Blood Diamonds (15 page)

In testimony to the U.S. Congress, John Bolton aptly described the mission as a “meltdown.” He placed major blame on the Lomé Accords themselves and the UN's hesitancy to fully endorse the amnesty clause:

For at least one person, things couldn't have been much better. Sankoh, just released from prison and settling into his new cabinet position, resumed earnestly plundering the diamond fields with bureaucracy, political connections, and old-fashioned corruption
rather than with machetes and machine guns. Though he was now a government official, he still had the RUF doing his dirty work by mining diamonds on his behalf. In the book
Fire
, journalist Sebastian Junger presents evidence of organized diamond-gathering activities by RUF on Sankoh's behalf while he was ostensibly in a position of responsibility over the diamond fields. A notebook discovered at Sankoh's residence detailed an RUF agent's diamond collections from October 1998 to July 1999—“a nine-month haul of about 786 carats of white diamonds and 887 carats of industrials. The RUF is thought to be exporting about half a million carats a year, which would suggest there were about 300 guys . . . gathering diamonds for Sankoh,” Junger wrote.
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And Sankoh wasted no time trying to find buyers for the gems. Even though the governmental commission he chaired had yet to be activated—a commission that oversaw Sierra Leone's diamond exports—he was busy negotiating with British and Belgian diamond brokers and American hustlers disguised as businessmen. Junger detailed one particularly bold scam that was orchestrated by the president of the U.S. Trading & Investment Company, John Caldwell, who was also the former vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Shortly before the commission he chaired was activated, Sankoh wrote up a contract between the RUF and Caldwell and his business partner, Belgian Michel Desaedeleer, giving the men monopoly mining rights—through a Virgin Islands–chartered company of which they were directors—to all the gold and diamond claims in Kono District. “The RUF was to provide security and labor for the mining operations and facilitate the transportation of diamonds out of the country,” Junger wrote. Caldwell and Desaedeleer's company would split the profits with the RUF.

According to Junger, Desaedeleer then immediately tried to sell the contract to anyone he could think of for $10 million, including De Beers, DiamondWorks, and—unbelievably—to the Sierra Leone government itself. The government's ambassador to the United States, John Leigh, was naturally aghast at the audacity of a hated rebel group's asking him to pay for the country's sovereign natural resources. And being asked by a partner of the former vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce added incredible insult to the offer.
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There's no evidence that Sankoh got very far with his plans because, like nearly everyone else involved in the tragic tale of Sierra Leone's diamonds, he also seems to suffer from congenital incompetence and terminal greed. Not content with his potentially influential position in Kabbah's government, many believe that Sankoh was planning a coup for the summer of 2000, smuggling in fixers like Brigadier General Issa Sessay—who went by the code name General Emperor—to coordinate the plot.

Before it could be executed, though, RUF commanders in Makeni spoiled the plan by surrounding a base filled with Kenyan peacekeepers and demanding the release of ten fighters who'd surrendered days earlier. A gunfight ensued and seven peacekeepers were taken hostage. The UN raided Sankoh's Freetown compound in retaliation and unwittingly averted the coup plot. Sankoh was again arrested and, as of November 2001, was being held on Bunce Island in the Sierra Leone River under heavy guard.

General Emperor took over as acting leader of the RUF.

 

WHILE PEACEKEEPERS, rebels, and mercenaries were busily slaughtering one another in a mostly forgotten jungle battle in West Africa, London residents Charmian Gooch and Alex Yearsley
were busily working on the heart of the matter and preparing to knock the wind out of the $6 billion-per-year, century-old diamond industry by revealing its deepest and darkest secret. Their nongovernmental organization, Global Witness, released a detailed report in December 1998 that tied illicitly mined and sold diamonds from the UNITA rebels in Angola directly to De Beers. By inference, Global Witness explained that all the death and destruction in that country, as well as other diamond-producing nations enduring brutal civil wars, result from the international diamond industry's willingness to pay the rebels for their ill-gotten goods.
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Angola is Sierra Leone's mirror hellhole. Its body count—half a million over ten years of civil war—has outpaced that of the smaller country only because it has a larger population. A former Portuguese colony, Angola launched into nearly nonstop warfare from the moment the colonialists pulled out in 1975. On one side was the Marxist MPLA government supported by Russia and Cuba; on the other was the Maoist UNITA, backed strangely enough by the United States and China. This Cold War chess game was funded on the government's side by oil revenues and on the rebels' side by the country's impressive diamond mines. Global Witness estimated that between 1992 and 1997, UNITA reaped $3.7 billion from the diamond mines, which led to a UN Security Council resolution in July 1998 aimed at stemming their sales. In spite of that, there has been no significant reduction in UNITA's diamond earnings.
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The reason for this goes all the way back to the 1870s and a greedy megalomaniac named Cecil Rhodes. At 18 years old, he strode across the moonscape of diamond mines near Kimberley, South Africa, with one goal in mind: world domination of the diamond market.

 

T
HERE IS NO QUESTION that De Beers abhors conflict diamonds. Perhaps more to the point, the company abhors what public outcry over conflict diamonds could do to its empire, a point that was being made to me at teatime in London on September 11, 2001. Neither I nor the men to whom I was speaking was aware that at that very minute thousands of people were dying at the
hands of Osama bin Laden across the Atlantic Ocean in New York City, Washington, D.C., and rural Pennsylvania. Even further from our imaginations was that bin Laden's African operatives had been buying millions of dollars worth of Sierra Leone diamonds for the past three years in preparation for that day. In our ignorance of real-time events, we were perfectly comfortable discussing in frank terms why diamonds sold by ruthless killers were bad from De Beers's perspective: Like all else in the hermetic world of diamonds, it came down to economics.

“No one in this industry is going to hide behind wringing hands, or a hearts-on-your-sleeves kind of thing,” said Andy Bone, chief media officer of De Beers's Diamond Trading Company. “There is a big moral dimension to this, but we're very happy to talk about the enormous commercial loss and gain potential of this as well. And the enormous long-term benefit for West Africa if the industry remains unharmed. . . . Yes, let's get rid of conflict diamonds. We've got more to gain than anyone else on this, apart from the victims. The next big prize is for the industry if we can get rid of this.”

Like most of that week in London, September 11 was chilly and fogbound. We were in a conference room on the second floor of the Diamond Trading Company (DTC) on Charterhouse Street in east London, a building through which 65 percent of the world production of rough diamonds flows, some $500 million worth of rough sold every five weeks to the same cadre of handpicked buyers. Located next to a fresh food market that smells like fish and attracts seagulls, the DTC operates out of an austere building, a huge cement block that looks like it could have been designed by the U.S. Department of Corrections. Indeed, it is probably more secure than most prisons. Visitors are greeted by a man sealed in a bulletproof cabinet who will, assuming your name is on a list, buzz
you through ballistic glass doors that are so thick they seem like they'd be impossible to see through. Only then are you allowed to speak face to face with a receptionist, who then ushers you into another room. Sitting there, amid mismatched furniture and oddly arranged desks, I wondered if this was the same room the prospective buyers—called “sightholders”—are required to wait in.

The second-floor conference room, though, was comfortable and was clearly designed to impress first-time visitors. Giant maps of De Beers's diamond holdings were built into the walls, and behind more bulletproof glass were models of famous diamonds, including the 986.6-carat Star of Sierra Leone, the third largest ever found. It was the size of a small brick and even the model is considered priceless. Samples of rough diamonds were displayed at lighted kiosks along the walls, as if in a museum. Tea and cucumber sandwiches were served on a silver tray, and a slickly produced video about conflict diamonds was eternally poised inside the VCR to explain the official stance. I was assigned two handlers, Bone and Tim Weekes, perfectly attired gentlemen whose first duty was to impress upon me the gravity of what I was there to talk about. Conflict diamonds are terrible, they agreed, but they represent a very small portion of rough stones found around the world and sloppy or sensationalistic reportage about them—dwelling on amputated civilians, for instance—could have dire consequences on their industry. There was no threat in their disclaimer—not even a hint of one—but it was clear that their jobs were to juggle acknowledgment of the horrors caused by conflict diamonds within the context of all the good that diamond mining does for some countries and more than a million employees worldwide.

None of us could have known that, at the very moment Bone was downplaying the spin-off horrors of the policies pursued by
his industry, policies that have been exploited by rebels and terrorists from Sierra Leone to Lebanon to Afghanistan and that have generated vast profits for De Beers and others throughout the industry, horrors worse than our collective nightmares were happening in America.

 

THE INCORPORATION of what was to become the undisputed world behemoth of diamond buying, selling, and marketing came only twenty-two years after the first discovery of the jeweled wealth in South Africa; the time frame alone is testament to the exploding nature of the boom in that country. In 1866, a 15-year-old boy named Erasmus Jacobs found a pretty-looking rock on the banks of South Africa's Orange River, and he pocketed it to give to his little sister, who collected interesting stones. A short time later, while the children were playing with the pebbles in the street, the glittering one caught the eye of a passerby, a local politician. Suspecting that it may be a diamond, he liberated it from the children and passed it on to a local peddler, who in turn mailed it to the government mineralogist. The stone turned out to be a 21.25-carat diamond, and it was sold to the governor of Cape Colony for 500 pounds sterling. The following year, it was displayed at the Paris Exhibition, mainly as an oddity. At the time, no one knew of the wealth to be had in South Africa.

Until diamond mining took permanent hold in South Africa in the 1870s, most diamonds were found in India and Brazil; in fact, the discovery of Jacobs's stone did little to change anyone's opinion that those two countries were the only places to find diamonds. The find in Africa was written off as a fluke initially—at least until more were plucked from the riverbank: The second find was a magnificent 85-carat white diamond. The discovery
was so awe-inspiring that Cape Town's colonial secretary, Sir Richard Southey, laid it on the table at the South African Parliament and proclaimed proudly, “Gentlemen, this is the rock on which the future of South Africa will be built.” The diamond was named the Star of South Africa.