Blood Diamonds (21 page)

“Yes?”

The man laughed. “We talked on the phone!”

It took a few minutes for it to sink in. Before embarking for Africa, I'd gotten one of the RUF's satellite phone numbers from a colleague who worked for the
Washington Post
and I'd placed several late-night calls from the comfort of my Colorado home to the jungles of Sierra Leone trying to talk to Gabril Massaquoi, the RUF military spokesman. I never managed to connect with Massaquoi, but had several long conversations with the people who'd answered the phone. By the most random of coincidences, this man happened to be one of them.

It was just the icebreaker we needed. The soldiers softened up and Kallon finally turned his attention from Aya to me for a time. I was of course interested in knowing from the RUF's perspective if the peace process touted so earnestly in UNAMSIL headquarters in Freetown was really going to work and how. And especially how RUF commanders would adjust to living without their diamonds-for-weapons economy, the only one they've ever known.

The civil war over diamonds in Sierra Leone is unique in that everyone involved in the fighting is so equally culpable in the violence and human rights violations—accusations of civilian amputations are leveled not only at the RUF, but also at the SLA, Kamajors, and ECOMOG—that peacekeepers are in the unenviable position of having to deal directly with killers and torturers and entrust them to varying degrees within an uncertain peace process. The Lomé Accords are a stark illustration of this, in which RUF leaders were given high positions in government without the benefit of elections, but it was evident elsewhere at lower levels.

Kallon, for instance, was the commander of a force that looted, terrorized, and besieged Lunsar, and on the day that I met him, he was preparing to transition into a new job as Kono District coordinator for child disarmament with UNICEF. It's not unusual that the advocacy organization would rely on local fighters to negotiate with their colleagues to release child soldiers, but Kallon seemed far from the best choice for such a delicate job. The World Food Program had to negotiate with Kallon to coordinate aid-food deliveries to schools in Lunsar and other areas under his control, and during our long walk to meet him, Aya had warned me to be very careful in my interaction with him. Educated in little more than terrorist-style guerilla warfare, he knew nothing of compromise, preferring to settle disputes with a MAC-10 machine-pistol. “These are very bad guys,” Aya said more than once.

But he seemed to be warming to his new job. As we were leaving, he invited me to accompany his men on a mission to Kono the following week, on behalf of UNICEF. He planned to load up one of the pickup trucks with guards, rifles, and rockets to barnstorm the Kamajor front near Koidu to see about evacuating young RUF fighters there. “We'll get in a big fight and save some little children,” he grinned.

I declined.

 

ONE OF THE BEST WAYS to end the trade in conflict diamonds is to end conflict where diamonds are found. If you have no war, you have no problem. Even though smuggling will likely never stop completely, it's easier to live with the possibility that your diamond paid a common thief rather than an uncommon band of savage murderers. If there ever seemed a time in the past ten years when peace may have a lasting chance in Sierra Leone, it was the latter
half of 2001, even though every previous peace attempt had been a dramatic and bloody disaster.

From the perspective of Margaret Novick i, the civilian spokesperson for the UN mission, things couldn't be going better, despite the fact that in the summer of 2001 the RUF still mined and sold diamonds uncontested in areas where the UN had only a marginal presence. A disarmament deal signed in Freetown by UNAMSIL, RUF, and the government in May 2001 was no different than any of the dozens of peace prospects that had failed miserably in the past few years, but you'd never know it talking to UNAMSIL representatives, who rarely acknowledged the hurdles yet to be overcome. The RUF was to morph into a political party and all of its soldiers and those of the Kamajors were to have laid down their arms by November 30, 2001. Although some 37,000 fighters—out of an estimated 50,000 combatants—had in fact turned in weapons to UNAMSIL by then, the most important RUF posts in Kono and Kailahun had yet to begin the process of demobilizing.
¹
Although the RUF was still firmly in charge of the diamond areas and continuing to mine and sell gems across the border in Liberia, RUF leaders continued to promise compliance with the agreement.

“They agreed at the highest levels,” Novicki had assured me. Novicki is a large American woman with a fondness for billowy African dresses and Marlboro Lights. “The commanders are playing a very big role in terms of sensitizing the soldiers on the ground about what the disarmament means. The only real problems we face now are logistical problems with having the facilities on the ground to receive a large number of combatants.”

Well, that didn't seem to be the only problem, which I discovered traveling to Makeni with the WFP that day. Our overland trip had begun in Freetown and included a stop along the way at a disarmament
camp in Port Loko, about 50 miles from the capital. Strategically, the village is in a treasured location at the end of Port Loko Creek, a freshwater tributary that feeds into the Sierra Leone River and leads directly to Freetown, providing perfect access for seaborne government assaults and the movement of heavy equipment to an interior staging area. It's also a key source of bauxite, with an estimated 46 million tons of reserve waiting to be mined. But the government has rarely been able to control the area and the RUF fought bitterly for Port Loko all the way up to the summer of 2000, when two journalists and several Nigerian soldiers were killed in an RUF ambush on the road leading from nearby Rogberi Junction to Lunsar.

The fact that more RUF and Kamajor fighters turned up at the gates of the Port Loko disarmament center than UNAMSIL expected perhaps has more to do with miscommunication than with a true desire to end the war, something I learned simply by showing up there.

The camp itself looks more like a POW compound than the first stage in a reintegration process. Located in a former school complex, the camp is a square of high fences and barbed wire guarded by Nigerians with heavy machine guns in fortified sandbag bunkers. Even though UNAMSIL provides security, WFP provides the food and UNHCR provided the tents, the camp is administered by the government's National Committee for Demobilization, Disarmament and Reintegration, called the DDR. And it seemed to operate about as well as anything else run by the government.

More than 3,000 former fighters—both RUF and Kamajors—roamed the dirt courtyard or lounged in hot plastic tents that accommodated up to twenty people. According to the agreement, anyone who arrived at the gates with an unloaded AK-47, FN rifle,
or other long-barreled rifle would be given flip-flops, a rattan mat, food, and the opportunity to enroll in carpentry or masonry classes. The combatants are encouraged to spend up to six weeks at the camp phasing from combat mode to civilian mode, at which time they're given an ID card and the equivalent of $15 for transportation anywhere in the country.

But the combatants I met weren't clear on some of these details. They were under the impression that they'd be given the Sierra Leone equivalent of $300 once they were discharged, a fortune in bush terms. This had been the case for a short while, but then UNAMSIL discovered that for every rifle turned in to the UN, $300 would buy two or three more on the arms market. So UNAMSIL's private sponsors that provided the cash—including the Soros Foundation and other philanthropy organizations—pulled their funding of the program. So the $300 was whittled down to $15, something few combatants discovered until they'd already turned in their arms. And they weren't pleased with it.

“I have sent a letter to my field commander in Kambia telling him to stop the disarmament,” announced a young RUF commander, Lieutenant Mohammed Fofanah. Like many of the others, he was decked out in a Tupac Shakur T-shirt, Hawaiian shorts, and sunglasses. Also like the others, he was highly agitated at the decommissioning process. “I told my men to put down their weapons and trust that the DDR will do the right thing. This camp is fucking bullshit.”

Indeed, there was a long list of “bullshit,” which was shouted to me by an increasingly large and unruly crowd of ex-combatants. There were no medical facilities, not enough food, no video entertainment, no soccer balls for the younger kids, poor-quality flip-flops, and—most importantly—not enough money waiting at the
end of the process. One kid was mostly agitated because he was promised a bicycle if he disarmed and he hadn't seen one yet.

“What makes you think you're getting a bike?” I asked him.

“It's in Lomé!”

Of course, the peace accords mention no such thing, but the fact that this boy and others were so out of touch with the reality of what was happening did not seem to bode well for the peace process; where UNAMSIL was trying to end a brutal war that has killed and mutilated thousands of people, many RUF were acting like they were enrolling in summer camp. It was simultaneously frightening, amusing, and depressing to hear ruthless killers complaining that they didn't have movies to watch or balls to play with. Frightening because it spoke to how tenuous the peace process was and illuminated the mentality of the fighters; amusing because the camp had almost everything they said it didn't (including soccer balls, which were being booted about within sight of our gathering; medical facilities; and food delivered almost daily from the WFP); and depressing because you were reminded of how young most of the RUF's soldiers were and how fundamentally they'd missed out on childhoods that most people take for granted. The kid who complained to me was probably no older than 13. He had likely killed people and could fire an automatic rifle in combat, but he'd probably never ridden a bike.

But there was little time to reflect on this at the moment. The crowd had lathered itself into a righteous froth about the perceived injustices of the camp and attacked a food-aid truck while we were talking. The hapless driver had just delivered sacks of rice and grain and was leaving for more when some former fighters surrounded the truck and began rocking it back and forth, threatening to topple it. Across the compound, the Nigerians looked on with amusement;
seeing that he was in his predicament alone, the driver gunned the truck and plowed through the crowd, scattering women and children from its path.

“Ah! You see?!” shouted Fofanah, arms outstretched, his face incredulous. “He tried to run them over! We will never disarm if these are the conditions we must suffer under.”

We decided to leave; our very presence was inciting unrest that lacked only the spark to transform it into a riot.

 

A FEW DAYS LATER, I was typing in the lounge at the Mammy Yoko in Freetown when I was interrupted by a bedraggled Irish radio reporter. He'd just been held hostage for three hours, he said, at the Port Loko DDR camp. The camp residents had barricaded the gate and refused to allow anyone to leave until living conditions improved. The Nigerian UNAMSIL soldiers barely changed their postures during the whole ordeal, he said, and their captors finally grew bored and opened the gate for them. The camp has been the scene of unrest ever since, hosting riots, beatings, and often-repeated threats of further trouble. The source of the trouble is always the same: The RUF's contention that the DDR and UNAMSIL have duped them into surrendering by making false promises.

Port Loko isn't the only trouble spot and the RUF isn't the only group complaining of underhandedness by the peacekeepers. A few days after visiting Port Loko, I took a helicopter to Daru with
New York Times
photographer Tyler Hicks and French freelance photographer Patrick Robert and ended up accidentally spending the day at the DDR camp there. Tyler and I had planned to fly to Tongo Field, a strictly controlled RUF diamond district about 30 miles northwest of Kenema, but at the last minute the RUF changed their minds about allowing the UN to land. We diverted
to Daru, where we found ourselves trying to hire a car to take us to nearby Kenema. We quickly learned that the only vehicles in Daru that hadn't been rendered skeletal by looters were those owned by the UN and none were going to Kenema. Our plans foiled, we tagged along with Patrick to the camp, where he was hoping to photograph a group of Kamajor fighters who'd been picked up and disarmed a week earlier.

Patrick had more than just a passing interest in this group of Kamajors: He'd met them months before while working on a photo story about Sierra Leone refugees escaping to Guinea and quickly developed a friendship with the commanders. The Kamajors were in Guinea, he learned, to rest and rearm in preparation for an assault on the RUF in Kono, entirely disregarding the peace process and the efforts to disarm those fighting in the bush, Kamajors included. They invited Patrick to join them in the bush, and for the previous month, he'd been hiking with them through the jungle to the battleground. He endured shootouts with the RUF, sleeping in the open on the jungle floor, and mysterious magical rituals that the Kamajors performed before battle. Once, a sacred totem that they carried before them into battle blew over in a high wind and their advance was delayed for days while they prayed to the god it represented for forgiveness for allowing it to touch the ground. During one ceremony, the Kamajor commanders decided to put a spell on Patrick so that he would be allowed to physically touch the members of the Kamajor unit. According to their superstition, it was the worst of luck for a non-Kamajor to touch a Kamajor who's prepared to engage in battle.

They'd fought their way through the jungle to the outskirts of Koidu, where they positioned themselves along one flank of a three-pronged assault. They were the outer circle in a series of concentric
forces: In the middle were the RUF, surrounding them was a battalion of Bangladeshis with UNAMSIL, and the Kamajors surrounded
them.
According to Patrick, the plan was to demolish anything within their circle to reclaim the diamond district, including UNAMSIL if they fought back. On the eve of battle, Patrick's unit dispatched a runner to flit through the forest and report to two other Kamajor units that they were in position and ready to attack.