Blood Diamonds (12 page)

Along with three other Sierra Leoneans schooled in the “art of revolution” by Libyan president Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, former Sierra Leone Army (SLA) corporal Foday Sankoh trained about 100 men in northwestern Liberian camps run by Taylor's rebellion, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL). In 1991, Sankoh's soldiers of the newly formed Revolutionary United Front marched into Sierra Leone and captured Kailahun District.

At first, the RUF was greeted as a heroic army that would return the country to a multiparty government that could achieve better equity in wealth distribution. The best way to get the current government's attention, it seemed, was to capture some of their diamond mines, holding them for ransom for a more democratic system and a brighter future for the majority of the country's citizens, who lived much like their ancestors had in the provinces.

But instead of rolling into the diamond areas and seeking the support of the locals, the RUF killed and mutilated them. Composed of mostly uneducated youths with no other outlet for their sense of disenfranchisement, the RUF was quickly revealed as an army of murderous thugs rather than justice-seeking rebels. RUF fighters fueled this impression at every opportunity. Field commanders adopted nicknames that both inspired terror and revealed their ruthlessness. Soldiers were named Rambo, Blood Master, Blood Center, What Trouble, and Wicked to Women. Their “tactics” of warfare were unbelievably brutal. Sometimes, after capturing a village, RUF fighters would gather civilian prisoners in the
town square and make them choose small strips of paper from the ground that described different forms of torture and death, such as “chop off hands,” “chop off head,” or simply “be killed.” Soldiers would bet with one another about the sex of pregnant women's unborn children. Winners were determined after the baby had been removed from the womb with a bayonet. In one instance, a young boy was beaten and roasted nearly to death on a spit in front of his mother for refusing to kill her. The RUF's depravity served a military strategy: It induced tectonic population shifts away from the diamond areas.

Ibrahim Abdullah and Patrick Muana, writing in a compendium of articles about African guerilla movements, describe the RUF's goals, or lack thereof, as succinctly as anyone:

The RUF's almost instant alienation of the people they were purportedly fighting on behalf of allowed Momoh to rally a defense by dispatching the Sierra Leone Army to quell the uprising, a force that was bolstered with a formidable—but totally undisciplined—“volunteer brigade” of bums and criminals from Freetown.

Momoh acted as any head of state would have by dispatching the army to deal with the insurgency, but unlike most other heads of state, he neglected to pay his soldiers. And those soldiers got stomped. Sierra Leone has never been at war with anything other than itself and the army was poorly prepared to fight in the bush against the comparatively more astute and better-armed RUF, whose leaders had been trained in guerilla warfare by Libyan leader Qaddafi. In fact, other than participating in the odd coup once or twice a decade, Sierra Leone Army soldiers were mostly called upon to carry the national flag during federal holidays and march at arms at Lungi Airport when important foreign diplomats paid a visit. And now they were getting slaughtered in their own jungles and not getting paid for it.

In 1992, 27-year-old SLA Captain Valentine Strasser decided that enough was enough and marched a band of soldiers from the battlefield in the Kailahun District back to Freetown to demand their pay. When that failed within hours of arriving, he persuaded his followers to join him in overthrowing the government. The coup was popular in Freetown: Momoh had been promising a return to multiparty politics under mounting pressure from citizens who'd had enough ineffective one-party leadership, but he'd used the war with the RUF as an excuse to postpone elections. Strasser set up the National Provisional Ruling Council, the NPRC, and was sworn in as the youngest head of state in Sierra Leone's history. Despite the
fact that later in 1992 he executed twenty-five people suspected of plotting a countercoup, he was a popular leader. He instituted a monthly program called National Cleaning Day, during which the country virtually shuts down while residents clean their yards and roadways, successfully campaigned for residents to pay their income taxes, and promised elections and a return to civilian rule by 1995.

But these efforts paled in comparison to the ongoing slaughter taking place in the provinces. The RUF cranked up its efforts to capture diamond fields and, by 1994, the northern and eastern portions of the country had descended into complete anarchy, a murderous black hole where only the AK-47 held authority. Diamond fields fell one after the other and the RUF was on course to roll straight into Freetown before the end of the year. In 1995, Strasser made a bold and controversial decision that delayed the inevitable fall of Freetown: He hired a private army to fight the RUF.

The use of mercenaries in warfare is as old as human conflict itself. In the words of P. J. O'Rourke, war is a great asshole magnet, attracting all types of human flotsam to the battlefield for reasons of their own. American mercenaries fought with the Croatian Army in the Balkans while Russian soldiers of fortune fought for their enemies, the Serbs, on the other side of the front lines. In any conflict involving Muslim forces, mujahideen fighters trekked from Iran, Saudia Arabia, and Afghanistan to help the cause. Some do it for the money, some for the thrill of killing, some for ideology. In Africa, the man who symbolized the international diamond industry, De Beers founder Cecil Rhodes, used an army of mercenaries in 1893 to beat down the Matabele people in what is now Zimbabwe; each soldier who volunteered was given nine square miles of land and two gold claims, an amount that equaled roughly
10,000 pounds sterling. Rhodes conquered the territory for the sake of his British South Africa Company, a gold-mining venture, and he named the country Rhodesia, after himself.

But while mercenaries of old still exist—that is, men who will fight for any cause so long as the price is right—they tend to be both unreliable and unprofessional. Within the past few decades, some former soldiers have changed the face of “mercenaries” into legitimate private armies, run by companies with articles of incorporation, profits and losses, and strict codes of conduct. The first company Strasser hired was Gurkha Security Guards, under the leadership of American Vietnam veteran Robert MacKenzie. Ironically, prior to going to Sierra Leone, MacKenzie had served in the Rhodesian Army.

MacKenzie's efforts in Sierra Leone didn't bear much fruit. After two weeks of training SLA and Kamajor fighters in the bush, he was killed in an RUF ambush near Port Loko, near the coast. Rumor has it that his remains were eaten by the RUF. The remainder of the Gurkha force refused to mount a counteroffensive and their contract was quickly canceled.

Strasser turned next to Executive Outcomes, a South African security company that is to private armies what De Beers is to diamonds. Founded in 1989 by Eeben Barlow, a former South African special forces officer, EO is either the embodiment of all the worst things about mercenaries or a source of stability and security in a continent that has been effectively abandoned by Europe and America to fend for itself. It depends on whom you ask.

EO's operations are necessarily shady. It's known that the company has worked extensively in Angola against the UNITA rebels, who also illegally mine and sell diamonds, and in Papua New Guinea and perhaps Colombia. The company is capable of rapidly
deploying a battalion-strength force almost anywhere in the world with impressive asset support. EO owns a slew of armored fighting vehicles: two Boeing 727s and a C-47, attack aircraft such as Mi-24 gunships and two MiG-23 /27 fighter planes, and all manner of light and medium artillery. According to its glossy brochures, EO provides its clients (either directly or through affiliated companies) military training and VIP protection; gold, diamond, and oil exploration and mining; airline transport; civil engineering; and even a chartered accountancy and offshore financial management services. Finally, EO also provides its own Russian technicians, medical support, intelligence, and infrared photo reconnaissance, and, before the company dissolved in 1999, was reportedly contracting with private firms to provide satellite imagery. With fourteen permanent staff at the time of its intervention in Sierra Leone, EO maintained a database of possible recruits numbering around 2,000.
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Hiring Executive Outcomes was not cheap, but if Strasser's government lacked money, it surely had diamond mines and exploration concessions to give away. A contract was signed with EO that in effect legalized war bounty. If the company could rout the rebels from the diamond areas, the government would grant it rights to those mines. EO has done this before—most notably in Angola—and was familiar with handling the complexities of the arrangement. Sierra Leone quickly saw its only decisive military victory against the rebels. A mercenary force of about 200 men, supported by an Mi-24 gunship, retrained the SLA and in a matter of weeks drove the RUF back from the capital and recaptured the country's diamond mines, including the most valuable ones in Kono. EO's presence provided Freetown's only period of stability and security—however brief—throughout the 1990s. The company established an effective intelligence service in Sierra Leone, which
still operates; rebuilt supply and communications networks; and trained and equipped the Kamajors.

The government paid EO in diamond-mining concessions and EO promptly sold the rights to a close “friend,” Branch Energy Limited. Branch Energy is incorporated through South Africa and the Isle of Man and is a wholly owned subsidiary of DiamondWorks, a Canadian exploration company. Not surprisingly, the company has a checkered past in African war zones. In Angola in 1997, Branch hired a security company called Teleservices that was owned by Executive Outcomes. Its responsibility was to secure future mining regions so that Branch could begin operations. Tele-service's security apparatus was headed by South African J. C. Erasmus, a man the South African
Weekly Mail & Guardian
called a “former member of apartheid South Africa's notorious Civil Co-operation Bureau death squad.” Erasmus told a reporter for the newspaper that Branch and EO were “good friends.”
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Combined with Branch's new EO-gained holdings in Sierra Leone, the company owned two kimberlite complexes, four alluvial fields, two minor development projects, and one exploration project in two African war zones. The holdings were said to potentially yield 20 million carats, with production peaking at over a million carats per year.
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DiamondWorks later took over Branch's Sierra Leone operations, but the company still maintains a presence. (British press reports that EO owned 40 percent of Branch Energy have been repeatedly and vociferously denied by DiamondWorks representatives, who claim that there is no connection at all between the mercenary company and their diamond companies.)

 

IN SPITE OF THE IMPRESSIVE RESULTS of the EO operation, many world leaders balked at the morality of hiring private soldiers to conduct war for governments. Never mind that for years
Europe and America had been promising funds to train and equip a pan-African peacekeeping force that never materialized and that Executive Outcomes had prevented a coup against Strasser and an untold number of civilian deaths at the hands of the RUF, and had also effectively ended illegal diamond mining. The message from the world community was clear: Get rid of EO or else. That was more or less the directive from the International Monetary Fund, which was withholding financial aid on those very grounds.

Strasser capitulated and canceled the EO contract. The company's helicopters were barely out of sight when chaos erupted again. In January 1996 he was overthrown in a coup led by Julius Bio and the RUF once again captured the diamond areas, including those in Kono. Nevertheless, previously scheduled elections were held two months later and Ahmad Tejan Kabbah was elected president, but he didn't get a chance to lead for long. Another coup followed soon after he asked his citizens to “join hands for the future of Sierra Leone,” and bag after bag of amputated human hands began to appear on the steps of the presidential palace. This time the coup was led by Johnny Paul Koroma, who headed a new rebel group, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), a band of former army soldiers who were aligned with the RUF.

Less than a year and a half after EO's departure, the capital fell to combined AFRC/RUF forces on May 25, 1997, in an unprecedented assault on Freetown's civilian population and ECOMOG observers.