Blood Diamonds (5 page)

Fawaz is a Lebanese diamond merchant, one of scores whose signs clog the main pothole-ridden road through Kenema, the smoking, popping, wheezing hub of diamond commerce in the heart of the Sierra Leone jungle.

Given its reputation as a diamond capital, it was no surprise when Kenema was attacked by the RUF and its mines captured in 1993. The town was then on the front lines of the diamond war and it was briefly recaptured by government forces in 1994, only to have the RUF win it back a few months later. Kenema stayed under RUF control until 1998, when ECOMOG forces reclaimed it for good. Three years later, in the summer of 2001, it was difficult to imagine that full-scale diamond production had ever been interrupted.
Indeed it really hadn't: It was simply conducted by the rebels and many Lebanese endured the threat of dying in a gun battle or artillery barrage to remain behind to deal with them for their diamonds. Unlike other liberated towns that are characterized by the sleepy drudgery of rural life, Kenema is a hectic, overcrowded anthill of nonstop commercial activity. Guarded by a battalion of Zambian soldiers serving with the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) and a remote base to what seems like every nongovernmental organization ever incorporated, Kenema is proof that properly motivated and controlled greed can overcome the threats of warfare.

The main thoroughfare, Hangha Road, is littered with Lebanese storefronts with large signs announcing “Diamond Merchant” in hand-painted letters. Every merchant's logo is a jumbo-sized brilliant-cut diamond, but the images add little luster to the garbage-strewn streets filled with beggars and refugees who still hang onto the old gambler's notion that they are just one lucky find away from eternal wealth. In the early days, that was certainly the case. Diamonds turned up in garden patches, latrines, and the middle of the streets. Like most other places in Sierra Leone, Kenema hid its dollar-value well: The town smelled like stagnant water and untreated wounds and clouds of disease-bearing mosquitoes hung in the air like a cartoon's crowded thought balloons.

Still, Kenema was more pleasant than most places emerging from the war. On a road parallel to Hangha, a mile-long marketplace seemed to explode with wares: Everything from doorknobs to underwear was on sale. On the other side of town, a food market was hip-to-elbow with colorfully dressed women selling mounds of cassava powder by the cupful and endless rows of tables assembled helter-skelter offering fish meat that had been sitting in the sun all day, attracting battalions of huge black flies. A stroll
through the food market certainly took care of your appetite; the reeking fish alone were enough to make most visitors swear off eating for the foreseeable future. In an alley, a group of men assembled shake-shakes from freshly cut pine, imported wire mesh, and ten-penny nails, banging them together much as their grandfathers had in the 1930s and 1940s. The finished products were stacked like oversized poker chips next to a towering pile of used shovels and picks for sale. And it wouldn't have been Africa if every other square foot of roadway wasn't occupied by salesmen hawking rare parrots, fish heads, tablecloths, camouflage T-shirts, and black-market cigarettes.

All the Lebanese shops were nearly identical: Each offered racks and racks of cheap Japanese boom boxes for sale, along with shortwave radios, Sony Walkmans, and various other electronic products. But that was just window dressing and giveaways, throwbacks to the time when Lebanese families made their living selling consumer goods in Freetown; the real business happened in the back rooms, usually past a phalanx of slender young men in Tupac Shakur T-shirts guarding the doorway. In these rooms, whose decorations didn't extend beyond the proprietor's state diamond license and maybe a grainy photo of an olive-skinned family on a rare visit to Lebanon, was where the real wheeling and dealing transpired. There was always a desk with a white velvet pad in the center, a low-hanging lamp directly overhead, a full ashtray, seven or eight magnifying lenses of different powers, and an array of jeweler's loupes. From the despairing tone of some of the Lebanese traders we visited, it seemed as though there was probably a thick film of dust on most of those lenses.

“All of the good diamonds are in Kono,” Fawaz said, waving his hand to indicate the area 50 miles to the north where the RUF still reigned. He'd invited me and Hondros into his storefront for a cup
of Lebanese coffee, which he ordered by simply shouting into the throng on the street, seemingly to no one. Dressed in gray polyester slacks and a tissue-thin 1950s-era button-down short-sleeved shirt—left unbuttoned near the neck to reveal a jet-black carpet of chest hair and a thick gold chain—the 50-plus-year-old Fawaz looked more like a counterman in a Philadelphia deli during the 1960s than a wealthy merchant in the jungles of Sierra Leone, through whose hands countless valuable gemstones have flowed. The Fawaz name was emblazoned on billboards up and down Hangha Road, but he insisted that the network of Fawaz cousins and brothers that operated in Kenema and other diamond villages was small compared to other merchants in town. But at the time of our visit, they were all pretty much muttering the same complaint: No good diamonds have been coming in from the fields.

Whether that was true or whether Fawaz simply didn't want to show us any goods is beside the point. One of Sierra Leone's most important diamond areas—Tongo Field—was a mere 30 miles away from where we sat and under complete control of the RUF. It was universally assumed that rebel couriers sold diamonds in Kenema. We'd seen diamonds everywhere there—including a large, eight-sided rough stone that an old man wandering in the market had popped out of his mouth—and it's likely that many of the stones skirted the legitimate channels. While the official currency is the leone (worth 2,000 to the U.S. dollar), in places like Kenema the currency of choice for anything beyond food and clothing was diamonds. If you needed a new car or motorcycle, you paid in diamonds because they were often easier to come by—and easier to carry—than a mountain of leones. If you owed your friend a favor for watching out for your family during the war, you gave him a nice piece of rough. Even a school for children
orphaned by the war, in Freetown's Aberdeen district, sells RUF-mined diamonds to reporters and personnel from nongovernmental organizations and the UN so that they can buy food and books for the students.

Fawaz and those like him are important middlemen in the legitimate diamond trade. Licensed by the Sierra Leone government, they're the first purchasers along a lengthy chain of buyers that ends with consumers in developed countries shopping for tennis bracelets. Out here, amid the sweltering heat and the potential of renewed RUF gunfire, he buys and sells diamonds that will be cherished as keepsakes forever by people whose only experience with such treacherous environments is gleaned from rare three-minute reports on CNN.

Like Fawaz, the majority of such dealers are Lebanese whose parents and grandparents moved to West Africa by the thousands in the wake of World War II to sell consumer goods and general merchandise. Some 120,000 Lebanese are estimated to live throughout West Africa, most of them in the import–export business.
⁴
When diamonds were discovered in Sierra Leone they were well positioned to enter the gem business, because soon after the war the country was thrown into its first significant bout of internal turmoil over the precious stones.

 

UNTIL THE EARLY 1950s, diamond production in Sierra Leone was dominated by one company, Sierra Leone Selection Trust (SLST), a branch of the London-based exploration company West African Selection Trust. The company had holdings in gold mines in Ghana and was owned by the South African diamond powerhouse, De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd. SLST was founded in Freetown in 1934, after De Beers's vanguard of miners had plucked
more than 32,000 carats of stones from the Sierra Leone jungle by hand. The company convinced the government—which was still administered by England—to grant it an exclusive mining concession, meaning that all the diamonds found in the rain forest went to one company.

That was the theory at least. In truth, Sierra Leone provided a horrible mining environment. The deposits were located in the heart of an unexplored jungle, scattered among chieftaincies and villages that weren't used to the sight of white men digging for rocks. The tropical vegetation in the bush grows as thick as anywhere on earth, communications with Freetown were almost non-existent, and travel into the provinces—often with heavy equipment and supplies—was a days-long endeavor from origin to destination. This harsh reality of jungle mining immediately raised concerns about security. The diamond-bearing region was so extensive and dense with vegetation, wild animals, and villages that few SLST officers were optimistic about being able to control one of diamond mining's inherent costs of business: theft through illicit mining.

In fact, the problem was worse than anyone anticipated. At first, mining went smoothly and SLST built a then-modern processing facility in Yengema, a town in the Kono District. Labor was abundant as the locals took advantage of endless opportunities to mine rivers and wash gravel.

Things changed drastically in the wake of World War II, when Sierra Leoneans serving the British in the Royal West African Frontier Force returned from the battlefields of Burma, having learned the value of the innocuous stones that were being mined out from beneath the feet of villagers. It's not surprising what happened after tales of limitless fortunes began circulating through the bush:
Miners abandoned their jobs and became independent operators. They were also illegal operators, since only SLST had the right to mine for diamonds in Sierra Leone.

But that hardly mattered. In the postwar years, Sierra Leone saw a massive diamond rush as thousands of locals and an equal number of neighboring Liberian and Guinean hopefuls struck out into SLST's private reserve of diamond mines. The boom very nearly sank the country in the mid-1950s as farmers ignored their fields and instead washed gravel day in and day out, usually under the cover of night when they were less likely to be discovered. A food shortage struck the interior and, for the first time, Sierra Leone had to import staples like rice, a grain that was usually so abundant that the country normally exported it. More than an estimated 30,000 illegal miners were operating in 1954, a human tide that was almost impossible to stem.
⁵
Many of these miners were supported by wealthy Lebanese financiers, most of whom had moved to Freetown in the wake of the war to sell general merchandise. Their business clout and expertise, their possession of import / export licenses, and their ties to supplies in Freetown made them natural partners for the men toiling in the bush.

The Sierra Leone Army, a 1,300-strong force of soldiers whose general duties consisted of little more than guarding their own barracks in Freetown, was dispatched to the Kono District to provide security for SLST, which began to form its own militias, often from the ranks of the local police forces. Violent clashes between miners and these militias became regular events, but even the threat of gun battles didn't slow the illicit trade; the returns provided by illegal mining far outweighed the risks.

The majority of stones were smuggled out of the country. By 1955, it became obvious that there was no way SLST—even with
the help of the army and a growing paramilitary police force—could control the smuggling situation. SLST and the government eventually dissolved the single-concession agreement and implemented an aggressive licensing program for indigenous diggers. But even with the dissolution of SLST's private concession and new laws allowing independent operators to sell their goods in Sierra Leone, most miners had already developed contacts outside the country, which also allowed them to avoid export taxes.

With the help of Saika Stevens, the minister of mines for Sierra Leone's government-elect, De Beers instituted the Diamond Corporation of Sierra Leone (DCSL), a company that would buy diamonds from those who were at the time “stealing” them from SLST and selling them in Monrovia, the nearby capital of neighboring Liberia. In turn, DCSL would transport the diamonds to the Diamond Trading Company (DTC) in London, another De Beers concern, which was part of the Central Selling Organization (CSO), the global diamond funnel established by De Beers in the 1930s. At the time, the CSO sold 80 percent of the world's diamonds to the retail marketplace.

For the scheme to work, however, De Beers had to buy the diamonds in the bush in order to compete directly with the illicit traffickers. In real terms, what this meant was that some brave soul—who would have to be an expert in evaluating diamonds—would have to leave the comfort and safety of a downtown office and set off into the heart of an unmapped jungle with a backpack crammed with cash. At the diamond mines and in countless villages he would then compete with savvy local middlemen and smugglers who likely wouldn't be too inclined to share their lucrative turf with the legitimate diamond cartel.

In the beginning, things didn't work out too well. The handful of London buyers who agreed to this risky assignment were up
against hundreds of traffickers who outbid them for the diamonds in order to keep a loyal customer base among the diggers. The DCSL buyers were also constrained by rates dictated from London. It took five years and the creation of a new government office before the diamond buyers were able to offer rates similar to those offered in Monrovia. Although illicit sales of diamonds were never halted, by 1960 the estimated loss to the illicit market fell to its lowest point since the diamond rush began.

The job of buying diamonds in the bush fell almost exclusively to the Lebanese traders once the system worked through all of its initial kinks. They were revered in diamond offices in Freetown. “After all, they accomplished the most dangerous part of the buyer's mission, for the idea of walking through the forest carrying large sums of cash appealed to no one,” writes Jacques Legrand in
Diamonds: Myth, Magic, and Reality.
“All things considered, the profits made by the Lebanese were commensurate with the work they performed and an equilibrium was established to everyone's satisfaction.”
⁶