by Carol Off
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.
Kieffer, as a born-again reporter, was even more contemptuous of rules. Though contributors to La Lettre are supposed to be anonymous—they often publish information that could put people’s lives in danger if the source was known—Kieffer introduced himself to people as a freelancer for the paper, much to Glaser’s unease. “GAK was writing under pseudonyms for the local press as well,” says Glaser with exasperation. “Things would turn up in the Ivorian press that were word for word what he had submitted to La Lettre.”
As Côte d’Ivoire descended into xenophobia, war and the tyranny of death squads in 2002, GAK took up his old job with a crusader’s zeal. He became the front man for the Network, most of whose members were active behind the scenes and even in government offices. They would give him information; he would get it into print while protecting his sources, including Ivorian journalists who were too afraid to publish it themselves. Sometimes, the Network would disseminate information informally to a broad circle of diplomats, politicians, aid workers and foreign journalists, in the hope that it would eventually reach someone with the power and inclination to do something about it. It was a deadly game, but Kieffer pursued it fearlessly. “People said that GAK didn’t care about his safety. That for some reason he no longer cared to live and that’s why he was so cavalier,” says Baudelaire Mieu. “But he loved life. He just hated the corruption.”
One way or another, Kieffer exposed schemes for diverting cocoa money to myriad enterprises with little or no benefit for the poor Ivorians who produced the country’s best cash
crop. Money that properly belonged in funds to support the market price for the farmers was being collected by the new regulatory agencies and used for weapons purchases. The new agencies were taxing the life out of the cocoa producers. They were sinking deeper into poverty even when prices were strong.
The information collected by the Network and reported by Kieffer gradually revealed a tangled conspiracy involving extortion, the diversion of cocoa and coffee shipments to offshore companies (some with ties to companies registered on the Canadian stock exchange), and financing for French and Kosovo-Albanian mercenaries who were brought to Côte d’Ivoire by the Americans to fight Islamic militants in rebel-held territories. Many of the stories involved Pastor Moïse Koré, a mysterious Rasputin-like character said to be Gbagbo’s spiritual advisor and a man with strong connections to right-wing American politicians.
One report led to an international police investigation into a complex money-laundering scheme, known as the Comstar affair, run through a mobile phone company. A network of foreign companies, registered in the Virgin Islands and Belgium, with close ties to the Gbagbo regime, imported prepaid phone cards, which they declared to Ivorian customs at a highly inflated value. Real money from cocoa profits was then funnelled through the company books to various secret destinations—including Liberia, where the laundered funds found their way to opponents of the Charles Taylor regime.
Then there was the equally opaque Magnific A Services operation, a financial group ostensibly based in Los Angeles that collaborated with Lebanese import/export companies and the Italian Mafia to launder money through a phony tomato-processing factory in Côte d’Ivoire.
The most intriguing investigation linked an Israeli financial company called the Lev Mendel Group to Simone Gbagbo, who was a company director in Côte d’Ivoire. With the patronage of the first lady, Lev CI became a private partner with the National Investment Bank of Côte d’Ivoire in managing the finances of the cocoa filière. The partnership enabled the bank to divert cocoa money to the president’s wife. The bank president, Victor Nembellissini, is a close associate of both the Gbagbo family and the powerful minister Bohoun Bouabré.
In July 2002, Kieffer published details of a European Union investigation that exposed the shady management of ANAPROCI, the big cocoa farmer’s cooperative that was notorious among the farmers for diverting profits into other enterprises. The head of ANAPROCI, Henry Amouzou, publicly challenged the Gbagbo regime “to get rid of” Kieffer or he would do it himself. But those who wanted to get rid of Kieffer were forming a long queue.
Before he disappeared, GAK told Antoine Glaser that he was on to something even bigger but he didn’t yet have the proof he needed. Glaser has no idea what it was.
A cloak of silence and secrecy enveloped the investigation in the following weeks after the journalist’s disappearance, with the French and Ivorian governments seemingly in collaboration to cover up the Kieffer Affair. Aline Richard at La Tribune in Paris, working with others in Abidjan, pushed for answers at the Elysée and the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, where she was sure that people knew more about the case than they were letting on. “I just wanted my government to do its work,” she says. Richard organized the “Truth for Guy-André Kieffer Association,” a group of concerned friends and journalists who staged rallies in Paris. The international group Reporters Without Borders put out numerous media releases about the failure of authorities both in France and Côte d’Ivoire to pursue an investigation of Kieffer’s disappearance.
Osange Silou-Kieffer, GAK’s second ex-wife and mother to his daughter, became one of his most vocal champions. She took up the cause of his disappearance with a vengeance. Silou-Kieffer is a skilled agitator from the same political school as her former husband. She’s short and stocky with a round face and large black eyes that flash fire when she talks passionately—and when she speaks of the disappearance of Guy-André, she is the embodiment of passion. Her public statements in Paris were calculated to embarrass the French government, but she also flew to Abidjan and met Laurent Gbagbo, who, she says, put his hand on his heart and swore that he was sure her husband was still alive. An Ivorian newspaper that is the voice of Gbagbo’s Front Populaire Ivoirien party reported that Kieffer was living in Ghana, where he had fled for his own safety. An anonymous caller told Osange that rebels had kidnapped Kieffer and he was secretly being held in a stronghold close to the Malian border. “I listened politely,” Osange told reporters, “but I resented it as an insult to my intelligence.”
She deftly dispelled rumours and innuendo about her ex-husband while making it clear that she felt it was the Ivorian government’s behaviour that needed investigating, not GAK’s. She told the French media that her husband (no mention was ever made that they were not still married) had many enemies, but one name came up repeatedly in their frequent communications—that of Paul Antoine Bohoun Bouabré. “I don’t know if he is mixed up with this affair,” she told reporters carefully but deliberately.
As Silou-Kieffer took up the crusade from Paris, Rita, his Ghanaian-born wife, faded into the background, fearing for her own life and descending into poverty. Kieffer’s friends and associates found themselves under constant threat. Guy-André’s brother Bernard emerged as another pleading voice, issuing press releases asking for information about his brother’s fate. The extended family, spread out over three continents, kept up the pressure, young Sébastien doing all he could to push the Canadian government in Ottawa for help.
Eventually, this ad hoc coalition of crusading women, foreign journalists, well-informed insiders from the Network, family members and worried friends had an impact at the Quai d’Orsay. The French government suddenly abandoned its strategy of demonizing Kieffer and turned to damage control. President Jacques Chirac had called Laurent Gbagbo shortly after the kidnapping to inquire what Côte d’Ivoire was doing about it. (There has never been a similar inquiry from the Canadian government.) But there had been nothing more. In mid-May, a month after the aborted meeting at the Prima Centre, the Ministry of Justice in Paris appointed a judge, Patrick Ramaël, to investigate Kieffer’s disappearance.
Judge Ramaël was no stranger to Ivorian politics. France had sent him to investigate the murder of Jean Hélène, the Radio France reporter shot dead by police six months before the kidnapping of Kieffer. Ramaël’s unsubtle nickname among policemen was “Le Bulldog.”
The judge made his way to Abidjan in May 2004, bringing with him an entourage of police, forensic investigators and detectives who pushed the Ivorian police into the background. Tudor Hera, the front man for the Canadian Embassy on the Kieffer file, was astonished at the size and strength of the French police probe: “Whatever people were saying about France not caring about this operation, it certainly didn’t appear that way when Ramaël arrived.”
One of the first orders of business for Ramaël was to get telephone records. With a team of French experts and the most modern technology available, the investigators sorted through a million calls a day for a month in order to trace people’s movements. From this, the French police got their first leads.
The Ivorians gave Judge Ramaël permission to question Michel Legré, the last person known to have seen GAK alive. Legré denied any responsibility, but his mobile phone records suggested otherwise, as investigators tracked his movements through indisputable satellite footprints. The records indicated that, on April 16 at 1:30 p.m., Legré was in the Prima shopping centre zone, where he presumably met Guy-André Kieffer; at 4:00, he was in the area of the ministry offices, including the office of Minister of Finance Bohoun Bouabré; at 7:00, he was back at the Prima Centre shopping plaza; and at 9:00, he was at Houphouët-Boigny International Airport, where Guy-André Kieffer’s little Japanese-made car with the Canadian-flag logo was later discovered, abandoned in the parking lot. Legré’s phone records also showed he was in continuous contact with people close to the minister of finance, including on the day that Kieffer disappeared.
With so much incriminating e
vidence, Ramaël was able to break Legré, who gave the French magistrate the names of eight people he claimed were involved in Kieffer’s abduction. The eight were all part of the inner circle of Bohoun Bouabré. The list included the finance minister’s cabinet director, Aubert Zohoré; Victor Nembellissini, head of the National Investment Bank (the one with Simone Gbagbo’s company Lev CI as its partner); Pastor Moïse Koré, Gbagbo’s advisor and chargé d’affaires for Defence; Patrice Bailly, head of security; and two senior military officers. Under questioning, Legré told Ramaël that at 4:00 he had indeed been in the zone of government ministries, as his phone record indicates, and had gone to the office of Aubert Zohoré, where Bohoun Bouabré himself gave Legré an envelope full of West African francs (amounting to 1,500 euros), calling them “professional fees.”
The case was definitely pointing towards a high-level murder by agents of the state, rather than a revenge killing for a bad business deal. Kieffer’s computer was found in the apartment of an associate of Legré’s. GAK’s friends knew that he was never far from his precious laptop, the electronic hub of his Network, and he would never entrust it to any third party, replete as it was with damning documents. Ramaël discovered that someone had opened the computer and attempted to access its files half an hour after Kieffer was bundled into the four-by-four in the Prima parking lot. Whoever abducted the journalist did so because of the man’s work, not his personal business affairs, concluded the investigators, who also discovered that Kieffer’s hard drive had been wiped clean. No matter what the rumour mill was spitting out, Kieffer’s disappearance had all the hallmarks of a political assassination.