Blood Diamonds, Revised Edition

There was, however, a problem. In the wake of the coup ousting Kabbah, the UN drafted a poorly worded resolution that was mostly composed by British lawmakers imposing an arms embargo on Sierra Leone. But according to the wording of the resolution, the embargo applied not only to the occupying junta, but also to the legitimate government that the British supported and wanted to see returned to power. British lawmakers interpreted the resolution as a blanket ban on weapons to Sierra Leone, regardless of whom they were destined for.

But Kabbah had a foreign friend who was willing to do all he could to restore Kabbah’s government to power: the British Foreign Office’s representative in Freetown, Peter Penfold, who interpreted the UN resolution differently than the lawmakers in his home country. Exiled by the coup to a hotel in Conakry, Guinea, Penfold was more or less cut off from his bosses in London: His satellite telephone didn’t work, crucial documents were either lost or destroyed by the German embassy in Guinea, which allowed Penfold to send and receive coded faxes, and high-tech communications gear delivered to him was left at the airport because it was too big to fit through the door of his hotel room. So chances are that he may not have been entirely aware that Britain had outlawed all arms deliveries to Sierra Leone, and he helped coordinate Kabbah’s contract with Sandline to provide Sierra Leone weapons in exchange for diamond-mining rights.

When it became known that the British High Commissioner to Sierra Leone was helping coordinate a gunrunning plan in contravention of British law and UN sanctions, a gigantic political scandal erupted in London. Foreign Office secretary Cook had built his reputation on mercilessly prosecuting the Conservative government’s secret delivery of arms to Iraq in the late 1980s, and he returned to his residence one night in April 1998 to find a fax from solicitors acting on behalf of Sandline, saying that it was under investigation by Customs and Excise for sanctions busting. The diamond war in Sierra Leone was capable not only of causing the deaths of thousands of innocent victims, but of jeopardizing the political careers of foreign politicians as well.²

Sandline sent 35 tons of Bulgarian AK-47s to Sierra Leone for use by the Sierra Leone Army and the Kamajors, but the brewing political scandal in London put deeper involvement on permanent hold. Meanwhile ECOWAS reinforced ECOMOG and its Nigerian soldiers in Freetown in an all-out military bid to restore Kabbah’s government. Interestingly, this force was considered “leg itimate” despite the fact that Nigeria had been expelled from the Commonwealth of Nations for the army’s gross violations of human rights within its own country, which culminated in the military murder—under the dictatorship of the Nigerian General Sani Abacha—of environmental activists in 1996. Worse still for the prospects of brokering peace was that, at the same time it was deployed to Sierra Leone, portions of the ECOMOG command stationed in Liberia had more or less gone into business with Charles Taylor, whose support of the RUF was well known. Taylor was a close friend and political ally of Sani Abacha, and some of Abacha’s soldiers assigned to ECOMOG in Liberia saw the opportunity to enrich themselves by stripping the country of railroad stock, mining equipment, and public utilities and selling them abroad.³ Sandline and EO may have gotten results, but the fact that they were private armies apparently made them more unpalatable than ECOMOG to world tastes. It appeared that the developed countries were willing to put Sierra Leone’s rescue in the hands of a less effective security force—one that was prone to flagrant corruption, bribery, savagery, and a disdain for human rights—just because it was quasi-governmental and not run by profiteers—at least not so openly.

ECOMOG’S ATTEMPT TO WREST control of Freetown from the RUF/AFRC was a human rights disaster. Its first order of business was to free the capital from AFRC and RUF occupiers and reinstate Kabbah to power, an operation that nearly involved destroying the city in order to liberate it. In fierce street-to-street fighting, ECOMOG lost hundreds of soldiers and the RUF/AFRC forces looted and burned everything they could in retreat. Drugged RUF child-soldiers wearing clothes donated by aid organizations dashed into Freetown’s burning streets, blindly firing deafening volleys of gunfire in the general direction of their enemies, hitting anything that happened to be in the way. ECOMOG was largely doing the same thing, its soldiers modifying their uniforms by fighting shirtless or with bandanas flapping around their heads. It was often hard to tell who was who, and RUF fighters began tying white bandanas around their heads in order to be recognized by their comrades.

While ECOMOG attempted to liberate Freetown, the Kamajors ran roughshod throughout the bush, storming RUF defenses and engaging in some of their hardest-fought battles, now armed more substantially by both the Nigerians and Sandline than they’d ever been before. The Kamajors proved to be a force unto themselves; although they were ostensibly fighting on behalf of the government, they soon proved to be beyond the government’s control. They fought the RUF, but they also looted villages, stole food, and killed civilians suspected of aiding the rebels. Their vigilante tactics would later be a stumbling block to peace once UNAMSIL deployed in 1999.

ECOMOG’s own scorched-earth tactics reduced Freetown to a smoking, corpse-filled hull of a city, but they did chase the RUF back to the bush to defend their diamond mines. Then field-commander Issa Sessay and Major General Sam “Mosquito” Bokarie helped Johnny Paul Koroma, the AFRC leader, flee to the eastern RUF stronghold of Kailahun and into Liberia, discovering in the process that he had hidden a large cache of rebel diamonds in his clothing to facilitate his escape.⁴ According to the United Nations, Koroma had enough goods to ensure quite a comfortable life in Europe. Mosquito and Sessay took the diamonds from him and sent him into Liberia at gunpoint.

Kabbah was restored to power in March of 1998. RUF leader Foday Sankoh was captured in Abuja, Nigeria, ensnared in a gunrunning plot. He was arrested and shipped back to Freetown, where he was sentenced to die for his role in supporting the AFRC junta. If ever the sordid tale of Sierra Leone should have ended, it should have ended there.

But the RUF’s insatiable lust for money and power is not easily extinguished. The RUF quickly regrouped in the wake of its defeat at the hands of ECOMOG and planned its worst assault yet: an all-out bid to take over the country and its wealth of diamonds. Although nearly a quarter of Nigeria’s entire military was based in Sierra Leone at the beginning of 1999 and the rebel leader was on death row in Freetown, the RUF rearmed with the help of Charles Taylor’s presidential plane, trading diamonds for weapons from Niger. It staged a bold assault on Freetown on January 6, 1999, code-named Operation No Living Thing. The date is burned into the mind of anyone living in the capital at the time. In the words of journalist Sebastian Junger, war does not get much worse than it did on that day.

JOSEPH KAMARA REMEMBERS the humid, overcast day well—it was the day he lost both his hands and his family in the space of about twenty minutes. He was in his home near Kissy Harbor in eastern Freetown when he heard a rocket sizzle down the boulevard in front of his house, exploding in the street several hundred yards away. He ran out the front door to see what was happening and saw two “technicals” careening down the street stuffed with RUF fighters. Technicals are pickup trucks that have been modified into combat vehicles; many have had their windshields and roofs taken off with a chainsaw and all of them have a heavy machine gun or antiaircraft gun bolted into the bed, weapons too heavy to fire without being stabilized. One of the trucks broke off from its high-speed run and skidded to a stop in front of him, spilling fighters bristling with gun barrels.

“You! Today you’ll die!” yelled one man, whom Kamara assumed was the commander. He tried to plead with them to spare his family, but the other soldiers ran into the house and dragged out his wife, 6-year-old son, two teenage daughters, and his brother. The brother was shot immediately, one bullet through the head with a nickel-plated revolver. Kamara remembers his body falling straight down, as if all the bones had suddenly been removed. Then a Molotov cocktail was pitched through the doorway of the house, a modest concrete cube, but one that was comfortable by Freetown’s standards.

He was then forced to lie on his back in the street with his arms outstretched. He wanted to yell to his son to leave so that he wouldn’t have to witness his mutilation, but did not want to reveal his hiding place to the soldiers. An ax was raised into the smoke-filled sky while the surrounding soldiers pinned him down and stood on his hands. It took more than a dozen blows to sever each arm, just below the elbow. The strangest sensation, he said, was that one minute he could feel his knuckles being ground into the asphalt by the soldier’s boot and in the next he watched as the man kicked his arm away as he felt nothing.

Once the amputation was complete, the soldiers fired a chain of machine-gun ammunition into the flaming remains of his house and then sped off looking for more victims. Delirious with pain, eyes stinging with tears, Kamara looked for his son, but he was gone. He staggered to the nearby Connaught Hospital in the hope that the doctors could keep him from bleeding to death. He never saw any of his family members again.

Scenes like this took place throughout Freetown for the next four days as the capital continued its now familiar plunge into chaos and anarchy. Recalling the horror of the May 1997 coup just two years before, international aid groups wasted no time evacuating their people, as did the media organizations and the diplomatic corps. Once again, Freetown’s population was left to fend for itself in the face of battalions of crazed RUF soldiers, with only ECOMOG to hide behind.

ECOMOG soldiers, caught off guard by the assault, went haywire and embarked on their own version of Operation No Living Thing, executing suspected RUF on the Aberdeen bridge and dumping their bodies into the river below. Roadside justice was the order of the day. Anyone remotely suspected of being involved with the RUF was tortured, raped, and summarily executed by the Nigerian soldiers, including an unknown number of perfectly innocent civilians whose elbows were tied behind them before they were shot at point-blank range. One retarded 9-year-old boy, whose plight was highlighted in the documentary film Cry Freetown, was stripped naked, beaten, and tortured by Nigerians who suspected him of being an RUF sniper. It’s hard to tell which is worse; that ECOMOG beat and tortured children, or that the RUF had enlisted young kids so extensively that ECOMOG was put into a position where it had no choice but to suspect even the least suspicious of being an RUF killer. Alpha jets and artillery emplacements fired on civilian targets and some soldiers in the Sierra Leone Army imitated the rebels they were ostensibly fighting, taking the arms or legs off anyone they suspected of being a rebel.⁵ ECOMOG’s wanton targeting of civilians and their property led Sierra Leoneans to quip wryly that the force’s acronym actually stood for “Every Car or Moving Object Gone.”

Still, no one outside the orbit of West Africa seemed to pay much attention to the matter. Operation No Living Thing was given brief and perfunctory treatment in Western media, which was busy with other matters that dominated the news. At the time thousands of Africans were dying over control of diamonds sold in shopping malls around the world, U.S. president Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury, NATO began bombing Yugoslavia, and everyone else was preparing for digital disaster from Y2K.

Nevertheless, the horror was too graphic to ignore completely. With little thought to the causes of the conflict, the U.S. Department of State dispatched negotiators—including envoy Jesse Jackson—to the region with one goal: End the war and secure a peace agreement. The agreement that was reached in Lomé, the capital of the small West African nation of Togo, was nothing less than a hands-down victory for those who started the war in the first place, for no better reason than to control and sell diamonds, a fact that seemed to escape all scrutiny from the diplomats and negotiators in Lomé.

THE 1999 LOMÉ PEACE ACCORDS, signed by the RUF, AFRC, the Sierra Leone government, and the United Nations, is a diplomatic work of art. According to the agreement, the RUF would end their hostilities in exchange for amnesty for war crimes committed since the beginning of the conflict and its leaders would be appointed to government posts. RUF leader Foday Sankoh—still in jail awaiting execution for his role in the 1997 coup—was to be released from prison and installed as the vice president under Kabbah, the man he and Johnny Paul Koroma had ousted two years earlier. Sankoh was also to be appointed as the chairman of the country’s Commission for the Management of Strategic Resources, National Reconstruction and Development. In other words, the internationally brokered peace accord gave the RUF total control of everything it had fought and killed for from the very beginning—the diamond mines. In exchange, the RUF agreed to demobilize and disarm to a UN peacekeeping force, dubbed UNAMSIL. After disarming, the RUF was to be given legal status as a political party. It’s hard to imagine that the band of killers who’d murdered thousands and sold the country’s most valuable natural resource out from under it for the past decade could have been happier with the agreement.

Western countries that helped negotiate the Lomé Accords enthusiastically supported the agreement, not because they were fair—but because it was a swift solution to what they perceived to be a nagging problem. Responding to criticism that the Lomé Accords were too favorable to the RUF, the U.S. assistant secretary of state at the time, Susan Rice, practically put it in those words when she said: “There will never be peace and security and an opportunity for development and recovery in Sierra Leone unless there is a solution to the source of the conflict. And that entails, by necessity—whether we like it or not—a peace agreement with the rebels.”⁶

Not everyone was convinced that for peace to succeed the RUF should be granted such a conciliatory arrangement. The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, in a bold but ill-advised move, signed an amendment to the peace agreement stating that he didn’t agree with giving combatants amnesty for war crimes, one of the document’s most important concessions to the RUF. By making such a statement, he essentially nullified the agreement in the eyes of the RUF before it was implemented and then sent 6,000 UN soldiers to Sierra Leone to try and enforce it.

ENTER UNAMSIL. Created through UN Security Council Resolution 1270, and deployed to Sierra Leone in October of 1999, UNAMSIL originally consisted of 6,000 military personnel and 260 observers. The majority of them were again Nigerians, the UN’s first mistake among many. Given the atrocities committed by Nigeria’s last foray into Sierra Leonean “peacekeeping” through ECOMOG, it was natural that most Sierra Leoneans looked on them warily. And as far as the RUF was concerned, the Nigerians were nothing less than a hated enemy, one to which they were now expected to turn over their arms.

Compounding this lack of respect and authority were consistent rumors that some ECOMOG units—which were to be absorbed into UNAMSIL—had made arrangements with the RUF to share the spoils of their diamond plundering, in much the same way as they had with resources in Liberia. That the Nigerians may have been interested in agendas other than peace was clear to UN force commanders from the early days of the UNAMSIL mission. By the time the mission was deployed, Nigeria’s dictator, Sani Abacha, had died unexpectedly of a heart attack—some say it was brought on by an overdose of Viagra—and that nation’s dictatorial dynasty, which always relied on equal amounts of corruption and military screw-turning, was in question. Given the growing uncertainty over Nigeria’s leadership, top military officers commanding troops under the UNAMSIL banner were presented with a tempting opportunity to amass war chests and hedge funds in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria.

John Bolton, at the time the senior vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, complained to the U.S. Congress about this seemingly obvious obstacle. “Why should Nigerians have been embraced by UNAMSIL?” he questioned the House International Relations Committee in October 2000. “Given that the RUF effectively considered them the enemy, this was virtually a guarantee of a repetition of the Somalia problem, when [local warlord] Mohammed Farah Aideed saw the UN forces allying themselves with local clans and subclans that he considered his enemies. . . . Inexplicably, the lessons of Somalia do not seem to have been applied in Sierra Leone.”⁷

UNAMSIL fell apart almost before its acronym was christened. The original force consisted of a hodgepodge of member-states’ militaries, and they didn’t exactly represent the cream of the crop, seeming to have been culled from those smaller states that could be pressured into troop commitments by the more influential UN members who didn’t want anything to do with a morass like Sierra Leone. While effective, experienced, and well-equipped soldiers from countries like the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Germany, and France stayed home, soldiers from Nepal, Croatia, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Zambia, and Ghana were dispatched to Freetown. The idea, perhaps, was that countries in the common continent should be deployed to handle an African problem, but the result was that variously disciplined forces that had never operated in concert were thrust into what was at the time the hottest military zone on earth next to Kosovo. And the disastrous results of this strategy were almost instantaneous.

The first problem was that UNAMSIL unwisely attempted to deploy everywhere at once—with 6,000 soldiers into a countrywide battlefield with some 40,000 to 50,000 combatants. When the RUF was suddenly faced with a heavily armed force of Nigerians demanding their disarmament—many of whom had served with ECOMOG before joining the UN’s mission—they naturally went on the defensive. In May 2000, the RUF killed seven UN peacekeepers and took fifty more hostage, stealing their weapons and vehicles. The number of captured soon rose to over 500, many surrendering their rifles and ammunition without a fight, further humiliating the UN. Many of those captured happened to be Zambians, and the Zambian president sharply criticized UNAMSIL and its Sierra Leone force commander, Major General Vijay Jetly of India. Only months into the mission the UN was having an embarrassingly public debate about command-and-control issues while a twelfth of its force was held prisoner. The Security Council’s decision in February 2000 to increase force strength to 11,000 troops did little to help the situation. Within weeks of the UNAMSIL deployment, Victor Bout made a series of arms shipments to Liberia for the RUF. The cargo, including several attack helicopters, demonstrated that the RUF had little intention of complying with the disarmament agreement.

UNAMSIL was so inept in its early days that the British sent in paratroopers independent of the UN mission to help stabilize the country, a move that was interpreted—mostly correctly—as an attempt to rescue the UN mission behind the scenes. Though they were to have pulled out by mid-June 2000, the British paratroopers were still there as of November 2001, operating beyond the UN’s channels and mandates.

Because of the troubled UN mission, the Lomé Accords were rendered useless. The RUF had yet to disarm and they continued to mine and smuggle diamonds under the noses of the UN. The Secretary General proposed increasing UNAMSIL’s size yet again to 20,500 troops, including eighteen infantry battalions, and changing the scope of the mission from neutral peacekeeper to ally of the government. But the Security Council refused to change the parameters of the mission and the UN couldn’t find any member-states willing to contribute the increased number of troops. While this debate ensued, a Sierra Leone Army splinter-group calling themselves The West Side Boys captured eleven British soldiers east of Freetown. The soldiers were soon freed, but it required a daring commando mission into the West Side Boys’ headquarters and cost one paratrooper his life. The British found $38 million worth of rebel diamonds in the hideout.

Meanwhile, in the midst of what was more or less unchecked warfare between UNAMSIL and the RUF, Jetly, the UNAMSIL commander, was busily preparing a secret report on the shortcomings of the mission’s Nigerian contingent, accusing them of undermining the UN’s mandate and pursuing their own agendas. The unfinished report was leaked and the Nigerian commander demanded Jetly’s dismissal as force commander. India eventually withdrew all 3,000 of its soldiers from Sierra Leone, including Jetly.

In testimony to the U.S. Congress, John Bolton aptly described the mission as a “meltdown.” He placed major blame on the Lomé Accords themselves and the UN’s hesitancy to fully endorse the amnesty clause:

There was never any serious review by the Security Council or the Secretariat whether the Lomé Agreement represented a true meeting of the minds of the parties, and whether it provided any real basis to believe that the peacekeepers could undertake the missions contemplated for them. This failure is a damning indictment of the Council’s entire approach to Sierra Leone and the decision to deploy substantial UN peacekeeping forces reflects a simplistic, knee-jerk to conflict resolution. Subsequent events demonstrate beyond question that there was never any real peace to keep and that the peacekeepers’ mission was almost certainly doomed from the start.⁸

For at least one person, things couldn’t have been much better. Sankoh, just released from prison and settling into his new cabinet position, resumed earnestly plundering the diamond fields with bureaucracy, political connections, and old-fashioned corruption rather than with machetes and machine guns. Though he was now a government official, he still had the RUF doing his dirty work by mining diamonds on his behalf. In the book Fire, journalist Sebastian Junger presents evidence of organized diamond-gathering activities by RUF on Sankoh’s behalf while he was ostensibly in a position of responsibility over the diamond fields. A notebook discovered at Sankoh’s residence detailed an RUF agent’s diamond collections from October 1998 to July 1999—“a nine-month haul of about 786 carats of white diamonds and 887 carats of industrials. The RUF is thought to be exporting about half a million carats a year, which would suggest there were about 300 guys . . . gathering diamonds for Sankoh,” Junger wrote.⁹

And Sankoh wasted no time trying to find buyers for the gems. Even though the governmental commission he chaired had yet to be activated—a commission that oversaw Sierra Leone’s diamond exports—he was busy negotiating with British and Belgian diamond brokers and American hustlers disguised as businessmen. Junger detailed one particularly bold scam that was orchestrated by the president of the U.S. Trading & Investment Company, John Caldwell, who was also the former vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Shortly before the commission he chaired was activated, Sankoh wrote up a contract between the RUF and Caldwell and his business partner, Belgian Michel Desaedeleer, giving the men monopoly mining rights—through a Virgin Islands–chartered company of which they were directors—to all the gold and diamond claims in Kono District. “The RUF was to provide security and labor for the mining operations and facilitate the transportation of diamonds out of the country,” Junger wrote. Caldwell and Desaedeleer’s company would split the profits with the RUF.

According to Junger, Desaedeleer then immediately tried to sell the contract to anyone he could think of for $10 million, including De Beers, DiamondWorks, and—unbelievably—to the Sierra Leone government itself. The government’s ambassador to the United States, John Leigh, was naturally aghast at the audacity of a hated rebel group’s asking him to pay for the country’s sovereign natural resources. And being asked by a partner of the former vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce added incredible insult to the offer.¹⁰

There’s no evidence that Sankoh got very far with his plans because, like nearly everyone else involved in the tragic tale of Sierra Leone’s diamonds, he also seems to suffer from congenital incompetence and terminal greed. Not content with his potentially influential position in Kabbah’s government, many believe that Sankoh was planning a coup for the summer of 2000, smuggling in fixers like Brigadier General Issa Sessay—who went by the code name General Emperor—to coordinate the plot.

Before it could be executed, though, RUF commanders in Makeni spoiled the plan by surrounding a base filled with Kenyan peacekeepers and demanding the release of ten fighters who’d surrendered days earlier. A gunfight ensued and seven peacekeepers were taken hostage. The UN raided Sankoh’s Freetown compound in retaliation and unwittingly averted the coup plot. Sankoh was again arrested and, as of November 2001, was being held on Bunce Island in the Sierra Leone River under heavy guard.

WHILE PEACEKEEPERS, rebels, and mercenaries were busily slaughtering one another in a mostly forgotten jungle battle in West Africa, London residents Charmian Gooch and Alex Yearsley were busily working on the heart of the matter and preparing to knock the wind out of the $6 billion-per-year, century-old diamond industry by revealing its deepest and darkest secret. Their nongovernmental organization, Global Witness, released a detailed report in December 1998 that tied illicitly mined and sold diamonds from the UNITA rebels in Angola directly to De Beers. By inference, Global Witness explained that all the death and destruction in that country, as well as other diamond-producing nations enduring brutal civil wars, result from the international diamond industry’s willingness to pay the rebels for their ill-gotten goods.¹¹

Angola is Sierra Leone’s mirror hellhole. Its body count—half a million over ten years of civil war—has outpaced that of the smaller country only because it has a larger population. A former Portuguese colony, Angola launched into nearly nonstop warfare from the moment the colonialists pulled out in 1975. On one side was the Marxist MPLA government supported by Russia and Cuba; on the other was the Maoist UNITA, backed strangely enough by the United States and China. This Cold War chess game was funded on the government’s side by oil revenues and on the rebels’ side by the country’s impressive diamond mines. Global Witness estimated that between 1992 and 1997, UNITA reaped $3.7 billion from the diamond mines, which led to a UN Security Council resolution in July 1998 aimed at stemming their sales. In spite of that, there has been no significant reduction in UNITA’s diamond earnings.¹²