by Carol Off
In a bizarre tell-all memoir that includes details of the incident, Finkel admits it was the single biggest mistake of his life. “I thought I’d get away with it,” he writes in True Story, a book about his troubles, for which he is purported to have received a $300,000 advance. In his account, Finkel weaves the details of his journalistic disgrace with another narrative—about a felon who stole Finkel’s own identity to escape prosecution for murder. Of his article for the New York Times Magazine, he says, “I was writing about impoverished teenagers in the jungles of West Africa. Who would be able to determine the main character didn’t exist?”
Finkel confesses that he wrote the article under a strict deadline that compelled him to stay awake for three days, high on amphetamines, and that he’d found himself short on research material for the story. He had come back from Côte d’Ivoire only with the intention of exposing the shoddy practices of other journalists and the NGOs, not the story of one boy’s dilemma, as his editors subsequently requested. Finkel admits that he considered flying to Toronto to try to bribe Anita Sheth and Save the Children Canada. He thought US$10,000 in cash might be enough to buy their silence. But he still maintains that, while the narrative may have been fictive, the story itself was true.
A number of newspaper and magazine articles about the Finkel debacle, published after his book was published, supported the idea that sometimes the truth is larger than the sum of the facts—and sometimes facts get in the way of truth. Whatever such apologies do for the state of American journalism, the labour issues of West Africa took on another layer of confusion.
The Finkel saga may seem tangential, but it reveals a number of disturbing elements that are germane to the narrative of exploitation in the world of global commerce: the tendency to manipulate facts from remote and undeveloped places to advance unrelated interests; the ripple effect of misinformation on political and corporate interests; the vulnerability of gullible victims to the polished and frequently self-interested inquiries of outsiders; the ease with which important issues can be dismissed by bad reporting and never recovered, no matter how much the dissembling is exposed.
Ultimately, in the months and years to come, the news story of “slave” children in the cocoa chain would take a back seat to the more pressing story of the “global war on terror.” A few journalists, such as Humphrey Hawksley of the BBC, continued to uncover stories about trafficking, but his was a more personal mission: “There’s something about this particular story that got under my skin and stayed with me. I can’t leave it,” he admits. But the journalistic pack had moved on.
Whenever there were questions about child labour in chocolate, the industry referred inquirers to the Harkin-Engel Protocol, which promised the world it would have “clean” chocolate by July 1, 2005. As part of the protocol, the corporations had started investing money in small ventures to make the lives of farmers better and to encourage them to send their kids to school.
One project that I visited in Côte d’Ivoire provides a little tree nursery so that children can cultivate their own cocoa crop. It also funds a small vegetable garden near the school where children are encouraged to grow their own food. From what I saw, the garden, at best, might feed fewer than half of the students in the school for a few days per week. Directors of the little enterprise maintain that the tree nursery will eventually generate money to pay for more food, a necessary development since the chocolate companies have made no commitment to long-term funding of either the nursery or garden.
As for the school building itself, it was crumbling. The playground reeked with the sharp odour of urine—there was no latrine. Yet this project was offered as an example of cocoa company largesse. The school, and several others like it, is conveniently located near Abidjan’s international airport. The teachers who run the little school canteen say they have a lot of visitors from abroad—people interested in seeing signs of progress. In truth, this small showcase project is an improvement over the situation in other schools only because the norm in Côte d’Ivoire farm communities is so pathetic. Compared with the massive amount of aid the oil companies pour into African countries to mollify local people and their governments, the investment from Big Chocolate in projects like this is minuscule. “I’ve seen some dreadful companies in dreadful places but few as stingy as these,” says the BBC’s Hawksley, speaking of his own investigations.
The Harkin-Engel Protocol, endorsed by the chocolate industry in 2001, at least acknowledged the existence of a child labour issue on West African cocoa farms. But any initiatives to deal with the abuse amounted to window dressing. Ultimately, the exploitation of children on the cocoa farms of Côte d’Ivoire would be impeded not by any good intentions on the part of politicians or corporate executives but by a factor neither group could control.
War.
Chapter Eight
CHOCOLATE SOLDIERS
“Whenever there is cocoa there is trouble.”
—A COCOA FARMER IN SOUTHWESTERN CôTE D’IVOIRE
JUNE IS A DISTRESSING TIME OF THE YEAR FOR THOSE who live in the fallow farmlands of Mali. The air buzzes with heat and singed dust. Scrawny cattle nose around in the few clumps of greenery, seeking whatever is left to eat. As they await the rains that may or may not come in sufficient quantities—or at all—people take on an air of quiet desperation. Especially now, as the Sahara continues its relentless spread southward, transforming large expanses of overused and depleted soil into sandy, sterile desert.
Forlorn families sit listlessly in their yards, listening to the distant rumble of a thunderstorm that always seems to promise rain for someone else. Their fields can feed them only for about nine months of the year. By June they are reduced to eating just one meal per day. And still, in the cooler part of the morning and before the fatigue of hunger sets in, they bend once more over the exhausted earth to coax the tiny plots of land to life, just one more time, planting their meagre seed and asking Allah, please, to send the rain.
It’s at this time of year that Malians of all ages abandon the parched fields, pack a few belongings and wander off to look for work. But in June 2005, more Malians were coming back than going. They returned with terror in their eyes and with stories to tell that were beyond the imaginations of the listeners.
Kader Ouattara was twenty years old, a sturdy young man with a lot of plans, when he left his village in southern Mali and headed for the Promised Land. The year was 1987, and Ouattara was responding to an appeal from the iconic African statesman Félix Houphouët-Boigny for ambitious farmers to come and put the Ivorian land to work, to turn jungles into farms. This was the West African dream, and Ouattara would be part of it.
“My father had engaged a wife for me,” he explains to me bashfully. With his willing young bride at his side, Ouattara emigrated to Côte d’Ivoire.
He learned the rules of his new country quickly. “You had to find a host who would welcome you and then would invite you to share a part of his land,” says Ouattara.
Robert Sho is the Ivorian who gave Ouattara his first break. “We were working with him at first, cutting bush and growing trees,” he explains. “And then he showed us another field to cut—one part for him and another part for me.” Ouattara insists the arrangement was always very friendly, as it was throughout the cocoa region. The indigenous farmers needed outside labour, especially the durable northerners from Mali and Burkina Faso, and there was plenty of land to share.
Ouattara worked his seven hectares while also toiling in the field of his patron. Through enormous personal effort he eventually saved enough to strike out on his own—to stop working for Sho and dedicate himself entirely to his own enterprise. That was part of the arrangement. But Ouattara was soon ready to expand even further, to grow more cocoa. By then it was the 1990s, and there were few areas in the overcultivated south-central part of the country left to develop. Cocoa was losing its value on international markets, and Ivorians were becoming less willing to share with outsiders. They cleared land fo
r themselves and tried to stave off their creditors by producting more beans and employing the cheapest labour possible to harvest them. Amicable arrangements between Malian immigrants and Ivorians such as Robert Sho became rare.
When Félix Houphouët-Boigny died in December 1993, Ouattara began to sense a new hostility towards the immigrants. The xenophobia became more overt as post-Houphouët governments began to preach a doctrine called Ivoirité. The term was vague, and took on many interpretations, but it came to mean that no one but those of pure Ivorian blood should enjoy full civil rights in the country. In practice, it meant that the immigrants who had been invited to take part in the economic miracle would no longer have any legal claim to the land they worked and lived on. At least, that is how Ivoirité was interpreted by people in the countryside. Ouattara says there were never any clear laws or directives, but Ivorian property owners took the racist policy as a licence to exploit their immigrant neighbours. “They would give you land,” Ouattara explains. “You would clear it and prepare the soil [for cocoa]. And then you would find someone else has claimed it and they are planting on it.”
The worst cases were perpetuated by the Guere people, says Outtara, natives of central Côte d’Ivoire. “Even if the Guere gives you land, his family will come along and take it back. The Guere people told us they wanted to make a census so that they would know whose fields to take.” Such a census would presumably allow the Ivorians to know who was a foreigner, even if a family had been in the country for generations.
Ouattara heard there land was still available in the southwest, near the Liberian border, that no one had yet cleared and that would be suitable for Theobroma. A lot of Malians and Burkinabès had already relocated to this virgin territory, far from the more densely populated parts of the cocoa belt, and were attempting to start their farms again. But this was a perilously precarious place to be.
Just over the border, Charles Taylor, the mercurial warlord-president of Liberia, was conducting a reign of terror. Refugees from Taylor’s killing sprees escaped into Côte d’Ivoire, and it often seemed a real possibility that the Liberian conflict would, itself, spill over soon. Ouattara didn’t know which way to turn. He was alarmed by the rancour and resentment of the Ivorians around him, and he feared the racist policies of Ivoirité, but he was also troubled by the threat of war. In the end, Ouattara gathered up his young wife and their one child and headed west, where he took up residence in a community made up almost entirely of Malians.
Blolekin is a village about thirty kilometres from Liberia, on the edge of the thick, dark rainforests and stunning national parks of a region called Man. Ouattara felt secure there. Not only did his countrymen surround him, but many of them were members of his own family. “My uncle was head of the village,” he says.
But peace in the region was an illusion. In September 2002, rebel soldiers from northern Côte d’Ivoire launched a coup d’état, sweeping down from the Malian border almost to the port city of Abidjan. They were later beaten back to Bouaké in the centre of the country, but the fighting continued. The rebels were of Malian descent, and they were reacting to the discriminatory policies of Ivoirité that had, among other evils, pitted the mostly Muslim north against the mostly Christian and Ivorian south. The front line between the two sides was now drawn through the heart of the cocoa belt.
Kader Ouattara listened to news reports of the war on the BBC and worried that his village would eventually become a battle zone. Blolekin was inside Ivorian-held territory, and he knew that its people, as Malians, would be regarded as enemies.
Almost simultaneously, fighting broke out to the west of their village, near Liberia. But Ouattara quickly realized it was not the same war. “It was about religion in the north,” says Ouattara—meaning Muslims fighting against Christians. “In our region, it was about land.” Ouattara says the Ivorians used the excuse of the conflict with the north to launch a land grab, forcing immigrants off their valuable property.
To make matters worse, Liberian mercenaries crossed the border to capitalize on the chaos and to further destabilize Côte d’Ivoire. Ouattara was terrified of these well-armed and savage warriors, many little more than boys. The soldiers were willing to help land-grabbing Ivorians drive the Muslim farmers off their land for a per centage of whatever value they could confiscate. The Liberians systematically moved through village after village in a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
As they closed in on Blolekin, Ouattara didn’t know what he would do. His wife was heavily pregnant, and he wasn’t sure she would be able to run when the time came to flee. During a night of thunderstorms, while nature’s violence whirled and crashed around them, she went into labour. The midwife, trapped by floodwaters from the storm, never arrived. After hours of agonizing labour, Ouattara’s wife gave birth, but then, soon after, she died. The newborn boy was sickly and feverish, but Ouattara couldn’t find a doctor. He watched helplessly as the child slowly perished. There was hardly time to bury his wife and infant before Kader realized he and his surviving son would have to flee before they too were victims—not of nature, but of a military campaign to rid the land of people like him.
The assault on Blolekin came before dawn. Liberian mercenaries and Ivorian troops first attacked the little village with artillery. “Then the soldiers entered the village. They ordered people out of their houses and told them to bring all their money. And then they blew up our houses.” Ouattara was stunned as the big guns reduced the mud huts to nothing while the soldiers stood around and laughed.
As their houses crumbled, civilians fled into the surrounding bush, but the soldiers chased them down. Now the sounds of both artillery and small-arms fire were overwhelming. “We would hide at night and move by day,” says Ouattara. The people of Blolekin met with others from surrounding villages, all heading north, into territory held by Muslim rebels. From there, the survivors were able to make their way back to Mali.
In late fall of 2002, fifteen years after he had left Mali, Ouattara was back in his home country, penniless and brokenhearted, his dreams incinerated. He told me his story one June afternoon in 2005, delivering the narrative in a single, steady stream of memory. He is a strikingly handsome man who would appear younger than his thirty-eight years but for the furrows on his brow. He is nearly deaf because of the bombardment that destroyed his peace in Côte d’Ivoire. At his side, Ouattara’s young son stands erect, watching with concern as his father speaks to a small delegation of strangers about their terrible flight. Ouattara attempts to reassure the boy, gently stroking his hand while his relatives gather around to listen to the story they’ve surely heard many times before. They are sad for Ouattara but also for themselves. They once depended on his earnings from the land in Côte d’Ivoire for survival. They have but one sustaining hope: that Ouattara will one day go back to reclaim his land in Côte d’Ivoire. When the war ends. If it ends.
When Ouattara finishes his story, the relatives silently stare out into their barren fields and listen for the thunder.
The death of Houphouët-Boigny in 1993 left a power vacuum in Côte d’Ivoire. The old man had been too self-absorbed to have properly arranged succession before his death—if rational succession in an autocratic state is ever possible. In fairness, it would have been difficult for anyone to administer a country where unemployment was growing exponentially; where drought and overcrowding were ravaging farmland; where foreign debt was exploding; where government institutions were being dismantled; and where the high expectations of a population had been thwarted. The entire economy rested on one industry—cocoa— and the president had learned he had absolutely no control over the price of beans. Houphouët-Boigny, like most megalomaniacs (even benevolent ones), had failed to groom a successor. His death left the country in chaos.
Henri Konan Bédié was Houphouët-Boigny’s immediate, but temporary, political heir. This new president had none of his predecessor’s charm or charisma, and Bédié attempted to control the country through fear and intim
idation. It was he who first introduced the toxic policies of Ivoirité, more as a political manoeuvre than as an actual law. He allowed authorities throughout the country free rein to harass immigrants and generally discriminate against them. When UNICEF first approached the Ivorian government to deal with the abuse of Malian boys on cocoa farms, the lukewarm response from the politicians was, in part, due to the prevailing attitude that “outsiders” had no political rights. Bédié gambled that his own incompetence might escape detection if he turned the immigrants into scapegoats.
Bédié’s pathetic efforts to govern by racism might have been temporarily popular, but his insatiable appetite for personal wealth estranged him from the population and drove the country further into debt. Bédié blamed the foreigners for all the country’s woes, but international financiers weren’t persuaded by his protests. In 1998, the IMF, the World Bank and the European Union suspended all aid to the country. A year later, the Ivorian military mutinied and Bédié was tossed out in a coup d’état. General Robert Gueï became the new president of Côte d’Ivoire. He was no improvement.
General Gueï may have disagreed with Bédié on many issues, but he took a fancy to the concept of Ivoirité, enshrining Bédié’s policy in laws restricting full citizenship to people born of “pure” Ivorian blood (meaning that both parents must have been born in Côte d’Ivoire). The problem was that Houphouët-Boigny had been so successful in recruiting outsiders into his Ivorian Miracle that nearly a third of the population of Côte d’Ivoire was now made up of foreigners or their descendants. This substantial minority were now, officially, non-citizens, even those who had never been outside the country.