CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE WAR GOES ON … AND ON …

Diamonds made the world go round in Sierra Leone, said Nellis when speaking about the lure of the precious stones in many African countries, ‘and many of my detractors, people who deprecated my actions, insisted that I was only there to make my fortune’. He continued:

To these people, it mattered little whether the rebels were cutting the hands and feet off children, or roasting their enemies alive and eating them. Instead, they concentrated their efforts on trying to dislodge this ‘foreign mercenary’ who was making a living by flying helicopter gunships in the war. That I was killing these barbarians was of no consequence to this pretty vocal bunch.

Unfortunately, while being involved in this internecine struggle, I’d become a media figure. One of the reasons for this was that the word had gone out that I was working hand-in-glove with the British to try to bring hostilities to a close. A number of my Freetown ‘enemies’ worked for NGOs and many of them actually sympathised, and sometimes clandestinely associated, with the brutal murderers in the RUF. These people sought a means of terminating what they termed, my ‘dreadful mercenary actions’.

They were an odd bunch, Nellis admitted. He would say that if you met them at a party in Hounslow or Clapham, they’d be like anybody else. However, he reckoned that they could be lethal.

I was tipped off at one stage, beforehand fortunately, that they even considered pouring cups of sugar into the fuel tank of my helicopter so that the Hind’s engines would seize while we were out on ops. It never happened, of course, because they’d have had to get into Cockerill Barracks first. However, I know that had they been able to, they would have done so.

Then somebody put the word out that Nellis wasn’t actually a military man at all, but a diamond smuggler. ‘You can’t win with some of these people’, he flatly declared.

I was actually investigated several times by a United Nations Special Investigative Committee. They wouldn’t be overly specific about what they were investigating but, soon enough, the diamond issue would surface. The first time was towards the end of 1999 when our entire crew was accused of smuggling diamonds. I was fingered as the principal culprit, although nobody was able to produce any evidence because there wasn’t any. I was as broke then as I am today, which wouldn’t have been the case had I been dealing in the stuff.

One of the ‘Golden Rules’ laid out by Nellis and Juba early on was that nobody on the team would get involved with either gold or diamonds. If they did, he said, even legally, they would be dismissed. It was what was termed a ‘zero tolerance’ issue. The same restrictions applied to drugs.

There was very good reason for us taking what some might have regarded as an uncompromising stance. We all knew that the Nigerians were smuggling diamonds. Not only that, they were doing so on an enormous scale … you couldn’t miss it because the same people who sidled up and offered us parcels of diamonds, would later be seen doing deals with the Nigerian soldiers. Worse, they weren’t even discreet about it.

Some Nigerians tried to load suspicious cargoes onto the choppers. A number of times Fred stopped them loading bags of what they said was ‘gravel’ onto both ‘Bokkie’ and the Hind. A Nigerian officer would arrive at a pick-up point in the interior with what he would say was rice—ten or 12 large bags of it. However, a closer examination would show that the bags were all filled with diamondiferous gravel.

We had some serious confrontations with these people. They told us that they had been deprived of their rights by our lack of cooperation and we left it to Fred to read them their so-called ‘rights’. More than once we were threatened that the matter wouldn’t be laid to rest.

So be it! We had Foday Sankoh’s jungle bunnies on one side and the Nigerian Army on the other, but we won in the end, which just about says it all.

It was interesting, he commented, that none of the people working for NGOs, or even the diplomats at local embassies, would ever confront members of the helicopter crew face-to-face. However, they would later hear accusations of smuggling and, as Nellis commented, it rankled.

These people didn’t have the balls to accost either me or any of the members of the crew directly. Once or twice I had to stop Fred from flattering the nose of some particularly obnoxious little shit who believed he could voice off and that we wouldn’t dare react.

In any war, repeated success in the field invariably leads to charges of human rights abuses, particularly where innocent civilians are involved. As well as being denounced as a diamond smuggler, Neall Ellis was also routinely accused of using his Mi-24 helicopter gunship indiscriminately, especially when he targeted RUF vehicles parked in or near villages or marketplaces. As he declared to one critic, ‘this was a regular ploy, used in the same way that the rebels would paint big red crosses on the roofs of buildings they used for military headquarters or operations centres’.

It was also pointed out that there was no International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) activity in the field either in Sierra Leone or Liberia, although that organisation was very well represented in the capitals of both countries. The truth was that the situation was just too dangerous in the jungle, where the fighting was at its most intense, for any kind of effective aid work. Anyway, the average pubescent rebel had no respect for the ICRC, the media, or the UN, for that matter. Most of these youngsters, high on liquor and drugs for 18 hours of the day, wouldn’t have known the difference between a UN official and the postman anyway.

One of the more dedicated people to emerge in West Africa during this time was a young woman by the name of Corinne Dufka. Formerly a journalist, she had covered the war in the Balkans and was so badly wounded by a land mine in Bosnia that she had almost died. Corinne had been living in West Africa for many years, mostly in Dakar.