‘Did you hear that?’ Jean-Marie Dedecker called out to his wife, Christine, in the kitchen, who had been preparing lunch at their home in the outskirts of Ostend. ‘He said it took him two years to turn cynical.’ He turned back to me. ‘It took me five. I’ve met hundreds of boys. I just don’t know the truth. I paid school fees for one, I paid for his mother to visit—’
Christine interjected: ‘When the boy was married it continued, money for the wedding, money for the crib when they had a baby . . .’
‘Ah, it was too much,’ Dedecker said. ‘It is the culture in Africa. When someone is doing well in the community they have to help others. I helped that boy. I did a lot for other boys, too.’
Dedecker is a liberal Belgian politician famous for speaking the truth. His book, Telling It to You Straight, about the political system in the country, was a bestseller. He had, though, made his name in sport. For five Summer Olympics he was head coach of Belgium’s national judo team, demanding the highest standard of discipline and fitness from his judoka. For each second one of his charges was late for a training session, they had to do 100 press-ups. The 1996 Games were Dedecker’s, and Belgium’s, most successful. ‘We had the Olympic champion, a silver and two bronzes. Belgium had six medals in total, four from judo,’ he said. ‘We were small but beautiful. I became quite famous after that.’ He was known for being hard but fair, a reputation befitting a burly stature which betrayed that he, too, had been a judoka in his youth. ‘I was known as a direct man so when there was a problem in sports when I was in politics, people came to me to get it solved. They were desperate, those boys.’
‘Those boys’ were 16-year-old Omo Monday and his friend, Manasseh Ishiaku, 17. They were two of four Nigerians who, in 2001, had gone to Dedecker for help. They had been football trafficked from Nigeria to play for Roeselare FC, a Belgian first division club. Dedecker said he was ‘stupefied’ when he heard their story. ‘They had been abandoned.’ He wanted justice, the boys wanted justice. Dedecker set about conducting the first major investigation into the issue of football trafficking from Africa and South America to Europe. It was his crusade. He battled clubs, suffered death threats from the mafia, investigated scores of agents (Africans, Belgians, French, Mexicans, Peruvians, Brazilians, Americans, Chileans) and football managers, exposed embassy corruption and made changes to the law. It ended with a defeat in court and Dedecker a confirmed sceptic about the football trafficking business. ‘I don’t know what to believe now,’ he said as we ate a traditional Belgian lunch of veal and potatoes.
‘I know what I think,’ Christine said. ‘But you are not allowed to say such things. I think a lot of those boys were not telling the truth about why they were in Belgium.’
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Belgium was bursting with African players and vied with France as the leading importer of talent from the continent. In 1997 there were 47 Africans playing in the top flight in Belgium, three fewer than in France. Clubs such as Beveren and Lokeren were largely made up of African players. The two teams had ‘feeder clubs’ in Africa. Beveren were known as the ‘Black Pearls’ and would eventually take to the field with an all-Africa starting XI. It was Beveren’s arrangement with the ASEC Mimosas academy run by Jean-Marc Guillou, friend and former assistant to Arsène Wenger, which had led to the Football Association investigation into Arsenal.
During these years, Dedecker’s nose for sporting controversy had sniffed out the exploitation of Africans. He had found 442 Nigerians who had been trafficked by agents linked to organised crime and lobbied lawmakers for change, succeeding in more than doubling the minimum wage for a foreign player – ‘It was €29,620 and it went up to €69,479.’ Dedecker believed that although that was too late to help Omo and Manasseh it did, eventually, prevent continued wide-scale exploitation.
‘But the investigations, that was a policeman’s work,’ he said. ‘Not a politician’s. It was linked to the mafia, organised crime. The same people who were trafficking children for prostitution were trafficking children for football. The Turkish mafia were involved. I knew some of them were living in Brussels and I was told if I went to see them, I would be killed.’ It is worth repeating this quote: ‘The same people who were trafficking children for prostitution were trafficking children for football.’
Death threats were also made when Dedecker said he would go to Nigeria to explore the relationship between clubs, agents and the trafficking gangs. ‘They sent me rat poison in the post,’ he said. ‘It just proved that I was right about the trafficking. It was a big noise at the time. It was on television, in all the newspapers.’
He had pages upon pages of evidence which detailed the movement of African children to Belgium. There were police reports, testimonies of boys, witness statements, admissions of guilt. He had lists of agents he had investigated. One had represented a former World Cup winner. The charge sheet for one, who remained active in the African academy system, ran to more than two pages. There were high-profile managers and coaches at big Belgian clubs.
We had spent the morning in Dedecker’s office in Ostend as a squall raged outside, the granite sky and North Sea merging into one. ‘I need to get my football file,’ he had said. He put on his reading glasses, wetted his finger and leafed through the papers. ‘Look here . . . these statements . . . same stories. The same names again and again,’ he said. ‘This guy. You recognise the name of this manager?’ I did. ‘This agent again . . . again. But this is the problem I found. Is it true, is it not true? Have these boys just taken the names of the agents? Some agents I couldn’t find, so did they even exist? It just couldn’t be proved that some of the boys were being accurate. They were telling lies so they could get help. Because of that a lot of cases could not go anywhere. It is as I said. What is the truth?’
So when Omo and Manasseh came to Dedecker, he had seen and heard similar stories. He was convinced, however, that he could build a case against Roeselare FC, the club that had brought them to Belgium. ‘I just need to jog my memory here, it was a long time ago,’ he said, as I asked him to tell me the boys’ story. ‘The boys, they knocked on the door of this office. Omo and Manasseh, and there were two others. Luka Tanku and Omerah Samuel. Tanku and Samuel disappeared to another part of Europe.’
In other words, as Darragh McGee had said, they had ‘run’.
‘Omo and Manasseh were playing football but they knew there was something wrong. They came here to become rich, they were very talented. Everybody here was collaborating against them.’ Dedecker explained that the boys had not been paid. They were given an apartment to live in and money for food. ‘They knew this wasn’t right.’
His first action was to contact Solange Cluydts of Payoke, the Belgian anti-trafficking charity. ‘I said, “Solange, I have a case of trafficking here that you need to hear for yourself.” She came immediately.’
‘So what happened next?’
Dedecker looked at me over the top of his spectacles, bemused at my impatience. ‘I am just checking here, going through the files and I will tell you everything.’ A few minutes later after some muttering in Flemish and more rifling through the football file, Dedecker cleared his throat. It was his way of saying, ‘If you’re sitting comfortably, the storyteller will begin.’ Instead of turning the pages of a thriller, Dedecker told the story of Omo and Manasseh through the police reports, the witness statements and court papers. He would hand over each piece of evidence with a ‘you see here?’ and ‘look at this page’ as he went.
‘Roeselare and a company called Football Soccer International set up an academy in Nigeria. The Nigerdock academy. They said it was just for football but it was trafficking of minors to come to play in Europe. The boys came from there. It doesn’t exist now. Omo’s and Manasseh’s parents got 25,000 Nigerian Naira (about €150) each. The soccer academy bought them. The academy bought the air tickets. They [the boys] were brought to the airport in Lagos by the manager of the academy, who was a former minister of sport in Nigeria. He gave them €40, then they came to Lille and then to Belgium with the agent. They had left Nigeria on 8 July 2000. The boys signed a contract with the company [which had] the same shareholders as the academy. The company Football Soccer International made double contracts with Roeselare FC, one to satisfy the Belgian FA with the minimum conditions and one which was the real contract, so they didn’t get anything.
‘Is it a slave trade? Yes. When you are buying a human being for €150? It is proof. They had a slave contract. The “official” contract was for €1,000 per month, and they didn’t get paid. They didn’t get any of that money. Just food and lodgings. Even when they were sold, the players would get nothing. The academy took 70 per cent [of transfer fee profit] and the club 30 per cent. The player nothing. This is the contract. The official contract. They declared it. The agent was Bart de Bruyne. He said so. It’s here. Here is his declaration.
‘They were minors. They couldn’t come as they were under 18, so what did they do? They changed their passports and I discovered they did that with the help of the Nigerian embassy here in Brussels. They weren’t old enough to play football. They realised there was a problem with the passports so they had to go to the embassy with about €1,000 and the embassy changed the date of birth. They got the money from the club to go to the Nigeria embassy in Brussels to change the passports – that’s De Bruyne’s statement here . . . here is the proof in the club’s accounts. The dates of birth were changed by hand at the Nigerian embassy. I will read this page from the police file: “DOB of bearer should read August 1, 1984 and not as erroneously written on ID page.” Omo saw they had changed it. They made him two years older. After the passport incident and then not being paid, they came to me. They were afraid. They couldn’t call home because in Nigeria you disappear for a lot less.’
With that evidence, Dedecker, and with the backing of Cluydts’s charity, Payoke, four men were charged with human trafficking: Roger Havegeer, James Storme, Bart de Bruyne and Maurice Cooreman. They were each found not guilty. Havegeer was the president of Roeselare and Storme was a businessman who had helped to set up Football Soccer International (FSI). De Bruyne, the agent, and Cooreman, who Dedecker said was a scout, were also part of FSI and had set up the Nigerdock academy. The court said the accused did not make use of ‘malicious manœuvres, force, threat or other means of coercion’ and they did not manipulate the ‘particular vulnerable position of the foreigner due to the unlawful or precarious administrative situation or state of minority’. Despite there being ‘reasonable doubt’ about passport fraud, the court said it was ‘not unreasonable to pay for new passports’.
‘I was very disappointed those guys went free,’ Dedecker said. ‘We had all the details, they changed the passports, the contracts, it was total abuse. The case was lost because the players declared they came to Europe. They wanted to come, so you can’t speak about human trafficking when they come voluntarily. The parents were paid. The conditions were made. “It’s your fault,” the court said. They couldn’t be slaves.’
Dedecker became disillusioned after the case. ‘I was blamed by a lot of the clubs,’ he said. ‘Solange was disappointed also. Who was telling the truth and who wasn’t?’ Dedecker concentrated on politics but Omo and Manasseh were not ‘abandoned’ for a second time. He paid for Omo to attend a football academy in Belgium. ‘With the help of Solange, Omo was in a special institute for minors, he went to school and he became a carpenter. I even paid for his studies myself. He’s married, living in Ghent, playing football at a low level. He’s not such a smart guy, very naïve. Manasseh went to Germany to play, had good contracts and lost everything, also I think because he’s very naïve. Solange is the godmother of his child.’
Solange Cluydts had been reluctant to meet. She let out a sigh over the telephone. ‘But this was a long time ago, no?’ she said. ‘It was all dealt with in the court and there was no crime.’ I explained that I wanted to know the truth about the trafficking of young footballers, whether they were complicit, whether they knew what they were getting into. Another sigh. ‘The football boys, you know, there is nothing in that story. Everyone knows that.’
Everyone didn’t know that. I convinced Solange to talk to me, so a few weeks later we met at Payoke’s poky office off a cobbled street in Antwerp. She was warm but seemed utterly bemused, almost to the point of amusement, that I had come from London to hear about Omo and Manasseh and Belgium’s victims of football trafficking. In her eyes, Payoke dealt with cases of trafficking involving child prostitution and economic exploitation. ‘Football?’ she scoffed. ‘It is not the same.’
Solange has been at Payoke for 11 years. Previously she had been the director of immigration at Zaventem airport and then worked for the Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism in Brussels. She was vastly experienced in the field. ‘In Belgium, Payoke is the only organisation which can ask victims of trafficking to see their papers. When a victim is going to court against his exporter we have to give them legal advice, we give them social support, shelter for the first three months, and then afterwards we look for a private apartment for them. We are working with police and prosecutors. If the judge says, “Yes, for me this is a victim of trafficking,” and the exploiters are punished with prison, on the basis of that judgement we can arrange it that people have a permit to stay in Belgium for ever.’
It was, however, fair to say that most of Payoke’s cases had not generated the same media interest as Dedecker’s 442 Nigerians or Omo and Manasseh. ‘There was a lot of hype at that time. And Jean-Marie liked to be on TV!’ The joke seemed to relax her and she began to talk of her memories of the case:
‘Omo and Manasseh were staying with a woman who was doing their laundry, feeding them. For the first time I saw their passports and you could see someone had written by hand, changed the date and it had been stamped. When I was there the local Roeselare police came to get them and put them on a plane back home because the club knew what would happen if those two boys would talk. I said to the police, “On what basis are you going to take them? Hey, no way, nooo way.” I said, “I’m taking those two to Brussels, to the federal police.” I called a judge in Brussels who I knew very well, explained what was happening, and he said, “Ok, take them in your car.”
‘Manasseh was very close with the family doing his laundry, I think the mother was in love with Manasseh! And Omo, he was younger. He didn’t have a place to stay so I took him with me, he stayed a week, two weeks and then he started to look too much to my daughter so . . .’ Solange laughed and clapped her hands, ‘. . . he has to go. So we put him in a shelter for minors, victims of traffickers. And he had another girlfriend, and there was, oh my god, there was always another one pregnant!’
A deal was done with Roeselare. Solange and Dedecker would not prosecute the club, which had undergone a change in ownership. Only the four individuals, including the old president, would face charges in return for Manasseh being given the contract he was supposed to have had.
‘Omo was a tearaway and he went to school, but Manna was a football player and he became a good player. He went to Brugge and he went to Germany to play, so he was good. He earned a lot of money, so I didn’t have to pay anything for him, like Jean-Marie did with Omo. Manna was a typical African. When they had money, they thought they could live like a king. They need Prada shoes, a sports car even if they had a car from the club. He spent all his money. And now he has a problem with his foot he can’t play. I think he has a job in a factory. He has two children. I know his wife, Kellie, she is alone with the children. So now I’m paying, helping her out with the kids because they need shoes, clothes. I said to him, “You have to help Kellie a little bit for the children because it’s not possible.” He said, “Ya, searching for a job, it’s not easy.”’
After the publicity surrounding Dedecker’s investigations and the charges brought against the four men in the Omo and Manasseh case, Payoke’s Antwerp office suddenly saw a spike in football trafficking cases. Normally they would have dealt with about 50 victims a year of ‘ordinary’ trafficking, like prostitution, but suddenly scores of boys began to arrive, claiming they had suffered the same fate as Omo and Manasseh. The reason for the surge in numbers was that a special permit to remain in the country could be issued for those trafficked for football. That was something widely reported in the newspapers and on television. Solange continued:
‘So one day the director [of Payoke] called me and said, “Hey, Solange, I don’t know what’s happening but I have ten boys who are sitting here and they are complaining and saying they are football victims.” I said, “Ok, wait, I’m coming. I’m going to do the interviews of these boys.”
‘Immediately I understood they were seeking a permit to stay. They were not victims of trafficking. Those boys were like, “I’m a good football player, I’m gonna make it here.” I checked it out with people at the administration of foreign affairs. Those boys, they were already here. Years and years in Belgium. There were boys who had come from Germany because they asked for political asylum there and when they didn’t get it they came here. And of course they had read the newspaper stories here and said, “I can play football.”’
‘So there was an explosion in kids saying they were trafficked for football?’ I asked.
‘Listen, I know the football world. My father was a football player, my brother-in-law was a football player, and I was married to a football player. I know agents. Some of them are my friends. I know what’s going on there. I know what’s going on and it’s big money, but on the other hand I know African people. I know Manasseh very well. I’m not going to say you don’t have young people who were trafficked by agents. They went to Africa and if you find a good player, it’s big money, eh? If he’s really talented, that black pearl, I’m sure it happened. The problem is that when they’re in Europe, even if there is not one club who is saying, “You are that pearl, come and play for us,” they are not going back. They don’t want to go back! They want to stay here! OK, they could trial at a club but if the club said, “No, you’re not good enough,” then they have to go back. Even if the agent said, “OK, you’re not good enough, here’s the ticket to go home,” those boys throw that ticket in the garbage. And when there is that hype about football players brought to Belgium, and they can get the permit to stay, they are, “Hey, where do I have to be?”
‘I was director of immigration at the airport. I have heard all the stories. They don’t tell the truth. I remember one, he said, “The man took my passport, I’ve come from the street.” We were in immigration at the airport. I asked him how had he got off the plane, gone through passport control and gone through the police without a passport. I said, “This is not possible. What did the policeman say?” “He opened the door and welcomed me to Belgium.” Solange let out a laugh. ‘Without a passport! You know, I had a field near the office at the airport and the African boys played football there. They had all asked for political asylum. “My life is in danger.” It happened all the time.’
Jay-Jay’s story. What did Solange make of that, then? I told her each detail.
‘A story like that I believe,’ she said.
‘Yes? That’s good.’
‘You have the white man going to Africa not for football but to use young boys sexually. The white man, he knows that young boys like football shoes, and if he approaches a boy that boy will tell him, “My big dream is to play in Europe . . .” Of course that white man is going to arrange it for him and then he gets something he wants. No, it can be like that.’
So I asked what Solange thought of the example of a player paying money to an agent, being bought an airfare, passport and visa and then abandoned. She looked at me with that mixture of irritation and mirth. As if I hadn’t been listening to what she had been saying for the last hour.
‘It was stories like that we were told around this very table after the hype and publicity,’ she said. ‘That the boys paid someone and then they were standing there without a passport and nobody came, or they were in a hotel and no one came for them for the trial. I don’t believe it. We checked it with the embassies. They have to go to ask for a visa. If it’s somebody who is arranging the papers for all those who are arriving in Paris, the embassies have to know the name of that man. It’s bullshit. It’s impossible. I don’t believe it.’
‘Why not just take the money, you don’t need to take the boy to Paris?’ I asked.
‘Of course. It’s crazy. If you see what a ticket costs from Africa to Europe, and a passport. They don’t earn money on those boys. The African wants a better life. It’s bullshit.’