Bitter Chocolate (25 page)

The worst cases were perpetuated by the Guere people, says Outtara, natives of central Côte d'Ivoire. “Even if the Guere gives you land, his family will come along and take it back. The Guere people told us they wanted to make a census so that they would know whose fields to take.” Such a census would presumably allow the Ivorians to know who was a foreigner, even if a family had been in the country for generations.

Ouattara heard there land was still available in the southwest, near the Liberian border, that no one had yet cleared and that would be suitable for
Theobroma
. A lot of Malians and Burkinabès had already relocated to this virgin territory, far from the more densely populated parts of the cocoa belt, and were attempting to start their farms again. But this was a perilously precarious place to be.

Just over the border, Charles Taylor, the mercurial warlord-president of Liberia, was conducting a reign of terror. Refugees
from Taylor's killing sprees escaped into Côte d'Ivoire, and it often seemed a real possibility that the Liberian conflict would, itself, spill over soon. Ouattara didn't know which way to turn. He was alarmed by the rancour and resentment of the Ivorians around him, and he feared the racist policies of Ivoirité, but he was also troubled by the threat of war. In the end, Ouattara gathered up his young wife and their one child and headed west, where he took up residence in a community made up almost entirely of Malians.

Blolekin is a village about thirty kilometres from Liberia, on the edge of the thick, dark rainforests and stunning national parks of a region called Man. Ouattara felt secure there. Not only did his countrymen surround him, but many of them were members of his own family. “My uncle was head of the village,” he says.

But peace in the region was an illusion. In September 2002, rebel soldiers from northern Côte d'Ivoire launched a
coup d'état
, sweeping down from the Malian border almost to the port city of Abidjan. They were later beaten back to Bouaké in the centre of the country, but the fighting continued. The rebels were of Malian descent, and they were reacting to the discriminatory policies of Ivoirité that had, among other evils, pitted the mostly Muslim north against the mostly Christian and Ivorian south. The front line between the two sides was now drawn through the heart of the cocoa belt.

Kader Ouattara listened to news reports of the war on the BBC and worried that his village would eventually become a battle zone. Blolekin was inside Ivorian-held territory, and he knew that its people, as Malians, would be regarded as enemies.

Almost simultaneously, fighting broke out to the west of their village, near Liberia. But Ouattara quickly realized it was not the same war. “It was about religion in the north,” says Ouattara—meaning Muslims fighting against Christians. “In our region, it was about land.” Ouattara says the Ivorians used the excuse of the conflict with the north to launch a land grab, forcing immigrants off their valuable property.

To make matters worse, Liberian mercenaries crossed the border to capitalize on the chaos and to further destabilize Côte d'Ivoire. Ouattara was terrified of these well-armed and savage warriors, many little more than boys. The soldiers were willing to help land-grabbing Ivorians drive the Muslim farmers off their land for a per centage of whatever value they could confiscate. The Liberians systematically moved through village after village in a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

As they closed in on Blolekin, Ouattara didn't know what he would do. His wife was heavily pregnant, and he wasn't sure she would be able to run when the time came to flee. During a night of thunderstorms, while nature's violence whirled and crashed around them, she went into labour. The midwife, trapped by floodwaters from the storm, never arrived. After hours of agonizing labour, Ouattara's wife gave birth, but then, soon after, she died. The newborn boy was sickly and feverish, but Ouattara couldn't find a doctor. He watched helplessly as the child slowly perished. There was hardly time to bury his wife and infant before Kader realized he and his surviving son would have to flee before they too were victims—not of nature, but of a military campaign to rid the land of people like him.

The assault on Blolekin came before dawn. Liberian mercenaries and Ivorian troops first attacked the little village with artillery. “Then the soldiers entered the village. They ordered people out of their houses and told them to bring all their money. And then they blew up our houses.” Ouattara was stunned as the big guns reduced the mud huts to nothing while the soldiers stood around and laughed.

As their houses crumbled, civilians fled into the surrounding bush, but the soldiers chased them down. Now the sounds of both artillery and small-arms fire were overwhelming. “We would hide at night and move by day,” says Ouattara. The people of Blolekin met with others from surrounding villages, all heading
north, into territory held by Muslim rebels. From there, the survivors were able to make their way back to Mali.

In late fall of 2002, fifteen years after he had left Mali, Ouattara was back in his home country, penniless and brokenhearted, his dreams incinerated. He told me his story one June afternoon in 2005, delivering the narrative in a single, steady stream of memory. He is a strikingly handsome man who would appear younger than his thirty-eight years but for the furrows on his brow. He is nearly deaf because of the bombardment that destroyed his peace in Côte d'Ivoire. At his side, Ouattara's young son stands erect, watching with concern as his father speaks to a small delegation of strangers about their terrible flight. Ouattara attempts to reassure the boy, gently stroking his hand while his relatives gather around to listen to the story they've surely heard many times before. They are sad for Ouattara but also for themselves. They once depended on his earnings from the land in Côte d'Ivoire for survival. They have but one sustaining hope: that Ouattara will one day go back to reclaim his land in Côte d'Ivoire. When the war ends. If it ends.

When Ouattara finishes his story, the relatives silently stare out into their barren fields and listen for the thunder.

The death of Houphouët-Boigny in 1993 left a power vacuum in Côte d'Ivoire. The old man had been too self-absorbed to have properly arranged succession before his death—if rational succession in an autocratic state is ever possible. In fairness, it would have been difficult for anyone to administer a country where unemployment was growing exponentially; where drought and overcrowding were ravaging farmland; where foreign debt was exploding; where government institutions were being dismantled; and where the high expectations of a population had been thwarted. The entire economy rested on one industry—cocoa—
and the president had learned he had absolutely no control over the price of beans. Houphouët-Boigny, like most megalomaniacs (even benevolent ones), had failed to groom a successor. His death left the country in chaos.

Henri Konan Bédié was Houphouët-Boigny's immediate, but temporary, political heir. This new president had none of his predecessor's charm or charisma, and Bédié attempted to control the country through fear and intimidation. It was he who first introduced the toxic policies of Ivoirité, more as a political manoeuvre than as an actual law. He allowed authorities throughout the country free rein to harass immigrants and generally discriminate against them. When UNICEF first approached the Ivorian government to deal with the abuse of Malian boys on cocoa farms, the lukewarm response from the politicians was, in part, due to the prevailing attitude that “outsiders” had no political rights. Bédié gambled that his own incompetence might escape detection if he turned the immigrants into scapegoats.

Bédié's pathetic efforts to govern by racism might have been temporarily popular, but his insatiable appetite for personal wealth estranged him from the population and drove the country further into debt. Bédié blamed the foreigners for all the country's woes, but international financiers weren't persuaded by his protests. In 1998, the IMF, the World Bank and the European Union suspended all aid to the country. A year later, the Ivorian military mutinied and Bédié was tossed out in a
coup d'état
. General Robert Gueï became the new president of Côte d'Ivoire. He was no improvement.

General Gueï may have disagreed with Bédié on many issues, but he took a fancy to the concept of Ivoirité, enshrining Bédié's policy in laws restricting full citizenship to people born of “pure” Ivorian blood (meaning that both parents must have been born in Côte d'Ivoire). The problem was that Houphouët-Boigny had been so successful in recruiting outsiders into his Ivorian Miracle that nearly a third of the population of Côte d'Ivoire was
now made up of foreigners or their descendants. This substantial minority were now, officially, non-citizens, even those who had never been outside the country.

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.