by Carol Off
The general didn’t last long either. Gueï was soon run out of town by the equally grasping and power-hungry Laurent Gbagbo. Under pressure from the international community to hold elections, Gbagbo went to the polls. But he was elected president principally because he had his only important adversary, the northerner Alassane Ouattara, eliminated from the electoral race. Ouattara is a Muslim whose heritage goes back to Burkina Faso. According to the policy of Ivoirité, Ouattara wasn’t a citizen even though he was born in Côte d’Ivoire, so Gbagbo declared him ineligible to run. It was a move of breathtaking opportunism, but the international community, wanting peace in West Africa seemingly at any cost, turned a blind eye. Gbagbo’s two predecessors had both been overthrown, and France, principally, wanted another strongman in power. The cunning Gbagbo, backed by his devious and ambitious wife, Simone, would fit the bill.
A few months after Gbagbo was installed, international human rights groups including Amnesty International reported on a mass grave found in Yopougon, north of Abidjan, in the heart of cocoa country, where Cargill runs its major cocoa-processing plant. When the grave was opened, investigators found the bodies of fifty-seven Muslim men who had all been known supporters of Alassane Ouattara. The men had been killed, according to witnesses, by the Ivorian gendarmerie. Gbagbo promised an inquiry, but no one was ever found responsible for the crime. It was only the first of many mass executions in Côte d’Ivoire.
In the cities, principally Abidjan, a new generation of educated and ambitious young Ivorians was waking up to the reality that Houphouët-Boigny’s economic miracle had come to an end. They’d missed out on the country’s brief moment of glorious prosperity, and they weren’t happy about it. Their deep resentment became a political resource to be exploited by young radicals who rose to prominence on promises that they would restore the golden age of Le Vieux. A charismatic and fierce young university student named Charles Blé Goudé, who came to be known as “The General,” mobilized thousands of angry young men into a militia group called the Panafrican Congress of Young Patriots. Simone Gbagbo was an open supporter of the militia and a covert financial backer of its leader. The students emulated the brash style affected by the American gangsta rap movement, wearing baggy tracksuits and gold chains, and they declared the martyred African-American icon Malcolm X to be their hero.
Blé Goudé was only one of several youth militia leaders based in Abidjan. The militias tyrannized immigrants and vandalized French business establishments. The General proclaimed that foreigners, both the immigrants from neighbouring countries and those from France, had too much economic influence in Côte d’Ivoire, and that the time had come for true Ivorians to take control of their nation’s destiny.
The United States, the United Nations and South Africa advised the Ivorian government to cool the young radicals and their racist rhetoric and to restore the rights of Côte d’Ivoire’s immigrant population before the volatile situation got out of hand. But Gbagbo refused. That’s when the Muslims from the north took matters into their own hands.
On September 19, 2002, all the trouble that had been building since the death of Félix Houphouët-Boigny finally erupted in a full-scale insurrection. Government soldiers who supported northern opposition leaders mutinied in three key cities: Abidjan in the south, Bouaké in the centre and Korhogo in the north. Three hundred people died in the early fighting, and General Gueï was assasinated, along with his wife, his son and his grandchildren, presumably by government troops loyal to Gbagbo who blamed Gueï for helping to stage the uprising.
Gbagbo’s forces managed to beat back the mutineers from Abidjan, but the territory from Bouaké to the northern borders of Mali and Burkina Faso fell under the control of a rebel group called Mouvement Patriotique de Côte d’Ivoire (MPCI). Côte d’Ivoire was severed, with Muslims in the north and Christians (as well as animists) in the south. The country teetered on the brink of anarchy. This is when Kader Ouattara and his fellow villagers fled Blolekin as it fell into the hands of marauding thugs, many of them from Liberia, and government soldiers. Four hundred thousand people, all considered non-citizens under Ivoirité, joined Kader Ouattara in his flight. Forty-eight thousand returned directly to Mali, while more than half of the refugees fled to Burkina Faso. The rest vanished into Ghana, Togo and Benin.
Fearing the possibility of another Rwanda, where Hutus exterminated 800,000 Tutsi in a racist frenzy in 1994, France offered Gbagbo military assistance. The concern was genuine, but it was clear that France was also taking care of its own national interests. More than sixteen thousand French nationals lived in Côte d’Ivoire at the time, while an estimated eighty per cent of Côte d’Ivoire’s economy was owned or controlled by French transnationals, who earned 2.5 billion euros a year there.
France negotiated a ceasefire line between the south and the north and sent a military force to back it up (as well as to guard French citizens and their enterprises). About seven hundred French troops landed a week after the outbreak of civil war, and they quickly brought the insurrection under control. Within months, France had three thousand troops in its former colony, making it the largest French military operation in Africa since Opération Turquoise, when French troops entered Rwanda first to rescue Europeans and then to prevent reprisals against the Hutu génocidaires (France’s traditional allies).
As international mediators and neighbouring African countries pressured Gbagbo to develop a peace plan and power-sharing arrangement with the northern rebels, France put hundreds more soldiers on the ground. They were heavily armed and had impressive air power and artillery to back them up. Another six thousand lightly armed United Nations peacekeepers, mostly from other African nations, controlled a “zone of confidence” around the ceasefire line.
The MPCI rebel movement in the north was, at least in the beginning, a fairly disciplined and professional operation whose members were well-trained former soldiers of the Ivorian army. Apart from occupying half the country, they’d made little trouble for the French or the Ivorian government. Civilians who lived in their occupied territories went about their business with minimal disruption. The northern territories they occupied had few resources of value to the Ivorian economy. But the “other war,” the southwestern uprising that Kader Ouattara and the other farmers had been caught in, was an entirely different matter. The fighting there was over cocoa. There was great wealth at stake in that region. The cruelty of the conflict intensified accordingly.
During a decade of waging war in Liberia, Charles Taylor had created a military force of unstable and often psychotic soldiers. Some young men and boys recruited by Taylor’s men were allegedly required to kill their parents as a form of initiation. Taylor was attempting to destabilize the entire region. His political and military ambition was to expand his authority into neighbouring countries and to create a Greater Liberia. Côte d’Ivoire was one of his targets, and Laurent Gbagbo’s political problems were, for Taylor, an opportunity.
While the Muslim rebels fought for control of the north, two unrelated rebel groups emerged in the southwest: the violent and ironically named Movement for Justice and Peace (MJP) and the Mouvement Populaire Ivoirien du Grand Ouest (MPIGO). These two forces had been loyal to General Gueï and now wanted to help overthrow Gbagbo. Charles Taylor was only too happy to help them. He provided the rebels with weapons and murderous manpower. The anti-Gbagbo rebels and the Liberian mercenaries had a common objective: to grab as much of the fertile cocoa-producing country as possible. Taylor would, in the process, establish a beachhead inside the country.
But a number of independent observers in the country believe that, for Taylor, the prospect of controlling cocoa profits was paramount. It would be a replay of his lucrative foray into the diamond fields of Sierra Leone. In the past, gems had financed his military projects; cocoa would be Taylor’s newest currency. The little brown beans were potentially as valuable as the “blood diamonds” that subsidized his delusional dreams of glory.
Taylor’s eq
uation of cocoa, guns and power wasn’t entirely original. President Gbagbo also relied on cocoa profits to finance the Ivorian army, and the rebels in the west saw cocoa as the key to their own financial and military prospects. He who controls cocoa—and the port of San-Pédro in the southwest—will rule the country.
Immigrant farmers were trapped at the confluence of a vicious and unpredictable power struggle among forces of the central government, anti-government rebels and Liberian mercenaries. Loyalties changed, but there was one consistent factor: the immigrants. All the parties to the conflict in the southwest targeted them. Government troops and local gendarmeries had instructions, which they gleefully fulfilled, to harass the foreigners. The police demanded of them proof of citizenship, which they did not have, and deeds to their properties, which they had never acquired.
Faced with ethnic cleansing and the corrosive policies of Ivoirité, Kader Ouattara and the others who had settled in the Promised Land had few options but to run away.
Roger Gnohite is a large beefy man who wears a wide-brimmed felt hat in defiance of the equatorial heat. A towel stuffed inside the crown hat absorbs most of the inevitable sweat. The headgear is a contemporary fashion statement in this part of Africa, a display of assumed American bravado, though such a fedora is rarely seen in the United States except in old Hollywood gangster films. It’s hard to tell how much of the gangster image is a reflection of reality and how much is vanity. Gnohite’s office walls are lined with photos of himself as active sportsman and also as influential politician, hobnobbing with Ivorian dignitaries, the most prominent in the gallery being Le Vieux himself.
Gnohite is the mayor of Gagnoa, a prosperous, bustling town whose trade in cocoa and coffee has continued without interruption throughout the civil war and ethnic pogroms. The giant Cargill enterprise and other transnationals have busy operations here, and the mayor is determined to keep his region peaceful. Gnohite’s authority extends beyond Gagnoa to include the sprawling cocoa-growing region all around.
I went to see Mayor Gnohite in the spring of 2005. A ceasefire agreement between the north and the south was holding, while UN and French soldiers kept things quiet in the zone of confidence. But in the southwest the savage killing, with its undercurrents of racism, continued. The immigrants who remained in the region had armed themselves and were attempting to hold their ground as both government soldiers and hired mercenaries fought for control of the valuable cocoa groves.
I was told that Gnohite was the man to see if you wanted to look into the face of Ivoirité. The mayor is notorious among the immigrant population. They believe he has incited youth gangs to roam the countryside and terrorize the “foreign” farmers. The mayor has made it quite clear that the allogènes, as the immigrants are called in French, have no deeds and no rights to the land, no matter how many generations they have worked the fields.
Isn’t this a betrayal of the values of Houphouët-Boigny—values that he professes to share? I ask him.
“No,” says the mayor. “Le Vieux would have wanted Côte d’Ivoire protected.” Gnohite states openly that the allogènes are known sympathizers of the Muslim rebels; hence, they are enemies.
“Doesn’t that send a message that outsiders have no right to protection here?”
“I am a man of the people,” he answers. “I protect everyone. No one is forcing people to leave. But if they are causing trouble, they have to go back to where they came from.”
“But innocent people are being killed because of their ethnicity—what is Gnohite going to do about it?” I ask.
“This is not ethnic cleansing,” he answers, actually laughing at the question. “We are all mixed together—not like Hutus and Tutsis. That kind of thing could never happen here.” If there are such reports, then “this is the fault of the media making things up. Western journalists fabricate these stories,” he says.
Ange Aboa, the journalist from Reuters who is travelling with me as my guide, shakes his head in amazement when we leave the interview. “If that is the official voice of Côte d’Ivoire,” said Aboa, “you can only imagine the unofficial one.”
Ten kilometres to the north of Gagnoa, in the town of Ouragahio, we get a clear illustration of how both official and unofficial voices of racist doctrine affect the lives of vulnerable people. In a house on the edge of town, Kassoum Cissé sits among the few possessions left to him. According to his identification papers, he’s seventy years old, but he looks much older. His eyes are sunk deeply in his thin, weathered face, and he shifts his scrawny haunches uncomfortably on a rough wooden bench. His ethnic roots are Burkinabè. Cissé issues an order to the young man who brought us here, and he disappears to fetch some plastic chairs and orange pop for the visitors. We site under the shade of a giant mango tree while Cissé explains the troubles.
How did a community that had lived in harmony for generations suddenly turn into a murderous melee? A year ago, Burkinabès in this area suffered a series of deadly raids that have never been properly investigated. According to one story, an allogène woman who lived in the community of Broudoume took some sand from a sacred forest in order to practise witchcraft. The local Bete people, the tribe from which Gbagbo descends, found out about it and drove out all of the eight hundred or so immigrants in the region. According to the Bete, those same immigrants returned at night and murdered Bete villagers.
Another, likelier, version of the story, and one that is consistent with other reports from this region, attributes the violence to a record harvest, coupled with higher than usual cocoa bean prices. In this account, government authorities encouraged indigenous Bete tribesmen to expel all of the immigrants on the eve of the cocoa harvest. According to newspaper accounts, another seven hundred people were evicted from neighbouring villages. No matter which version explains the outcome—and whether or not there were reprisal attacks by the victims—the operation seemed to have official sanction. Police failed to intervene to help the immigrants. In fact, there were reports of immigrants being removed from buses and summarily executed by policemen.
Kassoum Cissé is a respected tribal elder and the only resident of Ouragahio who would agree to speak to us about the violence that Mayor Gnohite describes as an invention of foreign reporters. As he ponders questions, Cissé wipes his face with a long sunburnt hand in a gesture of resigned despair, staring into space before he answers. He tells of the bands of young men who recently came door to door with guns, threatening everyone in the village and robbing them. The youths, probably members of the Young Patriots, were neither soldiers nor police, and they carried only small arms, in some cases hunting rifles. But no authorities came to protect the allogènes as the hooligans burned their houses and forced them to flee into the bush.
Cissé says he knows of ten people killed in just one attack. He escaped, along with others. They’ve returned to the village, but no one goes to work in the fields for fear of ambush. The area west of Ouragahio is under siege as we speak, with most of the former residents huddled in displaced persons camps. The violence is spreading through the cocoa area, and Cissé doesn’t know how much longer his village can survive it. I presume some of the villagers are now armed in anticipation of an inevitable showdown.
Even though he has identity papers to say was born in Côte d’Ivoire, Cissé’s birth village is in the Ivorian north—in rebel territory. That alone makes him a likely rebel sympathizer and collaborator in the eyes of the gendarmerie. Cissé assumed he had legal title to the land his father came to clear just after the Second World War. But the family never had a valid deed, according to the law as it is now understood. It was un achat traditionel, Cissé explains. A kind of old-fashioned gentleman’s agreement, worked out between local people, which everyone once honoured. Not anymore. Mayor Gnohite had spoken of these deals with contempt, referring to them as “gin-soaked informalities” that have no standing in law.
The sudden move to invalidate the achats traditionels came as a shock to the people who grow cocoa here. Und
er new regulations, which the government claims were in existence all along, only farmers possessing citizenship cards can own land, and no outsider can obtain such papers. Those who do manage to hold precious residency cards often have to watch in horror as the police destroy them.
The International Crisis Group (ICG) reports that, within days of the northern uprising, security forces moved into the rural communities and began to systematically arrest “sympathizers” among the immigrant population. According to an ICG report, these forces began a “campaign of mass destruction of shanty towns.” Police raided mosques and assassinated imams, and people who spoke out against Gbagbo’s regime or about the dirty work of his soldiers, would simply “disappear.”
As the economy tumbled and French businessmen shipped their families back to France to escape the violence, jobs in the cities disappeared. Young men, university educated but without employment prospects, returned to the countryside, bringing their disappointment and their bitterness with them. They had been indoctrinated in the language of hate that was percolating in the universities, finding strident voice through militia leaders such as Charles Blé Goudé. Now these angry young men returned to the countryside where their fathers or grandfathers had once farmed. Encouraged by local leaders such as Mayor Gnohite, they demanded that the land be taken back from the immigrants who farmed it, though in many cases their families had abandoned claim to the property long ago. It didn’t matter. The young men were determined to be masters in their own house, as The General had instructed them.
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.