Blood Diamonds (22 page)

Somewhere along the way, things went awry. Morning came and there was no signal to attack. The commanders sent scouts to probe the front lines, and before anyone knew what was happening, a fleet of UN helicopters had whirled in from overhead, foiling the attack at the last moment. The Kamajors took up defensive positions and the UN personnel who disembarked from the helicopters engaged in brisk negotiations with Patrick, who spoke on behalf of the Kamajors since he could communicate with them the best in his native French. What happened next depends on who's telling the story. According to Patrick, he was told by the on-scene UN commander that the RUF in Kono had agreed to disarm that very day and that according to the peace deal signed in May, the Kamajors were also required to lay down their rocket launchers and shotguns. The UN maintains that no one ever promised that the RUF in Kono would disarm that day, only that the agreement called for their eventual demobilization.

Either way, much to Patrick's professional disappointment—he'd invested a month living in the jungle only to have the bloody finale of his story torpedoed by the UN—the Kamajors agreed to hand over their weapons. One hundred and sixty-one Kamajors were disarmed, and eight RUF fighters turned over their weapons. Patrick was shipped to Freetown and kicked out of the Mammy Yoko as a pariah. As far as the UN was concerned, he had all but
helped orchestrate the attack. He spent a week moping around Freetown without a visa or a press card, broke except for a gold nugget given as a gift from the Kamajor commander. Tyler and I did our best to cheer him up, but Freetown's only distractions are nightmarish beach bars filled with child prostitutes, drunken aid workers, deafening pop music, and marijuana-crippled former combatants. It was clear that we had to help him get to the DDR camp in Daru where the Kamajors were sent so he could salvage his story.

Which is how the three of us ended up at the camp, encircled by joyous Kamajors who were happy to see their friend again. Not even the Ghanaian camp adjutant whipping residents with a reed took the smiles off their faces.

“So how are things?” Patrick asked one of the fighters.

“No problem,” the boy smiled back. “We get small-small rest, small-small food and when we leave we will be prepared to fight again.”

That mentality illustrates one of the main problems with the peace process: The Kamajors, although loyal to the government, are controlled by no one. They operate according to their own rules and during years of combat have become as enamored with diamonds as the RUF. There is suspicion among some in the UN hierarchy that operational control over the Kamajors is indeed in the hands of the Sierra Leone military, which claims the group as allies when it's favorable to do so and distances itself from them when it's not.

“The SLA can turn the [Kamajors] on or off as it wishes,” one UN official confided in me. “When they want them to run roughshod over the RUF, they claim they're beyond control. When the time is right to reel them in, they can do that too.”

 

EVEN THOUGH THE KAMAJORS continued to stage such bold assaults against the RUF and the rebels continued to mine diamonds, both actions in violation of the peace agreement, the news wasn't all bad. In fact, despite the obstacles yet to be overcome, the peace process in the summer of 2001 was further along than any previous attempt to end the war in Sierra Leone. And I had many conversations with people in the DDR camps and elsewhere who were all too happy to retire from the RUF and try to make a legitimate living. Twenty-six-year-old RUF Lieutenant Mohammed Morrison was 19 when he left the ranks of the SLA and joined the rebellion. His reason for joining was the same as his reason for leaving for the DDR camp in Daru, and he sounded sincere when he said his goal all along had been to “make the country better for me and my friends.”

In the early years of the war, the RUF dogma, outlined in a manifesto called “Footpaths to Democracy” penned by RUF leader Foday Sankoh, seemed to poor and illiterate blue-collar workers like Morrison to be a reasonable alternative to poverty, lack of economic opportunity, and governmental corruption. A jumbled mixture of patriotic and Maoist rhetoric, Sankoh's passage that comes closest to offering an excuse for the rebellion reads:

Although the RUF's raison d'être proved to be little more than a cover for plundering the diamond fields for the sake of its commanders and their Liberian patrons, it's easy to see how uneducated youths with few prospects for the future could be lured into armed rebellion and brainwashed into thinking that they were fighting for a better future. Morrison spoke with pride about his command of fifty soldiers in the RUF's 5th Battalion, D Company, which fought near Yengema in Kono.

“Sometimes we'd go out on patrol and if we heard about government movements, we'd lay our ambushes and put the situation under complete control,” he said, making a motion with his hands as if he were smoothing out bedsheets. The purpose of his unit was purely combat, providing forward and perimeter defenses for the diamond operations in Kono. The short, beefy commander had never even seen a diamond, he said, but he'd been a beneficiary of their revenues. His company was often resupplied with ammunition, food, and marijuana by the human mule-trains ferrying diamonds to the Liberian border. Most of their other supplies were stolen from SLA and ECOMOG units they ambushed. But after seven years in the rebellion without seeing any tangible political or social benefits, he had grown disillusioned with the cause. No one in command seemed interested in political dialogue, just diamond sales, he said. He thought about deserting, but had been in the RUF long enough to know what that meant if he were later caught.

So when he heard that a peace deal had been signed by Sessay and UNAMSIL in March 2001, he ordered his men that day to unload their weapons and travel with him to Daru. Out of the fifty
under his command, only eight complied. Several of them I met in Daru were barely capable of articulating why they obeyed Morrison's order, their reasons for wanting peace being as mysterious and esoteric as their reasons for going to war. “Now they say it is time for us to come in from the bush,” explained 19-year-old Mammy Massaquoi, a second lieutenant. Her face was covered in acne, accentuated with a shrapnel wound perforating her left cheek. “All is the work of Satan. That is why brother fought brother, but now the Lord has come and brought peace.”

All of them fear reprisal for leaving the rebellion's ranks, a trait they shared with the Kamajors who lived side by side with them in the camp. On their own initiative, about 300 combatants and their families had received permission from the UN to construct a village next door to the camp, a sort of temporary home while they waited for their former villages and towns to be disarmed. Surprisingly, former RUF and Kamajor fighters seemed to live quite peacefully in the geometric grid of stick-and-mud homes.

While Patrick mingled with the Kamajor fighters from the unit he'd marched with, Tyler and I strolled through the town, dubbed Peace Village by the residents. We met retired combatants from both forces who seemed to have accepted the new reality of living side by side with those they'd been trying to kill only weeks before. Their conversion appeared so complete that it was difficult to believe. A Kamajor named Lahaji Bila hunted RUF in Kono; now he was the village's blacksmith. RUF Major Daniel Kallon defected from the Sierra Leone Army to the RUF after Kamajors killed his brothers in Yengema, but now he was building houses for his former enemies. I didn't understand how the members of the two forces could so easily forget, or at least overlook, the brutality of the war in which many of them had fought for years until I spoke
to the camp adjutant. Ghanaian Lieutenant Charles Bendemba summed up his theory simply: “Hunger makes men see maybe war is not so good.”

Could it be that simple? The prospect of regular meals for six weeks in the equivalent of a detention camp—even if it was simple rice and cassava leaves—could entice battle-hardened men and women to lay down arms and live in harmony? Bendemba wasn't being quite that simplistic, of course, but what he meant was clear enough. The RUF war was conducted not for any ideological dogma, noble cause, or even for retribution by a long-aggrieved people, but purely for the economics of diamond mining. Even the brainwashed could see that a choice between suffering in the jungle and risking death for the financial benefit of their commanders or taking the opportunity to try and live a normal life wasn't a difficult choice at all. In the end, many fighters were simply too tired to keep on battling one another. The civil war had reached the fatigue point for many. Morrison, for instance, had seen combat and death for almost eight years and was ready for a change. “It is not worth my life anymore,” he said. “I am young. I am strong. This is my country and I want to make use of it now and make a better life.”

But if all it takes is a hot bowl of rice to convince fighters to stop fighting, it probably wouldn't take that much to change their minds and decide to once again start carrying weapons. Bendemba was worried about the future waiting beyond the camp gates for his charges. Fifteen bucks didn't seem like much of a financial incentive to keep former fighters who had been protecting millions of dollars in diamonds on the straight and narrow. He equated fighting with the RUF with a drug addiction. If all your friends are addicts, you live in a crack neighborhood, and all you've known for
years is getting high, it wouldn't take much to shove you over the edge once out of rehab.

“You go from here with an empty stomach and empty pockets,” he said. “You must depend on your parents, your friends or maybe you have some precious stones for survival. Someone who is 18 and a general or a major in the bush thinks that he is a big man. He can have women, drugs, money, respect. Once you leave here, you're just like every other man.”

When these men and women leave the DDR camp, the options are to head to their former homes, most of which in Daru's district were are still armed and dangerous, or to head to the capital to avoid retribution from those who kept their AK-47s.

“Me and my men are going straight to Freetown,” said Morrison.

 

HE'S HARDLY ALONE. Freetown's population of former and current RUF combatants is rivaled only by the population of the RUF's victims. The RUF has formed a political party, the RUFP (the Revolutionary United Front Party), and although its headquarters is in Makeni, its campaigners are by necessity in Freetown. Freetown is now home to nearly a quarter of the country's population.

“The RUF has a lot of support,” said a young man named Jonathan on the street near the Cockle Bay Guest House. “But they better not come to this place.”

“This place” was the MSF Camp for Amputees and War Wounded, Freetown's repository for those with the most horrific of the war's tales. It was the only place for people like Jonathan, Ismael Dalramy, and other amputation victims to go, if they were lucky enough to find room. MSF volunteer doctors fitted camp residents with donated prostheses and treated them for illnesses, at
least as much as funding permitted. There were some poorly attended workshops for people without arms to try to develop work skills with their prostheses, but what seemed to provide the only distraction from their suffering was soccer practice, held daily in the softening late-afternoon light. Every Saturday, there was a match between amputees and polio victims on the beach, and most of the camp's residents attended. Besides that, the only thing to do was recount their tales of horror to one another, their neighbors being the only people in the world capable of understanding what they went through.

Kabba Jalloh, for instance, lost his hands in Koinadugu, a haphazard collection of mud huts and zinc-roofed buildings in the mountainous jungle about 50 miles northwest of Koidu, but he feels lucky to have kept his life. Speaking in Temne through a translator—another man without hands—he stoically recounted how he was tortured by men who now wanted political legitimacy and his vote in upcoming elections.

He awoke one morning in the summer of 1996 in his field of cassava to find men in camouflage uniforms making their way through the bush on all sides of his small plot. He stood, confused. There was no telling who the men were, but they seemed to be moving easily and assuredly, seemingly uninterested in him. But there was a spark of fear in Jalloh. Men with weapons in Koinadugu couldn't mean anything good. It was time to leave.

As he gathered his children and two wives from the small thatched-roof hut in the center of his cassava farm, he didn't realize that the time to leave had passed him by in the night. Under the moon, hundreds of RUF soldiers had encircled Koinadugu. Thinking that he was escaping a trap instead of already being ensnared in one, Jalloh sheathed his cutlass used to harvest cassava and put his smallest daughter on his shoulders. They started walking
toward the village center. They walked about ten feet before they were ordered to stop.

Several small boys armed with rifles approached from the bush. Don't worry, they said. We're with ECOMOG and we'll protect you. Come with us.

Jalloh couldn't read or write. He'd been a farmer his entire life. But he had enough common sense to suspect that ECOMOG didn't use children in its ranks. He began to sweat with fear.