Hezbollah in Africa
“Moi, c’est Monsieur X.” The man before us at the table is
already on his third cigarette before he speaks his first words.
We are on the patio of a bar in Abidjan, the economic
capital of the Ivory Coast and one of the most important port cities in West
Africa. For security reasons, we cannot indicate when the interview took place.
Our source is a Shia Muslim, an Ivorian of Lebanese origin
who, after much hesitation, wants to tell us about the role of his community in
the cocaine traffic throughout the port.
The information he is going to give us, he says, could cost
him his life. He wants complete anonymity and asks three times how we can
guarantee it.
“You see, I live among them. I have a family. They can
easily get to me.”
Modus operandi
We came here to investigate Highway 10, the cocaine route
from South America to Europe, via West African ports.
Abidjan, the port city where we are located, appears for the
first time in an investigation by the Italian investigative journalistic
collective, IRPI. They traced a shipment of cocaine back from Antwerp to here.
At the end of March this year, the French navy intercepted six tons of cocaine
destined for Abidjan on the open sea, according to information from the Dutch
police.
The UN Security Council already sounded the alarm a few
years ago: drugs threaten to destabilise the African continent and endanger
development goals. The Security Council’s thematic session was presided over by
Ivory Coast.
In Abidjan the Italian ‘Ndrangetha and Camorra mafias are
present, but our source wants to tell us about an important, indispensable
third player in illicit drug trafficking.
After some effort and hesitation, he takes off and
immediately gives us a detailed insight.
“The drugs come in via the port, the money goes out via the
airport. Seventy per cent of the drug traffic here is in Lebanese hands. The
rest is divided among Brazilians, Nigerians and Italians.
“Suppose I am a Lebanese trader and I earn money from
illegal activities such as the import and export of weapons and drugs. I am
paid in cash for my services because no one wants the money to be traceable.
“Some of it has to be returned to Lebanon, possibly to a
commissioning party, but using the international banking system is too risky. I
will pay someone here the money in cash and they will order someone in Lebanon
to pay the same amount to the right person.
“In Abidjan, three people provide these operations. They
have ten employees and demand a five per cent payment. Those five per centare
then laundered by investing in supermarkets, restaurants, buying up large areas
and erecting new buildings.
“Most apartment buildings that you can see in Zone 4 in
Marcory have been built with that money. Ten years ago there was nothing in
that place. Now there are skyscrapers. The government does not control where
the money you use to build new buildings comes from, unlike in Europe.”
According to our source, the money laundering system then
enters a second phase.
“The apartments are supposedly rented out, but the official
residents are often children under eighteen. Every month the equivalent of the
rent is put in the bank and thus crime money is brought into the formal
economic system.”
Some of the money still has to be returned to Lebanon in
cash.
Our source referenced Hachem Ahmad, a 20-year-old Lebanese
with a French passport, who was arrested at Abidjan airport on May 31, 2019.
The police found 4.5 million euros in cash in his suitcase. Ahmad was on his
way to Beirut.
“A modus operandi that is often used,” says the man before
us. “Those who arrange the money transport approach poor, unemployed Lebanese
youth of barely twenty years old. They propose a trip to Lebanon with their
suitcase. He gets $ 20,000 for that.”
“His family will receive $100,000.00. He must not know what
is in the suitcase. After that, the aviation authorities are informed, who know
which man to let pass. The youngster will receive a three-year prison sentence,
but will often be released after a few months. Judge is part of the plot,” he
claimed.
Money laundering on a large scale
Does the man know about the recipients of the cocaine
shipments leaving the port?
“To my knowledge, Greeks, Italians, Belgians,” he says, and
immediately afterwards turns the tables. He now asks the questions: “Are you
Jewish? Why don’t you ask me about the role Hezbollah plays in all of this? ”
From the account that follows, Hezbollah appears to be the
missing link in the story we have just been told.
According to our source, Hezbollah is financing busing
services to the various mafias that use the port. Both in facilitating cocaine
traffic and in providing money-laundering services. All this results in an
organised money laundering operation on a large scale.
“I know of twenty Lebanese-owned companies who, employed by
Hezbollah, register the crime money in their accounts. The organisation injects
dirty money into the formal economy and then asks for donations. This happens
in car sales, import-export, real estate. And it doesn’t just happen here: also
in Togo, Benin and Nigeria.”
The reason our source is so loose-lipped?
“Anyone who is not a member of Hezbollah can forget it. You
have no chance of getting a job. Within the Shia community, there is a division
between who is and who is not a member. I don’t exist. We don’t exist. Just
like in Lebanon. In the meantime, they go make their prayers to make millions
and millions afterwards.”
The man promises to send us a list of people who are part of
the network of drug trafficking and money laundering operations at the end of
the meeting. We didn’t hear from him anymore.
As a precaution, he refused to give us his contact details.
So it is possible Monsieur X completely made up his testimony. It is also
possible that he gave this testimony out of personal frustration or resentment.
Marcory Zone 4
However, the findings from our investigation corroborate
most of what he told us.
First, there is the arrest of Hachem Ahmad, the
eighteen-year-old with a suitcase worth 4.5 million euros.
A source close to the Ivorian police confirmed to us in June
2020 that Ahmad was indeed allowed to leave prison after a few months. Other
sources had already tipped us off to take a look at Zone 4 in Marcory, the part
of Abidjan where most Lebanese live, nicknamed “Little Beirut”.
A gilded mosque is Seagate to Marcory. Zone 4 is located on
one side of the Boulevard Giscard D’Estaing, where the brothels and strip clubs
are, and the very edge of an island in the tropical lagoon of Abidjan on the
other side.
In August 2019, we counted 35 new buildings and 32
construction sites. When attempting to get out of the car with the camera
around our neck, we were immediately surrounded by private security preventing
us from taking photos.
We did a second count in May 2021. Seven new buildings were
completed and 19 construction sites were added. Zone 4 was merely an area of
four square kilometres where before 2004 no building was allowed to go higher
than two floors due to the instability of the soil. All the buildings we count
have seven to 20 floors. Some have “à louer”, which means “for rent” written in
large letters, most of them are empty.
Is this hard evidence for large-scale money laundering
operations? No, but the red flag was taken seriously by international crime and
money laundering monitoring institutes.
For instance, the imam of the golden mosque of Marcory was
put on the US sanctions list in 2009 for supporting Hezbollah.
Last September, a Lebanese construction company with
operations in Abidjan was put on the same sanctions list.
The construction company had been commissioned by the
Ivorian Islamic cultural association Ghadir, which in addition to a school
network, runs a scout in Marcory. Besides the Lebanese and Ivorian flags, the
uniforms of the scout leaders show a print of Imam Khomeini, according to
documentation gathered and published by Israeli intelligence services.
Tehran, Rotterdam, Antwerp
There is, therefore, no doubt that Hezbollah is present in
the economic capital of the Ivory Coast.
The fact that the organisation finances itself through its
facilitation in drug trafficking is nothing new in the world of international
crime monitoring. In the period before 2010, Interpol and the UN already wrote
in several reports that the proceeds from cocaine transported to Europe via
West Africa make up a substantial part of the funding of Hezbollah.
In June 2019, just before the start of this investigation,
the Abba Eban Institute for International Diplomacy in Israel went even
further.
Based on information about recent police operations in
Europe, the institute made a direct link to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, or
at least that part of the Guard that takes care of Iran’s foreign military
operations.
The members of Hezbollah operating on European soil receive
their orders from Hezbollah’s envoy in Tehran. At the time of Abba Eban’s
investigation, that envoy was responsible for Hezbollah’s foreign operations,
in close cooperation and dialogue with Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general
and popular hero who was killed in a U.S. air raid in Baghdad in early 2020.
Abba Eban estimates that one fifth to one-fourth of the
proceeds from drug trafficking along the West African route ended up in the
hands of Hezbollah. With that money, Hezbollah is armed, the wages of fighters
are paid for the families of the dead, for example in the Syrian civil war
where Hezbollah fights on the side of Assad.
From Tehran, through Hezbollah’s operations in West Africa,
the arrow goes straight to European ports. Although these are strongly
highlighted, Abba Eban lacks hard evidence of Hezbollah activity in Antwerp,
Rotterdam or Hamburg.
We found no one in the Belgian or Dutch judiciary or police
who wanted to confirm Hezbollah activities in these ports. The Abba Eban
Institute did not respond to our requests for an interview.
Only a few traces can be found in the crime reporting of the
past ten years.
In May 2011, Lebanese Zakaria Koleilat was arrested in
Belgium, who, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), had made
preparations to set up a drug line between Colombia and Benin.
His brother, Ali Koleilat, also arrested and handed over to
the U.S., was behind a failed drug transport from the Dominican Republic to the
business airport of Deurne near Antwerp. Ali maintains ties with Hezbollah,
according to the U.S., although this has never been confirmed.
Crime journalists for De Telegraaf newspaper wrote in the
autumn of last year that the Dutch judiciary suspected that top criminal
Ridouan Taghi, known as the leader of the most dangerous drug cartel in Europe
and Africa, was protected by the Iranian state during his stay in Iran and
Dubai. just before his arrest. That protection would have come after mediation
by Hezbollah. There is no certainty about this yet.
Hard evidence can be found just a little further back in
time.
In May 2008, German customs found approximately 8.7 million
euros in cash in the luggage of four Lebanese at Frankfurt airport. The money
contained traces of cocaine and fingerprints of a Dutchman codenamed Carlos.
German weekly Der Spiegel, cited by sources in the police
investigation, wrote that the two alleged money sent to relatives were the
direct link at the top of Hezbollah, including Secretary-General Hassan
Nasrallah.
Project Cassandra
Hezbollah is not the first, certainly not the only political
or military actor to finance itself with the help of drug money.
The Marxist FARC in Colombia, the French state in Indochina,
and according to a growing number of researchers the CIA in Nicaragua, to name
just three in a long list, preceded the Lebanese organisation. Drugs, and
especially their proceeds, have played an important role since the birth of
international drug traffic.
That is no different in the case of Hezbollah, as a recent
incident in the White House shows. The DEA’s Project Cassandra aimed to curb
the legal financing of Hezbollah.
It started in 2008 but was shut down by the Obama
administration in 2016, according to White House and DEA sources over concerns
that the project would displease Iran and jeopardise the nuclear deal. An
article that Politico published on this in 2017 was dismissed by Obama
administration functionaries as based on “biased sources and conjecture”.
One of the most well known and infamous chapters of Project
Cassandra took place in Benin, a vertical strip of land in between Togo and
Nigeria.
Over some time USD, 200-300 million would arrive in the
country in the form of second-hand cars every month. The cars hailed from a
network of 300 used car dealers in the US employed by Hezbollah.
The drug money was laundered for the feared Mexican cartel
Los Zetas, which had released tons of cocaine onto the US market. A Lebanese
businessman in Medellin had offered the Mexicans money laundering services from
Hezbollah in the form of second-hand cars.
After the cars had been sold in Benin, the money went via
cash couriers in cash and via bank transfers to Lebanon, from where it left for
the Americas.
Lebanese exodus
At the beginning of this year, our team was in Porto-Novo,
the capital of Benin, just in time to attend the festive appointment of the new
attorney of the Court for the Fight against Financial Crime and Terrorism.
The Court was erected in 2018, following international
pressure and several scandals, including one showing particularly close links
between the former president and a Lebanese holding active in the sale of cars
and household appliances.
The director of the holding was extradited to the U.S. in
2011 on charges of supporting Hezbollah, after intense pressure.
Will the new Court succeed in making a stand against money
laundering? It’s questionable.
The African Human Rights Court has repeatedly criticised
Benin for the fact that since the start of its existence, the new instrument
has been chasing opponents of the regime.
For example, a 47-year-old popular female politician is
currently behind bars after a terrorism conviction. A magistrate who said in an
interview that the Court’s decision had come under pressure from the regime,
had to flee the country.
The booming sale of second-hand cars has now come to an end,
but that is due to a decision by neighbouring Nigeria, which introduced an
import ban in early 2017.
A change in the exchange rate against the Nigerian currency
also thwarted the car business, local sources from the car dealer circuit say.
It even caused a minor exodus of the Lebanese community to neighbouring
countries. The remaining Lebanese car dealers we approached in Cotonou are
silent or hostile.
“I had always seen car sales as a solution to the massive
unemployment among Lebanese youth,” says Etienne Houessou, a veteran crime
journalist from Cotonou. “The Lebanese who stayed after the ban started running
casinos. Young people are still being arrested today at Cotonou airport with
suitcases full of cash on their way to Beirut. Not one of them has ever been
prosecuted to my knowledge.”
Another lens
Until now, we mainly relied on the reports of the
international crime prevention team to gain certainty about the role of
Hezbollah in drug trafficking.
However, they take little account of nuances, shades, a
political agenda and the broader African context. That happens when you look
through the lens of security and self-defence
Two nuances are in order: Hezbollah does not equal the
entire Lebanese diaspora and even if it is proven that Hezbollah is active in
drug trafficking, this may have more to do with a network of individuals than
with the entire movement.
We return to the starting point: Abidjan in Ivory Coast.
The historical role of the Lebanese community here has
always been to be a middleman between the French coloniser and the native
people, the middlemen who kept the French from becoming “Africanised” or
“wild”, according to the ideas of colonisation.
Studies passed on to us by French anthropologists show this.
At the same time, the discrimination and stigma against the Lebanese community
in Africa have always fed fears of persecution, causing the Lebanese community
to draw close to power and make payments to politicians for their protection
and business benefits.
Combined with a context of weak institutions, extreme
poverty, the majority of the population employed in the informal economy and
abysmal corruption, this creates a perfect opportunity for those who enjoy
political protection and at the same time can use a lot of money.
Not only Hezbollah, but also the Italian mafia in Africa,
and a growing number of African leaders, presidents and ministers have been
mentioned as pivotal figures in the international cocaine trade in recent
years.
“You should never forget who allows this to happen, without
whom all this would not be possible: the local regimes, the African political
elite who share the profits in return,” says a human rights activist in
Abidjan, under strict conditions of anonymity. “It’s a collaboration, a
symbiosis, in which the Lebanese very often play the role of scapegoats and
take the blows of local politicians hiding behind them.”
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