Blood Diamonds

by Greg Campbell

  The first problem was that UNAMSIL unwisely attempted to deploy everywhere at once—with 6,000 soldiers into a countrywide battlefield with some 40,000 to 50,000 combatants. When the RUF was suddenly faced with a heavily armed force of Nigerians demanding their disarmament—many of whom had served with ECOMOG before joining the UN’s mission—they naturally went on the defensive. In May 2000, the RUF killed seven UN peacekeepers and took fifty more hostage, stealing their weapons and vehicles. The number of captured soon rose to over 500, many surrendering their rifles and ammunition without a fight, further humiliating the UN. Many of those captured happened to be Zambians, and the Zambian president sharply criticized UNAMSIL and its Sierra Leone force commander, Major General Vijay Jetly of India. Only months into the mission the UN was having an embarrassingly public debate about command-and-control issues while a twelfth of its force was held prisoner. The Security Council’s decision in February 2000 to increase force strength to 11,000 troops did little to help the situation. Within weeks of the UNAMSIL deployment, Victor Bout made a series of arms shipments to Liberia for the RUF. The cargo, including several attack helicopters, demonstrated that the RUF had little intention of complying with the disarmament agreement.

  UNAMSIL was so inept in its early days that the British sent in paratroopers independent of the UN mission to help stabilize the country, a move that was interpreted—mostly correctly—as an attempt to rescue the UN mission behind the scenes. Though they were to have pulled out by mid-June 2000, the British paratroopers were still there as of November 2001, operating beyond the UN’s channels and mandates.

  Because of the troubled UN mission, the Lomé Accords were rendered useless. The RUF had yet to disarm and they continued to mine and smuggle diamonds under the noses of the UN. The Secretary General proposed increasing UNAMSIL’s size yet again to 20,500 troops, including eighteen infantry battalions, and changing the scope of the mission from neutral peacekeeper to ally of the government. But the Security Council refused to change the parameters of the mission and the UN couldn’t find any member-states willing to contribute the increased number of troops. While this debate ensued, a Sierra Leone Army splinter-group calling themselves The West Side Boys captured eleven British soldiers east of Freetown. The soldiers were soon freed, but it required a daring commando mission into the West Side Boys’ headquarters and cost one paratrooper his life. The British found $38 million worth of rebel diamonds in the hideout.

  Meanwhile, in the midst of what was more or less unchecked warfare between UNAMSIL and the RUF, Jetly, the UNAMSIL commander, was busily preparing a secret report on the shortcomings of the mission’s Nigerian contingent, accusing them of undermining the UN’s mandate and pursuing their own agendas. The unfinished report was leaked and the Nigerian commander demanded Jetly’s dismissal as force commander. India eventually withdrew all 3,000 of its soldiers from Sierra Leone, including Jetly.

  In testimony to the U.S. Congress, John Bolton aptly described the mission as a “meltdown.” He placed major blame on the Lomé Accords themselves and the UN’s hesitancy to fully endorse the amnesty clause:There was never any serious review by the Security Council or the Secretariat whether the Lomé Agreement represented a true meeting of the minds of the parties, and whether it provided any real basis to believe that the peacekeepers could undertake the missions contemplated for them. This failure is a damning indictment of the Council’s entire approach to Sierra Leone and the decision to deploy substantial UN peacekeeping forces reflects a simplistic, knee-jerk to conflict resolution. Subsequent events demonstrate beyond question that there was never any real peace to keep and that the peacekeepers’ mission was almost certainly doomed from the start.8

  For at least one person, things couldn’t have been much better. Sankoh, just released from prison and settling into his new cabinet position, resumed earnestly plundering the diamond fields with bureaucracy, political connections, and old-fashioned corruption rather than with machetes and machine guns. Though he was now a government official, he still had the RUF doing his dirty work by mining diamonds on his behalf. In the book Fire, journalist Sebastian Junger presents evidence of organized diamond-gathering activities by RUF on Sankoh’s behalf while he was ostensibly in a position of responsibility over the diamond fields. A notebook discovered at Sankoh’s residence detailed an RUF agent’s diamond collections from October 1998 to July 1999—“a nine-month haul of about 786 carats of white diamonds and 887 carats of industrials. The RUF is thought to be exporting about half a million carats a year, which would suggest there were about 300 guys . . . gathering diamonds for Sankoh,” Junger wrote.9

  And Sankoh wasted no time trying to find buyers for the gems. Even though the governmental commission he chaired had yet to be activated—a commission that oversaw Sierra Leone’s diamond exports—he was busy negotiating with British and Belgian diamond brokers and American hustlers disguised as businessmen. Junger detailed one particularly bold scam that was orchestrated by the president of the U.S. Trading & Investment Company, John Caldwell, who was also the former vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Shortly before the commission he chaired was activated, Sankoh wrote up a contract between the RUF and Caldwell and his business partner, Belgian Michel Desaedeleer, giving the men monopoly mining rights—through a Virgin Islands–chartered company of which they were directors—to all the gold and diamond claims in Kono District. “The RUF was to provide security and labor for the mining operations and facilitate the transportation of diamonds out of the country,” Junger wrote. Caldwell and Desaedeleer’s company would split the profits with the RUF.

  According to Junger, Desaedeleer then immediately tried to sell the contract to anyone he could think of for $10 million, including De Beers, DiamondWorks, and—unbelievably—to the Sierra Leone government itself. The government’s ambassador to the United States, John Leigh, was naturally aghast at the audacity of a hated rebel group’s asking him to pay for the country’s sovereign natural resources. And being asked by a partner of the former vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce added incredible insult to the offer.10

  There’s no evidence that Sankoh got very far with his plans because, like nearly everyone else involved in the tragic tale of Sierra Leone’s diamonds, he also seems to suffer from congenital incompetence and terminal greed. Not content with his potentially influential position in Kabbah’s government, many believe that Sankoh was planning a coup for the summer of 2000, smuggling in fixers like Brigadier General Issa Sessay—who went by the code name General Emperor—to coordinate the plot.

  Before it could be executed, though, RUF commanders in Makeni spoiled the plan by surrounding a base filled with Kenyan peacekeepers and demanding the release of ten fighters who’d surrendered days earlier. A gunfight ensued and seven peacekeepers were taken hostage. The UN raided Sankoh’s Freetown compound in retaliation and unwittingly averted the coup plot. Sankoh was again arrested and, as of November 2001, was being held on Bunce Island in the Sierra Leone River under heavy guard.

  General Emperor took over as acting leader of the RUF.

  WHILE PEACEKEEPERS, rebels, and mercenaries were busily slaughtering one another in a mostly forgotten jungle battle in West Africa, London residents Charmian Gooch and Alex Yearsley were busily working on the heart of the matter and preparing to knock the wind out of the $6 billion-per-year, century-old diamond industry by revealing its deepest and darkest secret. Their nongovernmental organization, Global Witness, released a detailed report in December 1998 that tied illicitly mined and sold diamonds from the UNITA rebels in Angola directly to De Beers. By inference, Global Witness explained that all the death and destruction in that country, as well as other diamond-producing nations enduring brutal civil wars, result from the international diamond industry’s willingness to pay the rebels for their ill-gotten goods.11

  Angola is Sierra Leone’s mirror hellhole. Its body count—half a million over ten years of civil war—has outpaced that of the smal
ler country only because it has a larger population. A former Portuguese colony, Angola launched into nearly nonstop warfare from the moment the colonialists pulled out in 1975. On one side was the Marxist MPLA government supported by Russia and Cuba; on the other was the Maoist UNITA, backed strangely enough by the United States and China. This Cold War chess game was funded on the government’s side by oil revenues and on the rebels’ side by the country’s impressive diamond mines. Global Witness estimated that between 1992 and 1997, UNITA reaped $3.7 billion from the diamond mines, which led to a UN Security Council resolution in July 1998 aimed at stemming their sales. In spite of that, there has been no significant reduction in UNITA’s diamond earnings.12

  The reason for this goes all the way back to the 1870s and a greedy megalomaniac named Cecil Rhodes. At 18 years old, he strode across the moonscape of diamond mines near Kimberley, South Africa, with one goal in mind: world domination of the diamond market.

  5

  THE SYNDICATE: A Diamond Is Forever

  London

  No diamonds in this box have been purchased in breach of UN Resolution 1173. The intake of diamonds being purchased by De Beers and its associated companies and being sold into the market through the Sight system does not include any diamonds which have come from any area in Africa controlled by forces rebelling against the legitimate and internationally recognized government of the relevant country.

  —NOTICE TO SIGHTHOLDERS

  placed in parcels sold by De Beers’s Diamond Trading Company as of March 2000

  THERE IS NO QUESTION that De Beers abhors conflict diamonds. Perhaps more to the point, the company abhors what public outcry over conflict diamonds could do to its empire, a point that was being made to me at teatime in London on September 11, 2001. Neither I nor the men to whom I was speaking was aware that at that very minute thousands of people were dying at the hands of Osama bin Laden across the Atlantic Ocean in New York City, Washington, D.C., and rural Pennsylvania. Even further from our imaginations was that bin Laden’s African operatives had been buying millions of dollars worth of Sierra Leone diamonds for the past three years in preparation for that day. In our ignorance of real-time events, we were perfectly comfortable discussing in frank terms why diamonds sold by ruthless killers were bad from De Beers’s perspective: Like all else in the hermetic world of diamonds, it came down to economics.

  “No one in this industry is going to hide behind wringing hands, or a hearts-on-your-sleeves kind of thing,” said Andy Bone, chief media officer of De Beers’s Diamond Trading Company. “There is a big moral dimension to this, but we’re very happy to talk about the enormous commercial loss and gain potential of this as well. And the enormous long-term benefit for West Africa if the industry remains unharmed. . . . Yes, let’s get rid of conflict diamonds. We’ve got more to gain than anyone else on this, apart from the victims. The next big prize is for the industry if we can get rid of this.”

  Like most of that week in London, September 11 was chilly and fogbound. We were in a conference room on the second floor of the Diamond Trading Company (DTC) on Charterhouse Street in east London, a building through which 65 percent of the world production of rough diamonds flows, some $500 million worth of rough sold every five weeks to the same cadre of handpicked buyers. Located next to a fresh food market that smells like fish and attracts seagulls, the DTC operates out of an austere building, a huge cement block that looks like it could have been designed by the U.S. Department of Corrections. Indeed, it is probably more secure than most prisons. Visitors are greeted by a man sealed in a bulletproof cabinet who will, assuming your name is on a list, buzz you through ballistic glass doors that are so thick they seem like they’d be impossible to see through. Only then are you allowed to speak face to face with a receptionist, who then ushers you into another room. Sitting there, amid mismatched furniture and oddly arranged desks, I wondered if this was the same room the prospective buyers—called “sightholders”—are required to wait in.

  The second-floor conference room, though, was comfortable and was clearly designed to impress first-time visitors. Giant maps of De Beers’s diamond holdings were built into the walls, and behind more bulletproof glass were models of famous diamonds, including the 986.6-carat Star of Sierra Leone, the third largest ever found. It was the size of a small brick and even the model is considered priceless. Samples of rough diamonds were displayed at lighted kiosks along the walls, as if in a museum. Tea and cucumber sandwiches were served on a silver tray, and a slickly produced video about conflict diamonds was eternally poised inside the VCR to explain the official stance. I was assigned two handlers, Bone and Tim Weekes, perfectly attired gentlemen whose first duty was to impress upon me the gravity of what I was there to talk about. Conflict diamonds are terrible, they agreed, but they represent a very small portion of rough stones found around the world and sloppy or sensationalistic reportage about them—dwelling on amputated civilians, for instance—could have dire consequences on their industry. There was no threat in their disclaimer—not even a hint of one—but it was clear that their jobs were to juggle acknowledgment of the horrors caused by conflict diamonds within the context of all the good that diamond mining does for some countries and more than a million employees worldwide.

  None of us could have known that, at the very moment Bone was downplaying the spin-off horrors of the policies pursued by his industry, policies that have been exploited by rebels and terrorists from Sierra Leone to Lebanon to Afghanistan and that have generated vast profits for De Beers and others throughout the industry, horrors worse than our collective nightmares were happening in America.

  THE INCORPORATION of what was to become the undisputed world behemoth of diamond buying, selling, and marketing came only twenty-two years after the first discovery of the jeweled wealth in South Africa; the time frame alone is testament to the exploding nature of the boom in that country. In 1866, a 15-year-old boy named Erasmus Jacobs found a pretty-looking rock on the banks of South Africa’s Orange River, and he pocketed it to give to his little sister, who collected interesting stones. A short time later, while the children were playing with the pebbles in the street, the glittering one caught the eye of a passerby, a local politician. Suspecting that it may be a diamond, he liberated it from the children and passed it on to a local peddler, who in turn mailed it to the government mineralogist. The stone turned out to be a 21.25-carat diamond, and it was sold to the governor of Cape Colony for 500 pounds sterling. The following year, it was displayed at the Paris Exhibition, mainly as an oddity. At the time, no one knew of the wealth to be had in South Africa.

  Until diamond mining took permanent hold in South Africa in the 1870s, most diamonds were found in India and Brazil; in fact, the discovery of Jacobs’s stone did little to change anyone’s opinion that those two countries were the only places to find diamonds. The find in Africa was written off as a fluke initially—at least until more were plucked from the riverbank: The second find was a magnificent 85-carat white diamond. The discovery was so awe-inspiring that Cape Town’s colonial secretary, Sir Richard Southey, laid it on the table at the South African Parliament and proclaimed proudly, “Gentlemen, this is the rock on which the future of South Africa will be built.” The diamond was named the Star of South Africa.

  Similar in many ways to the California Gold Rush, the South African diamond rush lured hundreds, then thousands of prospectors to South Africa’s scrappy farmland, usually men and families with few other viable opportunities who were enticed by the dream of instant wealth that, for many, turned out not to be dreams at all.

  Southey’s comment to legislators would have been equally accurate if he’d said the stone would also be the foundation for the world diamond industry. But he couldn’t possibly have guessed that the serendipitous discovery would lead, over the course of the next century, to the creation of one of the most successful commodities monopolies in world history and, as a result, to brutal warfare over natural resources that would plunge
at least three African states into chaos, poverty, and destruction at the end of the twentieth century.

  The harbinger of that course of history came marching across the South African scrub flats that were quickly vanishing beneath the swiss-cheese landscape of diamond pits in 1871 in the form of an 18-year-old boy in cricket flannels carrying a bucket and a shovel. When Cecil Rhodes arrived in Africa from England, the rush was already on, not only along the Orange River but also in the Vaal River valley farther north, at the end of a torturous 700-mile overland journey from Cape Town. He found a chaotic, disorganized chain of tent communities populated by vagabond diggers, many of whom didn’t even know what a diamond looked like, but who had been lured to the fields by tales of vast riches. They scratched away the land with the fervent hope that eternal wealth lay just below the next crust of earth. Indeed, sometimes it did. In his book The World of Diamonds: The Inside Story of the Miners, Cutters, Smugglers, Lovers and Investors, Timothy Green writes: “‘An English gentleman,’ reported one visitor to the diggings, ‘having worked a claim for six months and found nothing, went home disgusted, giving away his claim. The man who got it found on the same day a fine diamond of 29½ carats before he had gone six inches deeper than his predecessor. I believe he was offered 2,500 [pounds] for it.’”

  Rhodes pitched his tent at a site called New Rush, a diamondiferous hillock near a farm that was purchased by diggers for 6,000 pounds from local farmers Johannes and Diedrich De Beer. The brothers were disgusted by the mining activity that was wrecking the farmland and wanted to move to more peaceful environs. This little knot of land would achieve everlasting fame over the course of the next century as Kimberley Mine, also called the Big Hole—the deepest open pit mine ever dug by human hands. The mine eventually reached into the earth over 1,300 feet, following a snaking kimberlite pipe that has yielded some of the best and most valuable diamonds ever discovered. The mine was named after the British colonial secretary of the day—not for the kimberlite that produced the diamond wealth—because he couldn’t pronounce either Colesburg Kopje, the name of the hill, or Vooruitzigt, the name of the estate where it was located. And he refused to call it De Beers New Rush, as it was known locally among the diggers, because he deemed the name wholly undignified for a community under the dominion of Queen Victoria.