Blood Diamonds (8 page)

Because of their stable prices and the ease with which they can be moved around the world undetected, diamonds have been the currency of choice for a lot more than weapons that go to African insurgencies. They've been used to buy drugs in South America and they've been used by the Soviet KGB to pay spies. Former FBI agent Robert Hanssen was reportedly paid $1.4 million in cash and diamonds to provide the Russians with intelligence information and classified documents.

The amount of diamonds that are smuggled by individuals, though, is relatively small compared to the wealth of diamonds that can be stolen from the mines themselves by workers. Security at diamond mines the world over makes antiterrorism security efforts at airports look like they're conducted by the Boy Scouts. In Namibia, for instance, at the De Beers–owned Oranjemund claim, the only cars in the town in the 1970s were company cars that could never leave its borders. Private vehicles were banned when an enterprising engineer removed several bolts from the chassis of his car, bored out the middle for holding diamonds, and then screwed them back in tight. The fact that he was actually caught is testament in itself to how high the security was; from then on, De Beers outlawed new cars. All vehicles in the town had to stay there until they rusted away. One worker at the same site stole diamonds by tying a small bag to a homing pigeon, which would fly the diamonds back to his house.
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One day, he got too ambitious and overloaded his winged courier; the pigeon was so laden with stolen diamonds,
it couldn't fly over the fence and was discovered by security guards a short time later. They reclaimed the diamonds and let the bird go, following it to the man's home, where he was arrested after work.

Smuggling one or two small stones out of Freetown is one thing—smuggling a half a million dollars worth is something else entirely. If caught with an attaché case filled with rough at the airport, at best you'll lose your loot; at worst you'll be arrested and prosecuted. Smuggling large parcels out of Freetown requires a bit more cloak-and-dagger than hiding the goods in body cavities.

“The way it will work,” Singer explained one night at the Solar over Star beers in the bar, “is that we'll look at the goods here, agree on a price, and then meet in Conakry to complete the deal.” Like most nights, the place was almost deserted except for the staff and a few guests who'd gathered under the tin-and-thatch roof to watch CNN. A string of pale yellow lightbulbs gave the scene a jaundiced look and bamboo curtains were partially rolled down around the circumference in anticipation of the nightly rains. Valdy lounged in another booth nearby, smoking and watching TV.

Conakry, the capital of neighboring Guinea, has long been the location of informal conflict-diamond trades. Usually Sierra Leonean combatants will trade small pieces of rough in Guinea for rice or fuel, but there have been allegations of weapons deals being conducted between the RUF and Guinean military officials. One such deal that was said to have gone sour in the summer of 2000 resulted in the RUF attacking Pamelap, the Guinean border town on the road between Freetown and Conakry. The Guinean military retaliated, firing artillery shells into Kambia, on the Sierra Leone side of the border, with the result that more innocent civilians were sent to Freetown's MSF camp.

Guinea's guilt as a diamond conduit is reflected in discrepancies between what it exports to Belgium and what Belgium says is imported from Guinea. For example, from 1993 to 1997, Guinea reported 2.6 million carats of official diamond exports at an average of $96 per carat to Belgium. During the same period, Belgium—through the Diamond High Council, the diamond industry's self-appointed watchdog organization—reported imports from Guinea of 4.8 million carats averaging $167 each. “In other words,” reported the UN in December 2000, “Belgium appears to import almost double the volume that is exported from Guinea, and the per-carat-value is almost 75 per cent higher than what leaves Guinea.”
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People like Singer account for the discrepancy. By doing nothing more than shaking hands in Freetown, Singer doesn't have to carry any cash into the country or carry any diamonds out. Getting the diamonds to Conakry is the RUF's “problem,” even though it's not any more difficult than U.S. citizens' traveling across state lines to buy fireworks for their Fourth of July celebrations. If the deal is solidified in Freetown, RUF brokers often take the goods to the Guinean capital via ferry after bribing customs officials to ignore certain items of luggage. Bribery in West Africa is such a part of the culture that it's like tipping a waiter after a meal—I did it myself on arrival in Freetown, paying a customs official a mere $5 to avoid a time-consuming search of my incoming luggage, which, as far as he knew, could have been filled with pistols and $100 bills.

If the deal is made in the bush, the broker takes a backpack filled with diamonds on a motorcycle from Koidu, for instance, through bush trails across the border and on to Conakry. The trip can be made in a day during the dry season. The RUF representative goes to a bank in Conakry and deposits the parcel in a safe deposit box.
Buyers like Singer will then meet them in a café, adjourn to inspect the goods, and the money will be wired from Poland to be converted into cash at the same bank. In some circumstances, Singer said, the RUF rep will prefer to have the money deposited in a numbered account in Copenhagen for use later.

Guinean customs then inspects the diamonds and issues a certificate of authenticity that they originated in Guinea and—voilà—conflict diamonds magically become legitimate. If all goes according to plan, Valdy's company will send a twelve-seat private jet the same day to pick them up and the diamonds will be in Europe by nightfall, squeaky clean as far as the Diamond High Council is concerned.

“But they didn't originate in Guinea,” I said.

“So?”

“So how do you get customs to say that they did?”

He looked at me as if I hadn't learned a thing. He rubbed his fingers together, the universal sign language for “bribery.”

The certificate accompanying the diamonds is supposed to be the guarantee that the diamonds came from legitimate sources, but obviously such a guarantee is relative, and it's not just an African problem. Perhaps aware that some stones coming into Belgium are from questionable sources, the Diamond High Council in Antwerp until recently recorded the origin of diamond imports as the last country to ship the goods to the city's cutters and polishers. Therefore, a package of rough that began in the forests of Sierra Leone and was smuggled to Liberia before being exported to Belgium was recorded as being filled with Liberian diamonds. This is how Liberia can defy the laws of nature and outproduce South Africa by exporting 6 million carats of gemstones a year, when it can actually produce, at best, 200,000 carats of industrial diamonds from its
existing mines.
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And this is also how the entire issue of conflict diamonds has remained in the dark for so long, allowing the RUF to launder Sierra Leone diamonds under a cover provided by the diamond industry itself.

“I've been doing this in Sierra Leone since 1995,” said Singer. “It's not hard. In fact, it's almost impossible to get caught.”

If he has any moral qualms about buying diamonds from people who are going to use the money for weapons to kill innocent civilians and kidnap children into their ranks, he doesn't show it. In fact, he's never strayed from Freetown during all of his years doing illicit business in Sierra Leone, so he has no first-hand knowledge of what upcountry conditions are like.

But that's not to say he doesn't know what the rebels are capable of; in fact, he carries a small photo album of corpses that have been mutilated by the rebels to show to anyone unfamiliar with the horrors of the war. He squirreled it out one night, sliding it conspiratorially across the tiled tabletop at me. Four nude female corpses laying in the highway, hands and feet chopped off and laying nearby, genitals mutilated with a tree branch. A disembodied head laying on a table. A corpse minus its head and arms, which were arranged in a macabre pose some feet away.

“Listen here,” he said, wagging a finger for emphasis, “if the government made it easier to buy legitimate diamonds, people like me wouldn't have to deal with these savages. But I'm a businessman. What else can I do?”

Unmentioned, but widely understood in these circles, is that rebel diamonds are far less expensive than diamonds that go through official channels. RUF diamonds normally sell in the bush for 10 percent of what the same stones would otherwise cost through a licensed exporter, making them highly liquid and prized
by people like Singer who can sell them at a large markup in Europe's diamond centers.
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The way it should work is through the Fawaz model. The government issues mining and exporting licenses good for a year to people who apply for them and pass a rudimentary background inspection. The license holder is allowed to employ a certain number of upcountry miners, diggers, and buyers who are also licensed by the government. In theory, the exporter will bring diamonds to Freetown that have been dug up legitimately, and he'll provide proof of that through a series of receipts and invoices detailing the discovery of every gem he wishes to export. The package is valued, taxed, and sealed in a box at the Government Gold and Diamond Office (GGDO) in town with a numbered certificate of origin printed on security paper, the government's official stamp of approval that the package is “clean.” The parcel is also photographed with a digital camera and recorded in an electronic database, which is updated when the parcel is delivered to its stated destination. Once leaving the GGDO, the exporter is then free to leave the country without having to open the package again at the airport for inspection.

This is the system that was put in place as a result of UN Security Council Resolution 1306, an embargo on diamond imports from Sierra Leone adopted in July 2000 until such a scheme for certifying official diamond exports was adopted. But it's not likely that this action did much, if anything, to help stem trafficking in conflict diamonds. Clearly, the RUF didn't use official channels to sell its stones. For example, between 1997 and 1999, a mere 36,000 carats were officially exported from Sierra Leone, from a high of 2 million in the late 1960s.
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Although the war has prevented experts from forecasting Sierra Leone's diamond reserves, it's undisputed
that annual output is much higher than the official export numbers indicate. When the embargo was placed on Sierra Leone diamonds, all it truly meant was that the traders who legally exported the 9,320 carats
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recorded in 1999 would have to smuggle their goods instead to Liberia or Guinea, which had no restrictions or certification requirements. During the period when the embargo was in place, everyone mining diamonds in Sierra Leone became a smuggler.

The problem, even under the new official arrangement, is that the RUF has Kono and Tongo Field, which have the best stones and the best prices. Anyone wishing to buy them in the bush can do so, even requesting a forged “receipt” to show to customs officials. There's no guarantee just because someone has a license that the diamonds presented to the GGDO in Freetown were mined by his employees instead of bought from rebels in Tongo Field. In the end, it's just easier to smuggle them; smugglers don't pay any license fees or the 3 percent export tax.

Most of my meetings with Singer were cut short, usually by someone appearing in the shadows beyond the dim light cast from the bar, motioning for him to follow.

“Right,” he'd say with a Father Christmas smile. “Gotta go meet some people. You'll be around right? Goodonya.”

He and Valdy would be swallowed by the night.

 

A FEW DAYS LATER, Singer and I were engaged in our usual sunset activity: smoking, drinking, talking diamonds, and watching the news at the bar. At the time, the news was mostly coverage of America's war on terrorism in the wake of the September 11 Al Qaeda attacks. We were fortunate to watch even that; the bartenders had long tired of the coverage and had begun to play a cartoon
videotape featuring Alvin and the Chipmunks in protest. After the initial shock of the attacks had worn off, the locals began to look forward to watching the tape instead of the repetitive reports on CNN; earlier I had asked to watch the news and was resoundingly voted down, twelve Sierra Leoneans to one American. But on this night, the foreigners outnumbered the locals and CNN reigned, even though we were as bored of the coverage as they were.

As usual, Valdy was off to the side by himself. Singer was complaining about the unreliability of most RUF salesmen. “There's no such thing as an office or a phone number you can call to get a hold of them, you know,” he said.

On top of that, many “salesmen” were con artists trying to hawk glass to rich fools. The scam was simple, but bold: You'd pay your $100 for what you were told was a 2.5-carat diamond from a mine in Bo and think that you were going to make your girlfriend the happiest woman in town once you had the thing cut, polished, and set in jewelry. And just as you were thinking about how much money you could make doing this for a living, there would be a knock on the door and a phalanx of blue-suited Sierra Leone police would have you on your face on the floor of the guest house. You'd be dragged off as a smuggler captured thanks to a tip from an “informant” and jerked out of the hotel in front of the friendly people at the front desk. As you're half-carried through the lobby you yell at them to please take care of your luggage, your return plane tickets, and your passport, which are all laying in a huge mess in the room, which, of course, hadn't been paid for yet since you planned to spend a few more days there. You'd be shoved into one of their white-yellow-and-blue Range Rovers and taken to a sweat-tank at the station, and there subjected to threatening grilling from
customs and the Ministry of Mines and Natural Resources. Your demands to talk to someone at the embassy are ignored and you're given a few good whacks to the face. You're
fucked,
you're told, because you bought a diamond without having a license to do so. And then, amid the panic in your mind, a bubble of desperate lucidity comes to the surface: Can I buy a license now?