Blood Diamonds (25 page)

We soon discovered that the boy was a security guard for the building, which was a makeshift hospital. Through the gloom created by the rain clouds, we could see shadowy figures limping through the hospital's halls; we cautiously pushed our way inside.

“Hey, sa,” bellowed a voice from a room near the courtyard. “Hey, you got one stick a cig'rette, sa?”

We followed the voice into a small room, where a billowing patterned curtain provided minimal privacy. A bare-chested young man was sprawled on a filthy mattress, both of his feet heavily wrapped in gauze that had begun to turn brown. The concrete floor was covered in bloody footprints as if we'd walked into some sort of maniacal dance studio. Under the heavy thrum of the rain, the boy explained that he'd stepped on a crude land mine a few weeks before that blew off both of his heels. He could hobble around and felt that he was improving.

“I bedda dan all de mon here,” he said with a strange laugh, as if he were truly amused by his comment.

Other rooms were not filled with the strange mirth of pending dementia, but were instead gravid with fear and grief. At 22 years
old, the mine victim was the elder patient in the hospital, an echoing, fire-blackened maze of narrow graffiti-crazed corridors and garbage-littered chambers that were void of furniture, power, and running water. As we poked our heads into another curtain-covered doorway, a voice boomed from the darkness of the hallway.

“Hello! What you want here?”

A short boy in an orange Hawaiian shirt and matching shorts emerged from the shadows. A handgun was tucked into his waist. When we told him that we'd just ducked out of the rain and that we were journalists, he introduced himself as RUF Corporal James Morphison, local field medic.

“We have no medicine. No clean field dressings. We do what we can,” he said, leading the way into the room we'd been about to enter. The room was dark and the walls had been painted gray long ago. Sprawled on the floor on rattan mats that had been placed on piles of wet rotting hay were two young boys. Both were near death, as much victims of the world's manufactured hunger for diamonds—and the RUF's willingness to feed that hunger—as victims of their enemy's weapons. The boy on the left, Jusu Lahia, lay on his back with his arms and legs bent into the air. He'd stiffened up like curing jerky thanks to a tetanus infection that was eventually going to kill him. About two months before, he was nearly cut in half by a Kamajor rocket that exploded next to him and peppered him with fragmentation wounds. One piece of exploding steel blew through his face just under the left eye, blinding it. Other pieces embedded in his shoulder, side, groin, and leg, all on the left side. A flower-patterned bowl filled with congealed blood sat on the floor and there were long, smeared bloodstains on the gray wall next to his hay-pile. A rusted wheelchair lay in the corner, looking like a fallen combatant itself.

Nearer the door lay Matthew Sween, propped against the wall wearing a hole-filled Mickey Mouse T-shirt. Sween was more animated, but only with dread and terror. During the same Kamajor attack that had ruined Lahia, a bullet punched through the small of his back, ricocheted off something inside him, and exited through the front of his right thigh. He sweated profusely and shivered with chills. Morphison and another medic had simply taped his wounds shut. There was no way they could operate on him.

“They will both die,” Morphison said plainly, not bothering to lower his voice for the sake of his patients or Sween's young sister, who lay on the floor beside him, mopping his brow with a rain-wettened rag. No one in the room seemed surprised to hear the prognosis.

Sween stared with wide, unblinking eyes, obviously hoping that we'd come to help. The only thing we had, however, were four Cipro pills, a powerful antibiotic. We gave them to Morphison, although we knew they would be of little help to either of the wounded boys.

Soon, news spread that two white journalists were touring the hospital and dispensing pharmaceuticals. From the mounting gloom, crippled, emaciated patients oozing disease began plodding toward us like the undead. One was a 12-year-old civilian girl whose arm had been nearly shot off in crossfire. Another was shot in the knee, forced to lean on the wall with both hands in order to move closer to us. A retarded boy with severe polio simply sat in an ever darkening hallway corner, the whites of his staring eyes practically the only part of him that were visible.

The moans and creaks of the dim hospital soon proved too unnerving to endure much longer and we left. Morphison stood in the doorway watching us leave, the only person we'd met there
who had clean clothing. “Come and visit again before you leave,” he called after us.

 

WE DIDN'T.

Neither did the Save The Children reps or the UNICEF people, whose chopper swooped so fast out of the sky to avoid attracting gunfire that it seemed to simply materialize in front of us, a sudden tornado of rotor wash filling our eyes with dirt. It was explained to us that the RUF didn't allow wounded children to be evacuated because it conflicted with their earnest testimony that the rebel group didn't use children in combat. In Kailahun, such an assertion was demonstrably false, but denying the obvious was an RUF pastime. Again, the duty fell to Lieutenant Colonel Senesi to explain, in the presence of child soldiers, that the RUF had no child soldiers.

“All the children we have here will be under enemy pressure in the bush, so you have to train your children in case they are attacked or apprehended by the enemy in your absence,” he said.

What about Sween and Lahia, who both admitted to being in combat on the front line?

“Well,” Senesi said, “sometimes, if a child is especially brave, they will volunteer to go to the front and we allow them.”

The UNICEF helicopter landed on the soccer field next to a UN Mi-26, a massive personnel helicopter that must have been three stories tall. There's no question that Sween, Lahia, and the other injured kids could hear the excited chattering of those chosen to leave as they endured a last minute photo-op for the sake of a National Geographic photographer who'd flown in from Freetown for the event. Hondros and I hunkered in the woods, out of the heat of the sun, looking like bearded, disheveled bums, too tired and uninterested in participating in a group shot of the now-former
child combatants, many of whom had threatened and menaced us over the course of the past four days. Besides, we had more pressing things to deal with.

“I'm getting on that fucking helicopter,” I announced. The look on Hondros's face said good luck trying. Although we were registered correspondents with respected U.S. media outlets, accredited through the United Nations and generally well-organized people, not a single excursion on a UN chopper, pickup truck, or troop carrier was without its share of mind-numbing complications that soon made us seriously contemplate buying our own vehicle and taking our chances in the bush, something we would have done in Kailahun if there had been any operable vehicles. Traveling on a helicopter was impossible without an MOP, a “movement of personnel” form that's meant to keep track of who's going where so that if one of the helicopters crashes or is shot out of the sky, the responsible UN person back at headquarters would know whose parents to call to claim the bodies, assuming they weren't eaten by hungry Kamajors. Needless to say, we didn't have MOPs.

But I was willing to risk a fistfight with the Ukrainian pilots to avoid being stranded with the Ghanaians a moment longer. So far, it had taken four days to accomplish a portion of the mission that had been estimated back in the comfort of the base at Daru to take 12 to 14 hours.

The desperate and determined look on my face when I approached the pilot was apparently an acceptable alternative to having an MOP. He let us both on the plane.

Rotor wash is hypnotizing, invisible waves of superspeed air that flattens long grass and makes palm trees move like disco dancers. It seemed that all of the refugees and RUF defenders were in the trees around the soccer field to watch some of their young colleagues
fly off to a deprogramming center. Some waved, some stood still as statues until the blast of air became too powerful to face, and as we lifted off, quickly and into a turn before we were even fifteen feet off the ground, everyone had their heads buried in their elbows. The deafening roar of the chopper was welcome indeed and we craned our heads out the portholes to look down on Kailahun, the little roofless buildings fading rapidly into the jungle, challenging you to believe that some of the best gems sold throughout the world in the last seven or eight years had passed through this shelled and hopeless bush village.

I wondered what Sween and Lahia were thinking as they listened to us fly overhead.

 

 

 

 

I
N JULY 2001—more than a year into the Kimberley Process—a Lebanese diamond broker named Aziz Nassour arrived in Monrovia, Liberia, for a crucial meeting. Although his name appeared on a watch list issued by the United Nations Security Council merely two months before, Nassour was received at Robertsfield Airport as if he were a government official, greeted by Liberian law enforcement and escorted past the obligatory customs and immigration checkpoints to ensure that he was quickly on his way through the streets of the crumbling, humid West African city.

Within an hour of his arrival from Antwerp, he was inside a drab four-bedroom safehouse, a place that, if it looked normal from the outside, revealed quite a bit about its residents on the inside. Plastered on the walls were posters celebrating the suicide bombings of
Hezbollah, the Lebanese terrorist group, and videotapes of Hezbollah attackers killing Israeli troops were scattered around the VCR.

The safehouse was run by Senegalese men and the meeting had been arranged by their boss and countryman, Ibrahim Bah, a diamond trafficker who lived in Burkina Faso, two countries to the northeast of Liberia. Bah was also a general in the RUF, the rebellion's senior logistics expert in the movement of weapons and diamonds between Burkina Faso, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Several other high-ranking RUF officers were also in attendance.

The meeting occurred at a critical time. The two-year-old UNAMSIL had managed, after countless failures and broken deals, to kick-start a disarmament agreement between the RUF and the government of Sierra Leone that even the cynics agreed looked promising. By the time Nassour and the others sat down under the fanatical eyes of Hezbollah guerillas staring from the walls, the UN was claiming that half the country had been disarmed: More than 3,000 fighters had turned in their AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers and begun the process of reintegrating into daily life in Sierra Leone. If the schedule held fast, disarmament would be complete by the end of the year and, in theory, the war that had torn apart the small West African country over the course of the previous decade would be over.

This was good news for everyone but those who profited from Sierra Leone's diamond wealth, especially the men in the Liberian safehouse that day. In 1999, an estimated $75 million worth of gemstones had flowed from the RUF to the world market, a vast amount of capital for a bush army, moving completely undetected, untaxed, and unrecorded. In return, an army's worth of munitions, fuel, food, and medicine flowed back.

The United Nations banned Nassour and 130 others from traveling to or from Liberia in an effort to stem the tide of diamonds moving so easily from the RUF into the world market, and adopted Security Council Resolution 1343 on May 7, 2001, in an attempt to shut down one of the many branches of the illicit pipeline. Among other provisions, it banned countries from importing any diamonds from Liberia, regardless of whether they originated in Liberia or not; imposed military sanctions and travel sanctions on people like Nassour believed to be involved in the arms-for-gems scheme; and required the Liberian government to expel any RUF fighters seeking refuge in the country.

The list of those affected by the travel ban read like a “Who's Who” of the whole Sierra Leone melodrama. Besides Nassour, the list included Sam Bokarie, better known as Major General Mosquito, an RUF battle-group commander who fell out of favor with the RUF leadership in early 2001 and fled to Liberia. Mosquito was an instrumental middleman in moving diamonds out of Sierra Leone. Also named was Victor Bout, the former KGB agent who owns and operates the complicated network of private planes that ships munitions and weapons to the RUF from Eastern Europe. Wealthy Lebanese businessman Talal El-Ndine was named as well; he was the inner circle's paymaster. Ibrahim Bah was on the list, as was Nassour's cousin, Samiah Osailly, another Antwerp diamond broker.