Blood Diamonds

by Greg Campbell

  They’ll just make it harder to detect.

  9

  THE ROUGH ROAD AHEAD: Mining for Peace

  Freetown, Sierra Leone

  IN JANUARY 2002, UNAMSIL officially announced that the war in Sierra Leone was over and that the Revolutionary United Front no longer existed as a rebel group. I was in Lagos, Nigeria, at the time and you could almost hear the collective sigh of relief wafting down the coast from the west. For a time, it seemed that the last and most crucial step of the peace plan—disarming the Kono region and taking its diamond mines from the RUF’s control for good—might never be accomplished. The original deadline for disarmament for Kono, Kailahun, and Kenema Districts had been November 30, 2001, but that deadline passed with only a handful of soldiers turning in their weapons. Through December, rebels continued to mine diamonds and launder them through Liberia, with UNAMSIL taking little notice. Masimba Tafirenyika, the acting UNAMSIL spokesperson, was asked by a reporter two weeks after the deadline passed about the UN’s response to the continued mining.

  “This, including all other activities, are addressed by the government of Sierra Leone with the deployment of the Sierra Leone Police throughout the country,” he said. “The Sierra Leone Police have been deployed in Kono and will be deployed in other areas.”1

  The deployment of the police—an organization historically as corrupt and inept as the SLA—did nothing to stop rival RUF miners from staging a riot in Koidu on December 18. Different mining factions threw stones at one another in the presence of police and UNAMSIL soldiers.

  UNAMSIL stuck to its program of moderate diplomacy and employed the help of RUF Brigadier General Issa Sessay in appealing for peace and disarmament in the region, staging pep rallies and feel-good events in the contested areas. Until the end, Sessay used the continued occupation of the diamond regions as a trump card to try and negotiate the release of Foday Sankoh from his Bunce Island dungeon, claiming that only “Pa Sankoh” could get his children in the bush to give up their lives of rape and pillage for one of education and odd jobs, but neither UNAMSIL nor the government budged. One of the other reasons Sessay stalled for time, perhaps, was to allow his field commanders a little extra time to mine as many diamonds as possible before the inevitable end.

  But eventually, the end did come, at least as far as UNAMSIL is concerned. In the last days of January 2002, the UN staged a bonfire event in which it burned more than 3,000 weapons confiscated from the rebels over the course of the last year and announced that peace had come once and for all to Sierra Leone.

  Whether or not this is true, naturally, remains to be seen. The durability of the cease-fire in effect since March 2001, the fact that many areas of the country are now open to outsiders for the first time in more than ten years, and the mutation of the RUF into a recognized political movement shouldn’t be confused with smooth sailing. When the war was declared over, many problems still existed and threatened a return to Sierra Leone’s old patterns of violence. For example, the Security Council announced in January 2002 the formation of a special war crimes court for Sierra Leone. Representing a new chapter in international jurisprudence, the special court constitutes a blend of international and local laws and takes legal precedence over local Sierra Leonean courts. Whereas courts for war crimes committed in Yugoslavia and Rwanda were established directly by the Security Council, the tribunal for Sierra Leone was requested by the government in Freetown.

  From the beginning the court’s main targets were Major General Sam “Mosquito” Bokarie, RUF founder Foday Sankoh, and AFRC junta leader Johnny Paul Koroma. Sankoh, despite the RUF’s earnest efforts to see him freed, remained in jail in Freetown; Koroma also returned to the capital, now a born-again Christian preaching reconciliation.

  Immediately after the war, the special court represents a dangerous double-edged blade to peace prospects in Sierra Leone. Clearly, most of those living there demand accountability for war crimes committed by these men and others who would eventually be indicted. An important pillar of any peace process is justice, and seeing the men who dragged Sierra Leone through a decade of horror publicly accused and tried under international law is a critical component of the healing and rebuilding process.

  But it’s also something that the RUF has never been inclined to accept. Remember that the Lomé Accords gave the rebels everything they could have wanted—a government position for Sankoh, control of the diamond mines, and immunity from prosecution for war crimes—and it still failed miserably. UNAMSIL’s bloody start can be attributed, at least in part, to the fact that with Secretary General Annan’s public disagreement with Lomé’s amnesty clause, RUF leaders preferred to fight the UN rather than risk being tried for war crimes. That the RUF’s titular leader would be the first to stand before a UN-led tribunal when the RUF has tried everything from a prison break to diplomacy to see him freed seemed to provide a tailor-made excuse for them to abandon peace and renew the fight, especially for those RUF leaders who felt that they may eventually end up in the dock themselves. As Margaret Novicki of the UN mission once told me, a war crimes investigation would have to indict practically everyone. “Everyone’s guilty,” she said.

  On another level, if the tribunal is successful and is conducted with little dissent from the RUF, the majority of RUF leaders—including the current one, Sessay—could end up in jail, gutting the fledgling party of anyone in a position to lead it. With elections scheduled for May 2002, and the RUFP on the ballot, this meant the indictment of elected officials was a real possibility. This course of events would be fine for most Sierra Leoneans, but it seemed unlikely that the RUF would be willing to risk its complete erasure from the political scene.

  These are only the most obvious hurdles. Though the warfare and the amputations may have stopped, the RUF has left behind a shattered nation filled with ruined souls. Rebuilding homes and towns and restarting lives are only the first painful steps to recovery. People will have to revive businesses, find jobs, and figure out how to pay income taxes. It will be decades before farmers can feed the country again. Medical care and education will have to be modernized, democratized, and spread into the bush to avoid a replay of the disenfranchisement that allowed the RUF to grow in the first place. The military and police forces will have to be completely revamped and reeducated not only in standard law-enforcement techniques, but also in respect for human rights and international rules of law.

  PARADOXICALLY, what destroyed Sierra Leone may be the only thing capable of saving it: diamonds.

  For the first time in its turbulent history, Sierra Leone must manage its natural resources and mineral wealth. Diamond mining must be strictly controlled so that, for a change, the vast majority of the revenue will go to the people of the country, not to spoiled dictators and ruthless killers and their henchmen in Liberia and elsewhere. Important first steps in this regard are already being taken: Within a week of the UNAMSIL declaration of peace, Canadian mining company DiamondWorks announced that it would resume mining operations in Koidu, assured by President Kabbah that its permits and property titles acquired through Branch Energy (which acquired them thanks to the military efforts of Executive Outcomes) were valid. In a recent statement, DiamondWorks executives said, “This important step in the peace process has removed the remaining political obstacles to the re-establishment of the company’s operations in Sierra Leone after an absence of nearly five years.”2 Through Branch, DiamondWorks owns a 60 percent stake in a kimberlite pipe in Koidu, and two exploration permits for part of the Sewa River totaling 6,800 hectares of land.

  The quick reestablishment of legitimate mining operations should be seen as a positive development and it would be a welcome investment if the country continued to stabilize enough for De Beers to play a role once again. The company’s partnership with the government of Botswana, which has the fastest-growing economy in the world, should be viewed as a shining example of what properly organized and regulated industry can do for the good of a country. Some critic
s will balk that a partnership between De Beers and Sierra Leone will add yet more decimal points to the company’s wealth, but it’s a far cry better than the utter anarchy that dominated the 1990s. If De Beers’s greed for diamonds leads Sierra Leone’s leaders to be greedy for the good of the nation, then who loses, other than those who may be paying too much for their jewelry downstream? In terms of free-market economics, they already pay too much. The only difference would be that they’d be paying it to legally employed miners, not men who cut off arms with machetes. In this case, greed can be good.

  Stabilizing and controlling diamond exploration would have positive ripple effects that go beyond the end of one of the world’s worst ongoing wars. There’s no reason a country as beautiful as Sierra Leone shouldn’t have tourism as one of its top five industries. Foreign and domestic exploration investment can create an economy of its own as mining companies will require far more than shovels and shake-shakes to delve fully into Sierra Leone’s kimberlites; they’ll require modern facilities, sorting and processing centers like those found in Namibia, South Africa, and Botswana. Running those facilities requires a skilled workforce and it’s not unlikely that exploration companies would be willing to invest in the local education system for the sake of producing a labor pool from which to draw. De Beers has a good track record in this regard. The overwhelming majority of its employees are indigenous to the countries in which it operates.

  The big risk to De Beers—and to Sierra Leone’s diamond industry—is if Sierra Leone diamonds are tainted for good thanks to the RUF’s war; but such a risk is minimal given the ability of De Beers, through its marketing and advertising clout, to create and maintain any reality it wants for diamonds. Two years’ worth of publicity about conflict diamonds from Global Witness, Amnesty International, and other groups; numerous media reports on such high-profile television shows as 20/20 and Nova; and legislation by the U.S. Congress have not been enough by a long shot to overcome more than 100 years of marketing strategy. Most consumers still have never heard about “blood” diamonds and the African wars fought over them.

  “The fact of the matter is that to the consumer it’s a very low-interest issue,” said Tom Shane, the American diamond importer. “Even with all the articles that have been written, we don’t hear it in our stores being raised as an issue.”

  Shane’s employees, like many other jewelry retailers across the country, are prepared to answer questions about conflict diamonds, but as tradition would dictate, the issue is never openly acknowledged unless a customer asks about it specifically.

  “We don’t raise it and flaunt the fact that it’s not a conflict stone any more than I would say that it’s not stolen,” Shane said. “Why would it occur to them that it would be? It’s not that we’re ducking the issue in any way, shape, or form, but it’s not something that’s ever brought up, either by us or the customer.”

  Even if customers were interested in where their diamonds come from, there’s little they can do except take the word of the jeweler as to their origin, in much the same way that the jeweler takes the word of the Antwerp polisher, who takes the word of the broker, and so on. Although experts may be able to determine the origin of rough goods if given enough of a sample to peruse, it’s virtually impossible for anyone to tell where a polished piece came from.

  “To control the conflict stones, you have to start at the source,” Shane said. “The integrity of the system has to start at the source. You can’t go backwards and verify. It’s a one-way street, and that’s just the honest fact of what we’re dealing in.”

  CLEARLY, THE BIGGEST BENEFITS of peace will be to those who currently have no future at all and never will if the situation is allowed to stand. Children who grew up learning how to kill one another with smuggled Ukrainian machine guns can and should have the opportunity to become the generous, likeable, and well-humored people that many of their countrymen have proven they can be.

  In spite of my disinclination, I often found myself liking many of the RUF members I met, a situation that can boggle the mind if you think too deeply about it. In Kailahun, I often found myself laughing at the jokes and antics of a fighter who called himself T-Ray, a shrapnel-scarred man who always carried a .45-caliber pistol in his left hand as if it were part of his body. In one sense, it was terrifying to be caught so off guard by feelings of natural friendship with a man who admitted killing “dozens” of people during his years with the RUF. Shouldn’t I be hating this man with every ounce of my being? I’d think, in moments when I was suddenly crushed with shame at having laughed out loud at something he’d said, praying that no one had seen me.

  But later I realized that the fact that we could find common ground at all is a source of immense hope. I fantasized about a time when Sierra Leone was at peace and I returned not to report on war or death, but for the sake of a vacation. The only helicopters would be the commercial ones flying back and forth between Aberdeen and Lungi Airport, and the children wandering Lumley Beach Road would be burdened with schoolbooks instead of ammunition. The UN would be gone, along with most of the street crooks and hookers. Those who are today doomed cripples and hopeless amputees will have received proper support and medical care from the government in the hope that one day they’ll be able to support themselves and their families. The forlorn and shell-shocked would be replaced with tourists, local families, businessmen, and the everyday worker-bees of a normal economy, the components of a successful and peaceful country.

  Such visions would come only fleetingly, though. Invariably, they’d dissolve into the chaotic reality of Kailahun, where one of every twenty people I encountered were only days or weeks away from a painful death by starvation or disease and where no one went anywhere without their Kalashnikov. Other memories would flood my mind, defiant images that seemed to mock my fantasies of peace: Sween and Lahia were dead, I was sure. Dead of tetanus, and their images were never far from my mind’s work: Lahia’s eyes working against imminent paralysis to fix on me, saying most certainly “help me”; Lieutenant Sween’s fear of death so palpable that you could smell it in that dank room, his chest rising and falling with short breaths of despair, knowing that he was doomed to die, painfully; Lieutenant Colonel Senesi laughing at his lie about never having seen diamonds before; Ismael Dalramy trying hard, and failing, to show me that he can dress himself without hands; the baby with no left foot, the one sacrificed to a Guinean mortar; the terrifying visage I literally bumped into in Kailahun, a clitoral-circumcision victim adorned in black-dyed palm grass and a too-small carved mask depicting a screaming woman; a truckload of children carrying AK-47s met on the four-wheel path to Koindu, eyes vacant enough to hypnotize; the St. Nicholas twinkle in the eyes of Jacob Singer, eager to pay the RUF for their goods and get home to Australia; Andy Bone at the DTC, fretting over the impacts to his industry; the World Trade Center towers blooming like beautiful gray flowers of death.

  The end of the war only provided a blip of hope, because in West Africa, something always seems to go wrong at the worst possible moment. Indeed, within weeks of peace being declared in Sierra Leone, LURD rebels in Liberia surrounded Monrovia and threatened to topple Charles Taylor’s government. The situation promises to escalate and end badly, raising the question of how much pressure Taylor will put on his RUF compatriots to help quell the rebellion by again feeding him diamonds for cash.

  When I dwelled on these thoughts, I realized that I would be a very old man if my vision of tranquility ever came true.

  10

  TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION: Recovering from the Diamond War

  Sierra Leone, Belgium

  LIKE MANY OTHERS who were amputated by the RUF, in 1996 Ismael Dalramy pleaded with his captors to kill him when he saw the fate that awaited him. But his death would not have served the RUF’s political purpose. They amputated his arms to deliver the message that people without hands couldn’t vote for those who opposed the RUF.

  On May 14, 2002, Dalramy and hundreds of other a
mputees waited for hours in a hot long line to prove them wrong. When it was his turn to vote, he marked the ballot with his toe, only one remarkable facet of one of the most remarkable days in Sierra Leone’s history.1

  When the United Nations finally succeeded in disarming the vast majority of those fighting in Sierra Leone’s jungles, entire swaths of the country that had for the past decade been closed to anyone without a machine gun were once again open for travel, at least to UN monitors and humanitarian organizations. Only then was the destruction wrought by one of Africa’s most brutal modern wars finally clear. Once thriving villages and towns had been erased from existence. Where there were formerly fields of cassava and simple farming habitations, there were now crude graves and weather-ravaged skeletons of homes and buildings. Human bones littered the roadsides. Tens of thousands of refugees clung to life all along the Sierra Leone border with Liberia and Guinea, starving, wounded, and diseased.

  And still, diamonds brought weapons to the region. Less than two weeks after the election, 30 tons of rifles and ammunition were smuggled into Monrovia from Belgium through Nice, France. The consignment was paid for by Aziz Nassour, the Lebanese Al Qaeda go-between, and the arms were turned over to Sam “Mosquito” Bokarie, the former RUF field commander. Little more than a month later, another shipment of 15 tons arrived. Even though Al Qaeda’s organized diamond deals were in disarray, RUF leaders, Qaeda operatives, and corrupt government leaders (including Charles Taylor’s wife, Jewel Taylor) met in Burkina Faso in June 2002 to discuss how to continue their diamonds-for-guns schemes. The war may have been over, but it’s clear that Sierra Leone’s diamonds were still being smuggled away and used to buy weapons.2 Exploitation of the mines by sundry smugglers and criminals continued to be a problem that wouldn’t soon go away.