Blood Diamonds (31 page)

“There's no way,” he told me emphatically. I didn't need to ask why. Getting diamonds on credit from the RUF was to take your life in your hands. If anything were to happen to a single stone between Koidu and Freetown and back, Jango would be dead before week's end.

When I finally boarded a helicopter to take me to Lungi Airport and my flight to Ghana and eventually home, the trio of smugglers had reached an impasse. Valdy sulked under the banana trees near the Solar's outdoor bar, talking to no one and angrily smoking one cigarette after another. Singer was seen more frequently in the company of hookers than smugglers, and Jango only came around to hang out with me and other journalists rather than those he supposedly worked for.

In spite of the fact that it seemed they'd failed to smuggle diamonds out of Sierra Leone, I was under no illusion that smuggling had been eradicated, or even made appreciably more difficult with the coming of peace and the adoption of new import/export protocols. When I read about the rumored 1,000-carat find, I knew that if someone was determined enough to smuggle it away, it would be done, even though the logistics would be more difficult; after all, the thing would be the size of a softball if it existed. Something that big would be hard to pass around the diamond centers without drawing a great deal of attention . . . until it was cut into smaller stones, that is. Then, like all the blood diamonds that had been smuggled out of Sierra Leone before it, they would be anonymous and untraceable, as elusive as Osama bin Laden and impossible to identify.

Stones stolen from Sierra Leone at the tip of a machete and the barrel of an AK-47 could literally be anywhere, from safehouses in Monrovia to safe deposit boxes in Belgium to the display cases of jewelry stores in the neighborhood mall. Until international export controls such as those suggested by the Clean Diamond Act and the Kimberley Process are implemented and enforced to screen legitimate diamonds from those tainted by warfare and brutality—and until peace comes and takes hold in impoverished, desperate countries where diamonds are found—there will be no way to tell whether or not a cherished diamond ring was once washed in the blood of innocent Africans.

If nothing else, the story of Sierra Leone's diamond war has proven unequivocally that the world ignores Africa and her problems at its peril. Just like global commerce and the widening reach of terrorism, events far from home often have very tangible impacts. Sierra Leone has shown the world that there is no longer any such thing as an “isolated, regional conflict.”

Perhaps there never was.

JULY 2011

“YOU WANT TO SEE STONES? Here, I will show them to you.”

He was a heavy man, sweating and squinting in the sun. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small paper parcel, carefully shaking into his palm three tiny diamonds that, considering the wide, clear-cut moonscape of the mine on whose banks we stood, looked rather paltry. Bare-chested men with shovels and shake-shakes were visible for hundreds of yards in every direction, splashing in muddy water and moving piles of dirt, dwarfed below a veritable mountain of mine tailings nearly 100 feet high. This was the Number 11 mine on the outskirts of Koidu, and it was considered tapped out as far back as the 1960s by the state-run National Diamond Mining Company, which chopped down the trees, dredged the soil, and left the pile of tailings to be reclaimed long
ago by a carpet of grass and saplings. Although this dump pile was officially abandoned, the government donated it to the men who worked it, almost all of them former RUF soldiers and feared killers. The object was to keep them off the streets of Koidu and prevent them from terrorizing the citizens.

“All these guys are fighting for their survival,” said Mohammed Komba, the Kono District youth coordinator who'd smoothed the way for my visit and knew that this was the only job available for most of them. “It keeps them away from crime and armed robbery.”

Just barely, it seemed. As veterans of the civil war, most of the men toiling in the mine were in their thirties and early forties, and many bore the scars of their time fighting in the bush. They weren't pleased at the sight of visiting white journalists, and my colleague Mike Seamans and I braved a few angry flare-ups resulting from our aimed cameras. Like people elsewhere in Sierra Leone, they were sensitive to the fact that somewhere along the line, we were paid to be there and that made our lot in life a far sight better than theirs. For these men, who once commanded field units and enjoyed the comparatively lavish lifestyles blood diamonds bestowed on them, survival now depended on finding shards of diamonds overlooked fifty years ago. Knowing that they can turn—and have turned in the recent past—to strong-arm tactics when diamonds weren't being found put us on edge. In fact, the pit boss who proudly displayed his measly diamond chips quickly stuffed them back in his pocket and retreated to a nearby shack when I tried to photograph them. He'd assumed I was a buyer and wasn't happy to learn I was a reporter. Komba nervously watched our backs for signs that the men's indignation might turn to outright anger, and when things became tense, he negotiated a series of hasty payoffs to placate the former fighters.

These men were something of a concern in Koidu. Sierra Leone's civil war had been over for nearly ten years when I could finally return and visit the Kono District, its wealthiest diamond area, which had been impossible to travel to in 2001. Kono was also home to the country's largest concentration of former combatants, the majority of them unemployed and restless, and while most bands of RUF soldiers had long ago broken up and blended back into daily life, these men—all from the same unit and still loyal to their local commander—had not.

It was risky to visit the mine. Despite Koidu's reputation as Sierra Leone's crown jewel for diamond extraction, poverty there was at a dangerous, desperate level. Although the country has agreed to international standards for controlling diamond mining to avoid smuggling and theft, in some areas of the Kono region mining still occurred off the books and even government monitors dared not go there.
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Some wise soul in Freetown saw the utility in simply giving this gang an old mine to plumb for leftovers—technically in exchange for guarding the tailings dump from unauthorized freelance diggers, but as everyone acknowledged, more to keep them occupied. Everyone knew it was only a temporary fix. This mine, like most other surface mines in the area, was all but depleted of treasure. The men would eventually dig through the whole mountain of tailings and wonder what's next. But for now, the scheme seemed to work.

“You can work here for years and get nothing,” Komba said, summing up artisanal diamond-prospecting in a nutshell. “Then you can go tomorrow and find something. If they didn't find them, they wouldn't be here.”

Just as in the past, the men toiling in these mines can sometimes hear distant echoes of explosions rippling through the jungle from
the direction of the city. This time, however, the explosions are from commerce, not warfare. With surface mines largely tapped out by the RUF a decade ago, almost all of the wealth in Koidu is held by a pair of international companies that own kimberlite complexes and guard their holdings behind razor wire and with heavily armed private security forces: South Africa–based Koidu Holdings runs the largest operation, Koidu Kimberlite Project, and a conglomerate of international investors runs a smaller site called the Thunderball Mine. Rumor has it that the best restaurant in the provinces is inside the Koidu Holdings compound, as is a state-of-the-art medical clinic and a well-stocked company store. We don't know for sure, however; like almost everyone else in Koidu, we weren't allowed inside. Outside the compound, poverty, unemployment, disease, and crime were the order of the day.

Companies like Koidu Holdings look for diamonds differently than the ragged-looking men at the Number 11 mine. They blast with dynamite down into the earth, following the paths of two kimberlite pipes, and use bulldozers and earthmovers to extract rocks and pulverize kimberlitic boulders. No one uses a shake-shake at Koidu Holdings, whose compound is near the outskirts of town and is visible from the downtown market. Dynamite shakes the rafters for miles in all directions.

The Number 11 mine isn't completely without mining machinery; there's a working Caterpillar backhoe parked in the middle of the dirt field, but it's not being used. The cost to rent it and fuel it is $1,500 per day, we're told, and no one in sight even remotely has so much money. So they use shovels and dig in its shadow.

We left once everyone was mollified with the equivalent of about $30. If the former RUF crowd that had gravitated around us divided it up evenly—which I doubted given that it all went into the
pocket of the pit boss with the diamonds—they would each end up with about 50 cents. Everyone seemed to think that was a reasonable fee for the pictures we took, and we were gone before anyone had the chance to change his mind.

Anyone who doubts that the gap between diamonds' marketing mythos as symbols of love and the realities of their origins was as wide as ever in 2011—even without warfare to exacerbate the difference—need only spend a few days in Koidu, a run-down collection of cinderblock buildings, mosques, and market kiosks still teetering in the wake of war, held together with bush sticks and clotheslines. Throughout the RUF war, Koidu got the worst of it and has yet to recover. Overrun and occupied by rebels practically throughout the 1990s, the town remained too dangerous to visit the last time I was here in 2001, even as peace was being negotiated. Rebels plundered the diamond mines and even dismantled houses to dig through the foundations in search of stones. More than anywhere in Sierra Leone, Koidu has proved worth kicking over the dirt at one's feet; diamonds can be found everywhere, which might explain why the roads have never been paved.

The point was made early in my visit. In getting from my guesthouse on the edge of town to a Lebanese money changer in the center, I'd tried to outrun a gathering rainstorm but got caught in the downpour on the back of a hired motorcycle only about halfway there. Drenched, I waited out the deluge under a blue tarp strung over an alley with a knot of locals trying to keep their cigarettes dry. Two boys occupied themselves with a broom, pushing accumulated water out of the tarp overhead every few minutes, while the rest of us watched the hand-dug sewer paralleling the road fill with a muddy torrent of runoff. I was amazed at the volume of water that, like a flash flood in a desert arroyo, filled and
soon overflowed the knee-deep trench. The sight captivated the others for a different reason.

“You see,” said a man at my elbow, “the rain will loosen the precious stones. Many people will follow the stream and look for diamonds.”

Considering the flotilla of garbage being borne on the tide, it seemed an unlikely source of the kind of gemstones one would see at Tiffany's, but the man assured me it was true.

“You know the creek?” he said, referring to a stagnant cesspool a bit farther up the road. I referred to it as the Urinal based on how I'd seen the locals use it every time I drove past. He claimed it was the source of more than 700 carats of diamonds gifted to England when Sierra Leone gained its independence fifty years before.

At the moment, that was especially hard to believe. Just as during my last trip, I was staggered by the degree of poverty and desperation possible in a place that produced millions of dollars' worth of precious gems from its very ground. But at least last time, there was an excuse—ten years of otherworldly warfare and inhumane butchery provided an easy means of explaining the misery.

Not anymore. The RUF was long gone, at least from the surface. Its leaders were either dead or convicted of war crimes by the UNBACKED Special Court for Sierra Leone. Charles Taylor, captured in 2006 after an attempt to escape from his home in exile in Nigeria, was awaiting a verdict at The Hague. Rank-and-file soldiers had drifted back into society. From what I could tell, the men at the Number 11 mine were the exception in that they were still loosely affiliated with one another, but whether that was for some vague future revolutionary purpose or just due to enduring kinship was impossible to say.

Yet there was clearly a tense frustration in the air around Koidu, a vague feeling of trouble brewing that took some time to identify as
a deep-seated sense of injustice. In a place like Sierra Leone it's sometimes too easy to take such a thing for granted. But gradually it sank in for me that I wasn't alone in struggling to understand why—with regular TNT explosions rumbling the ground, announcing that Koidu Holdings was unearthing more of the country's wealth within sight of where I stood shivering in the alley—there was still no electricity, no jobs, and no adequate health care for most people in a place teeming with riches.

These disparities, and these conditions, are identical to what led to the RUF war in the first place.

 

I LIT OUT FOR KOIDU soon after arriving in Freetown, my first trip to West Africa since I left in 2001. After ten years, I thought, this was the perfect time to return and answer a question that had pestered me since I left, one that I pondered earlier in these pages. What would a peaceful Sierra Leone do with itself? Could it rise to the potential—in its people, in its resources, in its natural beauty—that so impressed me a decade before? Could it take control of its future, having learned the harrowing lessons of its past?

From afar, it was tempting to get the impression that all was fine. No instances of large-scale violence had occurred since the 2002 election that marked the end of the war. Taylor is the last of the main actors to be dealt with, and though a verdict has yet to be announced in his long-running war crimes trial, few are worried that he'll be given any second chances to prove himself as a statesman. The Sierra Leone Army had been so modernized and professionalized that the country sent soldiers on peacekeeping missions to Darfur, Sudan, and Somalia, setting milestones in the country's military history. While politics sometimes resulted in headlines about riots and isolated unrest, the government appeared stable and business was booming. Diamond mining and other mineral
extraction began again soon after the war, and—until the global financial crisis hit in 2008, dealing a blow to luxuries markets everywhere—diamond exports had been growing steadily, from $42 million in 2002 to $142 million in 2007. (They are again on the rebound as the recession fades, with $109 million exported in 2010, a 28 percent leap from the previous year—the latest figures available at this writing.) Competing with diamonds as a source of revenue are gold, iron ore, bauxite, and rutile, all of which have lured their own unique extractive industries. Sierra Leone's total exports have climbed from $65 million in 2000 to $341.2 million in 2010, an impressive 48 percent increase over 2009. Oil was recently discovered offshore, adding to the country's already impressive portfolio of riches.
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