Blood Diamonds

by Greg Campbell

  The airport’s location across the wide Sierra Leone River from downtown Freetown could be called a joke if the river weren’t so arduous to cross, a task made all the more trying thanks to most airlines’ perplexing habit of scheduling arrivals and departures in the middle of the night. One’s choices for reaching Freetown include expensive taxis that take up to three hours to circle north through Port Loko or a fleet of rickety vessels that sink with alarming regularity. I had been hoping for the speed and relative convenience of a commercial helicopter, but they had been grounded after one too many crashes into the bay.

  Seas were rough in the wake of the storm, and the water taxis’ floating wharf rolled in the surf like a funhouse ride. But the porters carried our luggage on their heads with no fear of slipping and sending the bags into the drink, their work lit crazily by the boat’s bobbing floodlight, which cut a golden prism through the downpour and helped, at least somewhat, to light the way for us less sure-footed passengers.

  Across the river, Freetown loomed in the mist like the remnants of a dream that refuses to be forgotten. Dim lights sketched the rough outline of the coast and the mountains beyond the city. It took me a moment to figure out what was so familiar and yet so wrong about the city’s silhouette. The lights were clustered in one dense spot in the downtown area, giving the impression that Freetown was much smaller than I knew it to be. No lights in the outlying neighborhoods meant no power there: after a decade of reconstruction and international investment in Sierra Leone’s mineral industry, the government still couldn’t provide electricity outside the downtown district. In fact, only 8.5 percent of its households countrywide have electricity.4

  Wandering Aberdeen in the daylight, I marveled that it was as choked as ever with garbage and misery. It smelled the same, a combination of fish and burning refuse. It was shockingly clear that whatever benefits Sierra Leone was deriving from its peacetime industries were not filtering down to where they were needed most. There were businessmen and schoolchildren walking the streets, as I had envisioned a decade before, but just as many drifters and beggars clogged the beaches and the roadsides, victims of double digits in both inflation and unemployment. I even recognized some of them; one of the first people I saw was Osman, the one-time wedding singer and former RUF prisoner who had been forced to mule-train weapons between RUF positions and the Liberian border during the war. He’d gone mad before I met him the first time, and he clearly hadn’t improved. He was half-naked, raving at ghosts and gesturing at unseen demons. I didn’t say hello.

  Of course, some things had changed. UNAMSIL was long gone and the Mammy Yoko Hotel was closed for renovations. Paddy’s, the sweaty pit of a tavern that inspired the beach bar scenes in Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2006 movie Blood Diamond (scenes that wholly fail to capture the reeking milieu of base human motivations on display at the real thing), had been run out of business. The MSF Camp for Amputees and War Wounded, once home to more than four hundred war victims and their families, had been closed, with some of its residents having been relocated to another facility on the other side of town, but most having simply drifted off to make their way elsewhere in the world. One difference—surely meant as an improvement but that instead had an Orwellian effect—was a proliferation of advertising buzzwords for a mobile phone company that were plastered on everything: “growth,” “prosperity,” “health,” “progress.” That these were antonyms for everything in sight and served only to amplify the unavoidable wretchedness was clearly lost on the company.

  In other words, Sierra Leone was just as forlorn as I’d left it, complete with a gang of shady Russian diamond dealers talking in whispers at the Solar Hotel’s breakfast table, and a cast of assorted ne’er-do-wells peering from the banana trees waiting for their opportunity to be my “friend.” I recalled quite clearly from my earlier visit that friendship between locals and foreigners doesn’t always mean what you think and, if you’re not careful, you could find yourself entwined in dealings you want no part of. At a minimum, you’ll end up with an entourage of beggarly hangers-on who all expect to be fed, supplied with beers, and provided with myriad and often unusual gifts. Some are more persistent than others. A young barber named Mohammed, who went by the nickname Fifty Cent, cornered Mike and me just outside the Solar’s entrance and, before I could fend him off, had asked me to buy him a Honda generator. When I politely told him I couldn’t afford it, he said he would settle for an electric razor.

  I’d been in Sierra Leone for less than twelve hours and was already feeling antsy to leave Freetown. I wanted to get to Koidu, the epicenter of diamond production both then and now. But without the UN to act as my personal helicopter chauffeur, I had to find a vehicle. That wasn’t proving easy; strangers hanging out at the hotel demanded rip-off prices to hire an SUV. I decided to see if I could find an old source of help, a person who I knew could pull strings and help smooth the way. But I didn’t know if he was alive, much less whether he was still in the area. I turned to Fifty Cent and cut off his pleading with a raised hand.

  “Do you know a man named Jango?” I asked. “Take me to him.”

  JANGO, AS IT TURNED OUT, was just as much the leader of Aberdeen’s area boys as before, commanding the same degree of respect and deference as I remembered. We fell quickly back into stride, another instance when it seemed I’d entered a time warp. Catching up with me over beers, he looked as if he’d not aged a day. Although we hadn’t corresponded even once since we’d parted ways at the Diamond Airlines helipad a decade before, it was as if I’d only been gone for a few weeks. Even his means of employment was the same, though he brokered deals for diamonds less often than in the past. Cheap stones from conflict zones were still to be had, but required traveling closer to Côte d’Ivoire, where Forces Nouvelles rebels controlled the mines in the north and used proceeds to rearm for a conflict dating back to 2002. Jango had been dispatched to Ghana, one of the many way stations for Ivoirian diamonds on their way into legitimate channels, in attempts to broker deals for his old boss Jacob Singer, who still made frequent trips to Sierra Leone to shop for cheap goods that continue to circulate on the black market.

  Technically, that shouldn’t be the case. When it was adopted in 2003, the Kimberley Process promised to end the trade in conflict diamonds, in large part by demanding that its participants rigorously monitor where the diamonds they export come from. When diamond parcels are issued their official KP certificates upon export, their guarantee depends on the assumption that local customs officials and diamond inspectors have done their jobs and accounted for the source of each gem being sent to market.

  In reality, the process doesn’t work out nearly as well as hoped. “Although three of the five countries neighboring Côte d’Ivoire, namely Ghana, Guinea and Liberia, are Kimberley Process participants, those States continue to struggle with the implementation of the Scheme, and loopholes in their systems of internal controls continue to allow the circulation of Ivorian rough diamonds,” according to an April 2011 report by the UN Security Council, which has banned the import of Ivorian diamonds since 2005 due to their use in the conflict. “Information obtained by the Group indicates that local diamond dealers, in addition to a number of foreign nationals from neighbouring States, continue to purchase diamonds in Séguéla [Côte d’Ivoire], which are then transported to Bamako [Mali], Conakry, Dakar and Monrovia, from where they are exported to other international markets.”5

  Due to weak internal controls in the surrounding transit countries, Ivorian conflict diamonds can easily be mixed with those that have been mined legitimately and then exported under the cover of a KP certificate. After that point, they’re never questioned again as to their true origin. The nongovernmental organization Partnership Africa Canada (PAC) reported in 2009 that half of the diamonds exported by the Democratic Republic of Congo couldn’t be traced; they were completely unaccounted for until they arrived in the capital for valuation prior to export. “For all intents and purposes, the DRC might as well label t
hese diamonds ‘origin unknown,’” according to the PAC report, “Diamonds and Human Security.” The Kimberley Process has inarguably created an easier way of smuggling conflict diamonds than in the past, when claims of a diamond’s origin relied on an unofficial “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy between people buying and selling. Now, they’re slipped into the mainstream with the Kimberley Process’s official seal of approval.

  What’s worse, the Kimberley Process has almost no mechanism for dealing with this problem. Site visits to review how participants are following the agreement’s dictates and principles are infrequent, and follow-up visits to ensure those falling short are tightening the screws can take years. Rogue participants can flaunt the system for years with no real worry that they’ll be sanctioned. There seems little will among Kimberley Process leadership to use its only punishment tools, suspension or expulsion from the club. And since the scheme’s chair changes year to year, it’s easy to dither long enough to pass off a problem state to the next leader.

  “A lot of governments have been happy to use the Kimberley Process as a fig leaf of respectability, so they can say, ‘OK, look we’re doing something,’” Elly Harrowell of the NGO Global Witness, one of KP’s primary architects, told me when I began looking into this problem in 2009. “A lot of people, especially in the public, seem to think it’s case closed.”6

  What had spurred my questions was the case of Zimbabwe, a stark illustration of how toothless the Kimberley Process has proved to be since it was adopted with much fanfare as the cure for blood diamonds. A KP participant, Zimbabwe had for years been ruthlessly using its state security units to force civilians to dig for diamonds at the Marange field near the border with Mozambique, a diamond area discovered in 2006. Armed forces of President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front party (ZANU-PF) violently took over the mines from local diggers after agreeing to a power-sharing arrangement with the opposition party Movement for Democratic Change. The diamond fields served as a sort of payment to Mugabe’s soldiers to ensure their loyalty; different brigades rotated to the area in order to spread the wealth. Unauthorized diggers were beaten and killed, with the death toll in the hundreds. Civilians, including children, mined the diamonds at gunpoint. Women reported being sexually assaulted. Many of the diamonds were smuggled out to Mozambique and then onward into the $72 billion diamond jewelry market.7

  To most people who monitor the trade in conflict diamonds, this seemed an open-and-shut case of a KP participant blatantly violating its commitment to the program. Human Rights Watch and other NGOs decried the abuse and called on the Kimberley Process to level sanctions on Zimbabwean diamonds.

  But the Kimberley Process, unbelievably, questioned whether the country’s actions violated the agreement. KP representatives argued that the diamonds from Zimbabwe weren’t conflict diamonds, in that rebels weren’t using them to wage war against the government. That the government was effectively waging war against its own citizens, and selling the bounty of that war into the multibillion-dollar international diamond market as perfectly clean stones approved by the Kimberley Process, seemed not to matter. The Kimberley Process operates by consensus, and the consensus was to cop out on a technicality—its official definition of conflict diamonds doesn’t include clear examples of gross human rights violations perpetrated on a country’s citizens by its own government. The Kimberley Process gave Zimbabwe a grace period to end the abuses rather than punishing it economically.

  Not everyone agreed with this approach, including De Beers, still the most powerful name in diamonds. Bruised by allegations that it had been complicit in conflict-diamond trafficking during the 1990s, particularly by association with its fictional doppelganger in the DiCaprio movie, the company was as determined as ever to support strong measures to wipe out the illicit commerce, if only for the sake of public perception.

  “Providing confidence about where these special symbols that mark moments in our lives come from is integral to their enduring value,” wrote De Beers chairman Nicky Oppenheimer in a Bloomberg op-ed in 2009, adding that he would have preferred the Kimberley Process take more “decisive action” against Zimbabwe.8

  Bowing to international pressure, the KP temporarily banned diamonds from Marange, but allowed the government to continue mining and stockpiling them until a KP monitoring team could determine whether it had ended abuses and complied with other demands. The ban was lifted in 2010 after Mugabe’s government agreed to partner with private investors who promised mining would be done with respect for human rights, paving the way for Zimbabwe to sell a cache of more than a million carats. But the KP seems to have been the only organization to believe this promise. The New York–based RapNet, one of the world’s largest private diamond trading networks, run by Martin Rapaport, an outspoken Orthodox Jew who railed against the KP’s gutless response to the situation, called for a boycott against Marange diamonds even if they have Kimberley Process certificates. He threatened to expel from his trade network anyone caught dealing in them.

  Despite this public, intra-industry vote of no confidence in the Kimberley Process, its chair unilaterally lifted all remaining restrictions on Zimbabwean diamonds in June 2011. Two months later, Human Rights Watch issued another report of rampant violence and abuses against unlicensed miners in Marange, this time at the hands of both the government’s and its private partners’ armed security forces.

  “Zimbabwe police and private security guards employed by mining companies in the Marange diamond fields are shooting, beating and unleashing attack dogs on poor, local unlicensed miners,” the report reads. “Some members of the international diamond monitoring body, known as the Kimberley Process, have tried to argue that conditions in the areas controlled by joint ventures are not abusive, and that those diamonds should be certified and allowed onto international markets. But Human Rights Watch has found, on the contrary, evidence of serious abuse by private security guards patrolling the joint venture territory.”9

  The report also quoted Tiseke Kasambala, Human Rights Watch’s senior Africa researcher, as saying, “The ongoing abuses at Marange underscore the need for the Kimberley Process to address human rights instead of capitulating to abusive governments and irresponsible companies. . . . The Kimberley Process appears to have lost touch with its mission to ensure that blood diamonds don’t make their way to consumers.”10

  Two of the KP’s main architects even abandoned the program. Ian Smillie, one of the founders of Partnership Africa Canada, resigned in 2009 over what he called the scheme’s “pretence that failure is success.” In his 2010 book, Blood on the Stone: Greed, Corruption, and War in the Global Diamond Trade, Smillie expanded on the concerns that he shares with many people:Can this trade in stolen and blood diamonds be stopped? The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme has helped to put a hold on the worst of it, but in the few cases where it has been tested—Côte d’Ivoire, Venezuela, Zimbabwe—it has stumbled. If a diamond-fuelled conflagration were to erupt in the Eastern DRC or anywhere else, there is little evidence that the Kimberley Process would be able to cope. It looks too much like the nearsighted Mr. Magoo, walking around in a fog, barely missing collisions with swinging girders and falling anvils through pure blind luck.

  The Kimberley Process is failing, and it will fail outright if it does not come to grips with its dysfunctional decision-making and its unwillingness to deal quickly and decisively with non-compliance. African governments need to tighten their controls, and trading countries need to make sure there are no loopholes in theirs. The industry itself needs to be much more forthright in demanding protection and enforcement from the governments that have passed Kimberley Process laws aimed at doing precisely that. The campaigning NGOs are unlikely to go away, and sooner or later, consumers will get the message. If things don’t improve, the reputation of diamonds will fall, along with their attractiveness for engagement rings and other expressions of love.11

  And in December 2011, Global Witness
—which was the first organization to bring the issue of conflict diamonds to light in 1998—followed Smillie’s lead, calling the Kimberley Process a lie and a failure in how it has reacted to Zimbabwe. The group quit the KP over fears that the Mugabe government would use its diamond revenue to fund a crackdown on political opponents in the months and weeks leading to 2012’s elections: “We don’t want to lend our credibility to, or be associated with, a scheme that could very well end up having blood on its hands if all this cash that KP has endorsed is used to fuel violence,” said Annie Dunneback, the organization’s senior campaigner. “We don’t want to be a part of that.”12

  Rather than the watchdog the KP insists that it is, it’s actually proven to be a handy cover for dictators, insurgent groups, and smugglers moving goods from their origins as blood diamonds to the corner jewelry store, where its certificates assure even concerned consumers that they are buying legitimate diamonds for their loved ones.

  It’s the same in Sierra Leone, Jango told me.

  “I will show you,” he said. “When do we want to go to Koidu?”

  I WANTED TO LEAVE immediately, but Jango turned out to be no better at finding cheap private transportation than I had. Inflation had grown from 12 percent to more than 16 percent between 2009 and 2010, and the leone was only half as valuable against the dollar as it had been during my previous visit.13 The weaker currency combined with higher prices for everything from gas to food to lodging makes Sierra Leone more expensive than in the past.