The killers struck just before midnight. With speed and method, they went from house to house smashing open doors and windows and shooting families in their beds.
Weeks later, blood remained visible on the walls as the village of Broudoume mourned its 12 dead and tended its wounded. A martyrs’ cemetery was dug and there was talk of vengeance.
It could be any one of Africa’s wars where political and ethnic tension is stoked by competition for natural resources. Except that this is Côte d’Ivoire and the fight is not for gold or diamonds or timber or oil. It is for chocolate.
Cocoa plantations from this west African state supply the raw ingredient for almost half the world’s chocolate, worth an estimated $350-million a year, which means there is wealth and power to be reaped from the yellow, green and red pods.
Officially, the civil war which flared in September 2002 is over: rebels and government forces have signed a ceasefire and agreed to rule jointly until elections next year. To cement the deal thousands of United Nations peacekeepers are due to deploy this month. But across much of the cocoa belt, overlapping micro-conflicts are pitting indigenous farmers against settlers from the north and neighbours such as Mali and Burkina Faso.
By regional standards the body count is low — probably in the hundreds, according to Human Rights Watch — but thousands have been displaced and aid workers warn of potentially much worse to come, and with it disruption of the cocoa supply. ”Look what they did,” said Jean Philippe Zahui, pointing to bullet holes in the bedroom of his brother, Mathieu, who was one of those killed in the March 4 attack on Broudoume. ”It was savage.”
Several wounded remain in hospital; others limp around the village. ”We’re too afraid to work in the fields. There could be another attack,” said a neighbour, Isaac Zoboua (42).
Mayhem
This village, three hours’ drive west from the commercial capital, Abidjan, is a study in how the region’s most prosperous, stable nation slid into mayhem. For four decades the indigenous Bete tribe welcomed and worked alongside the migrants and foreigners who helped clear the forest to plant cocoa.
But in the 1990s prices fell, and as the forest thinned, so did the welcome. A longstanding government policy to give land to those who cultivated it changed when President Laurent Gbagbo, a Bete from near Broudoume, declared that the settlers did not own it after all. ”The foreigners thought the land belonged to them but the indigenous people had rented it, not given it,” said Dano Djedje, the national reconciliation minister.
There are two versions of what then happened in Broudoume. Patrice Ouraga (44) the headman, said that last October a settler woman was discovered taking sand from a sacred forest for witchcraft. ”So we decided to drive them out.” All 816 settlers packed and left, leaving just Bete. Proving just how treacherous they were, the expelled settlers returned to murder their former neighbours in the March attack, said Ouraga. Nobody interviewed in Broudoume wanted them to return.
The other version is that the Bete, encouraged by the government, found a pretext to ethnically cleanse their neighbours and harvest their cocoa. ”The indigenous wanted to take back their land, so they tried to find a reason,” said the director of a cocoa cooperative in nearby Gagnoa.
Though the Bete deny touching the settlers’ crops, many became rich through the double harvest, he said. Last year’s bumper harvest fetched record prices. Jean-Marie Badiel, a foreign trader based in Gagnoa, said greed had partly motivated the expulsions. ”It is when the harvest is good that the indigenous become jealous.”
Settlers from two other villages, Badiepa and Pissekou, said 700 of them had been expelled on the eve of the harvest by neighbours who cited the rebellion as justification. ”They said we were killing their people, that we brought the war, that we should leave,” said Yaya Kone (55).
Djedje has negotiated the return of some communities, often after they agreed to pay rent to Bete neighbours, but some settlers say that with the police and army against them it is better to flee. Two camps shelter 7 600 displaced cocoa workers but aid workers estimate that thousands more are seeking refuge in cities and across the border. Since their revenge raid on those who evicted them, the settlers from Broudoume are hiding from security forces who allegedly dragged immigrants from buses and executed them in reprisal for the attack.
To the relief of chocolate makers such as Nestlé and Cadbury Schweppes, the cocoa war has not dented Côte d’Ivoire output — last year it harvested 1,4-million of the world’s three-million tons. But that may change. The director of the cocoa cooperative in Gagnoa said yields were down this year because indigenous farmers were unable or unwilling to replace the arduous labour of those expelled. ”They don’t have the experience to maintain the plantations.” – Guardian Unlimited Â