by Carol Off
Chapter Ten
THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
“Here [in Côte d’Ivoire] you can talk about politics with violent words, but the one thing that makes people mad is money. If you track money you risk the death penalty … Cocoa is a dark, confused world. You don’t know where the money goes. And into it came Guy-André, obsessed about telling the truth.”
—JACQUES HUILLERY, Agence France-Presse, Abidjan, June 2004
THE 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.
GAK had become one of the country’s leading experts in primary commodities
, and he specialized in the cocoa and coffee trade. He learned the basics working as a business reporter, providing information useful to investors and traders. But his curiosity had led him deeper and deeper into the shadows of the cocoa industry and into a dark underworld occupied by the clique whose members dominate the filière. He took up the cause of the cocoa farmers the day he arrived in Côte d’Ivoire, and he was determined to expose their oppressors—in his mind, the regime of Laurent Gbagbo with its ties to the big multinational cocoa companies. To that end he unearthed a lot of information, perhaps too much for his own good.
Kieffer was at the Prima Centre to meet Michel Legré, a man he disliked though still called his friend. During these sinister days in Côte d’Ivoire, the word “friend” had multiple meanings, especially when your “friend” was married to the younger sister of Simone Gbagbo, wife of the president and one of the fiercest ultra-nationalists in the country. Michel Legré was the type of friend who could indeed protect Kieffer. But in the wrong circumstances, he could also help to destroy him.
Friends of all kinds were important to Kieffer. The whorl of people he contacted regularly were the sources of the energy that drove his life. And yet few could claim to know him well, or understand what motivated him. He ate too much, he smoked heavily, he thrived on stress, he obsessed over details. As he forced his way into the inner sanctums of Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa world; as he pursued the cocoa bosses and exposed their corruption; as he disseminated damning information about the most dangerous people in the country, all of his “friends” began to wonder if he had a private death wish.
Legré finally showed up, but he wasn’t alone. The eight uniformed men accompanying him materialized as though from nowhere. They grabbed Kieffer, forced him into one of two four-by-four vehicles with no licence plates and fishtailed out of the parking lot at top speed. Kieffer’s two mobile telephones—his lifeline—suddenly went dead. He was marooned, isolated from the protective circle of collaborators, colleagues, spies, informers, former wives, lovers, journalists and cocoa bosses who made up his complex and treacherous universe.
GAK disappeared into the haze of the hot subtropical afternoon. His phlegmy, cigarette-singed voice would never be heard again; his round fleshy face would never be seen again. The bear of a man who never stopped moving and never stopped asking questions would never exasperate his friends again. The last, best champion of the cocoa farmers of Côte d’Ivoire vanished without a trace, as completely and unexplainably absent as if he’d never been there.
Baudelaire Mieu was surprised when he didn’t hear from GAK on Friday, and when Saturday morning rolled around without a call he became alarmed. Mieu is an Ivorian journalist, an impish-looking man in his twenties with a mouthful of conflicted teeth that he covers with his hand when he smiles. He is one moment bashful and the next aggressive, but under Kieffer’s influence he had become more confident. He collaborated with his mentor on many touchy stories that Mieu wouldn’t have had the courage to do alone, and they put out some damning reports together. But the partnership went deeper than just publishing: Mieu admired GAK more than anyone he had ever met. And Kieffer thought of Mieu almost as a son.
Baudelaire Mieu was twenty-two when GAK came into his life and his neighbourhood. Kieffer moved into an apartment in the Cocody district with his most recent wife, a Ghanaian princess named Lady Atta Afua, better known as Rita. She had three children whom Kieffer had adopted. GAK was a bon vivant and a bundle of contradictions. He passionately loved both fine wine and cold beer, Handel and John Lennon, contemporary politics and medieval history.
Mieu became a fixture in Kieffer’s home, hanging out whenever he could. GAK would talk endlessly while he lit one Dunhill cigarette off the butt of the previous one, letting the ashes fall on the carpet. He sat on the floor, eschewing furniture as too conventional. His friends often had the impression that Kieffer considered himself more African than European or Canadian, a simple peasant and not a middle-class bourgeois. But he always had his computer on, another link with his Network, through which he shared information and challenged authority any way he could. His mobile phones were constantly ringing. Kieffer would leap to his feet and move around the room like a restless animal but would quickly end up wheezing, his weak heart pounding. Though he was only fifty-four, Kieffer’s lifestyle had taken a toll on his body.
As for Mieu, his life was at a difficult crossroads. His father had just died. His wife and little girl had been caught up in the violence of western Côte d’Ivoire during a visit there, and they were forced to flee. What Kieffer was able to give Baudelaire was hope—filling his heart and soul with the idea that things in Côte d’Ivoire could change.
“A lot of journalists hated GAK because of the way he worked,” Mieu says. “But I loved it.”
When explosive documents materialized, Kieffer would publish quickly just to get the information before the public. He barged around the precincts of the cocoa industry, demanding answers from people known to kill for less than being asked irritating questions by nosy journalists. He went far beyond the boundaries of what other reporters considered “objective” journalism. According to Mieu, Kieffer adamantly believed that the Ivorian miracle could and should be revived. But it had to be redirected to profit the primary producers and reduce the privileges of the cocoa bosses and the multinationals. He was an idealist, and the young, impressionable Mieu loved him for it.
Mieu knew that Kieffer was meeting with Legré on Friday afternoon, and he was also aware that Kieffer planned to leave soon after to go to Ghana for the weekend. Rita returned home often, and Kieffer would occasionally join her in Ghana when he felt the need to “lay low” for a while. Mieu went around to Kieffer’s house, but there was nobody home. A domestic worker knew only that he had left for work as usual on Friday morning in his car. Mieu contacted Rita in Ghana, but Kieffer wasn’t there. Word of his absence spread quickly. The silence from his lifeline—the cellphones and the laptop—was uncharacteristic and ominous.
“He never went one day without calling me,” says Mieu. “I knew there was something wrong.” Mieu called the French Embassy.
Guy-André Kieffer had been a thorn in the side of French diplomats for a long time, sometimes making life miserable for bureaucrats as far away as the foreign ministry at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris. France was trying to hold on to its influence in Côte d’Ivoire, formerly the jewel in its colonial crown. Ideas of Empire die slowly, and Côte d’Ivoire bequeathed to France some fading sense of its former grandeur. It’s true that Côte d’Ivoire contributed billions of euros in profits to French businesses, but the country is also a hub of French influence in West Africa, a distant outpost of French language and culture. Recent discoveries of significant oil deposits in Côte d’Ivoire were also of great interest to international businessmen.
The Linas-Marcoussis Agreement, signed and dated in a Paris rugby arena, was supposed to heal the wounds of the warring north and south, but it had given Paris a questionable amount of sway over Ivorian affairs of state. What worried the French government more than the war was the ultra-nationalism stirred by Simone Gbagbo, given forceful expression in the racist ideology of Ivoirité, which was also turned against the French. Into these troubled waters, where everyone was accustomed to swimming cautiously, splashed Guy-André Kieffer.
In particular, Kieffer had incurred the wrath of Paul Antoine Bohoun Bouabré, the Ivorian Minister of Finance and the Economy and among the richest and most powerful people in the country. Bohoun Bouabré was one of GAK’s chief targets. Kieffer exposed the minister’s business deals and reported on his known—and previously unknown—diversion of cocoa funds into private interests. He often buttonholed the man in public places, mostly in the minister’s own office building, where, much to the chagrin of the minister, Kieffer had many “friends.” Bohoun Bouabré had threatened Kieffer in the past, and most Ivorians knew he was not a man to mess with.
But Kieffer also pursued Victor Nembellissini, the
director of the National Investment Bank and the man who had his hands on Côte d’Ivoire’s vast cocoa fortunes, which Kieffer believed should be in the hands of the cocoa farmers. Both of these men were tight with Kieffer’s arch-enemy, Simone Gbagbo, whose persuasive powers over the president were considered the reason the head of state had abandoned his plans for reforms to limit government corruption. GAK couldn’t have picked a more menacing group of people to antagonize. The French Embassy had grown accustomed to their complaints.
Now Kieffer had disappeared, which was a problem for French President Jacques Chirac and the Foreign Office. The disappearance of a French national, well known to the international media, possibly kidnapped on orders from the highest offices in the government of Côte d’Ivoire, presented delicate diplomatic challenges. And the situation was being complicated by reports from Ivorian journalists that two members of the French foreign ministry had arrived in Abidjan just hours before Kieffer was kidnapped and probably knew more about the abduction than they were prepared to admit.
The French Embassy did what embassies do when pressed for answers to awkward questions: It went silent. Kieffer’s friends—his Network—were calling embassy contacts, but nobody was answering the phones. It was, after all, the weekend.
On Sunday, someone in the Kieffer Network intercepted a police radio report about the discovery of a body on a road on the outskirts of Abidjan, that of a white man. After further inquiries, the police said they had taken the corpse to the hospital at six in the evening and that a representative from either the French or the Canadian Embassy was on the way to help with formal identification.
By seven that evening, the body of the still unidentified dead white man had vanished.
On a late Monday afternoon, Sébastien Kieffer was finishing another in a long series of exasperating days when the phone rang in his east-end Montreal apartment. His young daughter, Vivienne, born when Sébastien was only twenty-three and not yet ready for large responsibilities, needed a lot of time and attention. Besides being a single father, Sébastien was studying for a physiotherapy certificate. He was exhausted from daily classes and his nighttime job as a waiter. The phone call was about his father.