by Carol Off
The pressure was now on the Côte d’Ivoire government to do something. Predictably, they found a conspicuous scapegoat. Prosecutors charged Michel Legré with complicity in kidnapping, illegal detention and murder, even though no body had been found. Reporters Without Borders called it an effort to focus attention on one person instead of pursuing all those Legré had named as being complicit. It was revealing that the Ivorian police also charged Legré with criminal defamation of character for giving up the names of eight influential Ivorian men—an act that blocked any further efforts by the French magistrate to get Legré to tell him more about the roles played by those individuals.
Legré went to jail, but this was probably a blessing; life behind bars was safer for Legré than life on the street. During the November riots following the French destruction of Ivorian military aircraft, demonstrators tore down the doors of the Maison d’Arrêt et de Correction d’Abidjan (MACA prison). The prisoners seized the opportunity presented by this unofficial amnesty and fled—all except for one. Legré didn’t want to go.
Ramaël, for one, wanted him out. Interviews in prison were controlled by the presence of guards and government minders. But when Ramaël attempted to have Legré transferred to Paris for questioning, his request was blocked both by Ivorian authorities and those of France.
Despite his famous tenacity, “Le Bulldog” Ramaël would have nothing but trouble in his pursuit of the truth, and not only because of obstructions in Côte d’Ivoire. The French government found just as many ways to delay his work. Requests for information that had to go through the Quai d’Orsay were never transferred to Abidjan. As the judge narrowed his investigation to focus on the Bohoun Bouabré circle, the Quai d’Orsay vetoed his next visit to Côte d’Ivoire, citing security concerns. His bosses later relented under pressure.
Ramaël kept going back, tackling the obstacles, only to find that his targets were constantly moving farther away. He wanted, most of all, to interview the two military personnel on Legré’s list of eight, who may have led the abduction. One of them was the head of security for the first lady, Simone Gbagbo. and the other was Bertin Kadet, counsellor to the president for defence affairs. Neither would agree to a meeting, and the Ivorian government would do nothing to help. As far as the regime was concerned, they had their man—Michel Legré.
The French investigators, like countless Europeans before them, were also up against nature itself. “The heat and humidity destroy everything,” says one person who was on the inside of the investigation. “Fingerprints, for instance. They literally melt in the heat.” When police found Kieffer’s car at the Abidjan airport, it was obvious that whoever had driven it there was much smaller than Kieffer, as the front seat was pulled up close to the steering wheel. But the old car had been in the sun for two weeks and was effectively sanitized. Investigators could learn nothing more from it.
Ramaël used every weapon in his arsenal to try to get to the targets of his investigation, and he also had some lucky breaks. When Bohoun Bouabré’s communications minister was passing through Paris on business in early August, Ramaël had him arrested. Under questioning, Léonard Guédé confirmed the involvement of the eight collaborators on Legré’s list. Guédé also admitted that he had personally and publicly threatened Kieffer’s life, in the company of Victor Nembellissini, shortly before the kidnapping. Police searched Guédé’s Paris apartment, where they found a substantial computer file on Kieffer. Guédé couldn’t be charged under French law and was soon released from custody. In any case, Guédé and Legré were not the people Ramaël was after: His sights were set on people much higher up the political food chain.
With new momentum, Ramaël returned to Abidjan in October when he was finally able to interview the special advisor to the president, Bertin Kadet, as well as the shadowy spiritual advisor, Pastor Moïse Koré; Victor Nembellissini of the National Investment Bank; and Aubert Zohoré, the chef du cabinet to Bohoun Bouabré. People close to the investigation say Ramaël achieved amazing results. He was pushy, aggressive and very effective. “But at some point,” says one insider, “the momentum just stopped. It became blocked. There was just no further he could go. Why? He speculates that maybe the judge was just getting too close to the top.
Ramaël had also become concerned for his own life. He had received several death threats. They might have been discounted as a crude kind of obstruction but for what had recently happened to a fellow Frenchman on an investigative mission in Côte d’Ivoire.
Xavier Ghelber was a lawyer who had been sent to Abidjan by the European Union (EU) to perform an audit on the cocoa filière. Hundreds of millions of euros were disappearing into an African void, and the EU had been trying to get to the bottom of what clearly seemed to be systemic corruption.
In November 2004, a group of armed soldiers stormed into Ghelber’s hotel room during the night and took the lawyer into custody. When they attempted to put a sack over Ghelber’s head in the hotel hallway, he resisted. During the struggle a rifle went off and a bullet ricocheted off a hotel wall and severely wounded a soldier. In a kind of Keystone Kops panic, the soldiers took Ghelber’s cellphone and called someone to ask for instructions. The Ivorian soldiers then took Ghelber to military headquarters, where he was threatened with execution but was finally released. When French investigators examined the phone record later, it revealed that the call was placed to the president’s office, specifically, to the bodyguards of Laurent Gbagbo.
Xavier Ghelber survived, and French soldiers whisked him out of the country for his own safety. But it was a lurid illustration of how this world worked—this world of cocoa into which Ramaël was poking his European nose and into which Guy-André Kieffer had vanished, leaving no trace.
Judge Ramaël returned to Côte d’Ivoire four times, reassuring the Kieffer family that he would not stop until he found the truth, even if it took him the rest of his days. Bernard Kieffer’s plea for information about his brother’s murder eventually yielded some results, as a number of secret informers risked their lives to feed the investigators information—all of it leading, according to Bernard Kieffer, to the highest offices in Côte d’Ivoire. More arrests are imminent, according to the family, but members of the Network have their doubts that the truth will ever come out. “Not until Gbagbo is gone,” they say of the man who once seemed as full of promise for a new Côte d’Ivoire as Le Vieux himself.
Chapter Eleven
STOLEN FRUIT
Developing countries have been forced into a horse race with the rest of the world in which the thoroughbreds have already churned up the turf before their heavily handicapped horse has left the starting gate. The rules of the Global Trade Handicap Race were, of course, designed by the owners of the best horses.”
—PETER ROBBINS, Stolen Fruit, 2003
IF ABIDJAN COULD BE SEEN ONLY FROM A DISTANCE, or through rose-coloured lenses, one might have the idea that it is a truly modern African city. It cuts a smart, contemporary skyline of skyscrapers and office buildings, with foreign boutiques and a buzzing neon nightlife of bars and casinos. The massive Hôtel Ivoire, with its tennis courts, swimming pools and skating rink, sits on a charming blue lagoon, where long wooden fishing boats bob all day long. But a closer look reveals a fashionable city gone to seed: broken pavement, buildings crumbling in the thick humidity. The lagoons are garbage-strewn and much in need of dredging. The Hôtel Ivoire is shabby, the swimming pools are drained, and the skating rink, once kept smooth and glossy even in soaring heat, is only a distant memory.
When Félix Houphouët-Boigny built modern Abidjan, the city offered the promise of an African future as prosperous and as culturally alive as any in Europe. Now it’s just another unhappy place with a sharp divide between the very rich and the desperately impoverished. The elite neighbourhoods with their patisseries and fine restaurants are guarded against petty thieves; the downtown streets are clogged with the expensive cars of organized crime bosses; white people never go out alone, and some don�
�t venture out at all; refugees who have flooded in from the countryside to escape poverty and death squads try to shield themselves against more poverty and death squads.
At the fortified Canadian embassy office in central Abidjan, a team of mostly Québécois diplomats divides its time between documenting Côte d’Ivoire’s breathtaking free fall into the world of failed states, watching out for Canadians, and wondering at what point they should join the other foreigners who have fled the country. Being Canadian helps them, but only if they have time to explain to a potential attacker that they are not from France. And at some point, if the violence gets out of control, being Canadian won’t be much of a safeguard either.
This is probably the most sympathetic Canadian embassy I have encountered in my travels. They are obliged to tell me, they say, that I should not travel around the countryside asking a lot of questions about the cocoa filière. But since I insist that this is what I must do, we exchange all the numbers we have, including those of their homes, their mobiles and even satellite phones.
I first learn here that Guy-André Kieffer had been an important contact for this office for the few years before his disappearance. He was always willing to share information with his fellow citizens, though embassy staff knew that GAK’s facts might be a bit undigested. Benoît Gauthier, the embassy’s first secretary for political and cultural affairs, who replaced Tudor Hera in the summer of 2004, warns me that if I really must go around the country asking a lot of questions, I should take special care not to mention Kieffer. It’s not a safe topic.
This good advice proves not very useful, since everywhere I go it’s others who raise Kieffer’s name, usually by way of veiled threats. Just as in the days of Le Vieux, cocoa producers play key roles in government and bureaucracy. But Laurent Gbagbo and his cronies have essentially turned the country’s lucrative cocoa sector into a source of funds for pet projects and personal enrichment. The corruption is widespread and systemic. But even the blatant abuses are brushed aside in bland denials and allegations of external conspiracies.
Michel Yehoun is a large, blustering man, educated at the University of Dallas. I met him at the Atelier on the Responsibility of Producers in the Battle Against Dangerous Child Labour in the Cocoa Culture, the grandly titled conference where I first learned about the Oumé pilot project. The parking lot is chockablock with expensive SUVs. Cocoa bosses, who blame foreign influences for all their problems, dominate the event, chowing down on the luscious buffets that are replenished every few hours. Yehoun is especially dismissive of allegations regarding the exploitation of children. The issue of child labour is a fiction, he says, a tactic in a perverse campaign by powerful NGOs trying to raise money from gullible Europeans and North Americans.
Yehoun is overdressed for the occasion. In an effort to emulate the American business people he admires, he’s wearing a long-sleeved herringbone shirt with a dark tie and a sports jacket, plus his trademark felt hat. The outside temperature at Grand-Bassam, the seaside resort area where the lavish conference takes place, soars into the forties.
“I love Americans,” he declares. “Especially Texans. It’s every man for himself in Texas. No laws. Land of liberty. Do you know, there are no beggars anywhere in that state?” he tells the Africans sitting with us at a patio table near the Gulf of Guinea. “That’s because everyone is hustling. Everyone’s working.” Yehoun hasn’t met the Bush family yet, but he can’t wait. He owns a house in Texas and an apartment in Washington, so he expects that one day he is destined to cross paths with the great George W. Yehoun travels often to the United States, where he’s involved in a number of deals he won’t discuss with me.
Yehoun has profited handsomely from Gbagbo’s restructuring of the cocoa filière. He is vice-president of the FDPCC—Fonds de Développement et de Promotion des Activités des Producteurs de Café et de Cacao—one of the key para-public organizations with authority to collect money from the cocoa and coffee growers but with no responsibility to account for the spending. The money is to be used at the discretion of the cocoa producers for public projects such as roads, wells and schools and for short-term loans to help farmers through rough economic periods. But it’s difficult to find any evidence of the benefits of this money in the poverty-ridden cocoa groves of Côte d’Ivoire.
The funds are supposed to be distributed through the small farmer’s cooperatives in the regions, but the cocoa producers are poorly organized and powerless to face the FDPCC to use the money for those public projects. One of Kieffer’s most shocking allegations was that FDPCC funds were being systematically diverted through a series of fictitious cooperatives into the direct control of Laurent Gbagbo’s circle. A lot of it ends up in the hands of arms dealers. Gbagbo justifies spending the farmers’ money on guns by claiming it’s for their own security.
Yehoun is a master of the Ivorian blame game, holding others responsible for the appalling prices the farmers get for their cocoa beans. Yehoun says it’s the multinational corporations who are responsible for the corruption in Côte d’Ivoire, ignoring the fact that his own cooperative supplies beans to Cargill. When I ask him to explain how the multinationals are to blame for the plight of the farmers, he quickly shifts his criticism to the media. The press is a large part of the problem, he says, turning to Ange Aboa, the Reuters reporter who is with me.
Aboa is well known among Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa bosses for his coverage, and Yehoun accuses him of a hidden agenda. Negative reporting on corruption in cocoa cuts into his profits, he snaps at Aboa. “Who are you really working for?” he demands. Then, apropos of nothing, he raises the forbidden subject: “Where is Guy-André Kieffer now? Is he under here?” Yehoun pulls up the tablecloth and peeks under, then looks up, laughing. “Kieffer was a spy,” he says, chillingly. “And you know what happens to spies.”
The cocoa filière forms a complex organigram of agencies. Kieffer’s Network has produced a chart that tries to simplify the money trail from the primary producers into the void of corruption, much of which has been confirmed by a series of audit reports authorized by the European Union. Kieffer’s associates provided me with a copy of this document to help me understand the mechanics of the process. The Dead Sea scrolls would be easier to decipher. A series of arrows represents a money flow from the hands of the farmers into three principal entities: the FDPCC, for which Michel Yehoun works, the Bourse du Café et du Cocao (BCC) and the Fonds de Régulation et de Contrôle Café-Cacao (FRC). More arrows lead away from these agencies into a maze of private interests and then consolidate into a thicker arrow pointing towards the National Investment Bank. From there a very large arrow leads to a discretionary fund that is under the control of Gbagbo. Some of it then goes to international financial institutions, thus keeping the World Bank at bay. Most of the balance ends up in private hands or the various enterprises of the political elite.
It’s important to remember that this is money extracted from farmers in the form of taxes and fees, which are supposed to be redirected back into projects that will improve the lives of people and communities already impoverished by exploitation and pitiful prices. They are told that the funds will be used to stabilize the price of cocoa beans and help them through inevitable sags in the market. But as much as two-thirds of their potential income from cocoa farming vanishes, in the form of “special” levies, into the coffers of government and the elite para-public agencies for purposes about which the farmers know little or nothing. No matter how much liberalization affects the cocoa prices, the tariffs imposed by Gbagbo’s regime are a major cause of the chronic poverty in the countryside.
As head of the Coffee and Cocao Bourse (BCC), Lucien Tapé Doh is one of the most formidable members of the filière. The waiting room in his office is full of people with needs who all jump to their feet nervously when he enters the room. Tapé Doh ushers Ange and me into his inner sanctum, along with another very anxious-looking couple. “Just a moment,” he tells us and gestures to chairs. He makes a call on his mob
ile phone and barks an order: “Il faut que tu payes tout de suite!” (You must pay immediately!) He clicks off the phone and tells the couple that their money will be in their bank account the next day. They are hugely grateful.
Tapé Doh is a squat round man who wears traditional attire: loosely fitted colourful shirt and pants. But his clothing is much too big even for his extensive girth, and he seems to be lost in its floral fabric. I detect a familiar sweet smell in the office as we wait for him to adjust papers on his desk, and I notice a large slab of chocolate cake, melting in the heat. It’s decorated with a bulbous sugary orange object that looks like a miniature pumpkin but, on closer examination, is supposed to represent a cocoa pod. The inscription on the cake reads “Côte d’Ivoire—Land of Cocoa.” It’s odd to see and smell real chocolate here, since almost no one eats the stuff in Africa, in part because it’s too expensive, but also because it turns to liquid much too quickly. (In an effort to find chocolate that could be sent with U.S. troops into the deserts of Kuwait in 1991—a highly lucrative contract—the Mars Corporation tried to develop a bar that could take the heat. The people most famous for the confection that “melts in your mouth and not in your hand” found it was difficult not to compromise the taste and texture when you changed the fundamental chemistry of chocolate. As the Marquis de Sade knew from his suppositories, solid chocolate liquefies quickly in warm places.)