Blood Diamonds (29 page)

“The fact of the matter is that to the consumer it's a very low-interest issue,” said Tom Shane, the American diamond importer. “Even with all the articles that have been written, we don't hear it in our stores being raised as an issue.”

Shane's employees, like many other jewelry retailers across the country, are prepared to answer questions about conflict diamonds, but as tradition would dictate, the issue is never openly acknowledged unless a customer asks about it specifically.

“We don't raise it and flaunt the fact that it's not a conflict stone any more than I would say that it's not stolen,” Shane said. “Why would it occur to them that it would be? It's not that we're ducking the issue in any way, shape, or form, but it's not something that's ever brought up, either by us or the customer.”

Even if customers were interested in where their diamonds come from, there's little they can do except take the word of the jeweler as to their origin, in much the same way that the jeweler takes the word of the Antwerp polisher, who takes the word of the broker, and so on. Although experts may be able to determine the origin of rough goods if given enough of a sample to peruse, it's virtually impossible for anyone to tell where a polished piece came from.

“To control the conflict stones, you have to start at the source,” Shane said. “The integrity of the system has to start at the source. You can't go backwards and verify. It's a one-way street, and that's just the honest fact of what we're dealing in.”

 

CLEARLY, THE BIGGEST BENEFITS of peace will be to those who currently have no future at all and never will if the situation is allowed to stand. Children who grew up learning how to kill one another with smuggled Ukrainian machine guns can and should have the opportunity to become the generous, likeable, and well-humored people that many of their countrymen have proven they can be.

In spite of my disinclination, I often found myself liking many of the RUF members I met, a situation that can boggle the mind if you think too deeply about it. In Kailahun, I often found myself laughing at the jokes and antics of a fighter who called himself T-Ray, a shrapnel-scarred man who always carried a .45-caliber pistol in his left hand as if it were part of his body. In one sense, it was terrifying to be caught so off guard by feelings of natural friendship with a man who admitted killing “dozens” of people during his years with the RUF. Shouldn't I be hating this man with every ounce of my being? I'd think, in moments when I was suddenly crushed with shame at having laughed out loud at something he'd said, praying that no one had seen me.

But later I realized that the fact that we could find common ground at all is a source of immense hope. I fantasized about a time when Sierra Leone was at peace and I returned not to report on war or death, but for the sake of a vacation. The only helicopters would be the commercial ones flying back and forth between Aberdeen and Lungi Airport, and the children wandering Lumley
Beach Road would be burdened with schoolbooks instead of ammunition. The UN would be gone, along with most of the street crooks and hookers. Those who are today doomed cripples and hopeless amputees will have received proper support and medical care from the government in the hope that one day they'll be able to support themselves and their families. The forlorn and shell-shocked would be replaced with tourists, local families, businessmen, and the everyday worker-bees of a normal economy, the components of a successful and peaceful country.

Such visions would come only fleetingly, though. Invariably, they'd dissolve into the chaotic reality of Kailahun, where one of every twenty people I encountered were only days or weeks away from a painful death by starvation or disease and where no one went anywhere without their Kalashnikov. Other memories would flood my mind, defiant images that seemed to mock my fantasies of peace: Sween and Lahia were dead, I was sure. Dead of tetanus, and their images were never far from my mind's work: Lahia's eyes working against imminent paralysis to fix on me, saying most certainly “help me”; Lieutenant Sween's fear of death so palpable that you could smell it in that dank room, his chest rising and falling with short breaths of despair, knowing that he was doomed to die, painfully; Lieutenant Colonel Senesi laughing at his lie about never having seen diamonds before; Ismael Dalramy trying hard, and failing, to show me that he can dress himself without hands; the baby with no left foot, the one sacrificed to a Guinean mortar; the terrifying visage I literally bumped into in Kailahun, a clitoral-circumcision victim adorned in black-dyed palm grass and a too-small carved mask depicting a screaming woman; a truckload of children carrying AK-47s met on the four-wheel path to Koindu, eyes vacant enough to hypnotize; the St. Nicholas twinkle in the eyes of Jacob
Singer, eager to pay the RUF for their goods and get home to Australia; Andy Bone at the DTC, fretting over the impacts to his industry; the World Trade Center towers blooming like beautiful gray flowers of death.

The end of the war only provided a blip of hope, because in West Africa, something always seems to go wrong at the worst possible moment. Indeed, within weeks of peace being declared in Sierra Leone, LURD rebels in Liberia surrounded Monrovia and threatened to topple Charles Taylor's government. The situation promises to escalate and end badly, raising the question of how much pressure Taylor will put on his RUF compatriots to help quell the rebellion by again feeding him diamonds for cash.

When I dwelled on these thoughts, I realized that I would be a very old man if my vision of tranquility ever came true.

 

 

 

 

 

L
IKE MANY OTHERS who were amputated by the RUF, in 1996 Ismael Dalramy pleaded with his captors to kill him when he saw the fate that awaited him. But his death would not have served the RUF's political purpose. They amputated his arms to deliver the message that people without hands couldn't vote for those who opposed the RUF.

On May 14, 2002, Dalramy and hundreds of other amputees waited for hours in a hot long line to prove them wrong. When it was his turn to vote, he marked the ballot with his toe, only one remarkable facet of one of the most remarkable days in Sierra Leone's history.
¹

When the United Nations finally succeeded in disarming the vast majority of those fighting in Sierra Leone's jungles, entire swaths of the country that had for the past decade been closed to anyone without a machine gun were once again open for travel, at least to UN monitors and humanitarian organizations. Only then was the destruction wrought by one of Africa's most brutal modern wars finally clear. Once thriving villages and towns had been erased from existence. Where there were formerly fields of cassava and simple farming habitations, there were now crude graves and weather-ravaged skeletons of homes and buildings. Human bones littered the roadsides. Tens of thousands of refugees clung to life all along the Sierra Leone border with Liberia and Guinea, starving, wounded, and diseased.

And still, diamonds brought weapons to the region. Less than two weeks after the election, 30 tons of rifles and ammunition were smuggled into Monrovia from Belgium through Nice, France. The consignment was paid for by Aziz Nassour, the Lebanese Al Qaeda go-between, and the arms were turned over to Sam “Mosquito” Bokarie, the former RUF field commander. Little more than a month later, another shipment of 15 tons arrived. Even though Al Qaeda's organized diamond deals were in disarray, RUF leaders, Qaeda operatives, and corrupt government leaders (including Charles Taylor's wife, Jewel Taylor) met in Burkina Faso in June 2002 to discuss how to continue their diamonds-for-guns schemes. The war may have been over, but it's clear that Sierra Leone's diamonds were still being smuggled away and used to buy weapons.
²
Exploitation of the mines by sundry smugglers and criminals continued to be a problem that wouldn't soon go away.

With the disarmament completed in Kailahun District, UNHCR kicked its relief efforts into high gear in early 2002 only to find that it didn't have enough trucks to move the refugees swiftly to repatriation
camps. The effort was made more difficult when Liberian president Charles Taylor declared a state of emergency on February 8, 2002, in the wake of renewed fighting around Monrovia against rebel forces of Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy. Sierra Leoneans who'd fled to Liberia to escape the RUF now fled back across the border with thousands of Liberians. Between February 8 and February 12, 5,000 Sierra Leoneans and 6,000 Liberians seeking asylum straggled into the border towns. This was only a small portion of Sierra Leone refugees still stranded in neighboring countries, however. In all, UNHCR operated six camps in Liberia with approximately 35,000 refugees from Sierra Leone. Another 55,000 Sierra Leoneans were camped in Guinea and 8,000 more in The Gambia. The organization was only capable of moving about 1,200 people per week from the border of Liberia to temporary camps within Sierra Leone, and another 500 per week from Guinea.
³

By March 2002, 47,000 fighters—both RUF and Kamajors—had been disarmed in Sierra Leone, 25,000 weapons had been destroyed, and UNAMSIL's mandate had been extended by the Security Council until September 2002.
⁴
But the number that carried the most significance was the 2.27 million people who'd registered to vote in the May 14 election, in itself an astonishing count considering what happened the last time Sierra Leoneans cast their votes. The question that hung over the city streets and village paths of Sierra Leone: What exactly would these people do? Would they vote with their hearts, as they'd done in 1996, the election that saw President Kabbah voted into office only to be run out on a wave of violence and amputation? Or would they succumb to voting for the reviled Revolutionary United Front Party in the hopes of avoiding another disaster, frightened into giving their vote to killers and thieves by the party's thinly veiled threat of a campaign slogan: “Only the RUFP can ensure peace.”

Given the state of Sierra Leone by the time elections came up on May 14, it's hardly surprising that one of the UN monitors tasked with overseeing the vote told a reporter that “it's nothing short of miraculous” that the election was conducted without violence and in a manner that was consistently fair and trouble-free. This sentiment was hardly melodramatic; in fact, this characterization may have been understated. In the end, 80 percent of registered voters—constituting an estimated 40 percent of the population—showed up at the polls and 70 percent of them voted for Kabbah to be reelected to another five-year term. Considering what happened the last time elections were held, when hundreds of thousands of people were mutilated by the RUF, pictures of amputees struggling to cast their votes with smooth stumps were nothing less than a reaffirmation of the human spirit.

The contest itself was no less dramatic. The favored candidate was President Kabbah, representing the Sierra Leone People's Party. He was widely favored over the competition, although in truth there was little the man could point to in his past that qualified him to lead the nation. His previous presidency was interrupted after only a few months in office and it was during his tenure that the RUF overran Freetown not once, but twice. Kabbah proved himself a statesman by adhering to the world community's desire to face the RUF with ECOMOG rather than a force of mercenaries, thus winning Sierra Leone favor with the World Bank, IMF, the United Nations, and ECOWAS. Because of this—as well as the fact that the field of competitors running against him collectively had less to offer—the voters and the UN administrators who wanted to see him reelected were willing to overlook the man's other flaws, such as his approval of a series of extrajudicial executions of suspected AFRC coup-plotters once he was returned to office in 1998.

Facing Kabbah on the ballot was the AFRC's main coup-plotter himself, Johnny Paul Koroma, the junta's former leader who campaigned as “J.P.,” a born-again Christian. The man who had been exiled to Liberia at gunpoint by RUF leaders Mosquito and Sessay, J.P. claims to have found God and been saved; his religious conversion compelled him to return to Sierra Leone to preach reconciliation and run for president. As
New York Times
reporter Nori Onitshi wrote in May 2002, Koroma was a notably different man, having fired his old security detail—led by a heavy man named Hiroshima Bomb, who wore skirts, a bowler, and jewelry made of machine-gun ammunition—in favor of suited men with black sunglasses.

Rounding out the bizarre roster of presidential hopefuls was the RUFP's last-minute, lame-duck candidate, a hitherto unknown RUF member named Pallo Bangura. Having failed to secure Sankoh's release, the RUF apparently had difficulty finding a replacement. Gabrill Massaqoui and Omrie Golley, the RUF's military and civilian spokesmen, respectively, both turned down the opportunity and grew more and more scarce around Freetown, perhaps realizing that the RUF was singing its swan song. Bangura was hustled onto the ballot at the last moment. His platform consisted of a single plank—his claim that he didn't know anything about the RUF's crimes against humanity.

On election day, the vote fell as most suspected it would: Kabbah received 70 percent. The next closest finisher was Ernest Koroma, a candidate of the All People's Congress, who rode the party's name recognition to finish with 22 percent of the vote.

J.P. Koroma—the bloodthirsty junta leader, diamond thief, dime-store warlord, and now man of God—came in a distant third with 6 percent of the vote.

As for the RUF, their hopes disintegrated in the face of endemic disorganization, failing to receive enough votes to even register
beyond pollsters' margins of error. Their support, such that it was, collapsed everywhere. They even failed to earn a significant percentage of votes in Makeni, their northern heartland.