Blood Chocolate Soon in US Stores
US- and France-backed Alassane Ouattara is determined to impose new ownership of cocoa and coffee plantations. Current farmers were all killed, including children and women in their villages that were all burned down, in their cocoa and coffee plantations and in the bushes. The survivors, most of whom found refuge in neighboring Liberia and in places like the Duekoue Catholic church, are not only afraid of being killed by pro-Ouattara rebels and terrorists if they return, they have been replaced by Malinke and foreign national occupants on their lands and properties.
Ndzana Seme
BALTIMORE 04/19/2011 – There is a chance that the Hershey chocolate bar, the Donkin Donut chocolate glaze or the favored chocolate milk that any US kid or customer would enjoy within the next weeks will be tainted with human blood.
It is highly likely that a cocoa product that any consumer will purchase soon on the US market was grown, harvested and treated by a farmer who was killed during the widespread massacres that are unfolding in Cote d’Ivoire (the official name for Ivory Coast) since late March until this day.
A third of the world’s cocoa is produced in Cote d’Ivoire. Cocoa is the raw bean that yields chocolate once processed.
In the Catholic mission of the Western town of Duekoue where she shares a tiny space with 27 400 fellow Guere ethnic group members all displaced from their cocoa producing lands, 41 years old Bah Bonao Sidonie told IRIN reporter that three of her brothers were all killed at Carrefour neighborhood “when soldiers [pro-Ouattara rebel forces] came.”
The larger, half-million We ethnic group, which includes the Wobe and the Guere, have always lived in the area including the towns of Duekoue, Guiglo, Toulepleu, Blolequen, Bangolo, Kuibli and Facobly, since distant times; for there is no known historical We migration.
The We people have always been the area’s land owners going as far back as before the arrival of the French colonizer. They are most of all known as the owners of cocoa and coffee plantations.
In Duekoue, the Guere people own most cocoa and coffee plantations. But as it is common practice in the whole country since the 1960’s, these farmers use foreign labor as plantation workers.
Those cocoa and coffee plantation workers come from foreign areas, including internal Baoule people, but also foreign Malinke (Dioula-speaking) and other people from Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea and other countries.
Back in 1990, former French puppet dictator and greatest cocoa farmer Felix Houphouet Boigny appointed Burkina Faso national Alassane Dramane Ouattara Prime Minister.
Since then, above all because Boigny successor Henri Konan Bedie had denied Ouattara any opportunity to run for president as he lacked of “ivoirité” (being Ivory Coast national), relationship between Malinke workers and their Guere employers have, like in other farming areas of the country, shifted from job conditions disputes to land ownership disputes.
This situation was further poisoned since 2002 when Ouattara-funded and France-organized rebellion of Northern (mostly Malinke) ex-convicts and militaries attempted a coup to overthrow Laurent Gbagbo, who was then democratically elected less than two years earlier.
The situation was further inflamed after France positioned its Licorne troops as a buffer zone and drafted UN resolutions to add ONUCI troops in order to maintain a 9-year long separation of Cote d’Ivoire between rebel-held North and government-controlled South.
Because the Guere people found themselves in the separation area and because they are Laurent Gbagbo supporters, they have since then been subjected to Malinke and rebel attacks aimed at taking their lands by force.
During the 9-year period of negotiations during which France, after they had destroyed government’s air military capabilities, brought the government to consider the rebels as equal partners, tensions between farmers and their foreign workers were aggravated beyond all proportions.
In November 28, 2010, the presidential runoff election opposed rebel-supported Alassane Ouattara (article 42 of the Constitution was exceptionally changed to allow him to run) to incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo.
Laurent Gbagbo was proclaimed the election winner with 51% of votes by the Constitutional Council (the country’s Supreme Court on election matters). The court also nullified election results in several Northern zones where armed rebels had terrorized, killed, burned houses, tortured and raped voters, and threatened election observers and officials.
But Alassane Ouattara, along with his supporters, including the ONUCI chief who certified the fictitious provisional results read by pro-Ouattara CEI (Independent Electoral Commission) President, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, US President Barrack Obama and his crowd of following leaders all rejected the Constitutional Council’s proclaimed results.
This is like foreign leaders had rejected the Supreme Court decision to recount votes in Florida during the 2000 Bush-Gore election result dispute. Obviously, George W Bush’s government would have rejected in the strongest terms such foreign interference in US affairs. Which is exactly what President Laurent Gbagbo did, in response to the “international community”’s pressure.
Yet by imposing CEI President’s results (even though CEI did not actually reach any results because of lack of the required consensus) and pressing President Gbagbo to step down otherwise he would bear serious consequences, while Cote d’Ivoire’s Head of State rejected those external claims and stayed in power to preserve the country’s Constitution and sovereignty, the crisis Cote d’Ivoire was created, fueled and exacerbated.
Clashes erupted in the Duekoue and other Western areas between the We people supported by pro-Gbagbo local “Patriot Youth” and the Malinke and Baoule people supported by the rebels. Tens of people died.
Among the sanctions pushed forth by Nicolas Sarkozy and Barrack Obama to starve the government and bring Gbagbo to step down was the ban on Cote d’Ivoire cocoa exportations.
Côte d’Ivoire is the world’s largest cocoa bean producer, with 1.6 million metric tones in 2010. The country accounts for 44 percent of global cocoa production.
U.S. imports of cocoa beans were about $660 million in 2008, 60 percent of which were from Cote d’Ivoire (Source: U.S. Food Import Patterns, 1998-2007 / FAU-125).
U.S. imports of cocoa powder and other cocoa products (mainly chocolates), which undergo further value-added processing compared with cocoa butter, accounted for $2.6 billion in 2008.
Those imports were primarily from Netherlands (mainly from Nestle, the first world’s Cote d’Ivoire cocoa importer) and Mexico who accounted both for over 60 percent of cocoa powder imports to the United State (Source: U.S. Food Import Patterns, 1998-2007 / FAU-125).
These numbers show that any ban on Cote d’Ivoire cocoa beans and products hits US cocoa processing, transportation and trade businesses seriously, with major damages.
Because Laurent Gbagbo resisted the ban by taking the decision to nationalize the country’s cocoa sector, with the State purchasing all cocoa beans from framers and selling them to any companies of its choosing, international cocoa prices rose sharply.
Last January, world traders paid US$3 394.56 per tone compared to US$2 910.31 per tone in November 2010 when Ivorians went to the polls.
Cargill, one of the biggest global trading companies of cocoa, made an announcement that it was suspending cocoa purchases from Cote d’Ivoire.
Yet, the situation was so tense that American company and main cocoa importer, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), indirectly stated that it may not comply with the trade ban, according to a World Bank paper.
ADM, which maintains capabilities of 18 cocoa bean processing plants treating about 3,000 metric tones each year in the US, had actually no choice but to purchase cocoa in the expanding Cote d’Ivoire black market, which has channels in Burkina Faso and Ghana (Source: 2010 ADM 10-K)Because the ban was unbearable for US cocoa product companies as they are pressured by the demand from their world’s first chocolate consuming country, those set as a limit for all actors to solve the power crisis issue the date of March 31, 2011. After such date, they would pay to Laurent Gbagbo’s government all duties and taxes owed it for the already purchased cocoa stocked on the ports of Abidjan and San Pedro.
Therefore, it came to no surprise that on March 27, the rebels, terrorists and mercenaries behind Alassane Ouattara, with the support of French Licorne troops and ONUCI troops, advanced and attacked government army positions along the buffer line.
The national army refused to fight and withdrew instead all its troops and concentrated them only to defend Abidjan.
Unfortunately, when Ouattara’s armed groups took control of Duekoue and the other towns in the We area, they massacred over 800 people only between March 27 and March 28, most of whom were Guere people in what is nothing but genocide.
The farmers were all killed, including children and women in their villages that were all burned down, in their cocoa and coffee plantations and in the bushes.
The same pattern of massacres is noticed in all areas that fell under pro-Ouattara armed groups, including in Abidjan where, after they were stopped by Gbagbo’s republican guard they went into a spree of mass killings, arson, torture and rape of Gbagbo supporters, and of looting and robbery of companies and stores.
As the bodies continue to being discovered and removed in the areas of massacres by non profit organizations, the estimated count of the massacres may exceed 2 000 in the Duekoue and other Western We areas alone.
The survivors, most of whom found refuge in neighboring Liberia (the We people’s pre-colonial territory extends to that country) and in places like the Duekoue Catholic church, are not only afraid of being killed by the pro-Ouattara rebels and terrorists now re-baptized Republican Forces if they return, they have been replaced by Malinke and foreign national occupants on their lands and properties.
Since the French and Alassane Ouattara have always been pushing for citizenship reforms and for the land reform, it looks like they did not wait until they are established in power before they drive Ivorian farmers out of their cocoa and coffee producing lands by the force of massacres and genocide.
Current Ouattara’s Prime Minister Guillaume Soro, former Gbagbo’s French-imposed Prime Minister in charge of elections, registered cores of foreigners to vote during last presidential election.
Alassane Ouattara was married to Jewish French national Dominique Nouvian in 1990 by a mayor of Neuilly named Nicolas Sarkozy, who is of Hungarian, Jewish origins. Since then, the Ouattara’s and Sarkozy are very close friends.
Georges Soros, a Jewish US billionaire, lent his private jet to Alassane Ouattara during his last presidential campaign. Soros does not like Laurent Gbagbo, a socialist who is not likely to make of Cote d’Ivoire an “open society.”
Georges Soros is the main source of funding for the Democratic Party, which placed both Obama and Bill Clinton into the White House, with the potential of making Hillary Clinton the first female US President.
For a whole week before they captured Laurent Gbagbo from his hunker, Nicolas Saykozy-ordered French special forces had bombed (with Licorne and ONUCI helicopters and tanks) and destroyed all national army’s military camps and equipments, the presidential residence and palace, the RTI national television and radio that was debunking “international community” lies, the TCI telecommunication building, and many other residential locations, with cores of civilians killed, especially among those who were determined to maintain a human shield around their President’s residence.
If Alassane Ouattara were maintained as Cote d’Ivoire President as it is being settled now with Sarkozy and Obama support, it is unthinkable that the massacred and dispossessed WE people of Duekoue and the other (former) land owners in the country will accept the new, imposed “land reform.” And blood is about to taint Cote d’Ivoire cocoa for the years to come…
Ndzana Seme
BALTIMORE 04/19/2011 – There is a chance that the Hershey chocolate bar, the Donkin Donut chocolate glaze or the favored chocolate milk that any US kid or customer would enjoy within the next weeks will be tainted with human blood.
It is highly likely that a cocoa product that any consumer will purchase soon on the US market was grown, harvested and treated by a farmer who was killed during the widespread massacres that are unfolding in Cote d’Ivoire (the official name for Ivory Coast) since late March until this day.
A third of the world’s cocoa is produced in Cote d’Ivoire. Cocoa is the raw bean that yields chocolate once processed.
In the Catholic mission of the Western town of Duekoue where she shares a tiny space with 27 400 fellow Guere ethnic group members all displaced from their cocoa producing lands, 41 years old Bah Bonao Sidonie told IRIN reporter that three of her brothers were all killed at Carrefour neighborhood “when soldiers [pro-Ouattara rebel forces] came.”
The larger, half-million We ethnic group, which includes the Wobe and the Guere, have always lived in the area including the towns of Duekoue, Guiglo, Toulepleu, Blolequen, Bangolo, Kuibli and Facobly, since distant times; for there is no known historical We migration.
The We people have always been the area’s land owners going as far back as before the arrival of the French colonizer. They are most of all known as the owners of cocoa and coffee plantations.
In Duekoue, the Guere people own most cocoa and coffee plantations. But as it is common practice in the whole country since the 1960’s, these farmers use foreign labor as plantation workers.
Those cocoa and coffee plantation workers come from foreign areas, including internal Baoule people, but also foreign Malinke (Dioula-speaking) and other people from Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea and other countries.
Back in 1990, former French puppet dictator and greatest cocoa farmer Felix Houphouet Boigny appointed Burkina Faso national Alassane Dramane Ouattara Prime Minister.
Since then, above all because Boigny successor Henri Konan Bedie had denied Ouattara any opportunity to run for president as he lacked of “ivoirité” (being Ivory Coast national), relationship between Malinke workers and their Guere employers have, like in other farming areas of the country, shifted from job conditions disputes to land ownership disputes.
This situation was further poisoned since 2002 when Ouattara-funded and France-organized rebellion of Northern (mostly Malinke) ex-convicts and militaries attempted a coup to overthrow Laurent Gbagbo, who was then democratically elected less than two years earlier.
The situation was further inflamed after France positioned its Licorne troops as a buffer zone and drafted UN resolutions to add ONUCI troops in order to maintain a 9-year long separation of Cote d’Ivoire between rebel-held North and government-controlled South.
Because the Guere people found themselves in the separation area and because they are Laurent Gbagbo supporters, they have since then been subjected to Malinke and rebel attacks aimed at taking their lands by force.
During the 9-year period of negotiations during which France, after they had destroyed government’s air military capabilities, brought the government to consider the rebels as equal partners, tensions between farmers and their foreign workers were aggravated beyond all proportions.
In November 28, 2010, the presidential runoff election opposed rebel-supported Alassane Ouattara (article 42 of the Constitution was exceptionally changed to allow him to run) to incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo.
Laurent Gbagbo was proclaimed the election winner with 51% of votes by the Constitutional Council (the country’s Supreme Court on election matters). The court also nullified election results in several Northern zones where armed rebels had terrorized, killed, burned houses, tortured and raped voters, and threatened election observers and officials.
But Alassane Ouattara, along with his supporters, including the ONUCI chief who certified the fictitious provisional results read by pro-Ouattara CEI (Independent Electoral Commission) President, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, US President Barrack Obama and his crowd of following leaders all rejected the Constitutional Council’s proclaimed results.
This is like foreign leaders had rejected the Supreme Court decision to recount votes in Florida during the 2000 Bush-Gore election result dispute. Obviously, George W Bush’s government would have rejected in the strongest terms such foreign interference in US affairs. Which is exactly what President Laurent Gbagbo did, in response to the “international community”’s pressure.
Yet by imposing CEI President’s results (even though CEI did not actually reach any results because of lack of the required consensus) and pressing President Gbagbo to step down otherwise he would bear serious consequences, while Cote d’Ivoire’s Head of State rejected those external claims and stayed in power to preserve the country’s Constitution and sovereignty, the crisis Cote d’Ivoire was created, fueled and exacerbated.
Clashes erupted in the Duekoue and other Western areas between the We people supported by pro-Gbagbo local “Patriot Youth” and the Malinke and Baoule people supported by the rebels. Tens of people died.
Among the sanctions pushed forth by Nicolas Sarkozy and Barrack Obama to starve the government and bring Gbagbo to step down was the ban on Cote d’Ivoire cocoa exportations.
Côte d’Ivoire is the world’s largest cocoa bean producer, with 1.6 million metric tones in 2010. The country accounts for 44 percent of global cocoa production.
U.S. imports of cocoa beans were about $660 million in 2008, 60 percent of which were from Cote d’Ivoire (Source: U.S. Food Import Patterns, 1998-2007 / FAU-125).
U.S. imports of cocoa powder and other cocoa products (mainly chocolates), which undergo further value-added processing compared with cocoa butter, accounted for $2.6 billion in 2008.
Those imports were primarily from Netherlands (mainly from Nestle, the first world’s Cote d’Ivoire cocoa importer) and Mexico who accounted both for over 60 percent of cocoa powder imports to the United State (Source: U.S. Food Import Patterns, 1998-2007 / FAU-125).
These numbers show that any ban on Cote d’Ivoire cocoa beans and products hits US cocoa processing, transportation and trade businesses seriously, with major damages.
Because Laurent Gbagbo resisted the ban by taking the decision to nationalize the country’s cocoa sector, with the State purchasing all cocoa beans from framers and selling them to any companies of its choosing, international cocoa prices rose sharply.
Last January, world traders paid US$3 394.56 per tone compared to US$2 910.31 per tone in November 2010 when Ivorians went to the polls.
Cargill, one of the biggest global trading companies of cocoa, made an announcement that it was suspending cocoa purchases from Cote d’Ivoire.
Yet, the situation was so tense that American company and main cocoa importer, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), indirectly stated that it may not comply with the trade ban, according to a World Bank paper.
ADM, which maintains capabilities of 18 cocoa bean processing plants treating about 3,000 metric tones each year in the US, had actually no choice but to purchase cocoa in the expanding Cote d’Ivoire black market, which has channels in Burkina Faso and Ghana (Source: 2010 ADM 10-K)Because the ban was unbearable for US cocoa product companies as they are pressured by the demand from their world’s first chocolate consuming country, those set as a limit for all actors to solve the power crisis issue the date of March 31, 2011. After such date, they would pay to Laurent Gbagbo’s government all duties and taxes owed it for the already purchased cocoa stocked on the ports of Abidjan and San Pedro.
Therefore, it came to no surprise that on March 27, the rebels, terrorists and mercenaries behind Alassane Ouattara, with the support of French Licorne troops and ONUCI troops, advanced and attacked government army positions along the buffer line.
The national army refused to fight and withdrew instead all its troops and concentrated them only to defend Abidjan.
Unfortunately, when Ouattara’s armed groups took control of Duekoue and the other towns in the We area, they massacred over 800 people only between March 27 and March 28, most of whom were Guere people in what is nothing but genocide.
The farmers were all killed, including children and women in their villages that were all burned down, in their cocoa and coffee plantations and in the bushes.
The same pattern of massacres is noticed in all areas that fell under pro-Ouattara armed groups, including in Abidjan where, after they were stopped by Gbagbo’s republican guard they went into a spree of mass killings, arson, torture and rape of Gbagbo supporters, and of looting and robbery of companies and stores.
As the bodies continue to being discovered and removed in the areas of massacres by non profit organizations, the estimated count of the massacres may exceed 2 000 in the Duekoue and other Western We areas alone.
The survivors, most of whom found refuge in neighboring Liberia (the We people’s pre-colonial territory extends to that country) and in places like the Duekoue Catholic church, are not only afraid of being killed by the pro-Ouattara rebels and terrorists now re-baptized Republican Forces if they return, they have been replaced by Malinke and foreign national occupants on their lands and properties.
Since the French and Alassane Ouattara have always been pushing for citizenship reforms and for the land reform, it looks like they did not wait until they are established in power before they drive Ivorian farmers out of their cocoa and coffee producing lands by the force of massacres and genocide.
Current Ouattara’s Prime Minister Guillaume Soro, former Gbagbo’s French-imposed Prime Minister in charge of elections, registered cores of foreigners to vote during last presidential election.
Alassane Ouattara was married to Jewish French national Dominique Nouvian in 1990 by a mayor of Neuilly named Nicolas Sarkozy, who is of Hungarian, Jewish origins. Since then, the Ouattara’s and Sarkozy are very close friends.
Georges Soros, a Jewish US billionaire, lent his private jet to Alassane Ouattara during his last presidential campaign. Soros does not like Laurent Gbagbo, a socialist who is not likely to make of Cote d’Ivoire an “open society.”
Georges Soros is the main source of funding for the Democratic Party, which placed both Obama and Bill Clinton into the White House, with the potential of making Hillary Clinton the first female US President.
For a whole week before they captured Laurent Gbagbo from his hunker, Nicolas Saykozy-ordered French special forces had bombed (with Licorne and ONUCI helicopters and tanks) and destroyed all national army’s military camps and equipments, the presidential residence and palace, the RTI national television and radio that was debunking “international community” lies, the TCI telecommunication building, and many other residential locations, with cores of civilians killed, especially among those who were determined to maintain a human shield around their President’s residence.
If Alassane Ouattara were maintained as Cote d’Ivoire President as it is being settled now with Sarkozy and Obama support, it is unthinkable that the massacred and dispossessed WE people of Duekoue and the other (former) land owners in the country will accept the new, imposed “land reform.” And blood is about to taint Cote d’Ivoire cocoa for the years to come…
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