Blood Diamonds (33 page)

Not everyone agreed with this approach, including De Beers, still the most powerful name in diamonds. Bruised by allegations that it had been complicit in conflict-diamond trafficking during the 1990s, particularly by association with its fictional doppelganger in the DiCaprio movie, the company was as determined as ever to support strong measures to wipe out the illicit commerce, if only for the sake of public perception.

“Providing confidence about where these special symbols that mark moments in our lives come from is integral to their enduring value,” wrote De Beers chairman Nicky Oppenheimer in a Bloomberg op-ed in 2009, adding that he would have preferred the Kimberley Process take more “decisive action” against Zimbabwe.
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Bowing to international pressure, the KP temporarily banned diamonds from Marange, but allowed the government to continue mining and stockpiling them until a KP monitoring team could determine whether it had ended abuses and complied with other demands. The ban was lifted in 2010 after Mugabe's government agreed to partner with private investors who promised mining would be done with respect for human rights, paving the way for Zimbabwe to sell a cache of more than a million carats. But the KP seems to have been the only organization to believe this promise. The New York–based RapNet, one of the world's largest private diamond trading networks, run by Martin Rapaport, an outspoken Orthodox Jew who railed against the KP's gutless response to the situation, called for a boycott against Marange diamonds even if they have Kimberley Process certificates.
He threatened to expel from his trade network anyone caught dealing in them.

Despite this public, intra-industry vote of no confidence in the Kimberley Process, its chair unilaterally lifted all remaining restrictions on Zimbabwean diamonds in June 2011. Two months later, Human Rights Watch issued another report of rampant violence and abuses against unlicensed miners in Marange, this time at the hands of both the government's and its private partners' armed security forces.

“Zimbabwe police and private security guards employed by mining companies in the Marange diamond fields are shooting, beating and unleashing attack dogs on poor, local unlicensed miners,” the report reads. “Some members of the international diamond monitoring body, known as the Kimberley Process, have tried to argue that conditions in the areas controlled by joint ventures are not abusive, and that those diamonds should be certified and allowed onto international markets. But Human Rights Watch has found, on the contrary, evidence of serious abuse by private security guards patrolling the joint venture territory.”
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The report also quoted Tiseke Kasambala, Human Rights Watch's senior Africa researcher, as saying, “The ongoing abuses at Marange underscore the need for the Kimberley Process to address human rights instead of capitulating to abusive governments and irresponsible companies. . . . The Kimberley Process appears to have lost touch with its mission to ensure that blood diamonds don't make their way to consumers.”
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Two of the KP's main architects even abandoned the program. Ian Smillie, one of the founders of Partnership Africa Canada, resigned in 2009 over what he called the scheme's “pretence that failure is success.” In his 2010 book,
Blood on the Stone: Greed, Corruption,
and War in the Global Diamond Trade,
Smillie expanded on the concerns that he shares with many people:

And in December 2011, Global Witness—which was the first organization to bring the issue of conflict diamonds to light in 1998—followed Smillie's lead, calling the Kimberley Process a lie and a failure in how it has reacted to Zimbabwe. The group quit the KP over fears that the Mugabe government would use its diamond
revenue to fund a crackdown on political opponents in the months and weeks leading to 2012's elections: “We don't want to lend our credibility to, or be associated with, a scheme that could very well end up having blood on its hands if all this cash that KP has endorsed is used to fuel violence,” said Annie Dunneback, the organization's senior campaigner. “We don't want to be a part of that.”
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Rather than the watchdog the KP insists that it is, it's actually proven to be a handy cover for dictators, insurgent groups, and smugglers moving goods from their origins as blood diamonds to the corner jewelry store, where its certificates assure even concerned consumers that they are buying legitimate diamonds for their loved ones.

It's the same in Sierra Leone, Jango told me.

“I will show you,” he said. “When do we want to go to Koidu?”

 

I WANTED TO LEAVE immediately, but Jango turned out to be no better at finding cheap private transportation than I had. Inflation had grown from 12 percent to more than 16 percent between 2009 and 2010, and the leone was only half as valuable against the dollar as it had been during my previous visit.
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The weaker currency combined with higher prices for everything from gas to food to lodging makes Sierra Leone more expensive than in the past.

So, opting for a local approach to travel, very early one morning we made our way to a motor park to be shoehorned into a decrepit bus for the seven-hour drive to Koidu. Designed for twenty-five passengers, the bus wouldn't budge until at least fifty were packed aboard, with children counting as half. It's what made it cheap, at the equivalent of about seven dollars. Luggage was wedged under the seats and piled in the aisles, along with spare parts for the bus, livestock, and sacks of grain. As we waited in a humid downpour
to see if the springs would crack or the rivets pop with each new suitcase jammed into place, the bus's leaden, sweaty air felt like a disease incubator. I quickly learned that the only way to endure the ride was to pick one position you hoped wouldn't constrict your circulation too badly for the next quarter of a day and meditate yourself into some happy place in a far-off land. You could move only once in that period, during the halfway stop for lunch, water, and fresh air. It took at least ten minutes for the passengers to untwist themselves from their neighbors and disembark.

Apart from the discomfort, the trip was uneventful until the second half of the journey, when the only road to Koidu degraded and became full of potholes. With every lurch, passengers cracked heads. Combined with the limb-numbing fetal position I was forced to sit in and the claustrophobia of being sealed in by windows closed due to the rain, the roller-coaster jerking began to make me stir-crazy. The feeling was shared by others, and I soon became aware, over the din of eight children sharing the seat behind me, of people arguing somewhere toward the front of the bus. I caught only snatches of the conversation, but it was clear that two men were shouting in frustration about the condition of the road. I clearly heard someone yell, “You have all the diamonds coming from Kono, but look at the schools, look at the hospital, look at this road! There is no power, there is no transportation. Where is the money going?”

Getting off the bus in Koidu was like arriving in a frontier town in an Old West movie, where the strangers stand on the train platform and eye the dusty streets and wonder what sort of trouble lies ahead. The longtime RUF stronghold was still filled with former RUF fighters, including many desperate for work. In the course of our stay, Jango recognized dozens of rebel veterans, including
some he took pains to avoid encountering. I found myself doing mental math on everyone I interacted with: Men apparently within five years of my age I presumed to have been officer-grade RUF; odds were good that those in their late teens and early twenties had been child soldiers. It was strange to be deep in the Sierra Leone provinces again and have nothing to fear from kids up to age 17—they were too young to have fought in the war.

Koidu is loosely arranged like a wagon wheel, with the hub being a massive cotton tree known in the dark days as the “chopping tree” because its gnarly knee-high roots proved perfect for performing amputations. The city had been thoroughly pillaged as if by wild animals, but only partly put back together. It was easy to get the impression that the war had ended just the week before.

Our first task once we got settled was to find a Lebanese diamond merchant to help us get the lay of the land. We cold-called on a few, but none were willing to speak with journalists; we would learn later that the Lebanese did not get along as well with the Sierra Leoneans in Koidu as they had in Kenema ten years before. With unemployment and poverty so high, the Lebanese were regarded as foreign vultures who were exploiting Koidu's diamond wealth, stealing it from those to whom it rightly belonged. The Lebanese, of course, had been a mainstay of Sierra Leonean diamond trading for decades; nevertheless a strong scent of distrust hung in the air that we would come to understand more fully in the coming days but that at the moment lent an uneasy vibe to our door-to-door wandering. Finally, one merchant told us to find Kassim Basma, their elder statesman and chair of the local Lebanese community.

We found his office hidden in a maze of dirty alleyways jammed with engine parts from a neighboring auto repair shop,
and random, half-empty rooms furnished only with cracked and forgotten furniture. In the anteroom where we waited for a Russian flunky to announce our presence, one of a set of rusted handcuffs was locked to the iron grate covering the window. The other cuff dangled below, leading one to morbid speculation about what might have been done here during the war, before this became an elderly man's office. With Basma, I was hoping to repeat my success in talking to Fawaz S. Fawaz in Kenema during my last visit to the country. Though he'd been cagey about showing off any diamonds, Fawaz had helped us get our bearings in a strange place.

“Ah, but Fawaz is dead,” Basma said when I dropped the only name I knew in the West African Lebanese diamond community. “If it's the same man I'm thinking about, he died of a heart attack not too long ago. S. Fawaz, yes? From Kenema? Too bad. He was a young man.”

I didn't remember him as particularly young, but I did vividly recall Fawaz's towering pile of Marlboro butts and how quickly he added to them; I figured we must have been talking about the same person. If so, his demise didn't surprise me, but I didn't say so. Basma was also chain-smoking. The largest thing on his desk was a joke lighter the size of a pocket dictionary.

Basma was friendly, but wary of our questions. Like his late colleague, he insisted that business was slow and that there were no diamonds to display. As Mike and I continued to chat with him, doing our best to be disarming, he seemed to warm up. Like others who had described Kono's mines to us, he complained that many of the old surface mines were washed up and competition was fierce among the Lebanese to trade with those who were still producing stones. The big exploration companies working the Koidu Kimberlite Project and the Thunderball Mine didn't bother
with men like Basma; they took care of their own exports and didn't need him. He dealt more with small-scale diggers like those we would later see at the Number 11 mine, men hired by miners licensed by the government to explore a certain area for diamonds. When the transactions were made, he provided the seller with a receipt from a big notebook he kept, the cornerstone of what the Kimberley Process called “internal controls” on diamonds' origins. The Government Gold and Diamond Office issues Basma the Kimberley Process certificates when he travels to Freetown to export the goods and pay his taxes; should a monitor show up to question him about the details of his parcels, as he said happened from time to time, he referred them to the notebook.

“The Kimberley Process works properly,” he said. “It decreased smuggling and increased exports.”

After a quick glance at his Russian friend, who sat silently in a chair next to the desk, he added, “It's not bad, actually, as long as you're a law-abiding citizen.”

I thought this an odd statement and took the chance to press him. “Isn't it true, though, that there are still people selling diamonds who can't prove where they've come from? Or who aren't licensed to mine? Or who may have smuggled diamonds from, say, Côte d'Ivoire?”

He didn't balk as I'd expected.

“Yes, yes, it's true,” he said. “But I have not seen any Ivoirian diamonds lately. Stones like that come in from Guinea.”

“What do you when you're offered stones like those?”

Basma smiled and held up his palms in a half-shrug as if to say, Let's not fool each other here.