Blood Diamonds (9 page)

Ah, yes . . . postures ease . . . of course you can. It will be a license just to get out of their hands and onto the nearest plane out of Sierra Leone, though. How much money do you have? Six hundred dollars? But a license costs a thousand (unless you have a thousand, in which case it costs two), resulting in more whacks to the head. Okay, today's your lucky day; we'll take the $600, but you'd better leave the country immediately.

Indeed. What a scene: Dumped on the streets without even cab fare back to the room you now can't pay for, where all your possessions are being kept hostage by the innkeeper, reduced to begging to the U.S. ambassador or your friends in the press corps.

People like Singer were invaluable because they'd already screened such riffraff.

“You've got to have good contacts and fortunately I've been doing this long enough that I've got them. That's why he needs me.” He pointed to Valdy, whose Polish diamond-cutting company hired Singer to acquire cheap quality stones from the rebels.

“Say, you want to meet one of them? Name's Jango. He can tell you all about RUF mining,” he said.

“Why not?”

We headed into the night, the sound of UN helicopters carried to us on the ocean breeze that moved the leaves overhead like bored hand-waving from a local parade. There are few functional streetlights in Freetown and the short walk to Jango's compound took us
through an eerie collage of shadowy figures lit by the greasy flames of oil-lamps at sheet-plastic-and-timber roadside kiosks. Glaring headlights from UN Expeditions and Land Rovers speeding their occupants to Paddy's periodically blinded us; when we finally arrived, we were seeing stars and tripping over our own feet.

Jango's neighborhood was typical of most squatter housing in Freetown. Crumbling concrete housing blocks waved colorful laundry like Tibetan prayer flags. Black cauldrons bubbled with rice and cassava, creating a mist of cook-smoke that caught the firelight in a medieval light show. Streams of sewage and rainwater mingled underfoot in the pasty mud. From the shadows, the only thing visible of the people slumped on the porches and tree stumps were the whites of their eyes. Community activity centered around a slapdash kiosk composed of tree branches and UNHCR plastic sheeting. About a half dozen hard-eyed teens lurked inside around a battered boom box that was playing The Spice Girls at deafening volume, sipping tea. Naked children stopped in midstride to stare at the spectacle of two white men arriving unannounced on their doorstep after dark.

“Ha de body?” Singer said cheerfully. “Run get Jango for us.”

At the mention of Jango's name, the spell was broken and two of the teens broke off to be absorbed into the night in search of him. Jango apparently carried some weight among his neighbors.

It's not hard to see why. Though physically unremarkable—at 29, he has a typical African physique born of backbreaking labor, a wide friendly face, and a collection of scars from shrapnel and bullet wounds—his history as a longtime prisoner of the RUF has afforded him a certain degree of respect among his peers. And the fact that he now helps the RUF sell their diamonds to people like Singer has only added to his mystique, now seen as a man willing
to overlook the atrocities of the war to become a businessman. The only business worth doing in a place like Freetown, as everyone knew, was brokering illegal diamonds. If those diamonds came from people who beat and tortured him for 18 months in the bush, well . . . the money to be earned was well worth putting that aside.

Singer introduced me and soon left to conduct other business. Jango showed me to his room: As narrow as a closet, the door opened against the bed just enough to allow a thin person to squeeze inside. A tattered American flag was hung over the bars on the window as a curtain and a small shelf held a collection of personal belongings: toothbrush, cassette player, ashtray.

In the gloom, he showed me his wounds and told me about his time with the RUF.

 

WITHIN A FEW DAYS of the commencement of Operation Clean Sweep, the 1996 operation in which Ismael Dalramy lost his hands to an RUF ax, Jango was awakened in the middle of the night by a rocket blast. He was sleeping in the open, huddled under a palm tree and some bushes, near an open pit diamond mine, forced by his RUF captors to sleep far from the rest of the prisoners because he snored so loudly that they feared detection. But on this night, his snoring may have saved his life. The Kamajors had consulted their jungle gods and were told that success in attacking the RUF position was imminent. There's no light in the depth of the jungle at night, not even starlight because of the canopy, and Jango was dead blind when the first detonation rippled through the trees. He sprang to his feet to flee into the night, running instinctively toward the rest of the RUF contingent, simply because they had guns and he didn't and, as their prisoner, he was worth protecting. He hoped.

He never found out. Streaking through the forest suddenly alive with the hammering of automatic weapons fire and the mad designs of tracer bullets ricocheting off coconut trees, he heard a whoosh that was getting louder than all the other sounds. He turned just in time to see a rocket-propelled grenade sailing toward him like a neon football. Only random luck saved his life: His forward momentum carried him behind a tree, which immediately exploded with the rocket's impact, blasting shards of wood into his upper left arm. Jango flew into a hole, a small pit he and his fellow prisoners had just begun excavating for diamond exploration, reeling headfirst into the muddy water, just as the tree toppled behind him with a deafening crunch. He screamed underwater and surfaced to the sound of bullets zipping over the hole like supercharged hummingbirds, rockets pulverizing trees, screams of death from his captors and their enemies, a strobe-light world where there was no up or down.

He passed out from the pain in his arm sometime around dawn, when the shooting slowed, but was replaced with the more menacing sounds of Mende whispers—the language of the Kamajors. Hours later, however, he awoke to find everyone gone and the water in the hole tinged pink from the blood he'd pumped into it. Jango was in big trouble.

The main problem is that he had no idea where he was. He'd been kidnapped in Sefadu, a Kono District diamond-mining village that is Koidu's adjacent sister town, nearly a month before the attack and had been marched through the woods from one mine to another so often that he had no idea how far he'd walked or in which direction. He may have had a better sense of where he was if he'd been selected to be one of the RUF's mules, men who do nothing but walk back and forth to the Liberian border, carrying diamonds one way and returning with shiny new RPG tubes and
crates of rifle ammunition. But he was just a digger and he didn't know if he was in RUF territory or Kamajor territory. And he had no idea where to find help for his injured arm. Sitting in his Freetown bedroom, he pointed to the mass of scar tissue on his upper arm and said he spent three weeks staggering lost in the bush, eating nothing but mangos, hiding from voices and approaching footsteps.

Eventually, he made his way to a village. From his vantage point in the trees, it was clear there was no one there but RUF, young men and women lounging on eviscerated pickup trucks and on the crumbling cinderblock walls of front porches, their rifles and machine guns slung on their backs recklessly, the scene highlighted with the soft orange glow of cook-fires in the early evening. Things seemed calm enough, Jango thought, and he'd already decided that he would take his chances with the RUF if he ran across them. His only option was to continue wandering in the forest. The smell of cooking chicken made his decision all the easier.

He nervously left the thick bush and walked into the town. Some people stared at him and his now-infected wound and some didn't pay him any attention at all. He made it to the
barrie,
an open-walled structure in the center of town used for community gatherings in more peaceful times, and lay down on the ground in an attempt to be inconspicuous, evaluating his next move.

The mood was tense; many of the fighters seemed drunk and boisterous, sucking on “gin-blasters,” little plastic sleeves of alcohol like thawed freezer popsicles. Diamond smugglers from the Mandingo tribe hung out in the shadows, ready to deal with the RUF for their stones, to negotiate a trade or arrange a shipment. A female RUF fighter was arguing with a young man. Cheap transistor radios played rap music at a volume that completely distorted the tunes.

Jango was considering retreat. He knew that the moment he approached anyone for help he would be the center of the rebels' drunken attention. Before he had time to decide what to do, all of his choices were taken away.

The two arguing RUF fighters escalated their disagreement. The man was mocking the woman because he recognized her as a prostitute from Freetown. He was offering her diamonds to sleep with the entire battalion and everyone in earshot was laughing at her.

Drunk on gin and power, the girl—not older than 16 or 17—whipped her AK-47 off her shoulder and chambered a round. “I'm going to blow your fucking balls off,” she announced casually and aimed at his crotch.

What happened next took less than a second, Jango recalls: Laughter cut off immediately, as if everyone in the square realized at the same moment that she was serious. The man standing at the end of the barrel twirled, his right foot lifted. He knocked the barrel aside just as she pulled the trigger. The round flew across the square and blew a hole in Jango's right calf. It was the first time anyone noticed that he was there and he screamed into the night, suddenly surrounded by RUF, all of them screaming right back at him: “Who the fuck are you?” “What the fuck are you doing here?”

Jango opened his eyes to see a smiling Mandingo face next to his. “Hey boy,” the man whispered, “they're trying to kill you because they think you have diamonds. Sell them to me right now and it will save your life. I'll give you a good price.”

Telling me the story later, Jango said he regretted that he was jerked away so quickly that he couldn't even tell the man to go fuck himself.

 

SOON AFTER HE WAS SHOT and recaptured by this new band of RUF, Jango was back at work, stripped to his blue brief underwear
and standing up to his thighs in muddy water, slinging rocks and dirt around and around in a circular shake-shake. He churned the water with an abandon to task that is all too often found only in young children and prisoners of war. With four or five other prisoners, he was washing away the silt and clay from the stones, eyes trained to look for the gray, opaque ones.

On the banks of the shallow pit where he toiled, men with guns guarded his work, smoking. Other prisoners brought water and food, or just lingered, squatting in the shade of banana trees, staring at a group of soldiers kicking a soccer ball that sometimes caromed off a bare foot and into the water.

When the wind blew from the east, it sometimes carried the sound of small and highly maneuverable Nigerian alpha jets assigned to the ECOMOG force and the flat patter of small-arms fire.

If he heard these things, Jango didn't reveal it. He was there to find the special rocks, not listen to the wind. Even the pain in his leg and arm didn't distract him from the job. He'd given up, determined to do his job well and hope that he would eat that day. He was working on the “two-pile” system, an RUF digging regimen that allowed prisoners to keep any diamonds found in a pile of gravel he was allowed to wash for himself, but he suspected that it was rigged. He'd not found a diamond in weeks in the piles of gravel designated as “his,” but he'd been finding quite a few in those designated as RUF piles.

Around and around and around. Finally, he stopped sloshing his sieve, staring down into the soup of mud and gravel it contained. The sudden presence of four AK barrels shoved into his face confirmed what his eyes suspected. A hand reached in and plucked out a stone and dipped it in the water, rubbing away the stubborn clay. In the rebel's hand was a medium-sized rock, gray and white in
color, about the size of a small marble. Jango knew from experience that it was probably six or seven carats.

“Boss!” the guard yelled, holding it up between his finger and thumb.

A man on the bank smiled and winked at the boy as the gem was carefully passed to him from hand to hand. The man snatched it up and held it to the sun.

Another diamond began its journey.

 

REBEL FIELD WORKERS are lucky to end their days exhausted and hungry. Many have ended them in a shallow grave. Workers sleep by the sides of the mine and wake at first light to begin the day's digging. Except for the fact that the labor isn't voluntary and men with rifles guard the prisoners' every move, the process of extracting the jewels from the ground is identical to that in the licensed mines.

Capturing a diamond mine is as easy as showing up with a rifle and ordering everyone in the pit to start handing their discoveries over to the new bosses. The RUF sometimes sweetens the deal by offering to share the loot with the diggers, an arrangement that seems to the workers like a better offer than the rice and pennies they get from their legitimate bosses, as long as they overlook the fact that their bosses won't kill them if they refuse. In addition to the “two-pile” method, which was favored by those who guarded Jango, some units instead allowed prisoners to dig for four days for the RUF, two days for themselves, and have one day off. Even then, however, most diamonds the diggers were allowed to keep were comparatively worthless industrial-grade stones or very small gemstones worth little in the bush. The good stones, it was clear, went to the RUF. Those who refused or argued faced being shot on the
spot. Walking away was not an option. Most diggers complied quickly. But given the frequent alcohol- and drug-fueled rages of their captors, thoughts immediately turned to escape.