Bitter Chocolate (34 page)

As local and international media dug deeper, they discovered more alarming details. The torture was probably much more aggressive. As part of the physical coercion the kidnappers beat Kieffer with clubs and iron bars for perhaps even days before he died. When the secret police realized they had killed their subject and not just terrorized him, they had to cover up the crime. The body quickly disappeared.

While using intimidation on journalists who worked for foreign agencies had become commonplace in Abidjan, killing them was still taboo. Six months earlier, police had murdered Jean Hélène—a reporter for Radio France Internationale—shooting him dead on a street in Abidjan. The sergeant who had killed the reporter was now serving a sentence of seventeen years without parole. President Gbagbo condemned the assassination, but he publicly stated that he could understand why one of his people might be driven to such a desperate act, given the Ivorian frustration with France. The message was clear: It's wrong to kill foreign reporters, but you'll get official sympathy if you are compelled to do so.

What Kieffer's Network couldn't fathom was why a white man's corpse ended up on the side of the road two days later and how it subsequently disappeared from an Abidjan hospital. Was it Kieffer's body? What happened to it? It's not easy to get rid of a white cadaver in Abidjan without someone noticing. But that seems to be what happened. One foreign diplomat says he was told that the corpse was actually an albino African man and not a white European. But Baudelaire Mieu says that the police radio chatter they intercepted distinctly said it was a white man.

What did seem clear to Kieffer's Network was that the French government wanted the GAK affair to go away even more than
the Ivorian government did. The embassy withheld information that the Network knew it had regarding Kieffer's arrest, his detention and his treatment. A French foreign office representative suggested to journalists that Kieffer had been involved with nefarious activities, and that such involvement might explain his abduction. Another French official was reported to have said, “Kieffer's disappearance was best for everyone.”

Another story was circulating, and it turned up in French newspapers: Kieffer had been implicated in the kidnapping of a German restaurant owner some time earlier—a business deal that went bad—and he had been killed out of revenge. Kieffer's friends concluded that this theory was not just malicious but also highly improbable, given Kieffer's nature.

Baudelaire Mieu found all of this deeply hurtful, but he didn't have time to dwell on it: A week after Kieffer disappeared, Mieu himself was the target of a death threat for his alleged role in GAK's reporting. He felt compelled to go into hiding. The authorities derided Mieu's claims of intimidation, insisting that he was just grandstanding. But the Network knew better.

Aline Richard, an old friend of GAK's from his days at
La Tribune
, was also distressed by what she believed was the French government's attempts to demonize her friend. The two had worked together in Paris when Kieffer covered commodities and she was on the oil beat, but she lost contact with Kieffer when he moved to Africa. All of the official and unofficial stories put out about her friend alleged that Kieffer was a part of disreputable activities and not really a journalist. “The embassy started to say that Guy-André was a strange guy, that he was dubious and shady. Was he a journalist? Or what? That was the tone.” Aline Richard thinks if there were any questionable activities going on in Abidjan, they involved the French government, not her former colleague: “Just what is it that France is trying to accomplish in Côte d'Ivoire?”

A twist on the Kieffer story, and one that gave ammunition to his critics, is that he didn't initially go to Côte d'Ivoire as a journalist but rather as a consultant. In fact, he had moved to Africa at the behest of an associate, Stéphane de Vaucelles, a young idealist and a director with the HSBC Investment Bank, Africa branch, who was living in Abidjan.

In October 2001, the HSBC was asked by Côte d'Ivoire's prime minister, Seydou Diarra, to perform an audit on the cocoa
filière
, and de Vaucelles was chosen by the bank to head up the investigation. The marketing board that had kept the cocoa price stable and profitable for decades—CAISTAB—had been disbanded at the insistence of the World Bank, and some new system would have to be installed. Farmers were distrustful of attempts to launch new control systems and were attempting boycotts. World Bank leaders, who had substantial leverage in Côte d'Ivoire through their control of the state's debt, wanted some independent organization to investigate how the
filière
really functioned and to determine how it might be replaced. HSBC got the contract.

Laurent Gbagbo had come to power a year earlier, bringing with him a breath of hope that the years of instability since the death of Le Vieux had finally come to an end. Gbagbo claimed to be a socialist and professed an interest in cleaning up corruption in the cocoa industry and ensuring that the farmers got better funding. The World Bank and the IMF had made a mess of the cocoa
filière
with all of their SAPs, and Gbagbo claimed he wanted to restore its effectiveness. Indeed, the World Bank, the farmers and the government all agreed it was time for some fresh air to blow through the cocoa trade of Côte d'Ivoire. But there was one holdout. According to sources, the multinational food trader Cargill pressured the HSBC, of which it was an important client, to abandon the audit and shut down the cocoa review. It
isn't clear why Cargill would want to halt the investigation, but the HSBC agreed to do so.

Stéphane de Vaucelles disagreed. He wanted to keep going, believing he was part of a fresh new beginning in Côte d'Ivoire. With some encouragement from the new Gbagbo regime, he set up a private company called Commodities Corporate Consulting (CCC) and signed a contract with the Côte d'Ivoire government to continue the investigation without the resources of the bank.

In December 2001, de Vaucelles asked Kieffer if he would move to Côte d'Ivoire and become part of the investigative team, arguing that it would be a chance for the reporter to put his knowledge of markets and commodities to work for a good cause. Kieffer was an early supporter of the regime of Laurent Gbagbo. Its idealistic rhetoric and socialist orientation fit nicely with his own ideological makeup. As he saw it, a former French colony was about to be rehabilitated and reformed by a left-wing African president who had the interests of peasants and the proletariat in mind. Here was a chance to help. He decided to take a break from journalism to assist de Vaucelles with the audit on the cocoa industry and facilitate overdue reforms in the cocoa
filière
.

Antoine Glaser, a friend and the Paris-based editor of
La Lettre du Continent
, warned Kieffer against the move. Glaser and Kieffer met often for lunch in Paris when Guy-André was working at
La Tribune
and Glaser was down the street at
La Lettre
. They would talk about life, love and commodities. When Kieffer told Glaser that he was moving to Côte d'Ivoire to work not as a journalist but as a consultant for the Ivorian government, Glaser responded that it was a very bad idea.
“Journaliste est journaliste,”
Glaser told Kieffer. “If you pass to the other side of the mirror, you can't come back—it's a one-way trip.” But Kieffer didn't play by the rules, says Glaser. He was
“un soixante-huitard,”
according to Glaser—a sixty-eighter. “He was still thinking like it was 1968. He had no respect for power, and he had a big mouth.”

The audit took the consultants of CCC into some very dark places, revealing a secret world of people on the take and transnational corporations who simply played the game in order to get cocoa to the seaport. Without the protection of guaranteed price stability under CAISTAB's rules, farmers were at the mercy of price swings, from either market forces or manipulation. They were, most of the time, seriously underpaid. But the two new institutions set up with the World Bank's blessing didn't seem to offer any improvement. The CCC investigators came up with a plan to restructure the cocoa
filière
and, they hoped, get a better deal for the farmers. The World Bank and IMF grudgingly supported it, conceding reluctantly that their own ideas hadn't worked very well in Côte d'Ivoire.

Initially at least, it seemed as though Gbagbo genuinely wanted to change the way Côte d'Ivoire did business. The government gave the CCC team unprecedented access to data and officials in the cocoa trade and state bureaucracy. But something changed. As the CCC went about its work, the Gbagbo regime was beginning to reveal its true colours. And they weren't the altruistic banners that Kieffer had been led to expect. Either the president was betraying his real purpose, or he'd been infected by the corruption he had promised to eradicate. Gbagbo had presented himself as a socialist. Now he was emerging as an elitist and an ultra-nationalist.

It was no secret in Côte d'Ivoire that Simone Gbagbo was a fervent evangelical Christian and had joined an American-based church that was much favoured by people close to U.S. President George W. Bush. President Gbagbo and his wife made frequent visits to the United States, where their fundamentalist religious beliefs won them access to fellow Christians in prominent positions in politics and industry. Gbagbo made friends in high places.

There were other, more ominous, changes. Gbagbo had previously denounced the policies of Ivoirité. Now he seemed enthralled by the racist sentiments of his wife, much as he suddenly shared her piety. When Muslims in the north staged their rebellion in September 2002, Gbagbo declared to his new American conservative friends that resisting the rebels was his contribution to the war against Islamic extremism. He was as committed to “the war on terror” as were the Americans.

Watching this metamorphosis from a distance, Kieffer and his idealistic friends were appalled. This was not the regime, or the country, that Guy-André Kieffer had adopted as his own.

Within a year of his arrival in Abidjan, Kieffer and about twenty others who were part of CCC found themselves caught in a crossfire of competing interests. When the dust settled, there was an entirely new political configuration in Côte d'Ivoire. Paul Antoine Bohoun Bouabré became minister of finance. He was a wealthy ultra-nationalist who didn't have a lot of time for enthusiastic white boys from France, especially socialists, telling Africans how to run their affairs. The CCC's role in reforming the
filière
was suddenly terminated. The regime devised a solution of its own: four new cocoa agencies, accountable to the government.

The new bureaus were neither completely public nor completely private; they had the authority to tax cocoa profits and to spend the revenue as they saw fit, but they were not obliged to account for where the money went. To the astonishment of those watching these developments, the World Bank and the IMF approved the proposed new system. Within months, Kieffer and his colleagues were on the outside, flabbergasted at the audacity of a scheme that seemed designed to institutionalize larceny.

The erstwhile reformers became the targets of attack from powerful politicians. Many of the idealists in the CCC packed up quickly and left the country, hounded by physical harassment
and death threats. As the others fled, GAK decided to stay, to pass back through the mirror to a place he knew well, a place to transform his idealism into activism: journalism. He remained enough of an idealist to think that he could get away with it. He believed he could put to good use all the inside knowledge he had gleaned in the months he had spent with his Euro-Canadian nose buried deep in the system that cultivated the corruption that had infected the cocoa
filière
.

Despite his earlier pronouncement that, once outside the vocation, the journalist mutates into something else, Antoine Glaser commissioned Kieffer to write for
La Lettre du Continent
from Côte d'Ivoire. GAK had been not just a friend but also a very good reporter. And Glaser would discover that Kieffer had never fully left the world of journalism; according to those who knew him, he had passed back and forth through the mirror so often that he never really knew which side he was on. Even as a consultant, GAK had been feeding stories to the outside, “working as a consultant by day and a journalist by night,” says a colleague who knew him well.