Blood Diamonds (10 page)

Running away was a near impossibility, although it had been done. Within days, the RUF captors have broken the men physically by denying them food and water and working them to exhaustion. Few prisoners would have been able to run far and, even if they could, a sprint into the forest would only lead to another RUF unit that might not be as willing to allow them to keep their hands, feet, or lives. But in the bush, diamonds are a currency even more valuable than guns, loyalty to a tribe of warriors, or belief in an ideology. If a digger was clever enough to steal or earn a cache of rough, and lucky enough to offer them to the right person, he may be able to buy himself out of slavery.

Stealing from the RUF is an often fatal practice, however, essentially an African form of Russian roulette. Jango recalled one man who was found with a large diamond tucked into his lip. RUF soldiers slashed open the belly of his pregnant wife and removed the fetus with a bayonet. The fetus died immediately and the wife soon bled to death. The man was tied to the corpses, doused with gasoline, and set ablaze, all on the edge of the mine, in view of the remaining diggers, who were forced to continue their work.

Stealing the good diamonds before they made it into the hands of the RUF overseers was a risky but irresistible undertaking. One technique was particularly ingenious. When learning to wash gravel in the shake-shakes, one of the first tricks a digger learns is to flip a sieve-full of water onto his face without losing all the gravel, a quick way to cool off under the African sun without having to pause work. Seeing the men dousing themselves with mine water was a common enough sight, but RUF prisoners learned to
also flip diamonds into the air with the water and catch them in their mouths, whereupon they were instantly swallowed.

Swallowing the diamond is only part of the chore, of course. Retrieving it and keeping it hidden were also difficult.

Over the course of 18 months—after he was recaptured and accidentally shot in the leg—Jango managed to amass six pieces, mostly through the dangerous practice of simply palming the stones once he found them and sliding them into his mouth when the opportunity presented itself. He later hid them in a cigarette pack that he buried in the ground near where he slept.

He'd already begun talking to some of the Mandingo traders who visited Kono, middlemen who organized the transactions between the RUF field commanders and banks, arms dealers, and expatriate rebel bosses in Conakry and Monrovia. Depending on the greed of individual RUF commanders, the needs of the fighting force, and the deals that were cut from day to day, the diamonds were sold in the bush to Mandingos or they were physically walked to Liberia to be traded at the border for weapons. The weapons deals were much more tightly organized—a mule team of twenty-five prisoners guarded by five RUF would hike to the border, load up with weapons, and hike back.

If a commander wanted a retirement fund, fresh clothes, or a new car, however, he dealt with the Mandingos. The system is ridiculously easy. A few good stones are passed in the jungle and a new car—or clothes or electronics—is purchased for cash in Conakry. The merchandise can be delivered to the buyer in the forest or it can be stored in Guinea for later pickup.

The nomadic Mandingos were also largely responsible, according to the UN, for trafficking Sierra Leone diamonds to points on the west coast beyond Conakry and Monrovia, as if they get
cleaner the farther they're moved from the scene of the crime. Places like The Gambia are as notorious as Liberia in terms of its reputation as a conflict-diamond laundry. The Gambia has no diamond mines and yet managed to export to Belgium some $100 million worth of diamonds between 1996 and 1999, the height of RUF mining activity. Every one of the Belgian companies that imports stones from The Gambia also imports them from Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. The explanation is that there are nomadic traders like Mandingos wandering the coast looking for buyers—for some reason, they often find their way to The Gambia, which has been described as a mini-Antwerp by the UN—and the Gambian exporters are simply and legally buying rough on the open market. But the only reason the diamonds would be in The Gambia, one unidentified company admitted to UN investigators, is because they were smuggled there to avoid export taxes in another country or to hide their pedigree as conflict goods. One estimate put 90 percent of all goods exported from The Gambia as likely coming from Sierra Leone.

Farther to the east, the same is true of Ivory Coast: The country is capable of producing about 75,000 carats a year from its modest mines but somehow managed to export thirteen times that amount from 1994 to 1999. The Mandingos represent a subcom-munity of illicit traffickers and they didn't care who they dealt with, captor or prisoner, if it meant getting good stones. If you wanted to escape forced labor in an RUF mine, you traded diamonds to the Mandingos for your life.
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But before Jango was able to take the final step of offering a few of his stones to one of the dealers in exchange for being ferreted out of the mine, he was presented with another opportunity: a brand new mountain bike, left recklessly in one of the small hamlets
near the mining complex by its owner. Seizing the chance, Jango walked as casually as he could over to the bike, calmly mounted it, and rode away on it, six hot rocks in his pocket.

But his escape wasn't to be without some drama. After peddling all day through the green tunnel of the rain forest, he stopped to rest at another village. He still had no idea where he was, but the bristling barrels of AK-47s jutting from over most shoulders told him that he was still deep in RUF territory. Jango managed to blend in and everyone assumed that he was also a rebel. After a meal and some water, he prepared to mount his bike and continue the journey. A soldier asked him for a cigarette and, perhaps lulled into a sense of safety by his good luck, Jango withdrew a battered pack of 555 cigarettes. Three diamonds fell out of a hole in the bottom of the pack as he was reaching in for a smoke.

Instinctively, Jango slid his foot over the stones lying on the ground, but the soldier had seen them too. Like a cheerleader nimbly handling a baton, the rebel whipped his AK off his shoulder and drew the bolt.

“Move your foot,” he ordered quietly. No one else was paying attention; the sight of people pointing guns at one another, even those in the same unit, was common enough among the RUF. Jango did as he was told and the stones glittered up, reflecting the equatorial sunlight as only diamonds can.

The soldier bent down and picked them up. “Good stones,” he said, rolling them around in the palm of his hand. Jango nodded.

“What do you want for them?”

On the run, fresh from imprisonment, certain he would die before the end of the day, Jango made his first diamond sale. With that one transaction, he became a businessman, arranging sales between the RUF in Kono and smugglers like Singer in Freetown.

 

 

 

 

O
SMAN WAS A MAN whose malignancy ensured him an invisible bubble of personal space. Everywhere he went, people moved out of the way. Children scattered before him like chickens, glancing quickly over their shoulders to see if he was going to follow them into stone doorways or around corners. A small but powerful-looking man with a face like a wrinkled sponge, Osman was a heavy drinker who liked to brandish sharp knives, and there was no telling when he would reach the point of inebriation that would cause him to whip out a blade and scream that he was the baddest former RUF soldier in Freetown. His reputation was so fierce that his battle-group name was General Motherfucker.

The fact that this was not true only increased the berth people give him. Only a lunatic, they figured, would proudly claim to
have fought with the RUF when in fact he was their prisoner for nearly two years. In his lucid moments, when he was not menacing neighbors with knives and cutlasses, even Osman himself would admit that he was probably quite insane. He only purported to have been RUF, he said, because admitting to being a victim was too humiliating.

It's easy to see that Osman was once a powerful man; his body has maintained the shape and muscle tone, but now he's stooped and steps gingerly, as if in constant pain. A miner by trade, Osman was popular in Kono before the war because of his beautiful singing voice. Instead of trading diamonds to profess their love, couples preparing for marriage would hire Osman to sing tribal love songs at their ceremonies. Like Jango, Osman was captured by the RUF during Operation Clean Sweep.

When Jango and hundreds like him found diamonds, the stones were placed in leather bags and delivered to units like the one that imprisoned Osman. He was a prisoner of the so-called Bastard Brigade—it was composed of orphans—and his commander was a man who called himself Man Friday. Osman's job was simple: He walked nonstop from the Kono mines to the Liberian border near Kailahun—a 50-mile round-trip—and back again, repeatedly, for two years. He and twenty-four other mules were guarded by five heavily armed RUF soldiers who threatened to chop their Achilles tendons with machetes if they didn't keep up a quick pace through the forest. On the way to Liberia, the prisoners carried only food and water. The RUF carried the diamonds and Osman has still never laid eyes on one. “Prisoners were never allowed to see the stones,” he said.

Once at the border, they would meet Liberians with crates of ammunition and weapons in the beds of pickup trucks and larger trucks belonging to timber companies, whose owners had close
connections to Liberian president Charles Taylor. They traded the diamonds for the guns, a simple transaction in which the bag of diamonds was given to whomever was in charge of the Liberian group. Once everything was in order, Osman and the other prisoners would be loaded up. They carried brand new rifles and RPG tubes at the head of the line, while the ammo and grenades were carried at the rear so that the prisoners would be less likely to stage a revolt. Then they would cross back into Sierra Leone and return to the mines, the most difficult and dangerous part of the journey. The mules were required to carry up to 100 kilos of equipment each, and a twisted ankle, fatigue, or even a slow pace was enough of an excuse for their RUF captors to shoot them and dump their bodies in the woods. Then the others would have to divide the unfortunate man's load, making it all the more difficult for them to avoid a similar fate.

The life span of a mule was not long. Even if they avoided tripping, managed to keep up with the RUF, and somehow maintained enough health to keep going, it was only a matter of time before their bodies wore down. Osman began having debilitating back pain and severe arthritis in his arms and shoulders. He knew he was drawing closer to earning himself a bullet.

Before he met that fate, however, on another munitions trading trip his mule train was mistaken for an RUF patrol and attacked by Kamajors who exploded from the jungle, belching horizontal fireworks from the carpet of foliage. Osman watched as a Kamajor, barefoot and clad only in camouflage shorts and a wool ski hat decorated with fetishes and shotgun shells, walked from the woods directly up to one of the other prisoners—who was frozen with shock and fear—and shot him in the face with a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun. He said he'd never seen anything as frightening
as that attack. The Kamajors seemed unaware that the RUF soldiers were returning fire, as they were wildly killing most of those in the prisoner column and smearing their faces and chests with the blood of the vanquished. As he was about to be killed himself, by a man wielding a sword, he was recognized by one of the Kamajors. Osman explained that half the dead littering the footpath were prisoners and the Kamajors, after dispatching the RUF guards, turned the survivors free. They took a massive cache of diamonds from Man Friday's body and bled back into the bush.

Within a week of being turned loose by the Kamajors, Osman managed to hitch a ride to Freetown, where he embarked on his ongoing relationship with palm wine, gradually losing his mind to the things he'd seen.

 

THE AK-47 ASSAULT RIFLE is the bread and butter of armed conflicts the world over. Now used by more than fifty armies, the weapon was invented in 1947 by Red Army soldier Mikhail Kalashnikov and adopted for regular use in the Soviet army in 1949. Its distinctive crescent-shaped magazine holds 30 rounds of 7.62 ×39-millimeter cartridges that can be fired at a rate of 400 rounds per minute, with a muzzle velocity of 2,240 feet per second. Loaded, the AK-47 weighs almost 11 pounds, light enough for a medium-sized child to carry with little difficulty, and because of the simple chamber /action design it is almost impossible to jam. Tooling standards were kept intentionally loose so it could withstand serious abuse on the battlefield; therefore, AKs tend to rattle a lot when fired on full automatic and they don't even need to be properly assembled for them to function or even be reasonably accurate. Made from as much stamped metal and as little milled metal as possible to keep manufacturing costs low, AKs are cheap. Kalashnikov firearms are a guerilla's best friend and Sierra Leone is awash in them.