by Ofir Drori
and on my lips will wither a question.
I locked the flat and boarded a bus to Jerusalem, with music pouring from my headphones. Hope began to reach and curl through my thoughts like a plant finally put in the sun. When I arrived in Jerusalem, with the ring on my finger and old stone walls passing outside the windows of the bus, I was lit up by the urge to share my life with Rachel, to watch her invite neighbors for dinner, to have her encourage me to visit Future in Belabo again, to roam together in search of street boys, as in Nairobi, in hopes of persuading them to abandon their sniffing glue. I’d expected that my long search for purpose would fill me to the point of forgetting her. That my feelings were undiminished made clear the rightness of our time together in the past and the rightness of our being together again—and in marriage.
Dry-mouthed, I put down my bag at a public phone, feeling the pulse in my cheek as I dialed the number of Einat, the only friend Rachel and I shared. I spun the ring on my finger and recited my opening lines so Einat wouldn’t stop me before I began.
She answered.
“Hey, Einat, it’s me. It’s Ofir. Listen, I know I promised never to talk to you about this. I know. But it’s important. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, of Rachel, and you know—I still love her. I love her and I have something to—”
“Ofir!” Einat said.
“Yes but listen to what I’m saying. I want—”
“Ofir!”
“Yes.”
“Ofir. Rachel gets married next week.”
The moon shone on Marrakech with a light I would have once tried to capture. Off from the conference for an evening, I was finally out of my worn suit, roaming the markets where traders had once sold slaves. Moroccans wandered past fortune-tellers, acrobats, boxing children. The air was spiced with incense. I looked from side to side, trying to take it all in, the fabrics for sale, the peacock feathers, leather lamps, lizards in a wooden cage, painted camel bones, turtles, and a fire blower. The market was so frenetic and disorienting, I felt like Grandpa Moshe in the days my sister and I had forced him to play computer games.
An old blind man held out his hand to the stream of indifferent passersby. He sang, but too softly to gain any measure over the low roar of the market. I joined a crowd around a drum circle. As the beat vibrated into my chest, I understood that years of fighting in Cameroon had left me more fulfilled than I’d ever been but also emotionally depleted, as though what I’d accomplished had been as exhausting as screaming at someone I loved or was struggling to love. As I strolled through the market, past Moroccans ringing a storyteller, I doubted I would be able to hold on to the thought, but for a moment I understood that my ceremonies for Rachel were rituals for a ghost, the desperate urge to correct an imbalance in myself.
I was flooded then with so many moments of happiness with her—of flying in Uganda and our first kiss at the Monkey Park—wild happiness, the happiness of storms. The old stone walls of Marrakech reminded me of Jerusalem and for an instant I was there, in the Old City with Rachel’s hand on my leg and the full moon so low it seemed to be touching the town, as the moon was now low over Marrakech. I thought, If I stop giving what I have to memories, perhaps I can give to someone new and relearn to see more of what isn’t harsh. Or perhaps the strength for this is beyond me.
I returned to the singing blind man, pulled the silver ring off my finger and placed it in his outstretched hand. Then I turned and walked on through the market.
FEBRUARY 2008
Cameroon
APPRENTICE SORCERERS IN THE SHADOWS
Paul Biya, in power since 1982, declared that he wanted Cameroon’s constitution amended to remove term limits. The president had long been accused by the opposition of being a dictator who’d left the country crippled by corruption and poverty despite its vast natural wealth. Media outlets discussed whether the move to change the constitution was undemocratic. Biya had said that the constitutional limit on his ability to run for another term in 2011 “sits badly with the very idea of democratic choice.” Then he closed three radio stations and a television station. In the city of Douala, motorcycle taximen protested, and a riot broke out.
Three days earlier, I’d sent Barrister Mbuan to Douala, a lawyer working LAGA’s cases for the ministry. Trapped in his Douala hotel room because of the rioting, shouting into the phone, he described the scene below his window, of motorcyclists wrestling policemen, bloodied faces, guns fired in the air, burning cars. Julius was scrambling to find officers to evacuate him when a cloud of teargas seeped in around the windows and doors of his hotel room, and Barrister Mbuan had to flee.
Deaths that day in Douala sparked student riots in the southwest and northwest provinces. The opposition party called for a rally, which Biya prohibited. As riots spread across Cameroon, I tried to maintain the routine of the office, for, as the army had taught, the routine protects you.
I’d moved LAGA and myself from Mendong to Vallée Nlongkak, within Yaoundé proper, and we worked out of a large flat that doubled as my home. For three years, LAGA had averaged one arrest per week of a major dealer for wildlife crime. Depending on the year, 87% to 97% of offenders had been behind bars from the day of the arrest, which was essential when the accused could disappear into a remote village or cross a border out of Cameroon. Vincent, the publishing titan, was running media pieces every day of every year. The LAGA family had grown to a dozen members, all on salary.
When taxi drivers in Yaoundé went on strike, I arranged for a man in a rented car to pick up the staff from their homes and bring them to the office. I was storing food—sacks of rice, sardines, onions, spaghetti, bottled water. The office balcony gave views of smoke rising from nearby streets. Some radio stations were broadcasting nothing but music. Others were silent.
I tried to maintain contact with our investigators, who were stuck in towns across the country. The government was attributing the riots to rising food and fuel prices. “We can already say there are more than one hundred dead,” said Madeleine Afite of Maison des Droits de L’Homme. “I’ve been told that I’ve become a target since I’ve talked in public about the casualty toll. My car was smashed up last night.” No one knew whether Cameroon stood at the edge of revolution, a spontaneous uprising against the president. As rioting intensified, CRTV announced that Biya would give a speech.
“He has to acknowledge why people are in the streets,” Julius told me on the phone. He was helping to maintain order in west province.
When Paul Biya appeared on state television, he said, “… The apprentice sorcerers in the shadows who have handled these youths were not concerned about the risk they were running … To those responsible for manipulating the young for their own aims, I say that their attempts are doomed to failure. All legal means available to the government will be brought into play to ensure the rule of law.”
The next morning, though the opposition party had called on people to walk through Yaoundé wearing black, the streets were eerily empty. Kiosks were shuttered, most Cameroonians out of sight. Anxious on empty streets but wanting a hot meal, I went left toward the junction of Vallée Nlongkak. Military vehicles roared by, carrying soldiers. Armed men patrolled on foot. In the spot where a fish lady and meat man usually sold their food was a new army post fortified with sandbags. A soldier of Cameroon’s presidential guard gripped a mounted machinegun. And he wore an olive green uniform bearing in Hebrew the initials of the Israel Defense Forces.*
* Biya’s Presidential Guard was trained by an Israeli Colonel and was supplied military equipment by Israel.
APRIL 2008
Republic of Congo
FELA SAID, “I HAVE DEATH IN MY POUCH.”
“His name is Ikama. He’s an ivory dealer. But he’s the big one, the big fish,” the French investigator told me at a hotel in Brazzaville. “I’m not sure you can go after him. His carving skills are renowned. He’s well connected. He mentioned he supplies ministers and a colonel. He trades with West Africans. Chinese nationals
visit his workshop every week. But if we can take him down, it will have a real impact on the ivory trade.”
A year earlier, the investigator and I had bumped into each other at random in Kinshasa and taken a drink in a dark bar among Israeli diamond merchants. He’d been working undercover for TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network, cataloguing ivory for sale in African markets. In Cameroon he’d found that the ivory trade was feeling intense pressure from law enforcement and he’d even been chased out of a market for inquiring about ivory when in all the other countries he’d been welcomed. The data he’d collected he didn’t want dying in reports, so I’d given him a hidden camera.
“I’ve just come from Ikama’s workshop,” the investigator told me in his hotel room in Brazzaville. “Carvers there are using the usual dentistry tools. It smells of burned ivory. The workshop is at his house in the Ouenzé quarter. It’s a popular area, maybe not the safest place for an operation. You have a high wall around the compound, newly painted. It looks like a small fortress. Inside you’re trapped with no possibility to call anybody in the street.”
He drew me a diagram.
“Is he willing to supply the ivory somewhere else?” I said. “Outside the shop?”
“Ikama seems suspicious because I haven’t bought anything. VIPs and big dealers from Kinshasa usually come to collect their orders at his house. But if I can buy something, I know I can lure him out.”
“I’ll get you some Euros,” I said, “and you count them in front of him and calculate how much money is missing to complete the deal. We call it flashing. Then say you’ll meet him later today.”
The illegal trade of ivory was escalating under the umbrella of organized crime. At the Hong Kong port, a mobile x-ray scanner had revealed a hidden compartment in a shipping container holding 3.9 tons of ivory, ivory from more than three hundred elephants. The ship had sailed for Hong Kong from Douala, and the shell company that owned the container, Norkis Sarl, operated out of a private house in Yaoundé, in Bastos, not far from WWF. During our investigation, we discovered two more containers with false compartments, which I combed with a tiny brush. The DNA of the ivory chips, Dr. Samuel Wasser of the University of Washington matched with DNA in his database and traced to the rainforest in Gabon near the Congolese border. One container every three months had been sailing for Hong Kong with a hidden compartment packed with ivory. Three suspects, two of them Taiwanese nationals, fled Cameroon when the shipment was seized in Hong Kong. We arrested a Cameroonian accomplice whose testimony led to an indictment of the Taiwanese. But then the police commissioner released the man suddenly, and he disappeared. Later, in a house search, we found a receipt for funds sent by the Taiwanese to their Cameroonian workers who’d “managed” the situation with bribes. The receipt said, “Release Jean Claude in Douala, 500,000 CFA.” Cameroon received an Interpol Award for its investigation with LAGA, and our team was now seeking international arrest warrants.
Empowered by press in Europe, by an award received from CITES’ secretary general and by the continued enthusiasm of the international community, we’d decided it was time to replicate LAGA in the Republic of Congo. Luc Mathot, a Belgian and the coordinator of the Aspinall Foundation, had contacted me months earlier, enthusiastic about bringing wildlife law enforcement to the country. I’d traveled to Brazzaville with a plan to squeeze the building of a new organization into a month, by fostering relationships with the ministry, the police force, and the courts and by beginning recruitment. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and The United Nations Environment Programme were ready with financial support, and WCS, once closed to the idea of LAGA, had agreed to take part.
In the operation to arrest Ikama, I chose the restaurant inside the Hotel Hippocampe, which was shielded from the street and onlookers. The investigator had picked out more than $2,000 of worked ivory and persuaded Ikama to deliver it in town. Four officers on standby waited in a taxi outside the restaurant, which was deserted. I walked across a terrace toward the Chinese food buffet and took a table. A few meters away, just off the patio, was a broken swing set. At another table sat four men including two undercover gendarmes and Bonaventure, a ministry officer with jurisdiction in all of Congo. Wearing glasses and a fine gray suit, Bonaventure had the look of a statesman. We’d gotten to know each other at conferences where we’d often been the only participants involved with enforcement. He was on the Lusaka Agreement Taskforce.
I focused on the entrance and waited for Ikama.
A man in a blue cap appeared by the terrace. In his hand was a brownish bag as old and ripped as our undercover camera bags. He was a stout man, sweating, wearing tattered clothes, and he surveyed the tables, turned, walked a few meters, then stopped again. Something was wrong. According to the investigator, Ikama had been wearing a blue dress shirt earlier in the day, and I doubted he would have changed into old clothes for a sale. Maybe this man had been sent as a decoy. Or maybe it was Ikama. I called the investigator on my cell phone, fearing our target was about to slip away.
“Call him and find out where he is,” I said while watching the jittery gendarmes who seemed on the verge of leaping from their chairs to make an arrest—of potentially the wrong man. I hung up, waited. When he rang me back, the investigator said, “I called Ikama. He’s leaving his workshop. He’ll reach the restaurant in half an hour.”
I walked to Bonaventure’s table where each man was eyeing the entrance.
“It’s delayed,” I said.
“But it’s him with the brown bag, the heavy bag,” said a gendarme. “We go for him.”
“No,” I said, trying not to shout, “he’s not the one. Our target is coming.”
“You’re sure?”
Restless, I crossed the terrace to the parking lot and scanned for anyone loitering. A driver sat inside a car. He glanced over his shoulder at me, and I watched him, worried. When a Congolese man walked out of the restaurant to talk to him, I returned to Bonaventure’s table, unable to shake the feeling that something was off. Why was Ikama so late? Maybe someone had entered and talked to the waiters. I missed having Julius here, someone I could trust to act fast and improvise if things spun out of control.
“If the information is bad,” said a gendarme, “we can’t stay forever.”
I clenched my teeth. “Hang on. It won’t be long.”
I sat and looked at my phone and was about to get up again when I realized I was broadcasting nervousness. I refocused. A man entered in a blue dress shirt. He was distinguished and looked to be in his sixties. He carried a black plastic bag, the woven kind that always cut my hand when I filled them with too many plantains. I called the investigator and whispered, “Call him now. Say you just left the Hippocampe because you were waiting too long. Tell him you can return.”
I hung up, held my breath and watched. The phone chimed in Ikama’s hand.
I rang Bonaventure across the restaurant. “He’s the one.”
The men sprang from their chairs and strode toward Ikama, who didn’t move. Bonaventure seized the bag and pulled out a carving of a woman.
“That’s ivory,” a gendarme said.
“You need to come with us to the station,” said Bonaventure.
I circled Ikama as the taxi pulled up outside. The gendarmes put Ikama into the back seat with a pair of armed men, and Bonaventure and I followed them to the station.
I’d encouraged LAGA’s people to make our NGO a stopping point on the way to their own fights as independent activists. Arrey, an aspiring writer who I’d recruited for our management team, was working on books to educate children about AIDS and the environment. Eric, Vincent’s assistant, had registered an NGO with the intent of observing the coming election. Eric argued that efforts to promote democracy around election day ignored that Cameroonians participated in pseudo-democratic activities in everything from village women’s meetings to youth groups, where coerced voting was rampant, along with money influence and a lack of freedom of speech; and until these eve
ryday practices were eliminated, election day efforts were doomed. Anna, a linguist, was working on a project to document newspeak in the development and aid business. Saturday afternoons we reserved for debate, films, and presentations. And Cameroon’s Peace Corps decided to use our model for activism in their education program. Eunice was now studying in Europe. Galit was back in Israel, pursuing a masters in International Conflicts Resolution. And Marius had gotten a Ph.D. in France in environmental law, earning highest honors.
I faced Bonaventure at Congo’s central gendarmerie. I said, “From my investigator, I know the man has far more ivory at his house. We have to go and search there.”
“First,” Bonaventure said, “we need to interrogate him.”
“We cannot afford to lose time.”
I rallied the gendarmes. The operation with Ikama had been professional, and the men listened to me. “In Cameroon we do this every week. What we do now is continue with the information we have and search his house.”
Bonaventure began the interrogation, but then stopped and pulled me aside. “Ofir, I know this man. And everybody knows his son. I don’t know if you realize we’ve arrested a well-known man.” Bonaventure removed his glasses. “His son was a rebel leader in the war.”
“Then we can go to his house with a larger force,” I said.
“Ofir, his son could come here to the station with his own people, you understand? If we go to the house, he could meet us there. It could be a disaster.”
“There is ivory in his compound, and we need to apply the law.”
“Don’t push it, Ofir.”
Word spread through the station of the identity of the man in the corner wearing a fine blue shirt. His son, Marien Ikama, had been a rebel leader in the Forces Armées Congolaises or the Cobra militia. An officer told me that at war’s end, the president had executed many Cobra leaders. Other Cobras had been brought into the government, but questions remained about how many had disarmed.