Laurent Gbagbo thumbs nose at international condemnation in Ivory Coast

The US and EU has issued a travel ban on Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo after he refused to concede defeat in the 28 November run-off election. The US, EU, UN, and the AU have all recognized Gbagbo's challenger Alassane Ouattara as the winner of that election. Violence broke out last week when Ouattara’s supporters fought with Gbagbo’s security forces. The possibility is increasing of a return to the civil war fought between north and south of the country in the early half of the decade. (Photo: Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty)

But Gbagbo shows no sign of bowing to international pressure. Instead his troops have cut off food, water and medical help to Ouattara who has been holed up in the Golf Hotel in Abidjan since the election guarded by UN peacekeepers. UN observers in Ivory Coast say Gbagbo has ordered at least 50 murders and abducted many more in the last week. Gbagbo used state-controlled media to portray the calls for his departure as a foreign plot to control the country’s rich natural resources. He has also started to harass UN operatives after the Security Council extended the mandate of 8,650 peacekeepers until the end of June.

This year’s election was intended as a way of drawing a line under eight years of division between the north and south of the country which remains the world’s leading producer of cocoa. The civil war began in 2000 after a military coup which ousted President Henri Konan Bedie. Ouattara, a former Prime Minister and a Muslim, had intended to stand for the election due that year. But coup leader General Guei established criteria that all candidates had to have two Ivorian parents. Courts barred Ouattara on the grounds his mother was from Burkina Faso. Gbabgo eventually won the election but Ouattara has been a thorn in his side ever since.

Attempts to run another election since 2005 were hampered by continuing violence in the north of the country. In the first round in October 2010 Gbagbo came first with 38 percent and Ouattara was second with 32 percent. With neither reaching 50 percent, a run-off was required. Third placed Bedie was eliminated on 25 percent amid the inevitable claim the vote was rigged. In the run-off election at the end of November, provisional results showed Gbagbo had lost by nearly 10 percent.

Before the highest court in the land, the Constitutional Council, could validate any results, Electoral Commission boss Youssouf Bakayok appeared on France24 news channel without the approval of the other 30 members of the Commission, and announced a victory for Ouattara. But when the full Constitutional Council met, they decided to cancel thousands of votes from the north which was Ouattara's stronghold.

The Council declared Gbagbo the winner with 51 percent of the vote. The news was greeted with international condemnation. Obama’s press secretary Robert Gibbs said Outtara was the rightly and justly elected President and said the US ready to impose targeted sanctions individually and with other countries against Gbagbo who “continues to cling to power illegitimately.” “That election was clear. Its result was clear. And it’s time for him to go,” Gibbs said.

France joined the chorus of condemnation. The former colonial power still has many interests in the country and has a 950-strong security force posted there separate to the UN peacekeepers. French Foreign Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said their troops would defend themselves should they come under attack. President Sarkozy said the results show a clear and incontestable victory for Alassane Ouattara. A president has just been elected in the Ivory Coast. That president is Ouattara.” The message has yet to get through to Laurent Gbagbo.

Trafigura: the ugly face of capitalism

The latest installment in Trafigura’s sordid attempts to gag British media occurs today when the high court issues its judgement on the libel action the company took out on the BBC. Trafigura is the notorious oil and commodities trading company which was responsible for 15 deaths and the injuries of thousands of West Africans after it dumped oil waste. Trafigura says it is the world's third-biggest private oil trader, and declared $440m profit last year. Its 200 traders are reported to receive annual bonuses of up to $1m each. But it is highly sensitive to criticism and sued BBC’s flagship current affairs show Newsnight for telling the truth that they were responsible for murder. The Guardian, itself a victim of several Trafigura legal actions, says the BBC case was one of a series of legal threats against the media in several countries brought by the company. (Photo: AFP/GETTY)

Their most reprehensible order came in October when Trafigura made an extraordinary attempt to stop the Guardian from reporting on parliament. The attempt backfired after it ignited a Twitter firestorm and its lawyers Carter-Ruck withdrew the injunction within 24 hours. On that occasion Trafigura were trying to stop publication of a report they commissioned about their dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast. 12 people died and 31,000 people were injured as a result of their illegal dumping of a by-product of coker naptha in 2006.

After repeatedly denying liability, Trafigura eventually agreed to pay an out-of-court settlement more than $50m to almost 30,000 inhabitants of Ivory Coast’s largest city Abidjan. Nevertheless Trafigura engaged Carter-Ruck again to bring the libel action against the BBC on the basis that the company had been wrongly accused of causing deaths, not just sickness. This was despite official pronouncements by a UN investigator, and the Ivorian and British government which referred to deaths being caused directly by the dumping. Trafigura were able to get away with this because of the settlement it struck with another British law firm Leigh Day which led the class action acted on behalf of the Ivorians. The eventual compensation resulted in an agreed statement making no claims about deaths.

The original problem was a result of western greed and lax Third World safety standards. In 2005 Trafigura bought dirty oil contaminated with coker naptha from Mexico for next to nothing with the intention of cleaning it and selling it on for profit. The cleaning process involves pouring tonnes of caustic into the coker naptha but this generates dangerous and deadly waste such as hydrogen sulphide. The process is so dangerous, it is banned in most western countries.

But African countries are less strict. Trafigura chartered a ship and took it to Abidjan where they illegally fly-tipped at 15 locations around Abidjan. In the weeks that followed, tens of thousands of people reported a range of similar symptoms, including breathing problems, sickness and diarrhoea. In September 2009 BBC Newsnight revealed it had uncovered email evidence to show Trafigura bosses knew the waste dumped in Ivory Coast was hazardous. The BBC were backed up by a UN Report on the matter which found "strong prima facie evidence that the reported deaths and adverse health consequences are related to the dumping of the waste from the cargo ship".

The Minton Report which exposed the dumping and blamed Trafigura remains off-limits to British media due to a host of injunctions. According to Wikileaks which is keeping access open to the report, the illegal Ivorian dumping is “possibly most culpable mass contamination incident since Bhopal.”

Trafigura, meanwhile, released a disengenuous statement on 16 October aimed at dispelling “further misunderstandings” of what happened in Abidjan. They attempted to discredit the Minton Report (which they had commissioned) on the basis of its “hypothetical ideas”, the fact that no visits were made to Ivory Coast and its analysis was overtaken by field analysis by the Netherlands Forensic Institute. Though it doesn’t say whether the NFI analysis contradicted Minton, it is highly unlikely it did, given it was used as a basis to settle the class action.

None of that matters now except preventing the truth from being told. But here’s to Trafigura’s failure. Their dishonesty, greed, selfishness and contempt of public opinion deserve the widest possible audience and criminal action. They represent capitalism at its venial worst.

Trafigura throttles the Guardian but not the guardians of the Internet

The London based oil trader Trafigura bills itself as “one of the largest independent companies trading commodities today”. Whether it will still be as large in the coming months is open to question as its scurrilous attempts to do damage control by throttling the truth are coming completely unstuck. While Trafigura has admitted to a multimillion-pound payout to settle a huge African pollution damages claim, it is trying and failing to stop the world from finding out about its grubby activities. (photo of Houses of Parliament by Derek Barry)

In an extraordinary legal event, British broadsheet the Guardian was hit overnight with an injunction that prevents it from reporting on parliament – a right that has been guaranteed in British law since 1688 (*** see legal note below). But the Internet was not around in 1688 and the newly defined wider “media” is busy making an ass of the injunction.

The Guardian injunction sounds like it emerged from the pages of a Franz Kafka novel. The article was related to published Commons order papers containing a question to be answered by a minister later this week. But the injunction prevents the Guardian from “identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.” The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers “why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.” All the Guardian could say was that the case involves London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media on behalf of global corporations.

But while Carter-Ruck could shut down the Guardian they could not shut down the Internet. The Twitterverse went wild on speculation about the case, bringing it to a much larger audience than would otherwise have heard of the case in a wonderful example of the Streisand Effect. Meanwhile a simple Google search of “Carter Ruck Trafigura” took me to blogger Richard Wilson’s site. Wilson simply ignored the edict and linked to the parliamentary question.

The question is from Newcastle-under-Lyme Labour MP Paul Farrelly who wanted to ask the Secretary of State for Justice, “what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.”

According to Wikileaks the Minton report was a confidential report ordered by Trafigura into its toxic dumping practices in the Ivory Coast. A week after it was published, the Independent wrote an article “Toxic shame: Thousands injured in African city”. Mysteriously that article about Trafigura’s dumping of sludge in Abidjan has been pulled from the Independent’s website but the cached version is still available here.

Trafigura’s chemical operation used a cheap and dirty process called "caustic washing" that is outlawed in many countries. The company had claimed that the toxic waste they dumped in Abidjan was “routine and harmless”. But the Minton report showed the true nature of the problem. Thousands of Ivorians flocked to local hospitals in 2006 after coming in contact with hundreds of tons of highly toxic oil waste. At least 12 people died with fatal levels of the poisonous gas hydrogen sulphide, one of the waste's by-products. 31,000 others were injured. Many of these people are now involved in one of the world’s largest class actions.

What the whole shemozzle shows is that it is much harder to hide the truth with sharing tools like Twitter, Wikileaks, Google search, and Google Cache around. The quick and dirty actions of Trafigura and Carter-Ruck are reprehensible but probably par for the course in big business. But now they are facing the just deserts of their faulty cost-benefit analysis. The short term gain of their lies has been wiped away as the shabbiness of their actions is exposed. The lesson they are learning quickly is that the worst thing you can do is stop people from talking about you - It has exactly the opposite effect.

***Legal note: The Guardian’s breached right has been identified as “absolute privilege” which I believe is not entirely correct. I’m not a trained lawyer so my understanding may be wrong. However, according to my copy of The Journalist’s Guide to Media Law (Australian but based on British precedents) “absolute privilege” is reserved for what is said inside parliament (and the courts) and what is reported in tabled documents there. But journalists can never claim absolute privilege against defamation unless they are giving evidence or it is their document. The defence that journalists are entitled to is called “fair report” which allows them to provide “balanced and accurate” coverage of parliamentary proceedings.

==UPDATE== A victory for the Internet. The injunction has been withdrawn barely two hours after I wrote about it.

Ivory Coast tries to extend its Zone of Confidence

The president of Ivory Coast has signed a peace deal on the weekend with a rebel group in an effort to end a five-year long civil war. The deal will see the creation of a new government and calls for the departure of foreign troops from the troubled West African country. President Laurent Gbagbo signed the deal on Sunday with Guillaume Soro, head of the united rebel movement, the Forces Nouvelle. The peace deal will see a new transitional government established within five weeks and creates a new joint military command. The deal, brokered by neighbouring Burkina Faso President Blaise Compaore, also called for the removal of 9,000 UN troops and 4,000 French soldiers from the buffer zone called the "Zone of Confidence" that currently splits the country in two.

Ivory Coast has been divided between a loyalist Christian south and a rebel-held Muslim north since the war began in September 2002. The war started in Ivory Coast’s largest city, Abidjan but quickly spread to other cities. The two sides clashed for several months before they signed a peace deal signed in France in January 2003. However that accord was never implemented. Nor were follow-up deals in Ghana and South Africa. Talks stumbled repeatedly over disputes on disarmament and a national identity program to give immigrants the same rights as natives. The latest solution is a victory for long-term president Laurent Gbagbo at the cost of power-sharing with Soro's rebels.

Gbagbo has been president since 2000 although has never faced re-election since his initial victory, which itself was tainted by a northern boycott. He was born in 1945 into a Catholic family in the centre-west of the country in 1945. At school he was nicknamed “Cicero" because of his taste for Latin and he gained a PhD in history. He was employed as a university lecturer before being jailed for two years in 1971 for "subversive" teaching. He spent much of the 1980s in exile in Paris after challenging Houphouet-Boigny’s seemingly endless rule.

Félix Houphouët-Boigny was the father of independent Ivory Coast. He was a cocoa farmer who formed the country’s first agricultural trade union in 1944. He rose to prominence during the 1950s when he founded a multinational party Rassemblement Démocratique Africain which advocated independence for European colonies in Africa. Ivory Coast became independent in 1960 and Houphouët-Boigny was named first president. He would rule for the next 33 years until his death.

He cultivated political ties with West which insulated the Ivory Coast from the turmoil associated with the military uprisings that characterised the region. Ivory Coast would become one of the wealthiest countries in Africa under his guidance. But he also quashed all opposition and moved the country's capital from Abidjan to his hometown of Yamoussoukro where he also built Africa’s largest church modelled on St Peter’s in Rome at a cost of $300 million, the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro. This colossal edifice was built as a personal gift from Houphouët-Boigny to the Vatican.

When Houphouët-Boigny died in 1993, he was succeeded by Henri Konan Bédié. Bedie’s rule faced a number of difficulties including economic pressure from falling world market prices for cocoa and coffee, internal corruption that steeply reduced foreign aid, and mounting political opposition. Bédié was accused of massive corruption and was overthrown in Ivory Coast’s first ever military coup in 1999. General Robert Guéï was persuaded to come out of retirement to lead the country. He led until the election the following year when Gbagbo was swept to power.

The civil war began two years later. The issue of voting rights was critical. Ex president Bédié had introduced a concept of "Ivoirite" (Ivorianness in English). A quarter of the population were immigrants, particularly from Burkina Faso, a poorer country to the north. Racial tensions bubbled to the surface after a 2000 law was drafted to ensure both parents of a presidential candidate to be born in Ivory Coast. This law expressly excluded presidential candidate Alassane Ouattara who represented the predominantly Muslim north, who were immigrant workers from Burkina and Mali working on the cocoa plantations.

Cocoa farmers have a lot of power in Ivory Coast. Cocoa is the dried and partially fermented fatty seed of the cacao tree that ends up being the key ingredient in chocolate. There are a lot of chocolate lovers and most of the planet’s cocoa is grown in West Africa and Ivory Coast is the world's leading cocoa producer and produces about 43 percent of the global crop. As a result of the civil war there, international cocoa prices rose sharply in 2002. As 20% of the price of chocolate is cocoa, eventually the price of the raw material will force its way into the product. Nestle kept a close eye on Ivory Coast. The war itself was a stalemate, Government forces maintained control of Abidjan and the south, but the rebels took the north and based themselves in Bouake.

Most of the fighting in the civil war ended by 2004 but it left the country split in half. The French sent in a force of 2,500 men to keep the peace and encouraged the groups to come to a compromise. The UN also sent in a peace mission called United Nations Operation in Côte d'Ivoire (UNOCI). The two sides signed an agreement in 2004 and agreed to set of a government of national reconciliation but the rebels pulled out shortly after. The atmosphere of distrust lingered into the following years and the situation worsened when the Government used Belarussian mercenaries to bomb the rebel capital Bouake. They also accidentally killed nine French soldiers and France retaliated by destroying a bomber base in the capital Yamoussoukro.

Meanwhile Gbagbo’s original mandate as president expired in 2005 but with the country in disarray it was deemed impossible to hold an election, and his term in office was extended for a maximum of one year. But the situation was no better a year later and the UN Security Council endorsed another one-year extension of Gbagbo's term in November 2006. Nonetheless there have been signs of improvement. Ivory Coast's successful world cup campaign in Germany 2006 was influential in bring the country together.

The impoverished north in particularly wants simply to be recognised as genuine Ivorians. Despite the ability and charismatic charm of rebel leader Guillaume Kigbafori Soro, there are little or no government-run health or education services in the rebel-held north and west. 750,000 people were uprooted by the fighting, and over a million children have been without schooling since the war started five years ago. The latest deal offers them a small slice of improvement.

This peace plan envisages a line of observation posts staffed by "impartial forces", running through the centre of the current buffer zone. The observation posts would be halved in number every two months. It offers citizenship to migrants and envisions elections within 10 months. French Aid and Cooperation Minister Brigitte Girardin has praised the accord and said that France would consider pulling out its troops deployed in Ivory Coast. The country's Cicero, President Gbagbo, sounded optimistic of success.
"This is peace in Africa, this is peace by Africa,” he said “"All the problems which are born in Africa can find their solution in Africa."