Blood Diamonds (23 page)

Jalloh and his family did as they were told and eventually joined about fifty other residents, farmers and their families from nearby fields, at the local
barrie,
an open-walled concrete structure in the middle of the village used for community meetings and gatherings. They were outnumbered by soldiers, who surrounded them and separated the men and women.

Only seconds before the shooting started did one of the commanders finally laugh and admit that the villagers were going to be killed not by ECOMOG, but by the RUF. All of the men were machine-gunned to death, the women and children screaming in terror as their husbands and brothers and fathers vanished in a pink stew of pulp on the
barrie
floor.

Among the men, only Jalloh was spared, for reasons he can't explain. While his friends and relatives were being massacred, he was held off to the side, gaping wide-eyed, amazed that he'd awoken only thirty minutes before to a day he assumed would be as normal as all the rest stacked up behind it, filled with the typical hard labor of farming cassava. But nothing in his life would ever be the same and it was about to get worse.

When the last of the bodies stopped twitching, the RUF yelled at the women to run for their lives. Screaming and crying, they dragged their children into the bush, Jalloh's family among them. Soon he was alone with about 200 rebels.

“You will be the messenger,” said the commander, ordering his men into action. Two men grabbed his left wrist and pulled his arm taut while a third grabbed him in a stranglehold from behind. A fourth grabbed the cutlass from Jalloh's waist and in one swift, savage blow, hacked off his arm just below the elbow. The blow was so clean that the men holding the hand fell to the ground, clutching the dismembered limb, provoking laughter from the watching rebels. The two fell into a bit of macabre comedy, dancing around the now screaming Jalloh, hoisting his arm into the air, jubilant.

His screams of pain and protest were ignored, and the other arm came off the same way.

Jalloh's arms were placed in a plastic bag and tucked into one of the soldier's backpacks. “We'll send those to your president,” the commander told him.

After a short time, Jalloh was hoisted to his feet and a hand-lettered sign was placed around his neck. It read: “I am a victim of RUF. Leave now.”

He was placed on the road to the next village and told to spread his message.

 

NOW THE RUF is trying to spread a different message, a political one. In spite of young Jonathan's opinion that it wouldn't be very effective for the RUF to campaign at the MSF camp, there are RUFP political posters glued to the cement walls of the camp's gates. To say that camp residents are bitter is a drastic understatement.

“But what can I do?” said Jonathan with a morbid laugh, holding up two arms that ended in stumps at his elbows. “Kick a grenade at someone?”

It's this blunt reality that the UN seems to actively avoid addressing, the fact that the brutality of the RUF war was so acute that it will take years before any semblance of normalcy can be expected
in the lives of those who suffered under the RUF's guns and blades. Everyone I encountered was overjoyed that the shooting had finally stopped, but their moods were countered by a feeling of uncertain dread about the future, as if the current cease-fire were nothing more than a temporary respite from the horror they'd become accustomed to. They'd seen so many hopeful prospects die in a hail of renewed gunfire that very few seemed willing to be as optimistic as UNAMSIL that things would soon normalize.

To date, the UNAMSIL mission is the largest and costliest that the United Nations has ever fielded, comprising 17,500 soldiers and costing in excess of $612 million for 2001 alone. It's a massive test of the UN's ability to end conflict and, given the humiliations it suffered early on, “fixing” Sierra Leone seems to be as much a priority for the sake of saving face as it is for humanitarian and security reasons.

A good example of UNAMSIL's public relations efforts were the staged “child disarmament” ceremonies that disappointed every journalist who attended one. Through an agreement with UNICEF, it was decided that reporters wouldn't be allowed within 100 yards of any child with a weapon when UNAMSIL was present for fear that they might be photographed and thus—the theory was—further traumatized by having their images published in foreign newspapers and magazines. It was never properly explained how photographing child soldiers with weapons could possibly traumatize them any further than being kidnapped, drugged, and forced into combat, but those were the rules. So whenever UNAMSIL announced a disarmament event for children, it was guaranteed that the children had been disarmed well before the announcement.

We attended one of these events and that was mostly by mistake. Still eager to find quick transportation out to RUF diamond
territory, we agreed to fly to Kailahun with UNAMSIL to cover one of the ceremonies. In truth, we intended to ditch the UN as soon as the choppers touched down and find a ride to Tongo Field with locals. By that point, UNAMSIL had handled us so thoroughly that we couldn't escape its clutches, constantly being hustled from one prepared encounter to another so that the only view we had of Sierra Leone was the one they wanted us to have. Although disarming children was a major facet of the peace agreement, we were eager to get out on our own because I was interested more in the reasons why children were fighting in the first place: the RUF's diamond economy. We brought a lot of money with us and were prepared to buy a car or truck on the spot in Kailahun and take our chances driving through RUF territory into their diamond regions if we could only escape from the UN.

The problem with our plan was that we'd never been to Kailahun before and didn't realize that a working vehicle was as rare there as hope and happiness. Kailahun was a withered, war-shattered corpse of a village that was only a few more rainy seasons away from being completely reclaimed by the sweating jungle that breathed its humidity in every direction; it had known nothing but the rebel war since 1991. Kailahun was the first major town to fall before the RUF when its hundred or so original members marched across the Liberian border five miles to the east. It had been under their control for ten years by the time we arrived there and it looked it. In peacetime, Kailahun could comfortably house about 500 people; at the tail end of the war, more than 10,000 refugees fleeing combat on all sides of the village crammed its streets and were slowly starving to death.

After we'd dropped from the sky and marched with Ghanaian soldiers and the UN entourage to the town center, we split from
the group and started asking around about transportation. After an hour, in a town of at least 10,000 hot and desperate souls, we could only produce a motorcycle, not enough for me, Hondros, Tyler, and all of our gear.

We sat for awhile on the steps of a wrecked mosque across the square from the ceremony, listening to shells fired at us from Guinea falling a half mile away. Novicki, the UNAMSIL spokeswoman, kept craning her neck at us, no doubt wondering why the only international journalists on the mission were ignoring a ceremony being conducted purely for our sake. With nothing better to do, we wandered over to take an obligatory photo or two.

According to the script, the children being sent from the battlefield to a reprogramming center had already been identified, classified, and stripped of weapons and uniforms. An RUF commander shouted into a bullhorn and kids would come up to have their names checked off a manifest. Then there was a tribal dance and a bonfire of old uniforms that we were supposed to believe was an impromptu display of passion at being freed from the RUF's ranks, but it was clear to everyone that the entire display was devoid of anything impromptu. If any of those children had tried to be in any way spontaneous—especially by starting a fire—they would have been shot on the spot.

I stood in the shade, away from the dispersing crowds, settling into a profound funk about having to return to Freetown with the UN's dog-and-pony promoters when a hand settled on my shoulder. I turned to stare into a familiar face: Gabril Kallon.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

He smiled broadly and pointed to his ID badge. I had forgotten. The killer had been hired by UNICEF.

 

 

 

 

“N
EVER IN MY LIFE have I seen a diamond. People say this war is fought for diamonds, but it's not true. If you show me a diamond, I will not know it.”

The man who uttered those words, a wrinkled fighter named Eric Senesi, was a lieutenant colonel in the Revolutionary United Front. I was sitting next to him on a thin wooden bench, surrounded by RUF soldiers, and I could feel his silent, internal laughter convulsing his body as he tried to maintain a straight face. He was speaking to Ralph Swanson, a tall Sierra Leonean radio reporter who was holding a microphone in Senesi's face. When he claimed ignorance of diamonds, Senesi tented his fingers and held them to his chest in a “Who, me?” gesture of innocence, unconsciously drawing attention to his pale yellow T-shirt, which
depicted the silhouette of an AK-47 assault rifle in a circle with a slash across it, under the words “RUF for Peace.”

Like the shirt, his statement was a stab at improving public relations for the rebel group, which was trying to transform itself from a bloodthirsty band of murderers into a legitimate political movement. Unlike the T-shirt, the statement couldn't hold up under Swanson's unwavering gaze and, aware of how ludicrous the lie must have sounded not just to the reporters present but also to his assembled troops, Senesi couldn't stop a delirious smile from spreading across his face. It was either that or burst out laughing. It had a ripple effect; giggles vibrated through the crowd of RUF and even Swanson had to smile sardonically. It was a way of acknowledging the obvious without having to admit it on tape. Diamonds? No diamonds here. Nothing here but us peaceful rebels. . . .

By the time we spoke to Senesi, photojournalist Chris Hondros and I had spent four days in Kailahun District with GhanBatt-3, a contingent of Ghanaian soldiers serving UNAMSIL. We had been suffering under their institutional ineptness that was so thorough as to be almost poetic; we toiled around with them, lost in the jungle between four different warring factions, trying to save refugees and avoid getting stuck in the mud, eating cassava and frogs spawned from the rain. After being manipulated by the UN, we were determined to return to Kailahun to experience the contrast between a PR event and the real thing, and boy, did we ever.

Kailahun is the gateway to a place called the Parrot's Beak, a wedge of Sierra Leone that juts between Liberia and Guinea. Rebel groups of all three countries are effectively at war with one another and the Liberians and Guineans find it convenient to attack one another by skirting through Sierra Leone, dodging through RUF defenses before launching their attacks and running back across
their borders. Such maneuvers obviously attract retaliatory attacks into Sierra Leone, since those being shot at generally don't know who's doing the shooting, only where it's coming from.

The fighting was spurred mostly by a Liberian rebel group called LURD, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, a ragtag assortment of various factions disenfranchised under Charles Taylor's government, but they seemed to spend most of their time fighting not the government in Monrovia, but other groups in Sierra Leone and Guinea, some of which may have aligned with LURD; no one seemed to know. Complicating matters further was the presence of an estimated 2,000 Kamajor fighters ringing Kailahun.

For anyone new to the Sierra Leone diamond war, it would have been easy to believe that Senesi had in fact never laid eyes on a diamond. Clearly, none of the wealth being stolen from the jungle was making its way to the estimated 10,000 people trapped and starving to death in Kailahun. The clues were in the small details: commanders wearing expensive boots that could have only come from Guinea or Liberia, an AK-47 so new it still smelled of the lubricant Cosmoline, a satellite telephone linking field commanders to RUF High Command in Freetown. Whether Senesi saw them or not, millions of dollars worth of diamonds had flowed through Kailahun since the early days of the war, en route to Monrovia, and eventually to Antwerp, London, and retail jewelers around the world. In the mid-1990s, helicopters flew from staging areas in Liberia to deliver weapons directly to Kailahun in exchange for the diamonds. They landed in a soccer field on the outskirts of town, the same one now used by the UN to evacuate the RUF's child soldiers.

The Ghanaians with UNAMSIL had tried to drive into this mess to visit Kailahun a few weeks before we joined them in June 2001,
but had been repelled by Kamajor sniper fire and drunken RUF checkpoint commanders, little kids as young as 10 with heavy weapons and permission to kill anyone they pleased for whatever reason they wanted. The UN had been under mounting criticism for not yet fully deploying across a country that it was ostensibly demobilizing and rebuilding; therefore, establishing a permanent presence in Kailahun and other RUF strongholds was critical to the continuation of the disarmament process. When the Ghanaians were ready to try again, Hondros and I, along with six Sierra Leonean reporters, decided to travel with them, part of the first vanguard of the two-year-old UN mission to probe so far into the RUF hinterland.