So, opting for a local approach to travel, very early one morning we made our way to a motor park to be shoehorned into a decrepit bus for the seven-hour drive to Koidu. Designed for twenty-five passengers, the bus wouldn’t budge until at least fifty were packed aboard, with children counting as half. It’s what made it cheap, at the equivalent of about seven dollars. Luggage was wedged under the seats and piled in the aisles, along with spare parts for the bus, livestock, and sacks of grain. As we waited in a humid downpour to see if the springs would crack or the rivets pop with each new suitcase jammed into place, the bus’s leaden, sweaty air felt like a disease incubator. I quickly learned that the only way to endure the ride was to pick one position you hoped wouldn’t constrict your circulation too badly for the next quarter of a day and meditate yourself into some happy place in a far-off land. You could move only once in that period, during the halfway stop for lunch, water, and fresh air. It took at least ten minutes for the passengers to untwist themselves from their neighbors and disembark.
Apart from the discomfort, the trip was uneventful until the second half of the journey, when the only road to Koidu degraded and became full of potholes. With every lurch, passengers cracked heads. Combined with the limb-numbing fetal position I was forced to sit in and the claustrophobia of being sealed in by windows closed due to the rain, the roller-coaster jerking began to make me stir-crazy. The feeling was shared by others, and I soon became aware, over the din of eight children sharing the seat behind me, of people arguing somewhere toward the front of the bus. I caught only snatches of the conversation, but it was clear that two men were shouting in frustration about the condition of the road. I clearly heard someone yell, “You have all the diamonds coming from Kono, but look at the schools, look at the hospital, look at this road! There is no power, there is no transportation. Where is the money going?”
Getting off the bus in Koidu was like arriving in a frontier town in an Old West movie, where the strangers stand on the train platform and eye the dusty streets and wonder what sort of trouble lies ahead. The longtime RUF stronghold was still filled with former RUF fighters, including many desperate for work. In the course of our stay, Jango recognized dozens of rebel veterans, including some he took pains to avoid encountering. I found myself doing mental math on everyone I interacted with: Men apparently within five years of my age I presumed to have been officer-grade RUF; odds were good that those in their late teens and early twenties had been child soldiers. It was strange to be deep in the Sierra Leone provinces again and have nothing to fear from kids up to age 17—they were too young to have fought in the war.
Koidu is loosely arranged like a wagon wheel, with the hub being a massive cotton tree known in the dark days as the “chopping tree” because its gnarly knee-high roots proved perfect for performing amputations. The city had been thoroughly pillaged as if by wild animals, but only partly put back together. It was easy to get the impression that the war had ended just the week before.
Our first task once we got settled was to find a Lebanese diamond merchant to help us get the lay of the land. We cold-called on a few, but none were willing to speak with journalists; we would learn later that the Lebanese did not get along as well with the Sierra Leoneans in Koidu as they had in Kenema ten years before. With unemployment and poverty so high, the Lebanese were regarded as foreign vultures who were exploiting Koidu’s diamond wealth, stealing it from those to whom it rightly belonged. The Lebanese, of course, had been a mainstay of Sierra Leonean diamond trading for decades; nevertheless a strong scent of distrust hung in the air that we would come to understand more fully in the coming days but that at the moment lent an uneasy vibe to our door-to-door wandering. Finally, one merchant told us to find Kassim Basma, their elder statesman and chair of the local Lebanese community.
We found his office hidden in a maze of dirty alleyways jammed with engine parts from a neighboring auto repair shop, and random, half-empty rooms furnished only with cracked and forgotten furniture. In the anteroom where we waited for a Russian flunky to announce our presence, one of a set of rusted handcuffs was locked to the iron grate covering the window. The other cuff dangled below, leading one to morbid speculation about what might have been done here during the war, before this became an elderly man’s office. With Basma, I was hoping to repeat my success in talking to Fawaz S. Fawaz in Kenema during my last visit to the country. Though he’d been cagey about showing off any diamonds, Fawaz had helped us get our bearings in a strange place.
“Ah, but Fawaz is dead,” Basma said when I dropped the only name I knew in the West African Lebanese diamond community. “If it’s the same man I’m thinking about, he died of a heart attack not too long ago. S. Fawaz, yes? From Kenema? Too bad. He was a young man.”
I didn’t remember him as particularly young, but I did vividly recall Fawaz’s towering pile of Marlboro butts and how quickly he added to them; I figured we must have been talking about the same person. If so, his demise didn’t surprise me, but I didn’t say so. Basma was also chain-smoking. The largest thing on his desk was a joke lighter the size of a pocket dictionary.
Basma was friendly, but wary of our questions. Like his late colleague, he insisted that business was slow and that there were no diamonds to display. As Mike and I continued to chat with him, doing our best to be disarming, he seemed to warm up. Like others who had described Kono’s mines to us, he complained that many of the old surface mines were washed up and competition was fierce among the Lebanese to trade with those who were still producing stones. The big exploration companies working the Koidu Kimberlite Project and the Thunderball Mine didn’t bother with men like Basma; they took care of their own exports and didn’t need him. He dealt more with small-scale diggers like those we would later see at the Number 11 mine, men hired by miners licensed by the government to explore a certain area for diamonds. When the transactions were made, he provided the seller with a receipt from a big notebook he kept, the cornerstone of what the Kimberley Process called “internal controls” on diamonds’ origins. The Government Gold and Diamond Office issues Basma the Kimberley Process certificates when he travels to Freetown to export the goods and pay his taxes; should a monitor show up to question him about the details of his parcels, as he said happened from time to time, he referred them to the notebook.
“The Kimberley Process works properly,” he said. “It decreased smuggling and increased exports.”
After a quick glance at his Russian friend, who sat silently in a chair next to the desk, he added, “It’s not bad, actually, as long as you’re a law-abiding citizen.”
I thought this an odd statement and took the chance to press him. “Isn’t it true, though, that there are still people selling diamonds who can’t prove where they’ve come from? Or who aren’t licensed to mine? Or who may have smuggled diamonds from, say, Côte d’Ivoire?”
He didn’t balk as I’d expected.
“Yes, yes, it’s true,” he said. “But I have not seen any Ivoirian diamonds lately. Stones like that come in from Guinea.”
“What do you when you’re offered stones like those?”
Basma smiled and held up his palms in a half-shrug as if to say, Let’s not fool each other here.
“Look, if you have illicit people coming here, you can’t refuse, because then they will smuggle it,” he said. “But if you buy it, as an official exporter, you can legalize it. Somebody will buy it if not me.”
This was an unexpected admission, so I asked him to explain. Basma argued that buying stones of unknown origin and mixing them with legitimate diamonds for export was a means of cleaning up the black market, a unique argument that I’d never heard anyone try before. He seemed trying to convince me that the purpose of the Kimberley Process was to put all diamonds under an umbrella of legitimacy no matter where they came from. But before we could continue, his friend, who looked alarmed at the turn our conversation had taken, abruptly left the room. Basma sat back as if that signaled the end of our con
versation. Thanking him for his time, we showed ourselves out.
The moment we stepped onto the street, a cop who was marching our way stopped us. It was nothing serious, a low-grade hassling that involved us explaining our presence in town, but the officer was humorless and stern and the angry interrogation had me wondering if we had crossed some invisible local line. I was pretty sure it wasn’t a random stop, considering that white-skinned people were fairly common in Koidu and we hadn’t turned many other heads. Maybe we were being paranoid, but we assumed from that point on that certain people were keeping their eyes on us.
II
Before I left for Sierra Leone, I knew that I would find myself in situations that, if less dire than before, would still be strange and trying. The story had changed in ten years, and it was no longer about the RUF’s greed-fueled program of murder for control of diamonds; it was now about the government’s almost total inaction, in the RUF’s absence, in closing the yawning gulf between the value of Sierra Leone’s natural resources and the crushing poverty that continues to cripple the country. Moreover, it’s about the danger that situation poses. The country has been here before, and the outcome was cataclysmic. It is no mystery what led to one of the worst wars of the past fifty years. The government’s own Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigated the causes and came to an unambiguous conclusion: “The Commission finds that the central cause of the war was endemic greed, corruption and nepotism that deprived the nation of its dignity and reduced most people to a state of poverty.”14
While I expected to confront that poverty up close in an attempt to understand why the lesson hadn’t been learned, I did not expect to find myself clad in OR scrubs observing an operation in a hospital that has no power, no running water, and no modern equipment—an experience I had at the suggestion of a local doctor so that I could see just how great the divide was between Koidu’s poverty and the wealth being stripped out of its land just outside the city limits.
Dr. Bailor Barrie is a 2004 graduate of Sierra Leone’s only medical school and the founder, along with American Dr. Dan Kelly, of Wellbody, an organization that runs a free clinic for treating wartime amputees and their families. I met Barrie not at the clinic, but at Koidu’s main hospital, where we’d come for personal reasons rather than professional ones: It seemed that the bus ride from Freetown had felled one of our small band. Jango had been fine when he got on the bus, but seven hours later, his eyeballs were crusted over like Scotch eggs and he was shivering from chills and throwing up bright green bile the consistency of paint. He had malaria.
The day before our arrival in Koidu, the New York Times ran a promising article speculating that infant mortality rates would soon improve in Sierra Leone, thanks to a new, free health care program for pregnant women and children that had begun in 2010 and was being temporarily bankrolled by foreign donors. There is no such thing as socialized medicine or education in Sierra Leone. Aside from a handful of free clinics run by charities or foreign donors like Wellbody, even so much as scheduling an appointment with a doctor costs money, as Jango discovered when he was told he’d have to pay in advance just to get in line. And since health care is one of the many things Sierra Leoneans cannot afford, most women never see a doctor throughout their pregnancies and give birth at home. The Times piece was a cheerful story that expressed hope for a brighter, healthier future for newborns and mothers with high-risk pregnancies.
Our experience, however, was less cheerful than the article had led us to expect. For one thing, although the new program waived official fees charged by the hospital, it did nothing to address a long list of unofficial payments for everything from clean sheets to blood transfusions. As Alicia Lay, one of several American medical students who worked at the hospital as part of their study of tropical medicine, explained, the money goes not to the hospital, but to whoever collects the “fee.” It’s one of the most common forms of corruption and graft encountered in Sierra Leone—the random shakedown. It happens everywhere from the airport to the Freetown ATM, where the armed security guard expects a few bills for watching your back while you conduct your transaction. And heavily funded new medical program or no, it happens in the hospitals as well. In fact, we passed a sign taped to the wall outside one of the wards reading: “Notice! All deliveries are free. All Caesarean sections are free. Available drugs at the maternity are free. Therefore, patients are advice [sic] not to buy drugs from the nurses. By Management.”
When Lay and her colleagues introduced us to Barrie, I immediately recognized his voice. He had been one of the passengers on the bus arguing about the injustice of Koidu’s sad state considering the millions earned in diamond export taxes. Eager to pick up the conversation anew, he equated the situation to low-grade everyday graft, except on a much larger scale. The reason people go without medical care is the same reason entire communities are left without electricity—somewhere up the chain, someone is making off with what’s owed to those on the ground floor.
“My own personal view is that the government is corrupt,” he said. “The money [from diamond revenues meant for communities] goes into their pockets or their bank accounts. Kono is the wealthiest district in the country, but we don’t even have a college.”
The hospital was a fitting place for this conversation. The one-story government facility of concrete wards was a “hospital” only in that doctors and sick people frequented it. There were no X-ray, MRI, or CAT-scan machines, because those require electricity and the hospital has none. A collection of battery-powered ultrasound devices—which could have been recharged at any of the local kiosks in town that rent plug-in time for cell phones—sat on a shelf unused because no one knew how to operate them. Instruments were sanitized in an industrial pressure cooker heated on a propane burner; and because the plumbing didn’t work, the water came from a hand pump in the courtyard via bucket brigade, as did the water for flushing toilets and washing surgeons’ hands. It’s too risky to give surgery patients general anesthesia, Lay said, because they can’t intubate patients who stop breathing. The hospital has no pulse oximeters to ensure the blood is receiving sufficient oxygen.
The excuse for all this deficency is that the government has no money to pay for improvements and modern equipment, an argument that’s hard to buy with round-the-clock diamond production happening fewer than five miles away.
The following day, we accepted an invitation to watch a hysterectomy performed on a young woman who had a large fibrous mass around her uterus. As in the Wild West, a doctor had made the diagnosis by feeling her bloated abdomen and making an informed guess.
“Are you nervous?” I asked the surgeon, Dr. Bardu Abdulai.
“Of course not.”
“But isn’t this sort of a high-risk surgery?”
“I do them all the time.”
With that, we entered the OR. The patient, a 23-year-old woman, lay welded with dread to the operating table as if she was about to be executed by lethal injection. “The Macarena” was playing on a transistor radio. Lay was assisting Abdulai with the operation, along with three or four nurses and assorted helpers playing the roles of anesthesiologist, orderlies, and whatever else ORs generally require. Some of them wore flip-flops, but the doctor at least wore white Crocs sandals, which kept the blood off his feet when it started dripping off the operating table. Mike and I, our faces largely obscured behind surgical masks, were wide-eyed. In our time as journalists, we’d each run the long, ultimately fruitless gauntlet of U.S. hospital bureaucrats, HIPPA regulations, and insurance companies in attempts to observe surgeries for various stories over the years and had never even dented the iron wall of privacy surrounding patients’ rights, even when the patients wanted us to be there. Here, we weren’t even asked to wash our hands before we began creeping between the doctors for a better shot with our cameras.
The patient was given sedatives and a local anesthetic, and just before the first incision was made, we were asked not to stand between the patient and the w
indow—the doctors needed the sunlight to see what they were doing.
IT WOULD BE ONE THING if Sierra Leone had to make do in this way because the country was truly hopeless, if there was nothing available except direct charity to pay for the nation’s most basic needs. But regularly timed explosions serve as a constant reminder that Sierra Leone has more than enough resources to afford a more comfortable and dignified life for its people. Those resources, however, are sealed off from those living in Koidu by physical barriers and armed guards.
The Koidu Holdings project is a massive undertaking to excavate two kimberlite pipes known as K1 and K2. I’d never seen an industrial mine before and was awed by the scale of the operation. I got no closer than the locals, however; I was turned away at the gatehouse because I hadn’t made an appointment in advance. Despite several phone calls made during my week’s stay in Koidu to the company’s media relations department—itself an odd concept in the heart of the West African jungle—no one was available to accommodate a reporter showing up unannounced. Company representatives vetted my professional credentials in the process. They asked me to give details about what I’d written about Koidu Holdings in the past, which included only one short article in The Economist about diamonds in general, in which I mentioned the company’s scaled-down production (as well as that of many other diamond companies, including De Beers) during the global economic crisis. I went through the same process with representatives of the Thunderball Mine, who asked for references to my past work. After I pointed them to my professional website (which includes links and material related to this book), they initially gave me clearance to visit. But when our small fleet of hired motorcycles arrived outside the barbed-wire fence surrounding the pit, the foreman and an armed security guard turned us away. Someone in the company had called from Freetown and nixed our appointment at the last moment.
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