GAIUTRA BAHADUR

From port to port, he is trapped on a ship.
By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

A stowaway aboard a ship that docked last week in the Port of Camden is now a virtual prisoner on the vessel, says its captain, because no country will claim him.

The Trubezh arrived Jan. 20 bearing unexpected cargo, said Joe Balzano, executive director of the South Jersey Port Corp. A young man had stolen in with the cocoa beans the ship picked up in Ivory Coast.

Now he is stuck on the vessel indefinitely as it navigates from port to port.

The stowaway carried a French passport identifying him as Charles Philippe Zata, born in the Paris suburb of Nanterre on Oct. 2, 1985. The passport contained an expired entry visa that appeared to have been issued by Ivory Coast, said a source who interviewed Zata, but who asked that his name be withheld because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

Zata also had a card that local Ivorean immigrants said typically is issued to government workers in Ivory Coast. It described him as an unmarried driver from the port city of Abidjan.

None of the documents did Zata any good, however, when the owner of the Trubezh flew him back to the West African nation under orders from U.S. immigration agents.

Zata was denied entry to Ivory Coast and returned to Philadelphia on Jan. 22, where he arrived without any papers.
U.S. officials immediately transported Zata to the Trubezh, which departed from Camden on Tuesday night and reached Savannah, Ga., on Saturday.

Capt. Vitaly Teplov, speaking by phone from the ship, sounded bewildered by the return of the stowaway.

“The Customs and Border Protection, they come on board,” he said. “They say to me, ‘Stowaway stay on board. OK. Stay on board.’ The one question: Why stay on board without any documents?”

Teplov said Zata appeared to have been on a hunger strike that ended Thursday night. No one aboard the ship speaks French well enough to ask Zata why he refused to eat for two days, Teplov said.

The Trubezh has an almost entirely Ukrainian crew. However, it flies the flag of Belize; is managed by a company based in Cyprus called Crostis, and is registered in the Marshall Islands.
Each day the Trubezh sits in port, Crostis pays two armed guards to watch over Zata, who Teplov said was being kept in a cabin near the ship’s chief officer.

“Legally, the obligation of the owner is to treat stowaways humanely,” said Bob Degen, a lawyer with Fox Rothschild, a Philadelphia law firm with a large maritime practice.

It also is the owner’s obligation to figure out the stowaway’s true identity.

The French Embassy in Washington maintains that Zata probably is not a French citizen, and says his passport does not appear genuine.

“It doesn’t look like a French passport number,” said Agnès von der Mühll, a spokeswoman for the embassy.

Capt. Anatoly Mytrokhin, an official with Crostis, said the company was trying to resolve the situation.

Teplov said he was trying to arrange for Zata to be examined by doctors in Savannah. After that, it’s unclear what’s in store for him. The ship also will stop in New Orleans and Houston before it heads back to Ivory Coast.

Zata did not ask for political asylum, which would have gotten him a hearing before an immigration judge here. As a result, U.S. authorities do not decide his fate.

“They look at it as the ship’s problem,” Degen said.

The owners of vessels bear the responsibility, and the financial burden, to send stowaways home. Ship owners often also pay for armed guards while in U.S. ports with stowaways aboard. If the stowaway escapes, the owner is fined about $3,000.

Rather than bear the expense, some officers have ordered stowaways cast overboard.

“The law created incentives for stowaways never to make it ashore,” said Doug Stevenson, director of the Center for Seafarer Rights in New York.

The center defended the captain and first mate of the cargo ship MC Ruby, who were sentenced to life in prison for the 1992 murder of eight Ghanaian stowaways. The men were beaten with iron rods, shot, and dumped off the coast of Portugal.

The case prompted the U.S. government to limit to 15 days the time that ship owners must pay for the detention of stowaways who ask for political asylum. There is no limit to the time owners shoulder the cost for stowaways who do not ask for asylum.

Tragedies on the high seas still happen, however. Earlier this month, three Ukrainian sailors were charged with murder for allegedly forcing seven men found hiding in the pipes of the African Kalahari to jump into the waters off Durban, South Africa. Two stowaways drowned; five swam to safety.

Ivory Coast is a divided country occupied in the north by rebels. A three-year-old cease-fire between the rebels and government forces was broken earlier this month. The county also is wracked by anxieties over immigration from neighboring African nations.
“Zata is an Ivorean name,” said Franck Bamba, a spokesman for the Embassy of the Ivory Coast in Washington, “But I cannot certify this guy is from Côte d’Ivoire. A lot of people fake papers.”

Bamba and von der Mühll of the French Embassy said U.S. authorities had not contacted either of their consulates.
A ship owner stuck with a stowaway no country will accept has few options. Stephen Vengrow, a New York lawyer who represents vessel owners, said they sometimes turned to the World Service Authority, a private group in Washington that issues “world citizen” passports to refugees.

The group was founded by Garry Davis, a World War II bomber pilot disillusioned by the war who renounced his U.S. citizenship in 1948 to live as a “citizen of the world.” Its passports are accepted by Burkina Faso, Ecuador, Mauritania, Tanzania, Togo and Zambia.

At the request of the insurance companies for vessel owners, the World Service has provided passports to at least five stowaways since 1992.

“For some people it can be a quick fix,” said David Gallup, the group’s current leader. “And for some people, it’s the only solution.”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

Discord in their homeland divides Ivory Coast immigrants living here.
By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

When Alassane Dramane Ouattara’s opponents wanted to discredit him in his bid for president of Ivory Coast in 1995, they looked to Philadelphia for material.

Their operatives dug up the Wharton School graduate’s marriage certificate, issued by Pennsylvania in 1966. Detractors said it proved that Ouattara, a former prime minister, was ineligible because he was not born in Ivory Coast. Supporters swore the certificate had been doctored, and Ivorian newspapers printed a copy to prove the point.

The intrigue over the certificate is not the only way the crisis in the former French colony, also called Cote d’Ivoire, has played out in Philadelphia.

Civil war fractured the West African nation in 2002, and 5,000 miles away, on Baltimore Avenue – a hub for African immigrants – the same religious and tribal fault lines cracked open. Hair-braiders, cabbies and restaurants lost customers wary of the owners’ sympathies.

The conflict in Ivory Coast has divided immigrants in the region and across the United States in a way that risks fueling further discord at home.

Three years after troops from the mostly Muslim north mutinied, the battle lines still are drawn. Muslims rose up in 2002 because, they contended, they had been denied political power for decades by the Christian elite in the resource-rich south. French peacekeepers now mind a line of control that separates Muslim from Christian, north from south, rebel from loyalist.

This region’s contingent of Ivorians – 3,000 to 5,000, according to the country’s embassy in Washington – is not the largest in the United States but, by many accounts, it is the most passionate and most partisan.

La Calebasse, a restaurant on Baltimore Avenue, used to be a hangout and listening post for all of the region’s Ivorian immigrants. Within its warm, yellow walls, expats used to argue and exchange gossip about what was going on back home over steaming plates of peanut stew.

Now, from behind the counter, Ma Cisse holds a finger to her lips and warns in a whisper: “Don’t talk politics in here.” She has good reason to censor the chatter. Customers came to blows after the war, and had to be thrown out. Others boycotted the restaurant. It now has 20 fewer customers a day.

“They said: ‘Coming here is like giving money to the enemy,’ ” owner Daou Cisse said. “It’s not good to see people from your country, people you used to talk and laugh with, avoid you.”

The war siphoned off 30 percent of the Christian clients of International Boutique, a West Philadelphia beauty salon run by Muslims. “They don’t trust us,” owner Adja Sangare said, “and we don’t trust them either.”

The troubles began in 1993. Ivory Coast had been politically stable and, as one of the world’s largest cocoa and coffee producers, an economic powerhouse on the continent. Then Felix Houphouet-Boigny, president for three decades, died, sparking a succession battle.

In the next decade, the country that was once the envy of West Africa careened along a road of political turbulence that finally exploded into civil war. Its politicians fought bitterly over the question of Ivoirite – or who, in a country that had attracted generations of immigrants, had a rightful claim to Ivorian identity. The fight took on a religious and ethnic cast, with Muslims belonging to the northern Dioula tribe of traders portrayed as outsiders and, after the 9/11 attacks, even as terrorists.

Ouattara, the former Philadelphian and would-be president who now lives in exile in Paris, became the flag bearer for this group.
The mere mention of his name among Ivorians in Philadelphia quickens the collective pulse in a room: Supporters rush to retrievetheir copy of his marriage certificate, and detractors produce a directory of African students in the United States that, damningly, lists him as a scholar from Burkina Faso – a neighboring country that, to the ire of Ivorians, has flooded their country with workers.

Each of Ivory Coast’s major political parties, including Ouattara’s Rally of the Republicans (RDR), has a chapter in the Philadelphia area with an elected leader and a fund-raising arm.

“As far as people trying to do things for their political parties, Philadelphia is the busiest place,” said Franck Bamba, spokesman for the Ivorian Embassy in Washington.

The parties periodically picket the United Nations and the French and Ivorian Embassies. And they have raised thousands of dollars for medical supplies, food, shoes and – allegedly – even arms for their factions.

Coffie Sosthene, a South Philadelphia High School teacher with ramrod posture and a disciplinarian’s mien, keeps the eyes of his “party militants” on the prize: getting out the overseas vote for the Democratic Party of the Ivory Coast-African Democratic Rally during elections that the U.N. hopes to facilitate by October.
But Sosthene avoids canvassing on Baltimore Avenue. Political opponents have argued with him there, and it has gotten physical.

“Because I happen to be an Akan [a southern tribe], I become an enemy to the people,” he said. “I’m a symbol of what they went through in the Ivory Coast.”

Through remittances and by flexing political muscles, the immigrants feed the conflict at home, even as it saps their strength here. The interplay shows up a rough edge to the connectedness that globalization allows.

“The community here is both a victim of and an actor in the war,” says Eric Edi, head of the Cote d’Ivoire Association of the Delaware Valley, a mutual-aid group that, postwar, has lost members.

The split has made it harder for the community – which includes refugees and illegals, people with no medical insurance, and people juggling jobs – to meet its needs.

The Ivorians have even held rival independence day festivals, and their women belong to rival “kitty clubs,” which pool money for births and deaths using the African tontine system.

“This is how we got divided a little bit, stopped a little bit, because of issues back home,” said Alassane Ouattara, an RDR member who is not related to the exiled politician. He used to lead the association but, like most Muslim and northern Ivorians, no longer even belongs.

Edi and Ouattara have retreated to separate corners of the Ivorian community: a storefront church in Logan where Edi leads the choir in French, and a converted mosque on Girard Avenue where Ouattara translates sermons from Dioula. Both flocks pray for peace, but the imam and the pastor do not even know each other.

Abu Bakr Fofana, spokesman in exile for all imams in Ivory Coast, explains: “We can have some friends [from the other side]… but not too close.”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.