Bitter Chocolate (28 page)

It's this scooter system that the Malian border police suspect has become the favourite mode of transport for the child traffickers. Alzouma Fassoum Coulibaly is a sub-lieutenant with the Gendarmerie Nationale—a hybrid force of police and military—and the chief of the border patrol in this area. He is stationed in the garrison town of Kadiolo, just a short drive from Zégoua. From this small base of operations, and with only a handful of officers, Coulibaly is the thin blue line of authority at the frontier. He's a wiry young man who speaks with a steady staccato delivery and if it is possible for an African cop to be uncorrupted, Coulibaly might be the one.

The chief is frustrated and angry—and for good reason. He has no functioning office equipment, few vehicles and no computer access. How can anyone catch smugglers in these circumstances? In his windowless office of garish green peeling paint, Coulibaly rummages through his desk drawers, looking for photos of children he has intercepted at the border. In his manic search through the mess, he comes across a stick of deodorant and discreetly dabs it just below his shirt sleeves. The police chief hadn't been expecting visitors.

The unmistakable odour of Lifebuoy fills the humid room as Coulibaly tells of his experiences. He had been a highly regarded Customs officer in his hometown of Timbuktu, in northern Mali, where he busted a sophisticated Saudi Arabian smuggling ring. “They were stealing Mali children and transporting them on planes back to Riyadh!” Coulibaly tells me, still shocked at the audacity of the crime. But he thinks the child smuggling at this border crossing is even more refined. And despite reports in Côte d'Ivoire that the problem is all but fixed, Coulibaly says the trafficking continues, albeit on a reduced scale. Coulibaly claims that he and his men still intercept dozens of children a month.

Since Coulibaly arrived here in August 2003, the border patrol has been much more vigilant. The chief figured out that the scooter drivers were transporting children one or two at time,
then the smugglers were regrouping on the other side. The single advantage of the war is that he has the cooperation of the rebel Malians, who often allow border police to pursue smugglers right into northern Côte d'Ivoire. In some cases, the rebels actually send back children who are attempting to cross, though Coulibaly worries that the militias may also be keeping children to use as soldiers.

He laments the lack of cooperation with the constitutional government of Côte d'Ivoire, and, despite all the efforts to convince Malians that they should not give up their children in the first place, Coulibaly finds they are still willing to do so. “This year I caught a marabout with thirty-two children.” The chief is referring to a kind of monastic Islamic teacher who traditionally takes in African Muslim children, claiming to offer them religious instruction. The marabouts rely on the piety of naive farm families, who willingly turn over their children even though there is much evidence, confirmed by Coulibaly, that many—if not all—of these religious teachers are charlatans. “We know the marabouts are just another scam. But people believe in them.” Coulibaly nabbed the children, but the marabout escaped over the frontier.

The border police routinely uncover child trafficking rings, but the Kadiolo station doesn't have the resources to stay abreast of the smugglers and traffickers, who know they only have to move on to an easier part of the border and try again. “If I just had a fax machine, I could send pictures and information to the next post,” says Coulibaly. Without any database, it's difficult to catch the crooks.

We take my rental car to tour the backcountry. The chief has a Japanese-made SUV, a gift from the president of Mali as a reward for busting a network of bandits in southern Mali. But the vehicle gets only six kilometres to the litre, and Coulibaly can't afford to drive it, so it sits rusting in the parking lot.

We enter a tangled grid of paths and animal trails that cut through the woods and farm fields, and it's quickly obvious why
illegal cross-border transportation is often undetectable. We visit two border police outposts, strategically placed and potentially quite effective. But the farther of the little operations has been closed. The officer at that location would have to stay in the hut for a week at a time, since it was too expensive to go home at the end of the shift (the cost of petrol is prohibitive), and would have to depend on local people to bring him food. Understandably, Coulibaly had a hard time finding men who wanted the tedious assignment nor was the outpost very effective: there isn't enough budget to buy gasoline and allow for a proper patrol. The other outpost was closer to town, and the border guard could come and go at regular hours. But it was easy for the criminals to anticipate his movements. Coulibaly figures that the traffickers would just wait until lunchtime and cross the border while the guard was away for his midday meal.

The chief estimates that eighty per cent of the children who make it over the border never return to Mali. “Or they come back as delinquents and ruffians.” The stolen childhood and the lack of a real social life with a family and village, Coulibaly believes, stunts development and turns young men into deviants. Many of the bandits and petty criminals they arrest in southern Mali are those who have returned from brutal years as labourers without pay. “You can see it on their faces,” says the chief. “There is no human being inside anymore. That's what ten years of slave labour does to you.” They have no papers, and many of them can't remember who their families are. Without kinfolk in Mali, a person is doomed.

The transporters union for this region of Mali has its base on the main drag of Zégoua, and, from its sprawling garage depot, drivers have a unique vantage point for monitoring the daily activities of the town. Car rental offices and minibus agencies are nearby,
and they watch the boys and young men as they lurk in the corners, waiting for lifts into Côte d'Ivoire. For many years, the truckers thought nothing of it. They had, themselves, gone to Côte d'Ivoire as youngsters looking for work. But the networks of traffickers, delivering kids to farms where they will work for nothing, are relatively new in their experience.

As part of a campaign to educate Malians about the realities of bonded servitude, Save the Children Canada conducted a five-day instruction course for the truckers, paid them for the time and handed out certificates afterwards.

“We were very happy with the program,” Balla Keita tells me. He's president of the transporters union here, and he calls a number of the men into the garage to explain what they learned on their course. “The instructors told us about the development of a child. How they trust adults when they are young but then turn to their friends when they are a bit older.” The transporters were fascinated with this rudimentary education in child development. They realized for the first time that what they thought to be ordinary activity was, perhaps, abusive. Children seemed to go with the traffickers voluntarily, so the drivers thought nothing of it. “We didn't think it was a problem,” Keita explains. “We thought the men [traffickers] were just doing their jobs. If we stopped one, he might try to sue us.”

Save the Children Canada told the transporters they should challenge the traffickers—who would probably abandon the children as soon as they saw trouble—and then bring the children to Horon So, where they would be cared for and returned to their families. The transporters took up the task enthusiastically. A trucker tells me that the previous week he personally took four boys into custody. They were on foot, accompanied by a man who didn't seem to know them. Emboldened by what he had learned in his five-day course, the driver was suspicious and approached the stranger to ask what he was doing. The man was vague and excused himself on the pretence that he was going to get some
cigarettes. He never came back. “I took the four children to Sikasso [a two-hour drive],” the driver explains. “I called Save the Children to come and get the children, but no one came.”

The driver learned that Save the Children's Horon So operation had been shut down only weeks after they had finished their five-day course and there was no one from the agency working in the region, despite what they had said during the training program. The driver had used his own petrol to bring the boys to Sikasso. He had very little food—just his own meagre lunch—and he had no money to buy groceries. He lost a day's pay before someone finally told him that the local agency Mali Enjeu had accommodations for recovered children. He was thankful to leave his charges there, but it had been an unwelcome ordeal and he tells me he will not do it again. As they listen to their colleague's story, the other truckers finger the corners of their certificates and agree with him, grumbling that they'll hesitate before getting involved with smugglers.

Chief Coulibaly says he had the same experience. Aid agencies such as Save the Children Canada alerted him to the child-trafficking problem when he arrived here. But many of these foreign NGOs seem to have gone on to other things. He worries about who will take care of kids he might find in the future. He personally housed a group of intercepted children recently until their parents could be found. But he had to pay for their upkeep out of his own pocket. If child trafficking picks up after the war, as he suspects it will, Coulibaly isn't sure how he'll handle the volume.

Save the Children Canada says the program at Horon So was just too expensive to maintain for the number of children who needed the facility. The war years had made it more difficult and perilous for the traffickers to deliver their human cargo to the cocoa farms of Côte d'Ivoire. With the immediate crisis settled, Save the Children thought it best that local NGOs take over the task. “At the end of the day, it's a domestic issue,” Save
the Children's Nadine Grant says of the responsibility for taking care of the recovered children.

Coulibaly says that's all very well but he's anticipating a surge in trafficking when—or if—the war should end in Côte d'Ivoire. The country will not only be back to business but also be seeking cheap labour in order to rebuild. The chief expects the job-brokers will be even more aggressive than before and he's worried about something else. “There are a lot more weapons in the region than ever before,” he says. Northern Côte d'Ivoire is now awash with small arms that will undoubtedly be available to smugglers and crime rings. “I would not encourage the truckers to stop them in the future,” says Coulibaly.

Save the Children Canada is still training the transporters but now has a somewhat different program in place. A half dozen bus stations in both southern Mali and neighbouring Burkina Faso now have transporters acting as monitors who look for children in flight. The monitors register the names of any unaccompanied young people who are in transit and they also call security when they suspect a child trafficker is pursuing any of the kids. The project is sponsored by the Canadian International Development Agency but it's destined to last only until 2007. Save the Children Canada acknowledges that, should the Ivorian war come to a conclusion, the trafficking business will ignite like a brush fire. And children will be more vulnerable than ever.

In Sikasso, the Malian aid agency Guamina conducts a training program for teenagers from the region in an effort to discourage them from leaving the country. Since the border into Côte d'Ivoire has become easier to cross, Guamina is anxious to coach young people about the evils of the cocoa farms. Guamina has inherited the indoctrination program launched by Save the Children Canada.

Working on a little wooden stage at Guamina's community centre, teenaged boys and girls role-play various scenarios, using stories and anecdotes picked up from boys who have returned from the horrors of bonded labour. The young performers take different parts in what amounts to agitprop. Some of them play-act as traffickers who lure children with promises of wealth. Others take the roles of Ivorian farmers who beat children. Finally, we meet the heroes, representatives from Malian associations who will help them get back home. These are transparent little dramas with unambiguous messages about the evils of working in Côte d'Ivoire.