Blood and Chocolate: Civil war in Cote d'Ivoire

Cote d’Ivoire’s civil war: Another African conflict funded by the plundering of resources. That’s the story told from Global Witness, a London-based non-governmental organization that tracks the illegal exploitation and international market for natural resources like diamonds and oil.

The country’s civil war is eerily familiar to other African conflicts: countless human rights violations; an unsolved murder of a journalist; extortion of business people; 700,000 displaced persons; an immeasurable number shattered lives and a UN-brokered arms embargo.

While very real political issues lead to the war, economic issues continue to fuel the conflict. In an August report, Global Witness claims that both sides have misappropriated the country’s ample resources to fund their armies – and diminish the possibility of reconciliation.

At the heart of this conflict is cocoa, whose beans are grown from trees, picked and dried to make chocolate. As the world’s largest cocoa producer, these beans comprise a $1.4 billion industry to this divided West African nation. Global Witness claims the southern government diverted $58 million from the cocoa industry to fight the rebels. In the north, the group asserts, the Forces Nouvelles raised $30 million per year through a parallel tax on cocoa.

“The lucrative cocoa trade has been at the heart of the war economy and continues to serve the interests of protagonists to the conflict, to the detriment of the Ivorian population,” concludes the Global Witness report Hot Chocolate: How Cocoa Fuelled the Conflict in Cote d’Ivoire. “For the past four and a half years, both sides in the conflict have reaped significant political and economic benefits with impunity.”

Here are highlights of the report’s recommendations:

To the Ivorian Government:

• Ensure that the national cocoa institutions fulfil their stated role and that levies paid to cocoa institutions are not used to fund the conflict. In particular, they should not be used to finance the activities of militia or the purchase of weapons and other military equipment;
• Install greater transparency and accountability in the cocoa industry. In particular, all cocoa institutions should publicise where they hold bank accounts and should publish annual reports, including financial audits,with details of their activities and investments. These reports and audits should be made publicly available.

To the country’s cocoa institutions

• Fulfil their stated role, including providing oversight and regulation of the industry, enhancing and promoting production, collecting accurate production and export statistics, and supporting cocoa farmers, including by guaranteeing them a minimum price for their cocoa.

To the Forces Nouvelles

• Lift the blockade on cocoa traveling south from the FN-controlled zone;
  
• Disclose revenues generated by taxes on cocoa and other products throughout the FN zone and publish information on how this money has been used to date.

To the governments of Burkina Faso, Ghana and Togo

• Produce and publish accurate and comprehensive import, export and re-export figures for cocoa, indicating the origin and destination of cocoa exported and differentiating between domestic production, exports of cocoa originating wholly from Côte d’Ivoire, and exports containing a mix of domestic production and Ivorian cocoa.

To cocoa companies operating in Cote d’Ivoire

• Perform extended due diligence on all their cocoa purchases from the region to demonstrate publicly that they are not inadvertently providing money that is being diverted to the warring factions;
  
• Press for all cocoa institutions’ accounts to be audited and published, as a way of ensuring that levies paid by exporters are not contributing to financing the conflict.

To international cocoa companies buying from West African countries.

• Perform extended due diligence on all their cocoa purchases from the region to demonstrate publicly that they are not inadvertently providing money that is being diverted to the warring factions;
  
• Publish information on the exact origin of the cocoa they are buying, in particular how much of it originates from the FN-held area of northern Côte d’Ivoire.

To UN Security Council

• Perform extended due diligence on all their cocoa purchases from the region to demonstrate publicly that they are not inadvertently providing money that is being diverted to the warring factions;
  
• Publish information on the exact origin of the cocoa they are buying, in particular how much of it originates from the FN-held area of northern Côte d’Ivoire.

The conflict’s history

By now, the tale has been told too many times. Cote d’Ivoire was once hailed as Africa’s success story, a pillar of political stability and economic growth. Workers from all over West Africa flooded Cote d’Ivoire, searching for work in the country’s verdant fields, its bustling plantations and opulent cities.

There was room for everyone who wanted to help develop the country, said Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the benevolent dictator who ran Cote d’Ivoire since its independence from France in 1960. This former doctor, former cocoa farmer was seen as a modern-day Midas. But after his death in 1993, his proud legacy of agriculture-based development and ethnic and religious ecumenism slowly began disintegrating. Underlying these problems was the country’s worsening economy, already on the decline from the high-flying days of the 1980s when cocoa, sugar and coffee prices buoyed the state treasury.

Just a few years after Houphouet-Boigny’s death, commodity prices had fallen greatly, as did foreign investment and direct aid. Corruption, a mainstay of the Houphouet-Boigny administration, bled the treasury even more.

Many Ivorians, who years before put down their farming implements to find white collar work in the cities, now returned to start over in their villages. What they found were West African immigrants working their fields, carving out a life they once abandoned. Anti-immigrant tensions rose. So did the political rift between the opposition parties of the predominately Muslim north and the ruling parties of the predominately Christian south.

The ruling clan tried everything to hold on to power of the fraying state. Opposition parties boycotted the 1995 presidential elections, and the 2000 election was never held because the country’s first military coup intervened on Christmas day 1999. Leader of the bloodless coup, General Guei called for new elections in 2001, but the Ivorian Supreme Court exempted the largest northern party from participating due to questions over its candidate’s alleged Burkinabé heritage. It didn’t matter as Guei nullified the election’s results when it appeared he would lose. A revolt broke out in Abidjan, forcing Guei to flee and placing front-runner Laurent Gbagbo in the state house.

Full scale civil war broke out in September 2002 when President Gbagbo was visiting Rome. General Guei died in the first day of fighting, as did thousands of civilians. The French army intervened and the two Ivorian armies fought to a stalemate, effectively dividing the country between the north and south. Both sides reached an uneasy peace in January 2003. Yet government-sponsored paramilitary groups continued to harass and kill foreigners in the south, forcing hundreds of thousands of immigrants back to their home countries.

The country continues to be effectively divided between the Abidjan-centered Gbagbo government and the Forces Nouvelles ruling the north from Bouake, the Cote d’Ivoire’s second-largest city. Between them stands more than 4,000 French troops and 6,000 UN peacekeepers.

Both sides attempted to create a government of national unity in January 2003. This, and subsequent attempts failed. Most recently, both sides hashed out an agreement in Ouagadougou, which gives Guillaume Soro, leader of the Forces Nouvelles the position of prime minister. Elections could be held as soon as next year.

An uneasy peace continues to permeate the land.