Blood Diamonds (6 page)

Diamonds only added to the increasing political tension of pre-independence Sierra Leone. Those who would be charged with assuming the mantle of government from the British in 1961 faced both an economic windfall as well as a witch's brew of serious political and economic issues that would challenge any well-seasoned government. Sierra Leoneans, with the oversight of a British administration, had experienced no success in harnessing the country's most valuable natural resource, as the diamond boom of the 1950s had shown. More diamonds were smuggled away than were exported, robbing the country of taxes and contracts that could have been used to build roads, utilities, and medical and educational facilities. Control of the diamond fields would require an incredibly delicate and astute, yet forceful and uncompromising
government. The head of state would have to adopt strict border policies with Liberia, modernize export laws, and establish creative trade and labor agreements with diamond exploration companies. The entire monetary system should probably have been overhauled prior to independence. One of the reasons smugglers went to Monrovia was because Liberia's dollar was fixed to the value of the U.S. dollar until 1997, making it the equivalent of hard currency. The much softer currency of Sierra Leone was good only in Sierra Leone.

None of these measures was taken, however, and the smuggling did not stop once Sierra Leone was granted independence on April 27, 1961. Maintaining the diamond infrastructure was left to the Lebanese traders in towns like Kenema and Bo, and they had organized it in the first place to address the needs of smugglers.

The system employed by people like Fawaz is simple and dates back to the early diamond-rush days of the 1950s. Individual miners obtain a license from the government to dig on a certain plot of land or riverbank. Since the license is extremely expensive to the average would-be miner—who also needs to pay off the inevitable series of bribes—he often needs to find a sponsor, usually a Lebanese merchant. The merchant provides shovels, gasoline-powered water pumps, sieves, food, and pay for the miner's hired diggers. In exchange, the diamonds are sold to the merchant, minus the overhead. Fawaz himself, though he works in one of Africa's most valuable diamondiferous regions and is a conduit for what is eventually hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gemstones, has never even visited a mine.

When war broke out in 1991, the system was so well established—and the profits so lucrative—that many Lebanese abandoned their businesses only under the most threatening circumstances.
Even at the height of the RUF conflict, with the sounds of rocket blasts echoing off Kenema's high hills, many merchants continued to man their offices and buy stones from the rebels. Official diamond exports from Sierra Leone practically ceased in the mid-1990s—whereas 2 million carats per year were exported in the 1960s, a paltry 9,000 carats were exported in 1999—but the old smuggling routes to Monrovia were still open for business.

And there was certainly no lack of buyers. Everyone from legitimate brokers employed by Belgian cutting houses to agents of the Iranian-backed Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah crowded the streets and hotels of Monrovia, eager for the chance to buy diamonds from the RUF. Monrovia was a no-man's-land of freewheeling dealing in diamonds that had been soaked in the blood of innocent Sierra Leoneans. For the legitimate brokers, it meant cheap goods and high profits; for the terrorists, it presented a picture-perfect opportunity to launder vast amounts of money undetected, an important development in the role diamonds would come to play in international terrorism in the beginning of the new century.

 

 

 

 

S
ITTING ON FREETOWN' S white-sand beaches, it's almost possible to forget where you are, if you can ignore the regular rotor wash from UN helicopters returning to headquarters at the Mammy Yoko Hotel. But more tragic reminders are never far away.

A young sand-beggar wandered over to our table and told us that he was poor and in need of money. He'd escaped the RUF a year before and couldn't find work. He told us that he was 17 and had been fighting with the rebels since he was kidnapped at age 9. His mother and father were killed by RUF in Makeni, in north-central Sierra Leone, and he was trucked to the rebels' eastern stronghold in Kailahun and forced to join the rebellion. It was either that or execution. His weapon had been an AK-58, a more powerful version of the ever-popular AK-47, which can hold up to 75 rounds of
ammunition per magazine. He practiced his aim by shooting coconuts out of palm trees alongside other kidnapped children. After six weeks of training in guerilla warfare, he was ordered into battle.

“You had to go,” he said.

“Why? Could you say ‘no'?”

“They kill you if you say ‘no,'” he said. “Four kids in my unit were killed because they wouldn't fight.”

I asked him if he'd ever chopped off anyone's hands and he said he hadn't. But he'd seen it done.

“Why?” I asked.

“We only chop hands by order.”

“But why were the orders given?”

“To scare people. To get the diamonds and make them leave the mines.”

Less than five minutes after he left, a young child about 7 years old tentatively approached the table pulling an old man in sunglasses by the sleeves of his sport coat. The sleeves flapped in the breeze below the elbow and it was obvious that he'd had his hands chopped off. The girl wanted money for the man, her grandfather. He said he was once a diamond dealer and banker in Bo, Kenema's sister city 50 miles to its west, and when the rebels attacked, they presumed he was rich. They chopped off both arms and gouged out his eyes with a bayonet. Now, like the young RUF lieutenant, he wandered the beach with his granddaughter leading the way and begged for money.

Other than the Mammy Yoko Hotel, which hosted the offices of UNAMSIL, there was no place to escape the walking, talking evidence of how bad and desperate a place Sierra Leone was. Freetown was a city filled with war-ravaged beggars and thieves. There
were too many refugees and not enough humanitarian aid to go around. People crippled with polio staked out street corners, and tried to extort money from those passing within reach. Waiters would try to sell you diamonds or offer to rent their sisters to you for weeks at a time. Children with bloated bellies scratched at the windows of downtown restaurants.

Just when you thought you'd found a safe corner to escape to—some dim tent of a streetside restaurant where few people could see into the gloom and you could order yet another beer and let your mind wander to something other than death, disease, and torture—in would stumble a multiple-amputee, a man who'd had his arms, lips, and ears sawn off with a rusted ax. If it was really an unlucky day for you, the guy would also have polio and malaria and be partially retarded. There is no shortage of such people, and when they corner you in a restaurant whose walls are composed of stolen UNHCR rain-plastic, there are only two things to do: Stare stoically through him as if he doesn't exist, or reach for your wallet and hope a limp leone-note worth 50 cents is penance enough.

When giving money to the amputated, you must put it directly into their pockets.

 

FREETOWN'S VERY NAME is so ironic that no one even bothers to point it out. Its English founders, who had good intentions, however misplaced they might have been at the time, had certainly envisioned a different future. During the Revolutionary War, the British gave American slaves the opportunity to be freed in exchange for fighting for the crown. At the end of the war, more than 15,000 former slaves who had accepted the offer made their way to Great Britain. Although slavery was still legal there, in 1772 a court had ruled that once freed, a slave was free for life. Unaccustomed
to making a life of their own, and aided little by the government they had fought for, many of the new residents suffered crushing poverty and unemployment.

In 1787, a group of British philanthropists purchased 32 square miles of land near Bunce Island, a large landmass in the Sierra Leone River just north of the Freetown Peninsula, from local Temne leaders. Their idea was to create a “Province of Freedom” for the ex-slaves. Later that year, 100 European prostitutes and 300 former slaves arrived in what would become Freetown. Many of the freed slaves knew nothing of Africa, having been born in Europe or the Americas. Even if they had, very few of them—perhaps none of them—had ancestors from Sierra Leone. Although Sierra Leone had been plied for slaves prior to that time, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Cameroon were the main players in the trade. Of the original 400 settlers dropped at the peninsula's deep-water harbor, only 48 survived the next three years, the rest succumbing to a gallery of deadly diseases, warfare with the local inhabitants, or the temptation to leave Sierra Leone in search of their original homelands.
¹

Undaunted, the philanthropists tried again in 1792, this time shipping some 1,200 former slaves from the United States who had fled to Nova Scotia, Canada; they later sent 500 more from Jamaica. It was during this period that the Sierra Leone settlers first started profiting from the country's natural resources: To survive and make a rather handsome living in their new home, many of the settlers got into the slave trade, the irony being either lost on them or deemed inconsequential. Slaving was nothing new to Sierra Leone and the trade resembled that of conflict diamonds in a number of ways. For one, the history of slaving is filled with characters that seem to have been plucked from a lurid pulp novel. Consider the
self-proclaimed wretch of a slaving captain John Newton, a man so vile “that even his crew regarded him as little more than an animal,” according to historian Lindsey Terry. “Once he fell overboard and his ship's crew refused to drop a boat to him. Instead they threw a harpoon at him, with which they dragged him back into the ship.”

Newton, an Englishman, captained a specially designed slave frigate named, simply enough,
A Slave Ship.
She could carry up to 600 people, chained side to side and lined up like timber. The purpose was to pack in as many slaves as the ship could hold since an average of 20 percent died during the two-month-long middle passage to Cuba.

In 1748, Newton loaded slave cargo in Sierra Leone and weighed anchor into a massive storm that lasted eleven days. Convinced that he wouldn't survive, he had a religious conversion on the deck, in the raging storm, bellowing out to God to “save his wretched soul.” The experience led to his writing the psalm “Amazing Grace” some 20 years later.

Soon after slavery was abolished in Britain in 1807, the British took over the settlement and declared it a colony of the crown. In their efforts to enforce their antislavery laws—and impose them elsewhere—British warships patrolled the West African coast and intercepted slave vessels bound for the Americas, turning the islands off Sierra Leone into processing centers for “recaptives.” After a short time on Bunce Island or the Banana Islands, many of the recaptives were simply put on skiffs to the mainland; some of these lucky Africans came from villages just down the coast.

Even though slavery was illegal, the money to be made kept the trade alive and well up and down the west coast. Tribal chiefs in Sierra Leone would stage slave raids on rival groups and villages
and sell prisoners to Portuguese traders, who kept secret forts in the coastal swamps and forests just south of Freetown. Lookouts would scope the horizon for British men-of-war and, when the coast was clear, rush groups of slaves out to vessels anchored just beyond the surf. Convinced that they were destined for death, many captives would try to drown themselves in the surf, but the Europeans and their indigenous Kru partners kept a close eye out for this and thwarted many such attempts. In 1839, hundreds of captives were packed onto the
Tecora,
a Portuguese slaver, and sailed to Havana. They made land under cover of night because importing slaves into the Americas was illegal. But in a parallel to today's diamond controversy, slave traders dodged this by obtaining passports for their prisoners that showed they were Cuban. Fifty-three of these Sierra Leoneans were purchased by Spanish slave owners and put aboard the 60-foot coastal schooner
Amistad
for transport to Puerto Príncipe. But during the voyage, a Mende slave used a nail to pick his locks and freed his fellow captives. They took over the ship and wound up not back in Africa, as they'd planned, but in Mystic, Connecticut. In the resulting landmark trial, the would-be slaves were freed by the U.S. Supreme Court, aided in no small part by one their attorneys, former U.S. president John Quincy Adams.

Back in Sierra Leone, by 1850 more than 100 ethnic groups were living in Freetown, a mixture brought about by Britain's policy of releasing recaptives at Port Kissy. Like an African version of New York City, Freetown's heterogeneous population occupied different parts of town and the different groups lived fairly harmoniously. Collectively, the Freetown settlers became known as Krios and they developed a language of the same name that allowed them to communicate outside their various native tongues. Krio is a hodgepodge
of African dialects, its main component being English: The result is a mellifluous babble of pidgin slang, Queen's English, and tribal terms.