Blood Diamonds (13 page)

 

 

I
F THINGS IN SIERRA LEONE were bad before 1997, they were destined to only get worse. By the time Johnny Paul Koroma's AFRC junta had taken control of the government with the help of 600 criminals released from a Freetown prison by mutinous army soldiers, it seemed that everyone wanted to get their hands on Sierra Leone's diamonds and would stop at nothing to do it. While the RUF quickly regained control of the diamond mines they'd lost to Executive Outcomes in the east, joint AFRC/RUF forces concentrated
on securing the capital in a bid to take over the entire country. Still, the United Nations and the Western world did nothing; only a small force of ECOMOG soldiers and observers prevented complete anarchy.

Before the end of the decade, however, repercussions of the RUF diamond war would ripple across the world, creating turmoil in the UN Security Council, involving the fighting forces of some thirty countries that would contribute soldiers to a UN-led peacekeeping mission, and sparking political controversy in Great Britain. Countless diamonds were being openly stolen from the country's eastern mines and sold unimpeded to the world market, and the chaos they sparked in Sierra Leone would eventually attract the world's attention and start sucking the resources of developed nations into the morass.

On May 25, 1997, RUF and AFRC soldiers marched through Freetown's downtown streets shooting at anything that moved, the opening assault of a bloody coup that would send President Kabbah into exile and leave the killers in control. The judiciary building at the center of town is still pockmarked from small-arms fire and the landmark City Hotel, where novelist Graham Greene wrote his celebrated book
The Heart of the Matter,
was flattened. The streets were filled with the sound of gunfire and the silhouettes of people scuttling into fire-blackened doorways while bullets and rockets ripped through the air around them. The ammunition and weapons were provided by sales of diamonds, which were giving the RUF millions of dollars of spending money a year. Fighters looted downtown stores and, drunk on a sense of invincibility, they donned women's wigs to add further terror to their assault. They smoked marijuana between volleys of gunfire with ECOMOG troops, who were busily retreating west toward Aberdeen and the capital's edge.

Once-vibrant markets were deserted, their tables overturned and their wares spilled into the street along with the sprawled bodies of the dead. Pandemonium broke out among Freetown's population and people fled into the wooded hills surrounding the city or stole canoes to row out to the safety of the sea. U.S. Marines stationed in Monrovia flew helicopters to the Hotel Bintumani in Aberdeen to evacuate diplomats and U.S. citizens ahead of the wave of RUF advancing from the city center ten miles to the east. At the time, this was the extent of the West's involvement in a country that provided it with millions of dollars worth of diamonds every year.

Meanwhile, ECOMOG, the country's only hope, was cornered in the basement of the Mammy Yoko Hotel, surrounded on all sides by AFRC and RUF forces. The hotel was rocked with rocket-propelled grenades and chipped away by AK-47 rounds. Staff were forced to walk into the storm of bullets carrying bed sheets on which they'd written “We are RUF!” with black electrical tape in the hopes of escaping alive. Dozens of them made it, but most of the Nigerian ECOMOG soldiers trapped inside did not.

Further down the beach, the AFRC took over the Freetown Golf Club and installed an antiaircraft gun on the roof of the clubhouse to shoot at the Nigerian alpha jets that streaked in from the sea to bomb targets in the city.

Days into the coup, hundreds of bodies rotted in the street and in the surf and Freetown's postcard-perfect beaches were littered with bones and skulls.

The bloodshed didn't raise much publicity outside of West Africa. Most international media organizations wisely pulled their journalists out of the country and Sierra Leone's descent into anarchy was given little more than perfunctory treatment in the U.S. press. Humbled by a disastrous African intervention in Somalia
four years earlier—in which eighteen U.S. soldiers were killed in Mogadishu—there were no calls for humanitarian or military intervention from the United States. Another factor that probably lowered enthusiasm for involvement was that it was difficult to understand a motive for the bloodletting from afar; only those in the international diamond industry who understood that the war was simply an economic activity could place the warfare into an understandable context. Most of the world knew nothing of the connection between Sierra Leone's diamonds and its war, however, and dismissed the conflict as a confusing and tragic waste.

Kabbah fled to neighboring Guinea and immediately began desperate negotiations with arms dealers to equip an army that had been left gutted by EO's withdrawal. Finding little support from developed countries, Kabbah was forced to look to the fringe of the military supply industry, and one of the men he dealt with was Rakesh Saxena, a man memorably described by UK foreign secretary Robin Cook as “an Indian businessman, traveling on the passport of a dead Serb, awaiting extradition from Canada for alleged embezzlement from a bank in Thailand.” The weapons were to be delivered to Kabbah's soldiers—the remnants of the effectively disbanded SLA who fought alongside ECOMOG—through a private British arms dealer, Sandline International, a company with close ties to Executive Outcomes. Again, the guns were going to be paid for with diamond-mining concessions, the only thing of value in Sierra Leone and the one thing that kept the warfare at a high pitch.
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There was, however, a problem. In the wake of the coup ousting Kabbah, the UN drafted a poorly worded resolution that was mostly composed by British lawmakers imposing an arms embargo on Sierra Leone. But according to the wording of the resolution,
the embargo applied not only to the occupying junta, but also to the legitimate government that the British supported and wanted to see returned to power. British lawmakers interpreted the resolution as a blanket ban on weapons to Sierra Leone, regardless of whom they were destined for.

But Kabbah had a foreign friend who was willing to do all he could to restore Kabbah's government to power: the British Foreign Office's representative in Freetown, Peter Penfold, who interpreted the UN resolution differently than the lawmakers in his home country. Exiled by the coup to a hotel in Conakry, Guinea, Penfold was more or less cut off from his bosses in London: His satellite telephone didn't work, crucial documents were either lost or destroyed by the German embassy in Guinea, which allowed Penfold to send and receive coded faxes, and high-tech communications gear delivered to him was left at the airport because it was too big to fit through the door of his hotel room. So chances are that he may not have been entirely aware that Britain had outlawed all arms deliveries to Sierra Leone, and he helped coordinate Kabbah's contract with Sandline to provide Sierra Leone weapons in exchange for diamond-mining rights.

When it became known that the British High Commissioner to Sierra Leone was helping coordinate a gunrunning plan in contravention of British law and UN sanctions, a gigantic political scandal erupted in London. Foreign Office secretary Cook had built his reputation on mercilessly prosecuting the Conservative government's secret delivery of arms to Iraq in the late 1980s, and he returned to his residence one night in April 1998 to find a fax from solicitors acting on behalf of Sandline, saying that it was under investigation by Customs and Excise for sanctions busting. The diamond war in Sierra Leone was capable not only of causing the
deaths of thousands of innocent victims, but of jeopardizing the political careers of foreign politicians as well.
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Sandline sent 35 tons of Bulgarian AK-47s to Sierra Leone for use by the Sierra Leone Army and the Kamajors, but the brewing political scandal in London put deeper involvement on permanent hold. Meanwhile ECOWAS reinforced ECOMOG and its Nigerian soldiers in Freetown in an all-out military bid to restore Kabbah's government. Interestingly, this force was considered “leg itimate” despite the fact that Nigeria had been expelled from the Commonwealth of Nations for the army's gross violations of human rights within its own country, which culminated in the military murder—under the dictatorship of the Nigerian General Sani Abacha—of environmental activists in 1996. Worse still for the prospects of brokering peace was that, at the same time it was deployed to Sierra Leone, portions of the ECOMOG command stationed in Liberia had more or less gone into business with Charles Taylor, whose support of the RUF was well known. Taylor was a close friend and political ally of Sani Abacha, and some of Abacha's soldiers assigned to ECOMOG in Liberia saw the opportunity to enrich themselves by stripping the country of railroad stock, mining equipment, and public utilities and selling them abroad.
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Sandline and EO may have gotten results, but the fact that they were private armies apparently made them more unpalatable than ECOMOG to world tastes. It appeared that the developed countries were willing to put Sierra Leone's rescue in the hands of a less effective security force—one that was prone to flagrant corruption, bribery, savagery, and a disdain for human rights—just because it was quasi-governmental and not run by profiteers—at least not so openly.

 

ECOMOG'S ATTEMPT TO WREST control of Freetown from the RUF/AFRC was a human rights disaster. Its first order of business
was to free the capital from AFRC and RUF occupiers and reinstate Kabbah to power, an operation that nearly involved destroying the city in order to liberate it. In fierce street-to-street fighting, ECOMOG lost hundreds of soldiers and the RUF/AFRC forces looted and burned everything they could in retreat. Drugged RUF child-soldiers wearing clothes donated by aid organizations dashed into Freetown's burning streets, blindly firing deafening volleys of gunfire in the general direction of their enemies, hitting anything that happened to be in the way. ECOMOG was largely doing the same thing, its soldiers modifying their uniforms by fighting shirtless or with bandanas flapping around their heads. It was often hard to tell who was who, and RUF fighters began tying white bandanas around their heads in order to be recognized by their comrades.

While ECOMOG attempted to liberate Freetown, the Kamajors ran roughshod throughout the bush, storming RUF defenses and engaging in some of their hardest-fought battles, now armed more substantially by both the Nigerians and Sandline than they'd ever been before. The Kamajors proved to be a force unto themselves; although they were ostensibly fighting on behalf of the government, they soon proved to be beyond the government's control. They fought the RUF, but they also looted villages, stole food, and killed civilians suspected of aiding the rebels. Their vigilante tactics would later be a stumbling block to peace once UNAMSIL deployed in 1999.

ECOMOG's own scorched-earth tactics reduced Freetown to a smoking, corpse-filled hull of a city, but they did chase the RUF back to the bush to defend their diamond mines. Then field-commander Issa Sessay and Major General Sam “Mosquito” Bokarie helped Johnny Paul Koroma, the AFRC leader, flee to the eastern RUF stronghold of Kailahun and into Liberia, discovering in the
process that he had hidden a large cache of rebel diamonds in his clothing to facilitate his escape.
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According to the United Nations, Koroma had enough goods to ensure quite a comfortable life in Europe. Mosquito and Sessay took the diamonds from him and sent him into Liberia at gunpoint.

Kabbah was restored to power in March of 1998. RUF leader Foday Sankoh was captured in Abuja, Nigeria, ensnared in a gunrunning plot. He was arrested and shipped back to Freetown, where he was sentenced to die for his role in supporting the AFRC junta. If ever the sordid tale of Sierra Leone should have ended, it should have ended there.

But the RUF's insatiable lust for money and power is not easily extinguished. The RUF quickly regrouped in the wake of its defeat at the hands of ECOMOG and planned its worst assault yet: an all-out bid to take over the country and its wealth of diamonds. Although nearly a quarter of Nigeria's entire military was based in Sierra Leone at the beginning of 1999 and the rebel leader was on death row in Freetown, the RUF rearmed with the help of Charles Taylor's presidential plane, trading diamonds for weapons from Niger. It staged a bold assault on Freetown on January 6, 1999, code-named Operation No Living Thing. The date is burned into the mind of anyone living in the capital at the time. In the words of journalist Sebastian Junger, war does not get much worse than it did on that day.

 

JOSEPH KAMARA REMEMBERS the humid, overcast day well—it was the day he lost both his hands and his family in the space of about twenty minutes. He was in his home near Kissy Harbor in eastern Freetown when he heard a rocket sizzle down the boulevard in front of his house, exploding in the street several hundred yards away. He ran out the front door to see what was happening
and saw two “technicals” careening down the street stuffed with RUF fighters. Technicals are pickup trucks that have been modified into combat vehicles; many have had their windshields and roofs taken off with a chainsaw and all of them have a heavy machine gun or antiaircraft gun bolted into the bed, weapons too heavy to fire without being stabilized. One of the trucks broke off from its high-speed run and skidded to a stop in front of him, spilling fighters bristling with gun barrels.