Blood Diamonds (24 page)

By the time we arrived anyone there who could once have been called a civilian had long since been recategorized. Now they were called refugees, war victims, prisoners of war, and child combatants. Kailahun was a depressing human collage of teenage soldiers nearly blind from lifelong bouts with malaria smirking dementedly at graffiti-spoiled walls; naked toddlers abandoned to the whims of luck, fear, grief, and hunger; and the vacant stares of drooling amputees who were no more than a few hours from death's welcome embrace. All of this stumbling life took place, of course, at the point of a bayonet, the barrel of an assault rifle, and the stainless-steel explosive tips of thundering 120-mm artillery shells careening in from Liberia to blow holes in the jungle carpet. It was as stark an illustration of the impact of the diamond war on Sierra Leone's rural population as one could imagine. Nor could we have found a more appropriate microcosm of the UN's bumbling efforts in the war-whipped country, as our experience with the Ghanaian Army unit made us rethink the common characterization of the RUF as being disorganized. Compared to GhanBatt-3, the RUF could have been a crack team of U.S. Special Forces.

Somehow, despite the presumed leverage of the United Nations and the resources of UNAMSIL, once in Kailahun we seemed doomed to become refugees ourselves even though GhanBatt-3 had ostensibly come to this shattered, dangerous collection of roofless buildings deep in the jungle to rescue people, people we quickly came to resemble: dirty, depressed, hungry, and losing hope by the minute.

The irony of our situation was ever present: We drove into the village with thirteen troop carriers, six armored personnel carriers, four Toyota 4Runners, four Nissan HiLux pickup trucks, two tankers of water and fuel, and 200 soldiers. We were a formidable procession, accompanied for a portion of our journey from the UN base in Daru by an Mi-24 helicopter gunship that flew in deafening patterns just over the palm trees at 150 miles per hour. When we rolled into Kailahun at noon on day one under 100-degree skies, we were given a hero's welcome, the bedraggled and war-beaten refugees from Liberia and Guinea assuming that we'd come to save them from starvation.

It turned out that we could barely feed ourselves.

Apparently not used to hosting journalists in their long-range patrols, the Ghanaians didn't go out of their way to make us comfortable, and that included making us fend for ourselves for food, which we didn't expect to do. Meals with the UN occurred once a day and each occasion was a stark reminder of the desperate situation in Kailahun. The Ghanaian cooks prepared nothing but “chicken stew”—although I'm not sure it was either chicken or stew; it was more like bones boiled in grease—and they didn't have the foresight to prepare it in a tent, beyond the view of those starving on Kailahun's streets. Every time they cooked it up in a large black cauldron, the smell of food attracted a crowd of silent, desperate spectators, who ringed the cooking area, mouths agape,
eyes staring as ladlefuls of reddish goop were distributed to the troops. Having eaten nothing but grass and mangos for weeks, their hunger was palpable.

The locals—both refugees and fighters—turned on us the moment they realized that we carried no aid food or medicine. The UN's “authority” as administrators of the country's government and military security was quickly surrendered for the simple reason that there was no other choice. In terms of military assets, it was pretty much a draw. Even though the Ghanaians had the ability to order up air support in the event of a firefight with the local RUF squads, the Ghanaians were in no mood to fight. It would have gone against the entire purpose of the mission, which was to scout out the region, get a grip on how bad the refugee situation was, and prep the RUF for eventually handing in their weapons and ending the war. So we went from traveling with the world's premier peacekeeping force to being a traveling sideshow in about an hour.

Kailahun was no-man's-land, a place where fighting between RUF and the Kamajors was so fierce that farming was impossible and hunting was useless; there hasn't been game near Kailahun in ten years. The thousands of refugees clogging the town had stripped every banana, coconut, and mango tree in a three-mile radius. Going deeper into the jungle to search for food was suicidal since the Kamajor units were tightening around the area like a noose. Kailahun was off the radars of even the most daredevil aid organizations; driving a truck laden with food anywhere near the Parrot's Beak would have been like driving off a cliff, as it was likely to be hijacked within minutes of departing on its mission.

Hondros and I were contemplating our situation, sitting under a piece of balcony held onto a mortar-shattered building by a few
strands of rusted rebar, the only refuge we could find from an explosion of rain that had apparently destroyed the Ghanaians' already thin grasp on control. When the rain hit, the mission descended into chaos, the force scattered throughout the town, everyone soaked and struggling with conflicting orders, darkness descending, pale eyes watching from empty windows.

A woman emerged from the gloom and motioned for us to follow her. Locals boiled frogs and rice for us, and in a darkened basement stinking of urine, we ate them by hand, a flickering candle offering barely enough light for them to see the gratitude on our faces.

 

KAILAHUN LOOKS BETTER at night without electricity in a teeming thunderstorm than it does during the day. Under the harsh light of the equatorial sun, it's hard to call the collection of caved-in, bullet-warped buildings a “village.” It's more like a junkyard for houses caught in crossfire, a place where people can dump structures that have been destroyed by warfare, with only the barest evidence of its past as a peaceful place discernible through the destruction. In the middle of the main intersection, it takes hours of debate to agree that a slab of concrete and a rusty white pole were once part of a gas station. Decades-old paint valiantly struggles from beneath RUF graffiti to identify one building as a former municipal center. An eye clinic can only be identified by a lone piece of a long-since-shot-out sign hanging over the entrance, which nowadays is stuffed with sick and dying refugees and their doomed newborns.

People were everywhere: Slick RUF officers wearing Tommy Hilfiger clothing and Vuarnet sunglasses, an old Liberian man in tribal colors limping on a wounded foot swollen with gangrene, children of all ages wearing shirts and shorts composed more of
holes than cloth, Kamajor infiltrators in burlap sacks and dreadlocks, men with guns, women without feet, a young female secret society initiate adorned in black palm leaves and a black ceremonial mask depicting a screaming woman. Added to this motley mix were those of us with the UN mission: journalists, soldiers in Carolina-blue body armor and helmets, Belgian relief workers, a Russian “security consultant” to the United Nations, and men and women working for UNICEF who looked like they'd be more at home at a bridge game in West Palm Beach.

We spent the days driving through the jungle toward the very tip of the Parrot's Beak, our trucks crunching over boulders and through mud bogs until we reached the end of the line at Koindu, a frontline town a mile from the borders of both Guinea and Liberia, first stop for refugees who decided that war-torn Sierra Leone was better than either bordering country. Guarded by a battalion of weary RUF children, Koindu made Kailahun look mildly troubled in comparison. They were burned out from combat, fighting off Kamajors sneaking up from behind, Liberians on one side and Guineans on the other, both forces crossing regularly into Sierra Leone to attack the other from its borders. His head resting on the barrel of an AK-47, the 25-year-old commanding officer stared at his boots and told us that, on days when there was no shelling, at least 10 of the 30,000 or so refugees crammed into the village died every day from war wounds, starvation, or disease. How often is there no shelling? we asked.

“They shell every day,” he said.

Security prevented us from spending more than half an hour in Koindu. One of the Ghanaian soldiers had thrown a package of crackers to a little boy on the side of the road from one of the large troop carriers and had sparked a brief riot among those clogging the
roadside, who thought they were being fed. RUF brought the uproar under control with swift cracks of their rifle butts and several short bursts of gunfire overhead. The Ghanaians were nervous that we'd be taken hostage, held ransom for food and medical aid, so we left. Liberians shelled our convoy on the way back to Kailahun.

 

ON DAY FOUR, Hondros and I awoke in the back of one of the two-ton troop carriers surrounded by crates of rifle ammunition. We'd opted to spend the night on the wooden slats of the truck bed—where soldiers had slaughtered a captured goat the day before, bounty from the jungle that supplemented their daily rations—because a swarm of insects had infested our temporary quarters. In their attempt to provide us with a modicum of comfort, the Ghanaians had rigged an abandoned house with a portable generator, and by the time we returned from Koindu, a single high-wattage lightbulb had been burning all night, the only one in miles, providing a beacon for every flying insect in West Africa. There was no furniture in the house and no extra sleeping bags. So the options were to try to sleep on a writhing black carpet of flying ants, termites, wasps, and millipedes or retreat to the truck and take our chances with malarial mosquitoes.

Malaria won, hands down, and we forced ourselves into sleep to the bemusement of the Ghanaians charged with guarding the truck fleet.

Day four was a scorcher. We awoke to quickly ascending 85-plus-degree temperatures at 7 A.M. and a mob scene on the broad red-dirt road that pierced the town. Hysterical Liberians and Guineans were trying to get their names on a manifest for an evacuation helicopter that would, hopefully, arrive later in the day to fly them to safety, medical care, and—most importantly—food. Unbeknown
to anyone at the time, the Guinean refugees were actually prisoners of the RUF, captured months before in a cross-border raid into Guéckédou, and most of them feared that the evacuation flight was their last hope for survival. But there was limited room and the RUF had only permitted UNHCR to take the most critically ill or injured. Christine Hambrouck, a Belgian with UNHCR, struggled to keep her head above the crowd, which seemed on the verge of pummeling her. Kids got trampled, and plastic bags filled with clothes and other possessions were ripped open, their contents spilled in the dirt. Everyone was yelling, trying to be heard over the din.

Surprisingly, the Ghanaians seemed fairly well organized that morning, apparently energized into competence by their unexpected success in convincing RUF High Command in Freetown to release some of Kailahun's prisoners and refugees. Those negotiations had been going on since our arrival, a maddening merry-go-round of false promises, patronization, vague threats, and appeals to morality. In Kailahun, no one could do anything without clearance from the on-site RUF commander. Everything the Ghanaians did—whether it was deciding to camp or occupy abandoned buildings, interview child combatants, or leave—required his approval.

But leaving with anyone who didn't arrive with us was up to the RUF's big chief, Brigadier General Issa Sessay, in Freetown, who could only be reached by secure satellite telephone.

Who the RUF allows to be evacuated is up to the RUF alone and the reasons are all theirs, a sweaty, bearded New Zealander with UNHCR told me as we slumped in the hot dirt watching the maelstrom surrounding Hambrouck. Shortly after sunrise, he'd received word that the RUF would allow UNHCR to take up to 200 refugees. Yet thousands more were to be left behind, some of
whom died later that day from malnutrition, disease, or any of the hundreds of other things that were fatal about living in Kailahun. In fact, an infant girl died in the mob of refugees as we watched, helpless to do anything. She'd been registered to leave on the aid flight and succumbed to starvation within minutes of having her name added to the manifest. Hambrouck simply scratched out her name and that of her mother, who decided to stay and bury her child. A woman who had somehow survived a Cesarean-section delivery without anesthesia or medical instruments—her operation had probably been done with a machete—took her place.

Even the children-advocacy organizations were rewarded that day: RUF allowed fifty child soldiers to check their weapons with Save the Children and UNICEF and wait for an evac chopper. There are few things more terrifying than having a blank-eyed 12-year-old girl stick the barrel of a loaded AK-58 in your stomach, but there are also few things more satisfying than seeing her drop the weapon and squeal with long-lost childhood joy at the news that she'll soon be flying away from the frontline. But fifty kids are a drop in the bucket. For every preteen whose name was written on the manifest—in an even more chaotic shouting match between the child fighters and aid workers—there were twenty or thirty more who would be ordered into battle once we flew away with the lucky ones. Two of those kids almost certainly died within days of our eventual departure: 15-year-old lieutenants wounded in combat who lay slowly dying in a bleak and filthy RUF “field hospital” on the edge of town.

We discovered this place while resting in an overgrown soccer field where the Ghanaians first considered camping when we arrived in Kailahun. We lay out flat on the long grass where RUF resupply helicopters used to land to deliver ammunition and
weapons from Liberia, smoking and evaluating our wisdom in throwing our well-being in with GhanBatt-3. Suddenly the rains fell, a slaking detonation of water in the air. I was drenched before I even got my eyes open. Hondros and I dashed for the trees and the minimal protection they offered. We spotted a low building with fire-blackened windows staring like dead eyes and darted between the birches and banana trees until we were somewhat protected by a low patio roof on the side of the building. Slumped in a corner, a young man wearing a Michael Jordan basketball jersey cradled an AK-47 and smiled at us through a haze of marijuana smoke.