Bitter Chocolate (31 page)

Marx-Vilaire Aristide, the researcher for the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) in Washington, had made tremendous progress in ferreting out the truth about child labour in Côte d'Ivoire. Since his first visit to the region in the spring of 2002, he had been back several more times and had made key contacts with a number of informers who passed him crucial information. Aristide and the ILRF were building their case against the industry when they suffered a serious setback. In November 2004, on a freeway northwest of Washington, Aristide was killed when another driver in a stolen SUV slammed into his vehicle.

The workers at the ILRF lost a dedicated colleague and friend, but Aristide's death also meant they were cut off from his close contacts and inside knowledge of the child labour issue. It took months to recover, which they did mostly through intrepid sleuthing by another ILRF researcher, Natacha Thys, who had been with Aristide on his last trip and was able to recover many of his leads in West Africa. She conducted her own investigations over the following winter and spring and found what she was looking for: plaintiffs. People willing to sue the parties they considered to be ultimately responsible for the abuses in the cocoa business.

On July 14, 2005, the ILRF filed suit against Nestlé, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland in a federal district court in California, charging the three U.S.–based companies with involvement in the trafficking, torture and forced labour of children who cultivate and harvest cocoa beans that the company imports from Africa. The class action claim was filed on behalf of Malian children who were trafficked into Côte d'Ivoire “and forced to work twelve to fourteen hours a day with no pay, little food or sleep and frequent beatings.” Three individual plaintiffs were identified only as John Doe I, John Doe II and John Doe III. The ILRF argued in its brief that the children had to remain anonymous for their own security.

The timing of the suit was no coincidence, and the ILRF's media releases stated clearly that they were pursuing legal action on this scale because the industry had failed to meet its July 1 deadline. “A key part of the [Harkin-Engel] protocol was an obligation for companies to have in place an independent and credible system of farm monitoring, certification and verification for their suppliers, to ensure no child labour was taking place,” says the ILRF statement.

Legal advocacy is new territory for aggressive activists in the United States, who use powerful tools such as the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) to pursue multinational corporations. The act allows non-citizens of the United States to use federal courts to hold Americans accountable for violations of international law. There are few downtrodden labourers—especially children—who could possibly drag a transnational before a court on their own, but the ILRF frequently takes up their causes.

The organization has filed suits against Exxon Mobil, DynCorp and Coca-Cola, all under the Alien Tort Claims Act. In 2004, it sued DaimlerChrysler on behalf of the families of nine unionists at a Mercedes-Benz factory near Buenos Aires who had “disappeared” during the Argentine military dictatorship. It sued on behalf of five former Guatemalan trade union
leaders who held the Del Monte food giant liable for violations of fundamental human rights.

Of course, leading U.S. business interests have filed their own petitions, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to nullify the Alien Tort Claims Act. They argue that it puts U.S. companies at an unfair competitive disadvantage, since companies in other countries don't face these kinds of suits. Considering the fact that the Act pertains only to slavery, torture, extrajudicial killings, war crimes, crimes against humanity and arbitrary detention, it's alarming that U.S. companies believe the law gets in the way of their ability to compete in the global market place.

The “Class Action Complaint for Injunctive Relief and Damages” filed against the cocoa companies on behalf of “Former Child Slave Plaintiffs” is asserting claims not only under the Alien Tort statute but also under the Torture Victim Protection Act. Among the many charges, the suit alleges that the actions of Nestlé, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland “forced the Former Child Slave Plaintiffs against their will and under fear of harm to labour for Defendants' economic benefit and in doing so the Former Child Slave Plaintiffs were placed in great fear for their lives.” The suit says the children were between the ages of twelve and fourteen when they were taken from their homes; though the brief doesn't specify, the three John Does are probably over eighteen by now.

As the class action suit was making its slow passage through the U.S. court system in 2005–2006, the status quo remained unchanged. Côte d'Ivoire still held its place as the leading producer of cocoa in the world, as Le Vieux promised it would, uninterrupted by scandal, war, Washington protocols or legal actions. But the Ivorian cocoa business was suffering its own disease, perhaps as devastating as the scourge of witch's broom that afflicts the cocoa tree. Cocoa, in Côte d'Ivoire, was becoming infested with the scourge of organized crime.

T
HE MEETING WAS FOR 1:30 P.M. IN THE PARKING LOT
of the Prima Centre, a swank shopping mall in the upscale Marcory district of Abidjan. It was a Friday afternoon, April 16, 2004, and Guy-André Kieffer was early. He stood beside his old Hyundai Electra with its maple leaf sticker on the trunk, one of his little reminders to people that while he is French he is also Canadian, and he chain-smoked while waiting for his contact. Kieffer's two cellphones were turned on, as always. He was in constant contact with his Network: journalists, financiers, diplomats, businessmen both African and European and, most of all, the highest functionaries and money men of Côte d'Ivoire's foremost export product, cocoa.

Guy-André Kieffer, GAK, as his friends called him, knew more about the dark side of the
filière
, as the hierarchy of the cocoa trade was known, than almost anyone else alive. As a journalist, he had started investigating tropical commodities, especially cocoa, for newspapers in France even before moving to Côte d'Ivoire two and a half years earlier. In Abidjan, he
eventually got a job freelancing for the Paris-based periodical
La Lettre du Continent
while contributing, sometimes anonymously, to a number of local publications.

For several weeks prior to the Prima Centre meeting, GAK's friends had noticed a change in him: he was much more agitated. He'd always been frenetic and fidgety, and he rarely stopped moving. But a colleague remarked that lately his mannerisms had become more pronounced, as if driven by a new sense of anxiety. He'd been a bundle of nerves at dinner recently, scrutinizing everyone in the restaurant suspiciously, where he would normally greet almost every diner by first name.

Kieffer told his associate over their meal that events had taken a bad turn in Côte d'Ivoire and it was now extremely unsafe for journalists, especially white ones. This was an alarming pronouncement from a reporter who seemed to be utterly fearless. Most of Kieffer's colleagues stood back in awe as he tore into government officials in public places, took on the president, and bravely published information about the cocoa
filière
and its “Mafioso” dealings. Kieffer had been charging around like a bull in an Ivorian china shop since he arrived in Abidjan. If someone like GAK was worried, things had really turned ugly.

Political conditions in the country had deteriorated rapidly after January 2004 and went into a free fall in March of that year, when a peaceful demonstration against the Gbagbo government turned into a killing spree. A coalition of opposition parties and northerners had defied the ban against public protests and marched in the streets of Abidjan. Ivorian police went on the attack, dragging people out of their homes and executing them, including some who hadn't played any role in the anti-government demonstrations. A UN report later characterized the event as a “massacre in which summary executions, torture, disappearances, and arbitrary detention were repeatedly committed by units of the security forces and the parallel forces acting in coordination or in collusion with them.”

Death squads targeted the Burkinabè and Malian immigrants who had been living in shantytowns around Abidjan since they'd been evicted from their farms, and murdered unknown numbers of them. Official records say dozens of people died; the opposition says the real number was in the hundreds. No one knows with certainty what happened during those dark days. It was suicidal for white journalists from abroad to even think about trying to cover the massacres in Abidjan. As for local reporters, at best they were attacked and harassed, at worst they were raped and beaten, or they simply disappeared. Only government-controlled media outlets could broadcast or publish. Opposition newspaper offices were torched.

What alarmed Kieffer most was that the four thousand well-armed French soldiers and three thousand African soldiers who formed the peacekeeping force in Côte d'Ivoire did so little to stop the killing. Many civilians had joined in the illegal demonstrations believing that the foreign military personnel would guarantee their safety. They didn't, and GAK told his friends at the time that if the international community failed to condemn Gbagbo for unleashing this terror, then the president would regard it as an endorsement of his power and evidence that the world would not intervene in his excesses. Memories of Rwanda haunted all the reporters who had seen the same international indifference to the killing machines of the Hutu
génocidaires
in 1994. Kieffer worried that, without a strong message from France, in particular, it would become open season on reporters in Côte d'Ivoire.

But there was little international reaction as the death squads carried on the slaughter for days. All the major news agencies withdrew their reporters—the eyes and ears of the outside world. The UN High Commission for Human Rights investigated but refused to release its report, fearing it might add fuel to the flames. When a leaked copy made its way to Radio France Internationale, it confirmed the worst fears of the foreign media.
The commission documented “the indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians, and … massive human rights violations.” The report specified that “the march became a pretext for what turned out to be a carefully planned and executed operation by the security forces.”

Other developments disturbed Kieffer as well, most notably the actions of the Young Patriots of Charles Blé Goudé and the other less visible youth militias that operated underground. The fascistic “parliaments” convened by The General attracted thousands of young angry Ivorians who were now indoctrinated with the idea that the French were responsible for all of their problems. Kieffer had a fairly good idea, from his own sleuthing, that the youth militias were well supplied with arms. The likelihood of a violent insurrection, secretly guided by Gbagbo himself, seemed inevitable in the charged Ivorian atmosphere.

As Kieffer stood in the Prima Centre parking lot on an April afternoon less than a month after those events, he had a lot to be worried about. He had just published an explosive story, claiming that Côte d'Ivoire had illegally transferred money to the dictatorial regime of Guinea-Bissau, a small troubled state next to Sénégal, and an important ally of Gbagbo. Despite the economic woes of Côte d'Ivoire, the government seemed to have enough excess cash to bankroll the salaries of civil servants and military personnel in another country. The information in Kieffer's report was extremely damaging because it strongly suggested that the Gbagbo government was diverting cocoa profits to support a dubious political agenda abroad as well as at home.

In addition to the Guinea-Bissau affair, Kieffer was investigating a high-level money-laundering scheme run out of Paris and illegal financial transactions allegedly involving the National Investment Bank of Côte d'Ivoire, a principal financial agency of the state and of the cocoa
filière
. Kieffer had been relentless in exposing corruption under the Gbagbo regime, most of it involving the cocoa industry, in
La Lettre du Continent
and other
publications. He filed numerous reports making allegations about arms purchases financed from cocoa profits; shady weapons deals cooked up with Israeli and Ukrainian gun merchants; and suspicious arrangements with foreign companies to dredge sand from the cocoa-exporting port of San-Pédro.

Kieffer had received three death threats in recent weeks, more than the kind of intimidation a muckraking reporter learns to live with. What's more, these threats were coming from some of the highest offices in the land. Kieffer told friends he was confident that there were enough decent people left in powerful positions, but most suspected he was kidding himself. There was no one watching his back, especially not in the violently anti-French environment of Côte d'Ivoire. And once GAK sniffed out evidence of injustice, he became impossible to restrain.