Blood Diamonds (37 page)

In spite of the school's needs, he emphasized repeatedly that the one group he wouldn't harass for money in his effort to keep the school running were the students' parents.

“Everything is free for the children,” he said. “Everything.”

Before the war, Mansaray lived in Freetown and held a variety of odd jobs, from ditch digger to cell phone salesman. When fighting began, he joined the cyclonic movement of refugees who fled from place to place hoping to find a safe haven from the RUF's guns and blades. He survived a brief capture by RUF soldiers in Kono and
eventually made his way back to Freetown. He was in the city during Operation No Living Thing, an attack so brutal that he decided it was time to flee the country. He spent years living in refugee camps in Guinea.

Mansaray and his school form but one example of people in this small community who have stopped waiting for the government to improve their lives. Alfred George, who worked for 12 years with the Environmental Foundation for Africa but who is now unemployed, uses his experience with ecological issues to try to end the gravel mining. It may be hard to imagine community members caring about environmental degradation from clear-cutting trees when there's no telling where the next meal will come from, but there are tangible reasons to address it. Digging boulders out of the hillsides has resulted in an infestation of snails on the flatlands; with their natural ecosystem disturbed, the snails' eggs wash downhill during the rainy season. Snails destroy crops. In addition, to help prevent large-scale deforestation, George promotes what he calls an eco-stove; made of clay, it requires fewer pieces of coal or firewood to heat water than a typical campfire.

And a woman named Abbey Kamara who lives next to the school does her part as well. She and her husband, Ibrahim, adopted a two-month-old baby boy when his mother, who was single and had no other known relatives, died of a throat infection while breaking stones across the road. His twin sister fell ill and died soon after. The couple already has three small children, but Ibrahim told me that there had never been any question that they would adopt the baby. Like Mansaray, he said God told him it was the right thing to do.

After my visit to the school, I saw Mansaray frequently in Freetown, meeting him occasionally for coffee or lunch, but just as
often by happenstance, as he was hustling to or from funding meetings or school suppliers. I saw him on my last day in town, as he was coming out of a copy center with a fresh batch of report cards for the new semester. He'd just finished studiously blacking out the line on the front where other headmasters would fill in the fee for attending school. As he did every time we met, Mansaray reminded me that Borbor Pain was free, and so its report cards didn't need that line.

Mansaray provided me with the thread of hope I had been looking for. In a country rich in precious stones, it's inexcusable that children have to mine common ones in order to survive, but here was someone who had learned the lessons of the past and was trying hard not to repeat them, at least in the lives of some.

“All this hardship that I went through with the war prompted me, and the word of God prompted me, to establish this kind of thing because I don't want children to go in pain,” he said. “I think education is the key because the children are the future of Sierra Leone.

“If you let these children go down astray, then the country is going down astray.”

I
N LATE SEPTEMBER of 2001, I was stranded in Kabala, in northern Sierra Leone, one of those inevitabilities that come with the territory when the UN is your chauffeur. To this day, I don't know what the delay was, but for several hours I dozed fitfully in the ovenlike cargo bay of an Mi-8 helicopter, Flight 096, with three Ukrainian pilots and a Nepalese UN administrator. The Ukrainians stripped to their plaid boxers to battle the heat, which came in through the open passenger door and the open cargo doors under the tail boom with each hot breath of wind. The spectacle of three very pale, very flabby men wandering around a helicopter nearly naked was apparently the social and entertainment event of the year in Kabala, for there was soon a perimeter of gawkers ringing the sports field where we were parked. SLA soldiers kept them far from the chopper, though, and we killed time by giving one another vocabulary lessons in our native tongues.

One of the copilots, a man named Sergei, only knew one set of English phrases, a memorized mantra that he recited haltingly and painfully before each flight: “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard flight UN zero-nine-six flying from the Mammy Yoko to Mile 91, Magburaka and Kabala. Flight time to Mile 91, approximately
40 minutes. This Mi-8 aircraft is equipped with emergency exits here, here, and here and this is a nonsmoking flight. We hope you enjoy your flight.”

We mostly taught one another crude terms and profanity and boasted about our home countries' military might and the comparative beauty of each country's female citizens, but it was an effective way to kill time. By coincidence, these men had flown me around Sierra Leone more often than any others and it's not a stretch to say that we finally became friends while sitting there in Kabala that day, sweating nonstop and waiting for passengers who were apparently important enough to delay the flight. I wrote down their names when I left the chopper back at the Mammy Yoko Hotel and promised to send a postcard from Colorado.

On November 7, 2001, an Mi-8, Flight 103, crashed within a minute of takeoff from the Mammy Yoko. It was bound for nearby Lungi Airport, but plunged into the Atlantic Ocean near the lighthouse marking the western edge of Man of War Bay. All seven people on board died, including all three of my Ukrainian friends. The other victims included another Ukrainian copilot, two Zambian soldiers, and a civilian from Bulgaria working with UNAMSIL.

Therefore, I'd like to thank Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Savchuk, Captain Sergei Filippovich, and Captain Sergei Ayushev for their companionship, optimistic demeanor, low flybys, and rudimentary lessons in Russian. I'm sorry I never sent that postcard.

Otherwise topping my list of people to thank are my editor, Jill Rothenberg, not only for her hard work, organizational acumen, and excellent suggestions but also for the range of her vision and the depth of her passion about this work; Holly Hodder of Westview Press for her encouragement and confidence; John Thomas, without whose unsurpassed editing skill and critical eye this would have been a much lesser work; and Doug Farah of the
Washington
Post
for paving the way. I would like to thank Meg Campbell and my parents, Howard and Mary Campbell, for their support and help while I traveled and researched this book.

In no particular order, a potpourri of thanks go out to the following: Christine Hambrouck, Jonathan Andrews, Maya Ameratunga, Veton Orana, Margaret Atieno, and Saleh Tembo of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for their insight and companionship in Kailahun; Walter Pinn, Major (Nigeria) Mohammed Yerima, and Margaret Novicki of the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone; Aya Schneerson of the World Food Program; Chris Robertson of Save the Children; Lieutenant Colonel T-Ray and Major Gabril Kallon of the Revolutionary United Front; Jango Kamara for more reasons than I can list; the staff of the Solar Hotel for the constant use of their telephone and the staff of Jay's Guest House for their taste in music and tolerance of reporters with a taste for Johnny Walker at 2 A.M.; journalist Sophie Barrie for the companionship and the reading material; Tamara Connor, formerly of Boulder Travel, for the grace and flair with which she was able to get me into places like Sierra Leone, according to a jangled schedule and on budget, no less; Teresa Castle of the
San Francisco Chronicle
; Margaret Henry of the
Christian Science Monitor
; photographers Tyler Hicks and Patrick Robert, for their inspiration; Tim Weekes and Andy Bone of the Diamond Trading Company; Tom Shane of The Shane Company; Betsy Cullen, R.N., of Boulder Community Hospital, for on-the-road medical advice; Hassan Saad of the Sierra Leone Police; Fawaz S. Fawaz in Kenema; Saffa Moriba of the BBC; David Lemon and Jonathan Vandy of the Sierra Leone Government Information Service's Eastern Region office; Mamei Jaya and Elizabeth Gbomoba of the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Service; Ralph Swanson of Freetown's KISS-FM; Major (Ghana) M'Bawine Atintande and Major (Ghana) Moses
Aryee of GhanBatt-3; Iggy Pop and David Bowie for “Lust for Life,” the soundtrack to my African travels; Eric Frankowski and Greg Avery for listening to me gripe from faraway lands; Holly and Gary Nelson for use of the writer's hideaway deep in the Rocky Mountains; and to those in Kailahun who fed us when the United Nations wouldn't.

Special thanks are extended to photographer Chris Hondros for his enduring friendship, without which most of my journeys would have been intolerable; and my good friend Joel Dyer, who was always willing to help me decompress with far too few rounds of golf.

To Rebecca Marks I owe more than just thanks: you are the love of my life, my inspiration and my destiny. My heart and soul are yours forever.

Finally, this book could not have been written without the help of countless people in Sierra Leone—taxi drivers, fixers, smugglers, and hotel clerks—who provided intuitive leads and invaluable logistical assistance. Standing out among these people is Robert, whose last name I never thought to ask, for being a perfect combination of chauffeur, editorial assistant, and bodyguard.

But those most deserving of thanks are the victims of the RUF's diamond war. Without their willingness to recount, often in excruciating detail, the worst chapters of their lives, this book would not exist. I hope that it offers a small amount of justice to the horrors that they've suffered.

 

1
Human Development Report
(New York: United Nations Development Programme, 2001).

2
CIA World Factbook
(Washington, D.C.: Brassey's, 2001).

3
Report of the Panel of Experts Appointed Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1306 (2000), Paragraph 19, in Relation to Sierra Leone, S/2000/1195, presented to the UN Security Council at the Global Policy Forum, New York, December 20, 2000.

4
U.S. Rep. Tony Hall (D-Ohio), “Congressional Leaders Urge Action on Conflict Diamonds,” press release, Washington, D.C., July 3, 2001.

5
United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone,
www.un.org/Depts/dpko/unamsil/body_unamsil.htm
.

1
Jacques Legrand,
Diamonds: Myth, Magic, and Reality,
edited by Ronne Peltsman and Neil Grant (New York: Crown Publishers, 1980), p. 7.

2
Kevin Krajick,
Barren Lands: An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic
(New York: Times Books, 2001), p. 29.

3
Ibid.

4
Douglas Farah, “Al-Qaeda Cash Tied to Diamond Trade.”
Washington Post,
November 2, 2001, p. A1.

5
Legrand, p. 72.

6
Legrand, p. 78.

1
Mary Fitzgerald,
West Africa
(Footscray, Australia: Lonely Planet, 1998), p. 837.

2
See the Web site
www.crimesofwar.org
.

3
Matthew Hart,
Diamond: A Journey to the Heart of an Obsession
(Marble Falls, Texas: Walker Publishing Co., 2001).

4
Hart, p. 163.

5
Report of the Panel of Experts Appointed Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1306 (2000), Paragraph 19, in Relation to Sierra Leone, S/2000/1195, presented to the UN Security Council at the Global Policy Forum, New York, December 20, 2000.

6
The Heart of the Matter
(Ottawa, Canada: Partnership Africa Canada, 2000).

7
Douglas Farah, “Al-Qaeda Cash Tied to Diamond Trade.”
Washington Post,
November 2, 2001, p. A1.

8
Report of the Panel of Experts Appointed Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1306 (2000), Paragraph 19, in Relation to Sierra Leone, S/2000/1195, presented to the UN Security Council at the Global Policy Forum, New York, December 20, 2000.

9
Ibid.

10
Ibid.

1
Member-states of ECOWAS are: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo.

2
Report of the Panel of Experts Appointed Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1306 (2000), Paragraph 19, in Relation to Sierra Leone,
S/2000/1195, presented to the UN Security Council at the Global Policy Forum, New York, December 20, 2000.

3
Ibid.

4
Ibid.

5
Ibid.

6
Ibid.

7
Ibid.

8
The Heart of the Matter
(Ottawa, Canada: Partnership Africa Canada, 2000).

9
Ibrahim Abdullah and Patrick Muana, “The Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone: A Revolt of the Lumpenproletariat,” in Christopher Clapham (ed.),
African Guerillas
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998).

10
Kevin A. O'Brien, “Military-Advisory Groups and African Security: Privatised Peacekeeping?”
Royal United Services Institute Journal
, August 1998. Undoubtedly, Executive Outcomes's work in Angola must have been very impressive to Strasser. Similar to the Sierra Leone government, the Angolan government was under siege by UNITA, a rebel force that had total control of the country's oil fields and diamond mines. EO was hired to take back the town of Soyo, the location of a major oil field, in 1993. A small force succeeded in doing so, but Soyo was later recaptured once the South Africans left. The government returned to the company requesting a larger force and offering oil concessions as payment. To facilitate this arrangement, a Canadian oil company called Ranger (which has close associations with top EO officials) put up $30 million for the operation. UNITA was thoroughly routed by 500 mercenaries, some of whom had fought on the rebels' behalf in the 1980s. The company also retrained the Angolan Army, which began inflicting heavy casualties on the rebels, and helped them retake the diamond fields of Saurimo and Cafunfo in Luanda Norte Province. The operation led to the signing of the Lusaka Protocols, which effectively ended the civil war, at least for a time. EO, through its subsidiaries and its gray network of affiliate companies, was paid with lucrative oil and diamond concessions.