Blood Diamonds
Page 28
Therefore, I’d like to thank Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Savchuk, Captain Sergei Filippovich, and Captain Sergei Ayushev for their companionship, optimistic demeanor, low flybys, and rudimentary lessons in Russian. I’m sorry I never sent that postcard.
Otherwise topping my list of people to thank are my editor, Jill Rothenberg, not only for her hard work, organizational acumen, and excellent suggestions but also for the range of her vision and the depth of her passion about this work; Holly Hodder of Westview Press for her encouragement and confidence; John Thomas, without whose unsurpassed editing skill and critical eye this would have been a much lesser work; and Doug Farah of the Washington Post for paving the way. I would like to thank Meg Campbell and my parents, Howard and Mary Campbell, for their support and help while I traveled and researched this book.
In no particular order, a potpourri of thanks go out to the following: Christine Hambrouck, Jonathan Andrews, Maya Ameratunga, Veton Orana, Margaret Atieno, and Saleh Tembo of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for their insight and companionship in Kailahun; Walter Pinn, Major (Nigeria) Mohammed Yerima, and Margaret Novicki of the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone; Aya Schneerson of the World Food Program; Chris Robertson of Save the Children; Lieutenant Colonel T-Ray and Major Gabril Kallon of the Revolutionary United Front; Jango Kamara for more reasons than I can list; the staff of the Solar Hotel for the constant use of their telephone and the staff of Jay’s Guest House for their taste in music and tolerance of reporters with a taste for Johnny Walker at 2 A.M.; journalist Sophie Barrie for the companionship and the reading material; Tamara Connor, formerly of Boulder Travel, for the grace and flair with which she was able to get me into places like Sierra Leone, according to a jangled schedule and on budget, no less; Teresa Castle of the San Francisco Chronicle; Margaret Henry of the Christian Science Monitor; photographers Tyler Hicks and Patrick Robert, for their inspiration; Tim Weekes and Andy Bone of the Diamond Trading Company; Tom Shane of The Shane Company; Betsy Cullen, R.N., of Boulder Community Hospital, for on-the-road medical advice; Hassan Saad of the Sierra Leone Police; Fawaz S. Fawaz in Kenema; Saffa Moriba of the BBC; David Lemon and Jonathan Vandy of the Sierra Leone Government Information Service’s Eastern Region office; Mamei Jaya and Elizabeth Gbomoba of the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Service; Ralph Swanson of Freetown’s KISS-FM; Major (Ghana) M’Bawine Atintande and Major (Ghana) Moses Aryee of GhanBatt-3; Iggy Pop and David Bowie for “Lust for Life,” the soundtrack to my African travels; Eric Frankowski and Greg Avery for listening to me gripe from faraway lands; Holly and Gary Nelson for use of the writer’s hideaway deep in the Rocky Mountains; and to those in Kailahun who fed us when the United Nations wouldn’t.
Special thanks are extended to photographer Chris Hondros for his enduring friendship, without which most of my journeys would have been intolerable; and my good friend Joel Dyer, who was always willing to help me decompress with far too few rounds of golf.
To Rebecca Marks I owe more than just thanks: you are the love of my life, my inspiration and my destiny. My heart and soul are yours forever.
Finally, this book could not have been written without the help of countless people in Sierra Leone—taxi drivers, fixers, smugglers, and hotel clerks—who provided intuitive leads and invaluable logistical assistance. Standing out among these people is Robert, whose last name I never thought to ask, for being a perfect combination of chauffeur, editorial assistant, and bodyguard.
But those most deserving of thanks are the victims of the RUF’s diamond war. Without their willingness to recount, often in excruciating detail, the worst chapters of their lives, this book would not exist. I hope that it offers a small amount of justice to the horrors that they’ve suffered.
Steamboat Springs, Colorado,
December 13, 2001
NOTES
Prologue
1 Human Development Report (New York: United Nations Development Programme, 2001).
2 CIA World Factbook (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2001).
3 Report of the Panel of Experts Appointed Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1306 (2000), Paragraph 19, in Relation to Sierra Leone, S/2000/1195, presented to the UN Security Council at the Global Policy Forum, New York, December 20, 2000.
4 U.S. Rep. Tony Hall (D-Ohio), “Congressional Leaders Urge Action on Conflict Diamonds,” press release, Washington, D.C., July 3, 2001.
5 United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone, www.un.org/Depts/dpko/unamsil/body_unamsil.htm.
Chapter 1
1 Jacques Legrand, Diamonds: Myth, Magic, and Reality, edited by Ronne Peltsman and Neil Grant (New York: Crown Publishers, 1980), p. 7.
2 Kevin Krajick, Barren Lands: An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic (New York: Times Books, 2001), p. 29.
3 Ibid.
4 Douglas Farah, “Al-Qaeda Cash Tied to Diamond Trade.” Washington Post, November 2, 2001, p. A1.
5 Legrand, p. 72.
6 Legrand, p. 78.
Chapter 2
1 Mary Fitzgerald, West Africa (Footscray, Australia: Lonely Planet, 1998), p. 837.
2 See the Web site www.crimesofwar.org.
3 Matthew Hart, Diamond: A Journey to the Heart of an Obsession (Marble Falls, Texas: Walker Publishing Co., 2001).
4 Hart, p. 163.
5 Report of the Panel of Experts Appointed Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1306 (2000), Paragraph 19, in Relation to Sierra Leone, S/2000/1195, presented to the UN Security Council at the Global Policy Forum, New York, December 20, 2000.
6 The Heart of the Matter (Ottawa, Canada: Partnership Africa Canada, 2000).
7 Douglas Farah, “Al-Qaeda Cash Tied to Diamond Trade.” Washington Post, November 2, 2001, p. A1.
8 Report of the Panel of Experts Appointed Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1306 (2000), Paragraph 19, in Relation to Sierra Leone, S/2000/1195, presented to the UN Security Council at the Global Policy Forum, New York, December 20, 2000.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
Chapter 3
1 Member-states of ECOWAS are: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo.
2 Report of the Panel of Experts Appointed Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1306 (2000), Paragraph 19, in Relation to Sierra Leone, S/2000/1195, presented to the UN Security Council at the Global Policy Forum, New York, December 20, 2000.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 The Heart of the Matter (Ottawa, Canada: Partnership Africa Canada, 2000).
9 Ibrahim Abdullah and Patrick Muana, “The Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone: A Revolt of the Lumpenproletariat,” in Christopher Clapham (ed.), African Guerillas (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998).
10 Kevin A. O’Brien, “Military-Advisory Groups and African Security: Privatised Peacekeeping?” Royal United Services Institute Journal, August 1998. Undoubtedly, Executive Outcomes’s work in Angola must have been very impressive to Strasser. Similar to the Sierra Leone government, the Angolan government was under siege by UNITA, a rebel force that had total control of the country’s oil fields and diamond mines. EO was hired to take back the town of Soyo, the location of a major oil field, in 1993. A small force succeeded in doing so, but Soyo was later recaptured once the South Africans left. The government returned to the company requesting a larger force and offering oil concessions as payment. To facilitate this arrangement, a Canadian oil company called Ranger (which has close associations with top EO officials) put up $30 million for the operation. UNITA was thoroughly routed by 500 mercenaries, some of whom had fought on the rebels’ behalf in the 1980s. The company also retrained the Angolan Army, which began inflicting heavy casualties on the rebels, and helped them retake the diamond fields of Saurimo and Cafunfo in Luanda Norte Province. The operation led to the signing of the Lusaka Protocols
, which effectively ended the civil war, at least for a time. EO, through its subsidiaries and its gray network of affiliate companies, was paid with lucrative oil and diamond concessions.
11 “Mercenaries Grab Gems.” Weekly Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg), May 9, 1997.
12 J. A. McGregor, Due Diligence Report on Branch Energy Diamond Properties, Sierra Leone and Angola, 1997 (Toronto, Canada: Watts, Griffis & McOuat Consulting Geologists and Engineers, 1997).
Chapter 4
1 Andrew Rawnsley, Servants of the People (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000), pp. 176–184.
2 Ibid. Ominously, the solicitor’s fax said that Sandline was innocent of sanctions-busting because it was pursuing the deal with Peter Penfold’s encouragement. An arms scandal would be a death blow for Cook. He wasn’t aware that at the time he learned of the brewing tempest, customs had already raided the Foreign Office in a search for evidence. The Sunday Times printed his worst nightmare on May 3, 1998, with the headline: “Cook Snared in Arms for Coup Inquiry.”
3 Bill Berkeley, The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 55. One ECOMOG faction stationed in Liberia dealt with an armed band of men loyal to the country’s former despot, Samuel Doe, by partnering in an ore-mining deal near the Sierra Leone border. But when the ECOMOG command replaced the officers involved in the dealings, the new leaders didn’t want to participate in the profit-sharing arrangement and attempted to disarm the insurgents. The rebels duly attacked, killing sixty ECOMOG soldiers. The fight over the mines spiraled and, over the course of a few months, eventually led to another round of slaughter in Monrovia.
4 Report of the Panel of Experts Appointed Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1306 (2000), Paragraph 19, in Relation to Sierra Leone, S/2000/1195, presented to the UN Security Council at the Global Policy Forum, New York, December 20, 2000.
5 According to the article “UN Monitors Accuse Sierra Leone Peacekeepers of Killings,” New York Times, Feb. 12, 1999, p. A10, “A United Nations human rights mission has charged that regional peacekeepers in Sierra Leone have summarily executed dozens of civilians. Numerous reports of rebel violence against civilians in Sierra Leone have circulated, but in a report the mission describes systematic rights violations by both insurgents and peacekeepers. . . . the report accuses the monitoring group established by the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOMOG, of executing groups including children and some 20 patients at Connaught Hospital on Jan. 20. The report says that ECOMOG forces bombed civilian targets, shot at ‘human shields’ formed by the rebels and mistreated the staffs of the Red Cross and similar groups.”
6 John Bolton, testimony before the International Relations Committee, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., Oct. 11, 2001.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Sebastian Junger, Fire (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), pp. 192–193.
10 Ibid.
11 Matthew Hart, Diamond: A Journey to the Heart of an Obsession (Marble Falls, Texas: Walker Publishing Co., 2001).
12 Global Witness, “Conflict Diamonds: Possibilities for the Identification, Certification and Control of Diamonds,” June 2000, London.
Chapter 5
1 Timothy Green, The World of Diamonds: The Inside Story of the Miners, Cutters, Smugglers, Lovers and Investors (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1984), p. 23.
2 Kevin Krajick, Barren Lands: An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic (New York: Times Books, 2001), p. 104.
3 Matthew Hart, Diamond: A Journey to the Heart of an Obsession (Marble Falls, Texas: Walker Publishing Co., 2001).
4 Green, p. 27.
5 De Beers Group, Annual Report 1996, Johannesburg, South Africa.
6 Hart, p. 223.
7 Ibid., pp. 125–127.
8 Ibid., p. 135.
9 Interview with Tom Shane, December 19, 2001, Denver, Colorado.
10 Report of the Panel of Experts Appointed Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1306 (2000), Paragraph 19, in Relation to Sierra Leone, S/2000/1195, presented to the UN Security Council at the Global Policy Forum, New York, December 20, 2000.
11 De Beers Group, written testimony before the U.S. Congress, House Committee on International Relations Subcommittee on Africa, Washington, D.C., May 9, 2000.
12 Hart, p. 136.
13 Ibid., p. 199.
14 Ibid., pp. 120–121.
15 De Beers Group, Annual Report 2000, Johannesburg, South Africa.
16 Hart, p. 137.
Chapter 6
1 Interview with Margaret Novicki, UNAMSIL spokeswoman, June 2001, Freetown, Sierra Leone.
2 Foday Sankoh, “Footpaths to Democracy,” 1994, Kailahun, Sierra Leone.
Chapter 8
1 This account is recreated from a Washington Post article, “Al Qaeda Cash Tied to Diamond Trade,” Nov. 2, 2001, and interviews with the author, Washington Post West Africa Bureau Chief Doug Farah, in December 2001.
2 Interview with Doug Farah, via e-mail, December 2001.
3 In 1985, Doug Farah was a correspondent for UPI in El Salvador and Honduras at the height of the Contra revolution and then became a stringer in the region for the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and U.S. News and World Report once UPI sank in 1987. In 1990, he started covering the drug war in Colombia and became a staff reporter with the Post in 1992. He kept his beat in Latin America until 1997, when he was promoted to international investigative correspondent, specializing in drugs, overlords, organized crime, and money laundering. He was invited to apply for the West Africa bureau position when it came open and moved to Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in March 2000 with his wife and 8-month-old son.
4 Report of the Panel of Experts Appointed Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1306 (2000), Paragraph 19, in Relation to Sierra Leone, S/2000/1195, presented to the UN Security Council at the Global Policy Forum, New York, December 20, 2000.
5 In fact, Taylor’s NPFL invaded Liberia from Ivory Coast on Christmas Eve in 1989. Like many cities in West Africa, Abidjan is a dense, decaying slum of violent crime, disease, and poverty. Many media organizations base their West African bureaus there simply because it’s roughly in the middle of the region to be covered, not because of any perceived degree of relative safety. Most upper-class homes feature armed private security forces and “rape cages” in the bedrooms. A rape cage is an iron security device in which female residents lock themselves in case of a criminal siege on their home. The presence of such things also speaks to the quality of the security forces.
6 U.S. Rep. Tony Hall (D-Ohio), “Congressional Leaders Urge Action on Conflict Diamonds,” press release, Washington, D.C., July 3, 2001.
7 Matthew Weissenberger, “Industry Responds to Diamond–Terrorist Link,” Nov. 8, 2001, www.NationalJeweler.com.
8 Ibid.
Chapter 9
1 UNAMSIL Press Briefing, Mammy Yoko Hotel, Freetown, Sierra Leone, December 14, 2001.
2 “Canadian Firm Resumes Diamond Mining in Sierra Leone.” Daily Trust (Lagos, Nigeria), Jan. 23, 2002, p. 16.
Chapter 10
1 Alexandra Zavis, “As Peace Returns to Sierra Leone, Many Live with Legacy of the Brutal Past.” Associated Press, May 28 2002.
2 Alex Yearsley, “For a Few Dollar$ More: How Al Qaeda Moved into the Diamond Trade.” April 17, 2003, at www.globalwitness.org. Global Witness, London.
3 United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone, UNHCR spokesperson Maya Ameratunga, press briefing, February 15, 2002, Freetown.
4 United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone, UNAMSIL spokesperson Margaret Novicki, press briefing, March 22, 2002, Freetown.
5 International Crisis Group, “Sierra Leone: The State of Security and Governance.” September 2, 2003, at www.intl-crisis-group.org. ICG, Brussels.
6 Ibid.
7 Christo Johnson, “A Very Large Stone from Sierra Leone.” Freetown, Reuters News Agency, April 26, 2002.1. Interview with Michael Owen, U.S. ambassador to S
ierra Leone, August 15, 2011, via telephone.
Coda
1 Interview with Michael Owen, U.S. Ambassador to Sierra Leone, Aug. 15, 2011.
2 International Monetary Fund Country Report No. 11/195, “Sierra Leone: Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper—Progress Report, 2008–10,” Washington, D.C.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Chair of the Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 1572 (2004), concerning Côte d’Ivoire, to the President of the Security Council, April 20, 2011, S/2011/272, items 289–290.
6 Greg Campbell, “Blood Diamonds Are Back: Why the U.N.-Sanctioned System That’s Supposed to Ensure That Gemstones Aren’t Mined at Gunpoint Is Backfiring,” Foreign Policy, Dec. 24, 2009.
7 Human Rights Watch, “Zimbabwe: Rampant Abuses in Marange Diamond Fields; Police, Private Security Guards Attacking Miners” (New York, Aug. 30, 2011). See also http://www.hrw.org/africa/Zimbabwe.
8 Quoted in Campbell, “Blood Diamonds Are Back.”
9 Human Rights Watch, “Zimbabwe.”
10 Ibid.
11 Ian Smillie, Blood on the Stone: Greed, Corruption, and War in the Global Diamond Trade (London: Anthem Press, 2010).
12 Interview with Annie Dunneback, from her office in London, Dec. 6, 2011, via telephone.
13 IMF, “Sierra Leone: Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper—Progress Report, 2008–10.”
14 “Witness to Truth: Report of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Vol. 2,” Oct. 2004, Freetown.
15 Koidu Holdings press release, “Koidu Kimberlite Expansion Project Gains Momentum,” June 17, 2011, via email to the author.