UN Report on the security situation in Cote d’Ivoire

From Secretary-General, dated April 15.

The good news is the overall security situation stable, along with the country’s budding political atmosphere. However, the report raises worries about the disarmament about the northern-based Forces Nouvelles and militias in the western part of the country. Violent crime remains a concern, especially armed robberies.

In the political arena, the opposition party Rassemblement des republicans held its convention in Abidjan and named Allassane Dramane Ouattara as the party’s candidate for the presidential election scheduled for November 30. The ruling Front populaire ivorien held a rally in the former rebel capital Bouake.

Prime Minister Guillaume Soro attended a Women’s Day celebration in President Laurent Gbagbo’s hometown, and claimed the northern-based prime minister has a good working relationship with the president.

Civil society groups still clamor to be included in the Ouagadougou Agreement. Burkinabé president Blaise Compaore expressed desire to hold a national meeting with such groups.

Regarding the sticky issue of voting rights, more than 110 mobile courts have been dispatched throughout the country to issue duplicate birth certificates to any Ivorian over the age of 18 and not part of the previous census. By April 8, the courts had issued more than 565,000 certificates. They hope to finish by the end of the month.

While the legal framework for the electoral process has not been finalized, its budget has: $83 million, which the Ivorian government will chip in $18 and the European Union, Japan and Korea will provide $25. This currently leaves $40 million unaccounted for. (Any takers?)

The International Crisis Group is a little less sanguine about the political situation. In a recent report, the group points out that in the presidential election certain candidates may be willing to go to extremes, reigniting a potentially explosive environment.

The report also claims implementation has been shaky of many of the Ouagadougou Accords that brought a halt to the civil war. Importantly, they claim voter identification has not completely determined who is a citizen and who may vote. However, the largest worries go to all major political parties sticking to the Ouagadougou Accords and insuring the election is carried out in a transparent manner, with proper identification for all registered voters and a security situation that allows people to vote in peace.

Peace = lower malaria rates?

Peace in Cote d’Ivoire does not bring down malaria rates, says IRIN.

Statistics galore: At least 6-out-of-10 clinic treatments are for malaria, the story points out, and 20 percent of pregnant women have the mosquito-born disease, leading to low birth weights. Historical numbers were not available.

The question remains: Why do people get malaria in the first place? Never mind the how, we’ve covered that part here. We need to investigate the social aspects of the disease, and a post on Yahoo Answers (I couldn’t find anything better) claims that malaria thrives where people live in close quarters, in wet, “dirty places” (not my term) where mosquitoes thrive. Oftentimes these people lack the money – and/or will – to clean up the mosquito zone.

A different take. Environmentalists and international development agencies like USAID and the World Health Program have guilted African countries away from using DDT or other pesticides which will go after the mosquitoes that carry the disease, argues Paul Driessen in Spiked Online. Driessen, the author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death, claims that the most effective way to kill the mosquitoes in peoples’ homes (or at least where they sleep) is the combination of spraying DDT and using bed nets and screens, when necessary.

Yet, in a Reuters blog on the issue (which I must give a hat tip for the Driessen piece), a certain Ed Darnell contends DDT is an overrated (and dangerous) method of reducing mosquitoes in homes. A better solution would be better medical systems and education (and money) to drain those mosquito breeding areas.

Open letter from Human Rights Watch to Ban Ki-moon

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is currently touring four West African states. On the eve of that trip, Human Rights Watch wrote an open letter to the Secretary General regarding outstanding human rights issues in Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire.

Here are the excerpts.

Liberia:

While the [Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission]—empowered to recommend for prosecution the most serious offenders—has made significant progress chronicling a record of abuses, there appears to be no national strategy and little discussion by Liberian or international actors for holding perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity to account. Human Rights Watch believes that the many victims of these unspeakable crimes deserve justice for what they have suffered, and that prosecutions of the most serious crimes committed would go a long way towards consolidating and firmly anchoring respect for the rule of law in Liberia.

During your discussions with representatives of Liberia’s government and civil society we therefore urge you to emphasize the importance of accountability for past human rights violations, and also to encourage them to develop a strategy for prosecuting those allegedly responsible for the most egregious crimes. Given the persistent weaknesses in the Liberian justice system, international support is very likely to be necessary to ensuring justice for these crimes.

Cote d’Ivoire:

Impunity for Past and Ongoing Human Rights Abuses: Côte d’Ivoire is characterized today by an intense focus on the part of nearly all actors with a stake in the Ivorian crisis—at both the international and local levels—on the process leading towards upcoming presidential elections, currently scheduled for November of this year. While Human Rights Watch salutes the progress that has been made in implementing the Ouagadougou Agreement and the role the United Nations has played therein, we are concerned that in its narrow focus on elections, the international community risks losing sight of the need to resolve issues of impunity for human rights violations that are critical not only to calm during the upcoming elections themselves, but also to long-term prospects for peace and stability.

Despite the relative decrease in political tensions since the signing of the Ouagadougou Agreement, impunity for past and ongoing violations of human rights persists. Should political tensions rise in the lead-up to elections, Human Rights Watch is concerned that the prevailing climate of impunity could facilitate a dramatic resurgence of human rights abuses, which in turn could threaten the integrity of the elections themselves. It is therefore imperative that the international community begin to work with the government of Côte d’Ivoire in advance of the elections to tackle issues arising from impunity and the need for justice.

The letter called for three ways the United Nations could continue its critical role:

• Initiate a public dialogue regarding the human rights abuses that occurred during the civil war.
• Publish the findings of the 2002 study on human rights violations in the country
• Push the Ivorian government to accept a mission of the International Criminal Court to asses the possibility of an investigation regarding crimes committed in the country.

Double shot of instability: Mali and Cote d’Ivoire

Who says West Africa can still be mildly instable?

Mali has mostly avoided the issues with Tuaregs that has recently plagued the government of Niger. That may be due to the government’s more conciliatory approach to the situation. Have things taken a decidedly worse turn?

From IRIN:

Citizens are divided on what should be the next steps following the latest round of violence between Tuareg rebels and Malian army officers, which has led to the kidnapping of up to 30 Malian soldiers and the deaths of three soldiers and five civilians in Mali’s northern Kidal region.

Fighting broke out on 20 March 18 km from the town of Tin-Zaouatene when rebels ambushed a government military supply convoy capturing soldiers and seizing as many as eight vehicles.

"We do not know what to do. When the shooting began between the rebels and the army, the entire population had to hide out at home,” said Amadou Koné a government official in Kidal.

He continued, “people stop trusting each other because they don’t know who is who. It is like being in Iraq or Palestine.”

The fighting came two weeks after the Northern Mali Tuareg Alliance for Change (ATNMC) released 22 military hostages from the nearby town of Kidal, 1,200 km from Bamako.

Recently, western Cote d’Ivoire has seemed to be the most lawless area of the country. The reasons are plentiful: The number of internally displaced persons habituating this area along with the large number of Liberian refugees who sought safety there; or, perhaps it’s the former Liberian soldiers living in that part of the country and continuing to look for work.

Again, IRIN:

Two towns in western Cote d’Ivoire have been shut off by two days of riots by disgruntled Ivorian soldiers.

Troops started rampaging through the town of Duékoué, 400 km north west of the commercial capital Abidjan, on the morning of 24 March, protesting the murder of a low-ranking soldier by robbers the night before, Commandant Vazoumana, a gendarme in Duékoué told IRIN.

“We have been unable to leave our houses,” Flora Gbazé, a civilian in Duékoué, said on 24 March. “Since the morning soldiers have been shooting in the air.” Later the same day riots broke out in nearby Guiglo, army sources in the town told IRIN.

According to a humanitarian source in the region, one civilian death has been confirmed by stray gunfire.

Rioting continued in Guiglo on 25 March, however in Duékoué the soldiers spent the day in negotiations with government officials, a humanitarian official familiar with the situation told IRIN.

The soldiers were demanding the resignation of the governor in the region, the source told IRIN.

“The signals coming from both the government and military leaders are not at all clear,” the source said, noting that Ivorian soldiers had been petitioning the regional authorities to improve their security arrangements for some weeks.

Global Witness: Northern CI still illegally taxing diamonds, cocoa

During Cote d’Ivoire’s civil war that began in 2002, the northern-based Forces Nouvelles raised an estimated $30 million per year through a “parallel tax,” which charged cocoa-laden trucks that traveled through the country, according to a 2007 Global Witness report.

Apparently, the practice is still going on. In a new briefing, the NGO that investigates the links between resource exploitation and corruption found that cocoa trucks are still being “escorted towards Burkina Faso” by members of the rebel militia, who charge the drivers. Not only is this illegal, inefficient and sapping the government of Cote d’Ivoire of needed tax revenue, but funds received through extortion are increasingly hard to track. The 2007 Global Witness report claimed the rebels used some of the cocoa and diamond money to purchase weapons.

From Rapaport News at Diamonds.net:

A Global Witness mission to the country in February found that despite a 2007 agreement between the rebel held north and government controlled south to work toward peace, the north was still collecting taxes on diamonds and cocoa and keeping the revenue. Diamonds leaving the country from the rebel-held north have already been cited as the last remaining conflict diamonds by the NGO, and the World Diamond Council and United Nations.

Global Witness called upon the government and the north's New Force rebels to end “this extortion” and abolish the taxation.

“The system of parallel and illegitimate taxes only helps fuel the corruption,” said Patrick Alley, director of Global Witness. “This is an economic war that’s delaying the reunification of the country.”

Global Witness campaigner Maria Lopez said diamond diggers who sell their diamonds are being taxed 8 percent by the rebels, who were giving them permission to sell the stones. It was not clear where the stones were being taken next.

Humpty Dumpty: Gbagbo promises Ivorian election by June; questions remain about demilitarization

So, how do you put a country back together after civil war? Does one wait for the militaries to hand in their weapons? Or, does one rush to the polls to attempt to forge out a new government that people from both sides can rally around?

As part of the peace deal signed in March 2007 in Ouagadougou, fighters on both sides of the conflict will be disarmed; a new unified national army will be created; most importantly, identity documents will be distributed, which will determine citizenship (an issue that lead to the civil war); finally, the Ouagadougou agreement stipulates that and elections will be held.

Political leaders such as President Laurent Gbagbo and former rebel Guilllame Soro, who is now the Prime Minister, would like to hold elections at the end of June, a timeline Gbagbo reiterated after meeting with South African President Thabo Mbeki, who is acting as a mediator.

However, Reuters reports, that the country’s disarmament and military demobilization process is far behind schedule and this likely to impede the country’s political reunification. Opposition politicians Henri Konan Bedie from the south and Allassane Ouattara from the north worry that the two leaders will use the delayed disarmament as an excuse to further postpone the elections (and remain in power), argues Selay M.K in the citizen journalism site Agora Vox.

Question: Isn’t it also true that the two leaders have refused to disarm their militias to keep the other side(s) honest? The issue here is that elections have been scheduled in the past and have been postponed after previous peace deals fell apart.

Earlier this year, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called the government’s election plan “very ambitious.” However, a diplomat speaking anonymously told IRIN the June election deadline may be ambitious, but leaders set it to insure elections will be held during 2008.

With northerner Guillame Soro as Prime Minister, federal authority is slowly, but surely reinstalling itself in the former rebel-zone northern part of the country. This process has been hampered because many rebels would like to keep their parallel command structures intact in case the country devolves into conflict again, IRIN reported.

Other issues remain. In an October 2007 report, the UN Secretary General admitted the population is still visibly scarred by the civil war and many issues, such as land ownership, have not been resolved. Under this backdrop, the United Nations has pressed ahead on creating identity documents so people can vote. The Secretary General will release a report regarding election preparations before April 15.

Women in Abidjan protest lack of water

Abidjan is facing severe water shortages. From IRIN:

A third of Abidjan’s inhabitants have had no drinking water for over a month and many have taken to the streets to vent their anger.

"Each time we launch an appeal to the authorities for help there is no action," local resident Georgette Akissi 38, who has been on the search for water for three days, told IRIN.

Some inhabitants have been forced to walk up to 6 km every day to find water, Akissi said, while others are resorting to deepening their boreholes in their backyards.

Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire’s largest city, requires some 500,000 cu.m of water a day but only 350,000 cu.m is available. That has meant that 300,000 people have no water from the city’s central supply, Ebah Basile, executive director of the water company Society of Water Distribution in Cote d’Ivoire (SODECI) told IRIN.

Women took to the streets on 20 February to protest the lack of water, putting up barricades on the main road leading to the east of the city. Police used tear gas to disperse them.

Abidjan’s port reports 13 percent increase in traffic.

From Reuters:

Traffic at the port of Abidjan rose by 13 percent in 2007 to reach a record 21.4 million tonnes as the economy of the world's top cocoa exporter recovered from a 2002-2003 war, the port's general director said on Thursday.

Marcel Gossio said the increase in freight, which came despite a fall in cocoa exports last year, was driven by an economic recovery in Ivory Coast as the former French colony edged toward reunification and elections scheduled for mid-2008.

Ivory Coast has been divided into a rebel-controlled north and a government-held south since the conflict.

The division had slashed shipments through Abidjan as landlocked countries to the north, like Mali and Burkina Faso, turned to other regional ports to move goods.

RFI broadcasts suspended in Cote d’Ivoire

From Radio Netherlands Worldwide:

Abidjan, 1 February 2008: The Ivorian media regulatory body has suspended the broadcasting of Radio France Internationale programmes “across the whole of the country”, “until further notice”, because of the lack of a radio correspondent in the country.

“RFI programmes broadcast on FM and by satellite have been suspended as of midnight on 31 January,” says a statement issued by the Ivorian National Audiovisual Communications Council (CNCA), sent to AFP. The statement, signed by the CNCA chairman, Jerome Diegou Bailly, notes that on RFI’s part there is “a clear determination not to meet either its written pledges or to keep its word”.

…The radio had closed its regional office in Abidjan following the death of its correspondent, Jean Helene, shot in the head and killed by a police officer in Abidjan on 20 October 2003.

RFI FM broadcasts in Cote d’Ivoire have been suspended several times since the attempted coup d’etat of September 2002 by rebels of the New Forces against President Laurent Gbagbo.

Compromise not averted: Head of West Africa's central bank named

After opposition gelled against Laurent Gbabgo’s controversial first choice for the head of West Africa’s Central Bank, against my prediction, the Ivorian choose a compromise candidate.

A compromise indeed, says Reuters.

Dakoury Tabley, who was a board member for Ivory Coast at the African Development Bank, will take over from Damo Justin Baro of Burkina Faso. Baro had been serving as interim head of the regional central bank for more than a year.

...Dakoury Tabley is the brother of Louis Dakoury Tabley, the deputy political chief of Ivory Coast's New Forces rebel movement, which signed a peace deal with President Laurent Gbagbo in March aimed at reunifying the country and holding elections.

Louis Dakoury Tabley is currently minister for Solidarity and War Victims in the consensus Ivorian government that was formed after the March peace deal.

Now if they can get past outmoded rule of placing an Ivorian at the bank’s head.

Photo-journalist arrested in Abidjan

Jean-Paul Rey, a freelance photographer, was arrested December 27 in Cote d'Ivoire and detained in connection to a "plot" to overthrow the country's peace process, says the International Freedom of Expression Exchange Clearing House.

Jean-Paul Rey was arrested near the headquarters of the national broadcaster (Radiotélévision ivoirienne, RTI) in Abidjan on 27 December in the company of a group of unidentified individuals. He was first detained at the Abidjan police station, then at the headquarters of the domestic intelligence agency (Direction de la surveillance du territoire, DST). He is reportedly now being held at the criminal police headquarters in Abidjan.

The journalist normally distributes his photographic work through the Gamma agency, which knew of his intention to work on a story in Africa.

Cote d'Ivoire's voter rolls are growing

Mobile court hearings in Cote d'Ivoire, used as part of the process of identifying the country's voters among untold undocumented immigrants ahead of planned national elections next year, have been generally positive since they resumed in September, IRIN reports.

Ahmedou El Becaye Seck, Chief of the Electoral Assistance Division of the UN Operation in Côte d'Ivoire (UNOCI), told reporters at a press conference in Abidjan that nearly 1,300 hearings had been held so far and the number of substitute birth certificates granted had far exceeded the number in previous operations.

Another 30 new teams have been added to help with the process, while the National Committee for the Supervision of Identification, known by its French acronym CNSI, will also be reinforced.

Identification of voters - including millions of undocumented Ivorians and foreign-born residents - has been a key issue in the West African country that became divided in 2002 between the Government-controlled south and the rebel Forces Nouvelles-held north. Free and fair presidential elections are due next year, as part of a peace accord between the Government and the rebels that was signed earlier this year in Ouagadougou, capital of neighbouring Burkina Faso.

At one point, nearly one-quarter of the population of former economic powerhouse Cote d'Ivoire was believed to be foreign born.

The fight over the future of West Africa's central bank

"A rift between heads of state of the eight-nation West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) has left the bloc's central bank, BCEAO, with an interim governor for over two years now," writes Francois Gouahinga, for AllAfrica.com.

The problem centers on whether the body will continue following the unwritten rule that stipulates the bank’s director be an Ivorian national. This backroom decree was initially determined by Felix Houphouet Boigny and Senegal’s Leopold Sedar Senghor, going back roughly forty years when Cote d’Ivoire made up a super majority of the region’s GDP.

A bold move
Today, after war has sent Cote d’Ivoire’s economy – and political power – into decline, some members are quietly questioning the agreement. The politics of war aside, the major problem of some governments is Cote d’Ivoire’s choice for the bank’s head, Antoine Bohoun Bouabré.

Gouahinga points out the issues surrounding Bohoun Bouabré’s appointment.

The only state minister in the Ivorian cabinet, Bohoun Bouabré is a former economics professor at the University of Abidjan. Critics blame him for the decline in domestic production of cocoa and coffee, the nation's top export commodities. As finance minister from 2002 to 2005, he oversaw the reforms that many now say have resulted in more bureaucratic hassles for producers, prompting the emergence of a parallel market.

Others view his close relationship with the president as a liability. They say Bouabre, who is also Gbagbo's campaign manager in his hometown, may not survive as BCEAO governor should the president lose the upcoming election. Yet others point to the fact that unlike previous governors, Bouabre did not rise from the ranks of BCEAO.

The story points out that no formal opposition to the Bohoun Bouabré appointment has been formed. However, for Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo, who was at the government helm when the African Development Bank left Abidjan for Tunis, this appointment has become a matter of pride. If other governments balk at Bohoun Bouabré, Gbagbo has threatened to pull out of the union, taking with him his country’s estimated 32 percent of the bank’s reserves.

So, what is the BCEAO?
As a central bank, BCEAO lends money to other banks and financial institutions working in the West African monetary union. It grants assistance to banks working within member states, like providing advances on government securities and it deals with loans through their purchasing, selling or discounting.

Among other things, the bank is responsible for organizing the CFA monetary market and acts as a central storage unit for payment transactions. Also the bank maintains a statistics database on the finances of member nations.

Sticky fingers
Bohoun Bouabré’s problem of legitimacy is much greater than the AllAfrica.com story points out. A recent report detailing how the adversaries in Cote d’Ivoire’s civil war illegally appropriated the profits from the country’s cocoa harvest to enrich its leaders and continue the war effort. Should it surprise us that Bohoun Bouabré’s name is all over that report?

According to Global Witness, the London-based NGO tracking the exploitation of natural resources to fuel conflict and the report's author, soon after the Gbabgo government was elected in 2000, four separate cocoa institutions were created mainly to funnel monies to various presidential-controlled funds. These new institutions (another was created just before Gbabgo’s electoral victory) were financed by new cocoa and coffee levies, controlled by the ministers of agriculture and finance. However, the European Union found the levies charged were more than sufficient to cover running the institutions.

According to the report, called Hot Chocolate: How Cocoa Fuelled the Conflict in Cote d’Ivoire:

In 2006 the UN Panel of Experts on Côte d’Ivoire found a contract between the government of Côte d’Ivoire and an unnamed company revealing that for the 2005-2006 cocoa harvest, some exporting companies had paid at least US$20m in advance for the DUS. [The largest European cocoa exporter working in Cote d’Ivoire] Tropival confirmed that in 2005-2006, advance payment had been requested from all exporters. The person representing the state of Côte d’Ivoire in this contract was the then finance minister, Paul Antoine Bouhoun Bouabré. The use of the money raised is not known.

In another incident, Global Witness found that until 2003, the money collected from the cocoa levies was deposited in several bank accounts, mostly at BCEAO headquarters and the state bank of Cote d’Ivoire, the CAA, the acronym for the Caisse autonome d’amortissement. In October 2002, a transfer was made at the CAA totaling 10 billion CFA (around $19 million) from instructions by finance minister, Paul Antoine Bouhoun Bouabré and agriculture minister, Sébastien Dano Djédjé.

The funds from this account were lent, at 6.5 percent interest, to the Ivorian government for the “war effort,” Global Witness found. These funds were moved into an account held by the presidency’s financial services, also within the CAA. The loan was supposed to be reimbursed within 12 months, but it is not clear if the payment was made. The report states:

Between 28 November and 19 December 2002, under the instructions of the same two ministers, six transfers for a total of a further 10bn CFA were made from the same CAA account to an account held by the FRC, also at the CAA. Global Witness received a copy of a letter dated 26 November 2002 addressed to the CAA, signed by both ministers, asking the head of the CAA, Victor Jérôme Nembéléssini-Silué, to organise the transfer of this money. A letter from the FRC authorised the transfer of the 10bn CFA to the presidency’s financial services account, also at the CAA.

However, the UN Panel of Experts investigating Cote d’Ivoire’s economy during the civil war claimed the 10 billion CFA loan and the second 10 billion CFA “gift” directly contributed to the government’s expenditure on security and national defense. According to Global Witness:

It is likely that in the case of this loan and gift, the government simply appropriated the money and that the cocoa institution to which the funds belonged, the FRC, acted as an intermediary or a cover. Through the signature accounts, the government already controlled money from the cocoa trade, as the finance minister and the agriculture minister were the only official signatories.

Finally, the group reported that in April 2002, Bouhoun Bouabré opened a new account at the CAA, and filling it by moving 31.9 billion CFA ($61.6 million) from the BCEAO account. The state auditing administration stated that the Ivorian government had no claims over the BCEAO account and should not have moved it to the CAA. Bouhoun Bouabré claimed it was moved because CAA paid a better interest rate.

Three strikes and you’re out
I am no lawyer, but for those keeping score, these accounts seem to amount to more than a few instances of money laundering, bribery and just plain old corruption. Even looking past the extremely questionable politics of the Gbagbo regime, these policies carried out by Bouhoun Bouabré not only prolonged the war in Cote d’Ivoire, but hurt cocoa farmers (by lowering the price paid for cocoa) and generally brought even more harm to the admittedly weak Ivorian economy.

Part of me doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at Gbagbo’s audacity for appointing such a blatant stool pigeon for an important post. To me, there is no doubt that Bouhoun Bouabré would sully the bank’s solid reputation and perhaps even threaten its independence. Is such a person worth the destruction of the West African money union, which most likely will result if Gbagbo takes his country’s money and runs? My hope is that a compromise can be reached. The AllAfrica.com story points out an Ivorian daily has already published a shortlist of possible alternative candidates.

If no compromise can be found – and when has Gbagbo ever carried through on a compromise of any sort? – what happens next may be of great importance to the fragile economies of the world’s poorest region. Stay tuned.

Cote d'Ivoire: Continuing the search for journalist Guy-André Kieffer

One afternoon nearly four years ago, several armed men in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire threw French-Canadian journalist Guy-André Kieffer into a waiting car at a supermarket parking lot.

He has not been seen since. Inter Press Service has the rest.

Cote d'Ivoire tightens diamond monitoring

Cote d’Ivoire has once again strengthened its monitoring of the country’s diamonds, according to a story at Inter Press Service. The new agreement, worked out at the annual conference of the Kimberly Process in Brussels, will help insure diamonds are sold through official channels and will not go to fund the war effort.

The agreement comes at the heels of European authorities confiscating €14 million worth of diamonds from Cote d’Ivoire in spite of a screening system to block the conflict diamonds.

In 2005 a report by the NGO Global Witness alleged that diamonds mined in the area controlled by the rebel group Forces Nouvelles in northern of Cote d’Ivoire were being smuggled out of the country. A United Nations Group of Experts report later confirmed the illicit diamonds were helping fund the war effort and also brought personal financial gain to leaders of the Forces Nouvelles. In 2005 the United Nations placed an embargo on rough diamonds of Ivorian origin.

The smuggling may be continuing, however. The BBC recently reported that a smuggling ring was rumored to be operating in Mali, just across the Ivorian border. Officials at the Kimberly Process meeting admitted that even with more controls placed on Cote d’Ivoire, tracking illegal shipments of diamonds through its neighboring countries will prove difficult.

"The borders of Cote d'Ivoire are porous," Ian Smillie, research coordinator with Partnership Africa Canada, told IPS. "The borders of its neighbors are also porous. Diamonds don't stop in Burkina Faso, if that is where they are going. They all reach world markets in Europe, the U.S., Japan and India."

In late 2006, Ghana joined the Kimberly Process and reached an agreement on verifying the diamonds from Cote d’Ivoire. Neighbors Guinea and Liberia are also members of the 47-country program. However, neither Mali nor Burkina Faso has joined the Kimberly Process. Administrators said the two countries would like to cooperate.

Conflict diamonds first came to the world’s attention in the late 1990s when it was found the long running wars of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola were being funded by the plundering of natural resources, such as diamonds and gold. The IPS story reports that between 1992 and 1998, nearly $4 billion worth of diamonds passed through the hands of UNITA, a major rebel group in the long-running Angolan civil war.

The conflict diamonds provided a perfectly twisted metaphor: An unequivocal symbol of wealth and love that were mined under dangerous circumstances in poor countries and funding horrific and incomprehensible wars. Fearing international condemnation and worse, regulation, diamond industry representatives met with governments to undertake a scheme to monitor the sale of illicit diamonds. The groups met in Kimberly, South Africa in 2000 and hatched a voluntary regulation program.

Members of the diamond industry point out that conflict diamonds have dropped from 15 percent of the world market to below one percent. This proves the Kimberly Process has cleaned up the once blood-stained industry, representatives say.

In the IPS story:

Eli Izhakoff, chief executive with the World Diamond Council in New York, said it is "unprecedented" for an industry to seek the kind of controls that he favours over gemstone trading centres.

"Our policy is one conflict diamond is one diamond too much," he told IPS. "We are doing everything in our power, together with NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and governments, to make sure the right controls are in place. We have done a lot but of course there is more to be done."

According to an independent audit by Global Witness, the process has done a good job shedding light on the issue of conflict diamonds and driving the illicit industry underground. However, the industry-governed process still contains loopholes.

From the 2006 report:

Although there is much to praise about the inaugural phase, the scheme has not yet evolved into a fully credible check on the international movement of diamonds. Foremost are gaps in oversight, specifically of internal control systems in individual countries and of the peer review monitoring system (PRMS) overall. Another main weakness is the inadequate check on private industry by individual governments or on an overall system basis. Data collection and analysis, although improving, is uneven at best. Recent administrative decisions have sought to strengthen the relationship between compliance and participation, but the rules are not well-fleshed out and have yet to be tested. If Kimberley is to be fully credible, Participants will need to squarely address the issue of conformance without jettisoning widespread participation on which the scheme depends.

Participants will need to consider governance and resource issues if the Kimberley Process is to evolve into a robust, dependable regime. So far, KPCS has flourished with an ad-hoc, voluntary system of administration, but deficiencies are emerging as the regime transitions from implementation to compliance. Participants will need to consider how to improve on the informal structure yet preserve the flexibility and political practicality that has been a hallmark of this novel, voluntary model for multilateral agreement and action. The shift to compliance also will reveal inevitable differences in capacity and commitment among countries. Participants will need to draw on the strong political will already in place to set priorities, allocate needed resources and verify compliance at all points along the chain.

Sanction busting in Cote d'Ivoire?

As the UN Security Council voted Monday to continue its sanctions on Cote d’Ivoire, the BBC reports that those sanctions continue to be broken.

In a unanimous vote, the council prolonged the 12-month blockade against guns and arms entering the country and diamonds leaving. Council members also renewed travel bans even though Cote d’Ivoire’s president called for those bans to be lifted against three people from the southern part of the country: Charles Goudé Ble, Eugène Djue and Kouakou Fofie.

The BBC reports that a leaked United Nations Group of Experts monitoring report claims the rebels of northern Cote d’Ivoire continue to smuggle diamonds through Mali.

The diamonds from Cote d’Ivoire end up in Sikasso, a Malian town about 100 km north of the Ivorian border, where allegedly they are shipped to Bamako.

"Often you find diamonds in transit here, which have come from Seguela, passing through to Mali's capital. When they get to Bamako there are certain businessmen there who send them to western countries," an unidentified man told BBC.

However, the reporter could not find any evidence of diamond smuggling. Nor had any of the people she spoke to seen a diamond.

In Sept. 2005, Global Witness found that northern rebels of Cote d’Ivoire were smuggling diamonds through Mali and Guinea to fund their war effort against the south. This was backed up by a report from the UN Panel of Experts, who pointed out both sides of the conflict were also using cocoa to purchase military equipment. (Here is a story on Global Witness’s work in Cote d’Ivoire.)

The UN Security Council first began its bans on Cote d’Ivoire in 2005. The Council Monday declared they will review the sanctions after all parties have fully implemented the so-called Ouagadougou peace agreement and holding free and fair elections.

Earlier last month, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon worried about the pace of the peace plan.

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.

UN triple shot: Cote d'Ivoire, Somalia, Guinea-Bissau

Cote d’Ivoire: In a recent report, the UN claims Cote d’Ivoire’s military is obstructing inspections regarding the international embargo on arms and related material.

During the investigations, which took place between mid-July and mid-August, the Group “observed a lack of understanding on the part of certain Ivorian political authorities who believed that, with the signing of the Ouagadougou Political Agreement on 4 March 2007, their mission was out of step with the current reconciliation process.”

The Group also heard reports of Malian smuggling rings to ferry illegal diamonds out of the country and potential violations on diamond exports.

Somalia: Increased violence between the Transitional Federal Government and other parties has resulted in “suspicion” toward the humanitarian community, which is impeding relief work and food deliveries.

An estimated 60 uniformed and armed members of the Somalia National Security Service stormed a UN compound October 17 and abducted a member of the World Food Program staff member. So far the captive, Idriss Osman, is reportedly unharmed.

Since then, the WFP has discontinued work in the region where three million people are in need of assistance.

The abduction of Mr. Osman follows the shooting death of three WFP-contracted drivers.

Guinea Bissau: The UN Security Council called for the United Nations to examine how best to support Guinea-Bissau, which has been awash in claims that drug trafficking undermines its peace and stability.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the West African nation has become a transit point for cocaine moving between Latin America and Europe. Even though the government has made at least 50 drug seizures in the past two years, it is a small a portion of drugs moving through the country.

Drug traffickers have leveraged the country’s poverty and political instability, the lingering effects of a brief civil war six years ago, to outmaneuver weak government surveillance with planes and ships to drop-off and pick up drugs.

Another issue remains that drugs confiscated by the government often find a way back to the street through corruption and thievery.