have been raped, the Young Patriots, along with other less well-known militias, managed to drive about half the French population of Côte d'Ivoire out of the country. French troops fought back, killing an unknown number of Ivorians.

In the midst of the melee, The General addressed his troops at one of the parliaments: “This week, the mask has fallen and we see who is the godfather of this rebellion. It is France.”

T
RAVELLING SOUTH FROM THE
M
ALIAN CAPITAL OF
Bamako, the road towards Côte d'Ivoire inspires a sweet feeling of optimism. Sikasso is a hub of West Africa and the halfway point between Bamako and the border. The bustling town is a sudden explosion of colour and activity, a suggestion that there is more to life than the sad and worn-out farmlands that drape the rural landscape. I can imagine that the boys who arrive here from their dreary villages are filled with a sense of adventure, even as they meet the men who would doom them to months or years of servitude. Leaving Sikasso, the drive farther south towards the frontier fills the senses: dried-up river beds and scrawny cattle give way to mango groves and lush blue-green vegetation in the south. The air smells rich and exotic, full of sensual promises.

Before the war, this route to Côte d'Ivoire teemed with activity. Great transport trucks overflowed with billowy raw cotton from the local harvest, as well as timber, cement and metal, all headed for the great Ivorian ports on the Gulf of Guinea. Buses piled with people and their meagre goods for sale—or their empty baskets, destined to hold a wealth of Ivorian merchandise—rumbled along the narrow highway, heading for the land of milk and honey.

The traffic flow dried up almost completely at the height of the war in Côte d'Ivoire. Malian rebels would allow very few vehicles to cross into the occupied northern area. And the Ivorians allow even fewer to pass over the ceasefire line that divides the country between north and south. Since the spring of
2005,
the ceasefire has been holding. Restrictions are looser. Travellers and transporters willing to negotiate a thicket of roadblocks and pay the mandatory bribes can make their way even into southern Côte d'Ivoire. For Malians, whose lifeline is to the south, the possibility of peace between northern rebels and Ivorian authorities is their only source of hope for salvation.

Squatting right on the border to Côte d'Ivoire is the Malian town of Zégoua, a dusty, vulgar little place that enjoyed prosperity before the war and now awaits the return of good times. The Harlem City Hotel, just near the customs station, claims to have a tiki bar and advertises cold beer, palm wine, a jazz club and “all the comforts.” These days, the comforts amount to little more than scratchy music from a ghetto blaster, warm fizzy drinks and a few glum-looking prostitutes.

A row of Chinese-made scooters lines the main drag near the customs booth, the drivers offering to carry anything or anybody over the border for a fee. After I watch the activity around the border patrol for a while (there isn't much else to do), it becomes obvious that scooters are able to cross without much hassle, no matter what they might be carrying. For a small additional payment, I'm told, the drivers will smuggle any cargo over the border at less conspicuous crossing points, following the network of little paths that crisscross through the backwoods. The Mali–Côte d'Ivoire frontier has always been porous, even at the height of the war and nowhere more so than in the sleepy countryside, where shepherds graze their sheep and extended families sprawl without regard to national distinctions. The rugged little bikes easily navigate the goat paths with their clandestine cargo undetected.