Blood Diamonds (34 page)

“Look, if you have illicit people coming here, you can't refuse, because then they will smuggle it,” he said. “But if
you
buy it, as an official exporter, you can legalize it.
Some
body will buy it if not me.”

This was an unexpected admission, so I asked him to explain. Basma argued that buying stones of unknown origin and mixing them with legitimate diamonds for export was a means of cleaning up the black market, a unique argument that I'd never heard anyone try before. He seemed trying to convince me that the purpose of the Kimberley Process was to put all diamonds under an umbrella of legitimacy no matter where they came from. But before we could continue, his friend, who looked alarmed at the turn our conversation had taken, abruptly left the room. Basma sat back as if that signaled the end of our conversation. Thanking him for his time, we showed ourselves out.

The moment we stepped onto the street, a cop who was marching our way stopped us. It was nothing serious, a low-grade hassling that involved us explaining our presence in town, but the officer was humorless and stern and the angry interrogation had me wondering if we had crossed some invisible local line. I was pretty sure it wasn't a random stop, considering that white-skinned people were fairly common in Koidu and we hadn't turned many other heads. Maybe we were being paranoid, but we assumed from that point on that certain people were keeping their eyes on us.

Before I left for Sierra Leone, I knew that I would find myself in situations that, if less dire than before, would still be strange and trying. The story had changed in ten years, and it was no longer about the RUF's greed-fueled program of murder for control of diamonds; it was now about the government's almost total inaction, in the RUF's absence, in closing the yawning gulf between the value of Sierra Leone's natural resources and the crushing poverty
that continues to cripple the country. Moreover, it's about the danger that situation poses. The country has been here before, and the outcome was cataclysmic. It is no mystery what led to one of the worst wars of the past fifty years. The government's own Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigated the causes and came to an unambiguous conclusion: “The Commission finds that the central cause of the war was endemic greed, corruption and nepotism that deprived the nation of its dignity and reduced most people to a state of poverty.”
¹⁴

While I expected to confront that poverty up close in an attempt to understand why the lesson hadn't been learned, I did not expect to find myself clad in OR scrubs observing an operation in a hospital that has no power, no running water, and no modern equipment—an experience I had at the suggestion of a local doctor so that I could see just how great the divide was between Koidu's poverty and the wealth being stripped out of its land just outside the city limits.

Dr. Bailor Barrie is a 2004 graduate of Sierra Leone's only medical school and the founder, along with American Dr. Dan Kelly, of Wellbody, an organization that runs a free clinic for treating wartime amputees and their families. I met Barrie not at the clinic, but at Koidu's main hospital, where we'd come for personal reasons rather than professional ones: It seemed that the bus ride from Freetown had felled one of our small band. Jango had been fine when he got on the bus, but seven hours later, his eyeballs were crusted over like Scotch eggs and he was shivering from chills and throwing up bright green bile the consistency of paint. He had malaria.

The day before our arrival in Koidu, the
New York Times
ran a promising article speculating that infant mortality rates would
soon improve in Sierra Leone, thanks to a new, free health care program for pregnant women and children that had begun in 2010 and was being temporarily bankrolled by foreign donors. There is no such thing as socialized medicine or education in Sierra Leone. Aside from a handful of free clinics run by charities or foreign donors like Wellbody, even so much as scheduling an appointment with a doctor costs money, as Jango discovered when he was told he'd have to pay in advance just to get in line. And since health care is one of the many things Sierra Leoneans cannot afford, most women never see a doctor throughout their pregnancies and give birth at home. The
Times
piece was a cheerful story that expressed hope for a brighter, healthier future for newborns and mothers with high-risk pregnancies.

Our experience, however, was less cheerful than the article had led us to expect. For one thing, although the new program waived
official
fees charged by the hospital, it did nothing to address a long list of unofficial payments for everything from clean sheets to blood transfusions. As Alicia Lay, one of several American medical students who worked at the hospital as part of their study of tropical medicine, explained, the money goes not to the hospital, but to whoever collects the “fee.” It's one of the most common forms of corruption and graft encountered in Sierra Leone—the random shakedown. It happens everywhere from the airport to the Freetown ATM, where the armed security guard expects a few bills for watching your back while you conduct your transaction. And heavily funded new medical program or no, it happens in the hospitals as well. In fact, we passed a sign taped to the wall outside one of the wards reading: “Notice! All deliveries are free. All Caesarean sections are free. Available drugs at the maternity are free. Therefore, patients are advice [
sic
] not to buy drugs from the nurses. By Management.”

When Lay and her colleagues introduced us to Barrie, I immediately recognized his voice. He had been one of the passengers on the bus arguing about the injustice of Koidu's sad state considering the millions earned in diamond export taxes. Eager to pick up the conversation anew, he equated the situation to low-grade everyday graft, except on a much larger scale. The reason people go without medical care is the same reason entire communities are left without electricity—somewhere up the chain, someone is making off with what's owed to those on the ground floor.

“My own personal view is that the government is corrupt,” he said. “The money [from diamond revenues meant for communities] goes into their pockets or their bank accounts. Kono is the wealthiest district in the country, but we don't even have a college.”

The hospital was a fitting place for this conversation. The one-story government facility of concrete wards was a “hospital” only in that doctors and sick people frequented it. There were no X-ray, MRI, or CAT-scan machines, because those require electricity and the hospital has none. A collection of battery-powered ultrasound devices—which could have been recharged at any of the local kiosks in town that rent plug-in time for cell phones—sat on a shelf unused because no one knew how to operate them. Instruments were sanitized in an industrial pressure cooker heated on a propane burner; and because the plumbing didn't work, the water came from a hand pump in the courtyard via bucket brigade, as did the water for flushing toilets and washing surgeons' hands. It's too risky to give surgery patients general anesthesia, Lay said, because they can't intubate patients who stop breathing. The hospital has no pulse oximeters to ensure the blood is receiving sufficient oxygen.

The excuse for all this deficency is that the government has no money to pay for improvements and modern equipment, an
argument that's hard to buy with round-the-clock diamond production happening fewer than five miles away.

The following day, we accepted an invitation to watch a hysterectomy performed on a young woman who had a large fibrous mass around her uterus. As in the Wild West, a doctor had made the diagnosis by feeling her bloated abdomen and making an informed guess.

“Are you nervous?” I asked the surgeon, Dr. Bardu Abdulai.

“Of course not.”

“But isn't this sort of a high-risk surgery?”

“I do them all the time.”

With that, we entered the OR. The patient, a 23-year-old woman, lay welded with dread to the operating table as if she was about to be executed by lethal injection. “The Macarena” was playing on a transistor radio. Lay was assisting Abdulai with the operation, along with three or four nurses and assorted helpers playing the roles of anesthesiologist, orderlies, and whatever else ORs generally require. Some of them wore flip-flops, but the doctor at least wore white Crocs sandals, which kept the blood off his feet when it started dripping off the operating table. Mike and I, our faces largely obscured behind surgical masks, were wide-eyed. In our time as journalists, we'd each run the long, ultimately fruitless gauntlet of U.S. hospital bureaucrats, HIPPA regulations, and insurance companies in attempts to observe surgeries for various stories over the years and had never even dented the iron wall of privacy surrounding patients' rights, even when the patients wanted us to be there. Here, we weren't even asked to wash our hands before we began creeping between the doctors for a better shot with our cameras.

The patient was given sedatives and a local anesthetic, and just before the first incision was made, we were asked not to stand
between the patient and the window—the doctors needed the sunlight to see what they were doing.

 

IT WOULD BE ONE THING if Sierra Leone had to make do in this way because the country was truly hopeless, if there was nothing available except direct charity to pay for the nation's most basic needs. But regularly timed explosions serve as a constant reminder that Sierra Leone has more than enough resources to afford a more comfortable and dignified life for its people. Those resources, however, are sealed off from those living in Koidu by physical barriers and armed guards.

The Koidu Holdings project is a massive undertaking to excavate two kimberlite pipes known as K1 and K2. I'd never seen an industrial mine before and was awed by the scale of the operation. I got no closer than the locals, however; I was turned away at the gatehouse because I hadn't made an appointment in advance. Despite several phone calls made during my week's stay in Koidu to the company's media relations department—itself an odd concept in the heart of the West African jungle—no one was available to accommodate a reporter showing up unannounced. Company representatives vetted my professional credentials in the process. They asked me to give details about what I'd written about Koidu Holdings in the past, which included only one short article in
The Economist
about diamonds in general, in which I mentioned the company's scaled-down production (as well as that of many other diamond companies, including De Beers) during the global economic crisis. I went through the same process with representatives of the Thunderball Mine, who asked for references to my past work. After I pointed them to my professional website (which includes links and material related to this book), they initially gave me clearance to visit. But when our small fleet of hired motorcycles
arrived outside the barbed-wire fence surrounding the pit, the foreman and an armed security guard turned us away. Someone in the company had called from Freetown and nixed our appointment at the last moment.

While we waited for permission to visit Koidu Holdings, we were hassled again by the police, who followed us as we walked past the police station and peppered us with questions on our way to inquire at the mine. It was disconcerting enough that we decided to hire motorcycles to whisk us past that short section of road on our return. I chalked it up to underpaid civil servants trying to intimidate foreigners into paying a bribe, but Jango, more in tune with local subtleties, wasn't so sure. I had trouble buying the idea that police and PR stooges alike were actively discouraging our inquiries, but I had equal trouble understanding how over the course of a week no one could spare an hour to chat face-to-face. Even when I offered to return to Koidu later in the month, I got nowhere.

In any event, I didn't need to get into the mine to gauge its magnitude. Every time I traveled from our room at Uncle Ben's Guest House on the outskirts of town to the city center, it dominated the view to the south. Giant earthmovers crawled across a steep mesa of waste tailings and dirt. I often mistook the scheduled blasting for thunder. And the mine's plans to expand its operations were on everyone's lips.

The Koidu Kimberlite Project processes fifty tons of kimberlitic rock an hour and produces about 120,000 carats of diamonds a year; by 2015, the K1 mine will reach more than 1,000 feet into the ground and the K2 mine will be 800 feet deep. The South Africa–based company employs nearly eight hundred workers, 90 percent of them Sierra Leoneans.
¹⁵
But it hasn't exactly been welcome
in Koidu. For one thing, the diamond mines were located at the edge of existing villages on the outskirts of the city—and getting to the diamonds involved getting rid of those who lived in the villages. With the blessing of the government and the local chief, the company “relocated” 284 households, which affected 2,380 people.
¹⁶
The plan was to build an entirely new village for these residents beginning in 2005 and to move them during a series of so-called “rolling resettlements.” But the company began blasting apart the kimberlite before everyone safely moved, leading to massive protests against the company. On December 13, 2007, police faced off with hundreds of unarmed demonstrators assembled outside the gates leading to the mine to protest the detonations, yet Koidu Holdings proceeded with blasting as scheduled that day. When the protesters went wild at what they considered a provocation, police opened fire in a manner later described by government investigators as “indiscriminate, disproportionate and reck less.” Two people were killed and ten were wounded. The same commission reported that had Koidu Holdings “shown a little bit of restraint and sensitivity towards the demonstrators . . . by not proceeding with the blasting,” the outcome might have been different.
¹⁷