This was the situation in 1991 when miners Chris Jennings and Gren Thomas boarded a Twin Otter airplane in one of Canada’s hinterland cities, Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, and flew 200 miles farther north, in a desperate race to stake claims before De Beers. When the men arrived in Yellowknife, they learned that De Beers was already there, chartering helicopters for a big push into the north.
In such an environment, locating diamonds is rather different from in places like Sierra Leone. Frozen tundra, nine months of nonstop snowfall, and glacial movements require astute geological surveys, not just blind luck. Therefore, in the early days the Barren Lands explorers were hunched over in the land of caribou and bears, digging holes and lugging around sacks of dirt and rocks, the only humans for hundreds of miles amid the eskers and frozen lakes. Their samples would be flown to laboratories and examined for kimberlite indicators, traces of minerals that can be expected to be found in diamond-rich kimberlite. If you find red pyrope garnets, green chrome diopsides, or black ilmenites, you might be sniffing in the right place. From that point, it’s just a matter of detective work, intuition, and good luck.
What made Canada such a threat to De Beers wasn’t its harsh mining environment or the high quality of goods being discovered, but the fact that Canada is home to most of the diamond industry’s pilot-fish—small, publicly traded exploration companies known in the business as the “juniors.” Usually comprising little more than a few close friends and exploration experts, the juniors had the ability to track down rumors and move quickly to stake claims. De Beers’s mode of operation has usually been to allow these companies to find diamonds and then buy out their claims once the hard exploratory work has been done and the discovery has proven its worth.
And that might have been the scenario again if the major find hadn’t been discovered by BHP Minerals, a subsidiary of Broken Hill Proprietary Company, an Australian mining company. BHP’s North American headquarters was in San Francisco and the company owned several coalfields in the U.S. Southwest, a fact that scuttled any possibility of a De Beers partnership: The conglomerate’s antitrust troubles in the United States would likely jeopardize any arrangement. The fact that BHP already had a solid presence in the United States was equally worrisome. The belief was that arctic diamonds would flow almost exclusively south, into the maw of the world’s hungriest diamond consumer, America. Therefore, one of the most valuable diamond discoveries of the twentieth century seemed likely to be out of reach of the company that had made diamonds what they are in the first place.
De Beers was facing similar challenges on other fronts. Once his work in Canada was finished, Chris Jennings boldly began looking for diamonds on De Beers’s doorstep, in Kimberley—and he found them.
Not 200 miles from the conglomerate’s stomping ground in Kimberley, Jennings used old cartographical information, gumshoe footwork, and modern exploration methods to discover a 25-mile-long kimberlite fissure and a micropipe on a farm called Marsfrontien. Although De Beers eventually was awarded the claim in court, after the heirs to the farm sold it the mineral rights, Jennings wasn’t finished pounding on the giant. He moved to Angola, where his company won the right to explore one of the largest diamond-producing kimberlites in the world, in Camafuca. Under the deal, Jennings’s company paid the MPFL mineral and exploration fees and shared the profits with the government.14
This trio of blows, all delivered within a few short years in the 1990s, knocked De Beers off balance. In 1999, it took the advice of its financial consultant and agreed to quit its role as “market custodian” of the global diamond market, selling a quarter of its London stockpile. The timing couldn’t have been better; in 2000, economic prosperity in the United States was at an all-time high. The company ended the year selling a record $5.7 billion worth of diamonds. Profits exceeded $1.2 billion.15
The new business strategy for the company was retail selling. It’s such an obvious move that it’s a wonder it hadn’t been pursued earlier. The De Beers name is synonymous with diamonds, luxury, romance, and commitment. Every other retailer in the world will now have to compete with “A Diamond Is Forever,” one of the most recognized advertising slogans in the history of marketing. As these companies attempt to stir up demand for their product, they will fill that demand—where else?—from De Beers, the only diamond retailer in the world that will also sell millions of carats of rough a year to its competitors. It’s estimated that retail sales could account for $500 million a year to De Beers.16
On June 8, 2001, De Beers officially disappeared from the radar. All publicly owned shares of the company and its subsidiaries were purchased by a consortium of buyers collectively called DB Investments. The buyers were the Oppenheimer family, which has controlled the company since the 1920s; Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa, De Beers’s sister corporation that focuses on gold exploration; and Debswana, the diamond exploration company owned jointly by De Beers and the government of Botswana.
The absorption of the company from the South African and London stock exchanges into private hands means that De Beers no longer has to make detailed public financial reports to securities organizations or shareholders. According to the script drafted by Cecil Rhodes more than 100 years ago, De Beers is officially accountable to no one.
6
WAGING PEACE: Taking the Conflict out of “Conflict Diamonds”
Makeni, Sierra Leone
WE FOUND RUF MAJOR Gabril Kallon hungover from a night of indulgent marijuana and gin intake; there was apparently little else to do in Makeni, the RUF’s northern stronghold, except get blinded on drugs and wait to see what would happen with the UNAMSIL peace agreement. Even in his exhausted state, Kallon was a fierce person. In his mid-twenties, he had the eyes of an experienced killer, a look I’d seen almost everywhere in Sierra Leone, a look that said life can be taken without a second thought. He was an important cog in the RUF diamond machinery, a man whose brutality inspired enough terror in his countrymen that they would abandon any place the RUF wanted for itself.
I was sitting on the front porch of Kallon’s compound, a pink concrete house that, according to the sign still standing in the front yard, was once the Makeni headquarters for Concern, an aid organization that had fled the city like most other groups. Makeni was the RUF’s political and military base in the summer of 2001 and most peacekeepers were unwelcome there. I’d hitched a ride with three employees of the UN’s World Food Program to meet some RUF leaders, an endeavor that, until I ran into Kallon, proved almost utterly fruitless. I’d had a five-minute conversation with Eldrid Collins, one of the RUF’s military leaders turned political bosses, but he wasn’t happy that I’d arrived unannounced in the middle of a strategy meeting. I told him the name of my guest house in Freetown and he promised that his men would look me up in a few days for a formal interview, something that never happened.
So I wandered the pulverized town of Makeni with Aya Schneerson, one of WFP’s directors, as she scouted the market for aid food being resold on the black market. Hundreds of RUF supporters and refugees were jammed into the market, a four- or five-block maze of kiosks, rough timber food stands, upturned buckets, and gaunt faces, all centered around a dump truck that reeked of fish. Shirtless men stood on top with shovels, yelling down into the crowd, selling the skinny fish by the spadeful. Movement was practically impossible without resorting to shoving and jostling and the cacophony was deafening: hundreds of people yelling, screaming, mumbling, laughing, and crying, a sardine tin of humanity that emanated body heat like sun-baked asphalt.
We made our way to a quiet corner of the teeming market and bought Cokes, wondering about our next move. We hadn’t found any illegally sold aid food and we hadn’t found any RUF leaders who had time to talk with us. Just as we were contemplating leaving for Freetown, a tall black woman in an ankle-length dress recognized Aya. She was one of Kallon’s wives and she offered to take us to him.
“Is it far?” Aya asked.
“No,
no,” the woman answered. “Small-small walk.”
Based on that description, we decided to leave the WFP Land Cruiser and walk, none of us thinking that a “small-small” walk might be different for us than for someone used to walking everywhere. We were soon out of the city center and meandering down one of the access roads, the street lined with widely spaced houses that had been destroyed during the recent years of fighting. Most were now occupied by RUF fighters who’d claimed one for themselves. Several sat on their porches, polishing rifles and looking with suspicion on two white-skinned people trying to act calm during a stroll through RUF territory, heading deeper and deeper into the jungle. We were nervously discussing the intelligence of leaving the truck behind when we came upon a UNAMSIL checkpoint manned by Nigerians, one of the few times in my life when the sight of a peacekeeper only made me more uneasy.
“The Nigerians won’t lift a finger for us if something happens,” Aya said, reading my thoughts.
But we glided through the checkpoint and after another hour of walking, when we were ready to give up and go back, our guide pointed to the former Concern building. “There,” she said.
The compound looked like an African version of a fraternity house. The porch was clogged with armed fighters lounging with a tense boredom and gangs of chickens fought in the courtyard. Two black pickup trucks were parked in the dirt, tricked out in suburban ghetto-style, festooned with antennas, decorated with peeling and sun-faded stickers depicting Bob Marley, marijuana leaves, and geometric designs. We were regarded warily by Kallon’s squad and were eventually invited to sit with them.
Aya was the center of attention. White people tend to draw stares in the African outback, but attractive white women with long blonde hair are rare enough that their presence can stop the economy, if there were one. I was pointed to a chair on the corner of the porch and ignored as she did most of the talking.
Kallon emerged from the gloom of the house, shirtless and wearing tight-fitting black jeans. Even though he was only a midrank ing officer, he was the commander of Lunsar District, centered on the town of the same name about 55 miles west of Makeni. We’d been through Lunsar earlier in the day. The site of ferocious battles the year before, the town was deserted except for RUF patrols. Almost all the buildings in Lunsar are flattened and the jungle has moved in like a hungry scavenger plundering a corpse. We hadn’t stayed long there; Lunsar’s distance from Makeni made it a tense and boring outpost and those we encountered seemed to be weighing the opportunity to terrorize unexpected visitors. One young RUF soldier who reeked of ganja followed me throughout the town, staring nonstop from behind thick wraparound sunglasses, saying nothing, but obviously waiting for me to fall behind like a wounded fawn being tracked by an inexperienced hyena.
My relative anonymity on the Concern porch was shattered when I introduced myself to Kallon.
“Greg Campbell?” came a booming voice from the other end of the porch. A huge RUF soldier leaned toward me with sudden interest. “From Colorado?”
What? How could he know that? I thought quickly back to everything I’d done in Sierra Leone up to that point that could have caused my reputation to precede me, way out here, in the middle of the jungle, to a commandeered headquarters deep in RUF territory. I could think of nothing.
“Yes?”
The man laughed. “We talked on the phone!”
It took a few minutes for it to sink in. Before embarking for Africa, I’d gotten one of the RUF’s satellite phone numbers from a colleague who worked for the Washington Post and I’d placed several late-night calls from the comfort of my Colorado home to the jungles of Sierra Leone trying to talk to Gabril Massaquoi, the RUF military spokesman. I never managed to connect with Massaquoi, but had several long conversations with the people who’d answered the phone. By the most random of coincidences, this man happened to be one of them.
It was just the icebreaker we needed. The soldiers softened up and Kallon finally turned his attention from Aya to me for a time. I was of course interested in knowing from the RUF’s perspective if the peace process touted so earnestly in UNAMSIL headquarters in Freetown was really going to work and how. And especially how RUF commanders would adjust to living without their diamonds-for-weapons economy, the only one they’ve ever known.
The civil war over diamonds in Sierra Leone is unique in that everyone involved in the fighting is so equally culpable in the violence and human rights violations—accusations of civilian amputations are leveled not only at the RUF, but also at the SLA, Kamajors, and ECOMOG—that peacekeepers are in the unenviable position of having to deal directly with killers and torturers and entrust them to varying degrees within an uncertain peace process. The Lomé Accords are a stark illustration of this, in which RUF leaders were given high positions in government without the benefit of elections, but it was evident elsewhere at lower levels.
Kallon, for instance, was the commander of a force that looted, terrorized, and besieged Lunsar, and on the day that I met him, he was preparing to transition into a new job as Kono District coordinator for child disarmament with UNICEF. It’s not unusual that the advocacy organization would rely on local fighters to negotiate with their colleagues to release child soldiers, but Kallon seemed far from the best choice for such a delicate job. The World Food Program had to negotiate with Kallon to coordinate aid-food deliveries to schools in Lunsar and other areas under his control, and during our long walk to meet him, Aya had warned me to be very careful in my interaction with him. Educated in little more than terrorist-style guerilla warfare, he knew nothing of compromise, preferring to settle disputes with a MAC-10 machine-pistol. “These are very bad guys,” Aya said more than once.
But he seemed to be warming to his new job. As we were leaving, he invited me to accompany his men on a mission to Kono the following week, on behalf of UNICEF. He planned to load up one of the pickup trucks with guards, rifles, and rockets to barnstorm the Kamajor front near Koidu to see about evacuating young RUF fighters there. “We’ll get in a big fight and save some little children,” he grinned.
I declined.
ONE OF THE BEST WAYS to end the trade in conflict diamonds is to end conflict where diamonds are found. If you have no war, you have no problem. Even though smuggling will likely never stop completely, it’s easier to live with the possibility that your diamond paid a common thief rather than an uncommon band of savage murderers. If there ever seemed a time in the past ten years when peace may have a lasting chance in Sierra Leone, it was the latter half of 2001, even though every previous peace attempt had been a dramatic and bloody disaster.
From the perspective of Margaret Novick i, the civilian spokesperson for the UN mission, things couldn’t be going better, despite the fact that in the summer of 2001 the RUF still mined and sold diamonds uncontested in areas where the UN had only a marginal presence. A disarmament deal signed in Freetown by UNAMSIL, RUF, and the government in May 2001 was no different than any of the dozens of peace prospects that had failed miserably in the past few years, but you’d never know it talking to UNAMSIL representatives, who rarely acknowledged the hurdles yet to be overcome. The RUF was to morph into a political party and all of its soldiers and those of the Kamajors were to have laid down their arms by November 30, 2001. Although some 37,000 fighters—out of an estimated 50,000 combatants—had in fact turned in weapons to UNAMSIL by then, the most important RUF posts in Kono and Kailahun had yet to begin the process of demobilizing.1 Although the RUF was still firmly in charge of the diamond areas and continuing to mine and sell gems across the border in Liberia, RUF leaders continued to promise compliance with the agreement.
“They agreed at the highest levels,” Novicki had assured me. Novicki is a large American woman with a fondness for billowy African dresses and Marlboro Lights. “The commanders are playing a very big role in terms of sensitizing the soldiers on the ground about what the disarmament means. The only real problems we face now are logistical problems with having the facil
ities on the ground to receive a large number of combatants.”
Well, that didn’t seem to be the only problem, which I discovered traveling to Makeni with the WFP that day. Our overland trip had begun in Freetown and included a stop along the way at a disarmament camp in Port Loko, about 50 miles from the capital. Strategically, the village is in a treasured location at the end of Port Loko Creek, a freshwater tributary that feeds into the Sierra Leone River and leads directly to Freetown, providing perfect access for seaborne government assaults and the movement of heavy equipment to an interior staging area. It’s also a key source of bauxite, with an estimated 46 million tons of reserve waiting to be mined. But the government has rarely been able to control the area and the RUF fought bitterly for Port Loko all the way up to the summer of 2000, when two journalists and several Nigerian soldiers were killed in an RUF ambush on the road leading from nearby Rogberi Junction to Lunsar.
The fact that more RUF and Kamajor fighters turned up at the gates of the Port Loko disarmament center than UNAMSIL expected perhaps has more to do with miscommunication than with a true desire to end the war, something I learned simply by showing up there.
The camp itself looks more like a POW compound than the first stage in a reintegration process. Located in a former school complex, the camp is a square of high fences and barbed wire guarded by Nigerians with heavy machine guns in fortified sandbag bunkers. Even though UNAMSIL provides security, WFP provides the food and UNHCR provided the tents, the camp is administered by the government’s National Committee for Demobilization, Disarmament and Reintegration, called the DDR. And it seemed to operate about as well as anything else run by the government.
More than 3,000 former fighters—both RUF and Kamajors—roamed the dirt courtyard or lounged in hot plastic tents that accommodated up to twenty people. According to the agreement, anyone who arrived at the gates with an unloaded AK-47, FN rifle, or other long-barreled rifle would be given flip-flops, a rattan mat, food, and the opportunity to enroll in carpentry or masonry classes. The combatants are encouraged to spend up to six weeks at the camp phasing from combat mode to civilian mode, at which time they’re given an ID card and the equivalent of $15 for transportation anywhere in the country.
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