Blood Diamonds (14 page)

“You! Today you'll die!” yelled one man, whom Kamara assumed was the commander. He tried to plead with them to spare his family, but the other soldiers ran into the house and dragged out his wife, 6-year-old son, two teenage daughters, and his brother. The brother was shot immediately, one bullet through the head with a nickel-plated revolver. Kamara remembers his body falling straight down, as if all the bones had suddenly been removed. Then a Molotov cocktail was pitched through the doorway of the house, a modest concrete cube, but one that was comfortable by Freetown's standards.

Kamara shouted to his family to run while he tried to distract the soldiers. Everyone fled but the 6-year-old, who hid behind the carcass of a car about twenty yards away. He didn't want to leave his father.

Kamara pled with the soldiers for his life, but they forced him to his knees and placed the hot barrel of the revolver to his head.

“Why are you doing this to me?” he screamed. “I don't know you. I've never done anything to you.”

“We must cut off your hands,” the commander told him, matter-of-factly. “Those are our orders.”

He was then forced to lie on his back in the street with his arms outstretched. He wanted to yell to his son to leave so that he wouldn't have to witness his mutilation, but did not want to reveal
his hiding place to the soldiers. An ax was raised into the smoke-filled sky while the surrounding soldiers pinned him down and stood on his hands. It took more than a dozen blows to sever each arm, just below the elbow. The strangest sensation, he said, was that one minute he could feel his knuckles being ground into the asphalt by the soldier's boot and in the next he watched as the man kicked his arm away as he felt nothing.

Once the amputation was complete, the soldiers fired a chain of machine-gun ammunition into the flaming remains of his house and then sped off looking for more victims. Delirious with pain, eyes stinging with tears, Kamara looked for his son, but he was gone. He staggered to the nearby Connaught Hospital in the hope that the doctors could keep him from bleeding to death. He never saw any of his family members again.

Scenes like this took place throughout Freetown for the next four days as the capital continued its now familiar plunge into chaos and anarchy. Recalling the horror of the May 1997 coup just two years before, international aid groups wasted no time evacuating their people, as did the media organizations and the diplomatic corps. Once again, Freetown's population was left to fend for itself in the face of battalions of crazed RUF soldiers, with only ECOMOG to hide behind.

ECOMOG soldiers, caught off guard by the assault, went haywire and embarked on their own version of Operation No Living Thing, executing suspected RUF on the Aberdeen bridge and dumping their bodies into the river below. Roadside justice was the order of the day. Anyone remotely suspected of being involved with the RUF was tortured, raped, and summarily executed by the Nigerian soldiers, including an unknown number of perfectly innocent civilians whose elbows were tied behind them before they
were shot at point-blank range. One retarded 9-year-old boy, whose plight was highlighted in the documentary film
Cry Freetown
, was stripped naked, beaten, and tortured by Nigerians who suspected him of being an RUF sniper. It's hard to tell which is worse; that ECOMOG beat and tortured children, or that the RUF had enlisted young kids so extensively that ECOMOG was put into a position where it had no choice but to suspect even the least suspicious of being an RUF killer. Alpha jets and artillery emplacements fired on civilian targets and some soldiers in the Sierra Leone Army imitated the rebels they were ostensibly fighting, taking the arms or legs off anyone they suspected of being a rebel.
⁵
ECOMOG's wanton targeting of civilians and their property led Sierra Leoneans to quip wryly that the force's acronym actually stood for “Every Car or Moving Object Gone.”

ECOMOG eventually routed the RUF from the city once again, but this time the death toll was nearly 6,000.

Still, no one outside the orbit of West Africa seemed to pay much attention to the matter. Operation No Living Thing was given brief and perfunctory treatment in Western media, which was busy with other matters that dominated the news. At the time thousands of Africans were dying over control of diamonds sold in shopping malls around the world, U.S. president Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury, NATO began bombing Yugoslavia, and everyone else was preparing for digital disaster from Y2K.

Nevertheless, the horror was too graphic to ignore completely. With little thought to the causes of the conflict, the U.S. Department of State dispatched negotiators—including envoy Jesse Jackson—to the region with one goal: End the war and secure a peace agreement. The agreement that was reached in Lomé, the capital of the small West African nation of Togo, was nothing less than a hands-down
victory for those who started the war in the first place, for no better reason than to control and sell diamonds, a fact that seemed to escape all scrutiny from the diplomats and negotiators in Lomé.

With a single frenzy of bloodletting, one that was openly named after its intention to kill everything in the RUF's path, the rebels effectively won their diamond war, at least for a time.

 

THE 1999 LOMÉ PEACE ACCORDS, signed by the RUF, AFRC, the Sierra Leone government, and the United Nations, is a diplomatic work of art. According to the agreement, the RUF would end their hostilities in exchange for amnesty for war crimes committed since the beginning of the conflict and its leaders would be appointed to government posts. RUF leader Foday Sankoh—still in jail awaiting execution for his role in the 1997 coup—was to be released from prison and installed as the vice president under Kabbah, the man he and Johnny Paul Koroma had ousted two years earlier. Sankoh was also to be appointed as the chairman of the country's Commission for the Management of Strategic Resources, National Reconstruction and Development. In other words, the internationally brokered peace accord gave the RUF total control of everything it had fought and killed for from the very beginning—the diamond mines. In exchange, the RUF agreed to demobilize and disarm to a UN peacekeeping force, dubbed UNAMSIL. After disarming, the RUF was to be given legal status as a political party. It's hard to imagine that the band of killers who'd murdered thousands and sold the country's most valuable natural resource out from under it for the past decade could have been happier with the agreement.

Western countries that helped negotiate the Lomé Accords enthusiastically supported the agreement, not because they were
fair—but because it was a swift solution to what they perceived to be a nagging problem. Responding to criticism that the Lomé Accords were too favorable to the RUF, the U.S. assistant secretary of state at the time, Susan Rice, practically put it in those words when she said: “There will never be peace and security and an opportunity for development and recovery in Sierra Leone unless there is a solution to the source of the conflict. And that entails, by necessity—whether we like it or not—a peace agreement with the rebels.”
⁶

Not everyone was convinced that for peace to succeed the RUF should be granted such a conciliatory arrangement. The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, in a bold but ill-advised move, signed an amendment to the peace agreement stating that he didn't agree with giving combatants amnesty for war crimes, one of the document's most important concessions to the RUF. By making such a statement, he essentially nullified the agreement in the eyes of the RUF before it was implemented and then sent 6,000 UN soldiers to Sierra Leone to try and enforce it.

Meanwhile, peace deal or not, the diamond channels were wide open. Hundreds of thousands of carats of diamonds flowed from the blood-soaked jungle of Sierra Leone to brides everywhere, and 7.62-mm Kalashnikov rounds flowed back. Rebels still controlled the diamonds and thus the country.

 

ENTER UNAMSIL. Created through UN Security Council Resolution 1270, and deployed to Sierra Leone in October of 1999, UNAMSIL originally consisted of 6,000 military personnel and 260 observers. The majority of them were again Nigerians, the UN's first mistake among many. Given the atrocities committed by Nigeria's last foray into Sierra Leonean “peacekeeping” through ECOMOG,
it was natural that most Sierra Leoneans looked on them warily. And as far as the RUF was concerned, the Nigerians were nothing less than a hated enemy, one to which they were now expected to turn over their arms.

Compounding this lack of respect and authority were consistent rumors that some ECOMOG units—which were to be absorbed into UNAMSIL—had made arrangements with the RUF to share the spoils of their diamond plundering, in much the same way as they had with resources in Liberia. That the Nigerians may have been interested in agendas other than peace was clear to UN force commanders from the early days of the UNAMSIL mission. By the time the mission was deployed, Nigeria's dictator, Sani Abacha, had died unexpectedly of a heart attack—some say it was brought on by an overdose of Viagra—and that nation's dictatorial dynasty, which always relied on equal amounts of corruption and military screw-turning, was in question. Given the growing uncertainty over Nigeria's leadership, top military officers commanding troops under the UNAMSIL banner were presented with a tempting opportunity to amass war chests and hedge funds in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria.

But the biggest problem with the Nigerians was in their perception as aggressors and war criminals.

John Bolton, at the time the senior vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, complained to the U.S. Congress about this seemingly obvious obstacle. “Why should Nigerians have been embraced by UNAMSIL?” he questioned the House International Relations Committee in October 2000. “Given that the RUF effectively considered them the enemy, this was virtually a guarantee of a repetition of the Somalia problem, when [local warlord] Mohammed Farah Aideed saw the UN forces allying themselves
with local clans and subclans that he considered his enemies. . . . Inexplicably, the lessons of Somalia do not seem to have been applied in Sierra Leone.”
⁷

UNAMSIL fell apart almost before its acronym was christened. The original force consisted of a hodgepodge of member-states' militaries, and they didn't exactly represent the cream of the crop, seeming to have been culled from those smaller states that could be pressured into troop commitments by the more influential UN members who didn't want anything to do with a morass like Sierra Leone. While effective, experienced, and well-equipped soldiers from countries like the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Germany, and France stayed home, soldiers from Nepal, Croatia, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Zambia, and Ghana were dispatched to Freetown. The idea, perhaps, was that countries in the common continent should be deployed to handle an African problem, but the result was that variously disciplined forces that had never operated in concert were thrust into what was at the time the hottest military zone on earth next to Kosovo. And the disastrous results of this strategy were almost instantaneous.

The first problem was that UNAMSIL unwisely attempted to deploy everywhere at once—with 6,000 soldiers into a countrywide battlefield with some 40,000 to 50,000 combatants. When the RUF was suddenly faced with a heavily armed force of Nigerians demanding their disarmament—many of whom had served with ECOMOG before joining the UN's mission—they naturally went on the defensive. In May 2000, the RUF killed seven UN peacekeepers and took fifty more hostage, stealing their weapons and vehicles. The number of captured soon rose to over 500, many surrendering their rifles and ammunition without a fight, further humiliating the UN. Many of those captured happened to be Zambians,
and the Zambian president sharply criticized UNAMSIL and its Sierra Leone force commander, Major General Vijay Jetly of India. Only months into the mission the UN was having an embarrassingly public debate about command-and-control issues while a twelfth of its force was held prisoner. The Security Council's decision in February 2000 to increase force strength to 11,000 troops did little to help the situation. Within weeks of the UNAMSIL deployment, Victor Bout made a series of arms shipments to Liberia for the RUF. The cargo, including several attack helicopters, demonstrated that the RUF had little intention of complying with the disarmament agreement.

UNAMSIL was so inept in its early days that the British sent in paratroopers independent of the UN mission to help stabilize the country, a move that was interpreted—mostly correctly—as an attempt to rescue the UN mission behind the scenes. Though they were to have pulled out by mid-June 2000, the British paratroopers were still there as of November 2001, operating beyond the UN's channels and mandates.

Because of the troubled UN mission, the Lomé Accords were rendered useless. The RUF had yet to disarm and they continued to mine and smuggle diamonds under the noses of the UN. The Secretary General proposed increasing UNAMSIL's size yet again to 20,500 troops, including eighteen infantry battalions, and changing the scope of the mission from neutral peacekeeper to ally of the government. But the Security Council refused to change the parameters of the mission and the UN couldn't find any member-states willing to contribute the increased number of troops. While this debate ensued, a Sierra Leone Army splinter-group calling themselves The West Side Boys captured eleven British soldiers east of Freetown. The soldiers were soon freed, but it required a daring commando mission into the West Side Boys' headquarters
and cost one paratrooper his life. The British found $38 million worth of rebel diamonds in the hideout.

Meanwhile, in the midst of what was more or less unchecked warfare between UNAMSIL and the RUF, Jetly, the UNAMSIL commander, was busily preparing a secret report on the shortcomings of the mission's Nigerian contingent, accusing them of undermining the UN's mandate and pursuing their own agendas. The unfinished report was leaked and the Nigerian commander demanded Jetly's dismissal as force commander. India eventually withdrew all 3,000 of its soldiers from Sierra Leone, including Jetly.