Global Policy Forum

By Irwin Arieff

Ivory Coast's rebel-held north is smuggling more and more cocoa, cotton and diamonds to neighboring countries for sale on the black market, helping fund rebel military activities, U.N. experts said on Thursday. Rebels are also personally profiting from the rapidly growing illegal trade in the West African nation's main natural resources, the panel of three experts said in a report to the U.N. Security Council obtained by Reuters. Because the goods are not sold through the official state systems, the smuggling is also eating into government revenues already depleted by soaring defense spending in one of the world's most deeply indebted countries, the panel said.

The report makes it clear that Ivory Coast, divided since a 2002 civil war, is now on a growing list of African nations plagued by resource wars, in which rebel groups have plundered their countries' natural wealth to fuel conflict and unrest, including neighboring Liberia, nearby Sierra Leone, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The 15-nation Security Council asked the experts to determine whether its arms embargo on Ivory Coast was working. The panel found that government defense spending was high and accused officials of doing a poor job of tracking both arms deals and revenues from the sale of its natural resources. But it concluded that neither the government nor the rebels had the money or the need at this time to procure weapons. Their biggest needs for now were helicopters, four-wheel drive vehicles and trucks, the report said.

The panel praised the government for cooperating with its inquiry but accused the rebels of not giving it enough help. The main rebel group, Forces Nouvelles, for example, had never provided U.N. peacekeepers in Ivory Coast with a list of all its weapons, as the Security Council had demanded as a first step toward stripping all armed groups in the country of their weapons. The panel told the council it should ask the FN to urgently turn over a full inventory of its weapons. It also recommended that the council close a loophole in the embargo enabling the purchase of so-called dual-use vehicles with both military and civilian uses. The panel also thanked Belarus, Bulgaria, Romania, South Africa and Israel for helping crack down on illicit arms deals but said neighboring Guinea had refused to provide it with the information it needed to detect banned arms sales.

Exporters in Ivory Coast, the world's largest cocoa producer, estimate that around 150,000 tons of cocoa a year are being smuggled from Ivory Coast, the world's largest cocoa producer, to Ghana, where prices were higher, and the amount is growing by at least 15 percent a year, the panel reported. Cocoa is also smuggled to Burkina Faso and Togo, it said. Cotton is being sneaked into Mali and Burkina Faso, despite a February 2005 promise by FN leader Guillaume Soro to prevent its diversion to other countries, the panel reported. Millions of dollars of rough diamonds are being mined and exported from riverbeds in northern Ivory Coast, in violation of a government ban on the trade, the panel said. "The group believes that revenue from this illegal diamond production provides an important income for the FN," it said. The rebels also earn significant sums of money by "taxing" vehicles as they pass through the dozens of roadblocks they maintain, known in the area as "cash points," it said.

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