Blood Diamonds, Revised Edition

“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.

Somewhere along the way, things went awry. Morning came and there was no signal to attack. The commanders sent scouts to probe the front lines, and before anyone knew what was happening, a fleet of UN helicopters had whirled in from overhead, foiling the attack at the last moment. The Kamajors took up defensive positions and the UN personnel who disembarked from the helicopters engaged in brisk negotiations with Patrick, who spoke on behalf of the Kamajors since he could communicate with them the best in his native French. What happened next depends on who’s telling the story. According to Patrick, he was told by the on-scene UN commander that the RUF in Kono had agreed to disarm that very day and that according to the peace deal signed in May, the Kamajors were also required to lay down their rocket launchers and shotguns. The UN maintains that no one ever promised that the RUF in Kono would disarm that day, only that the agreement called for their eventual demobilization.

Either way, much to Patrick’s professional disappointment—he’d invested a month living in the jungle only to have the bloody finale of his story torpedoed by the UN—the Kamajors agreed to hand over their weapons. One hundred and sixty-one Kamajors were disarmed, and eight RUF fighters turned over their weapons. Patrick was shipped to Freetown and kicked out of the Mammy Yoko as a pariah. As far as the UN was concerned, he had all but helped orchestrate the attack. He spent a week moping around Freetown without a visa or a press card, broke except for a gold nugget given as a gift from the Kamajor commander. Tyler and I did our best to cheer him up, but Freetown’s only distractions are nightmarish beach bars filled with child prostitutes, drunken aid workers, deafening pop music, and marijuana-crippled former combatants. It was clear that we had to help him get to the DDR camp in Daru where the Kamajors were sent so he could salvage his story.

Which is how the three of us ended up at the camp, encircled by joyous Kamajors who were happy to see their friend again. Not even the Ghanaian camp adjutant whipping residents with a reed took the smiles off their faces.

“So how are things?” Patrick asked one of the fighters.

“No problem,” the boy smiled back. “We get small-small rest, small-small food and when we leave we will be prepared to fight again.”

That mentality illustrates one of the main problems with the peace process: The Kamajors, although loyal to the government, are controlled by no one. They operate according to their own rules and during years of combat have become as enamored with diamonds as the RUF. There is suspicion among some in the UN hierarchy that operational control over the Kamajors is indeed in the hands of the Sierra Leone military, which claims the group as allies when it’s favorable to do so and distances itself from them when it’s not.

“The SLA can turn the [Kamajors] on or off as it wishes,” one UN official confided in me. “When they want them to run roughshod over the RUF, they claim they’re beyond control. When the time is right to reel them in, they can do that too.”

EVEN THOUGH THE KAMAJORS continued to stage such bold assaults against the RUF and the rebels continued to mine diamonds, both actions in violation of the peace agreement, the news wasn’t all bad. In fact, despite the obstacles yet to be overcome, the peace process in the summer of 2001 was further along than any previous attempt to end the war in Sierra Leone. And I had many conversations with people in the DDR camps and elsewhere who were all too happy to retire from the RUF and try to make a legitimate living. Twenty-six-year-old RUF Lieutenant Mohammed Morrison was 19 when he left the ranks of the SLA and joined the rebellion. His reason for joining was the same as his reason for leaving for the DDR camp in Daru, and he sounded sincere when he said his goal all along had been to “make the country better for me and my friends.”

In the early years of the war, the RUF dogma, outlined in a manifesto called “Footpaths to Democracy” penned by RUF leader Foday Sankoh, seemed to poor and illiterate blue-collar workers like Morrison to be a reasonable alternative to poverty, lack of economic opportunity, and governmental corruption. A jumbled mixture of patriotic and Maoist rhetoric, Sankoh’s passage that comes closest to offering an excuse for the rebellion reads:

No more shall the rural countryside be reduced to hewers of wood and drawers of water for urban Freetown. That pattern of exploitation, degradation and denial is gone forever. No RUF/SL [Sierra Leone] combatant or civilian will countenance the re-introduction of that pattern of raping the countryside to feed the greed and caprice of the Freetown elite and their masters abroad. In our simple and humble ways we say, “No more slave and no more master.” It is these very exploitative measures instituted by so-called central governments that create the conditions for resistance and civil uprising.²

Although the RUF’s raison d’être proved to be little more than a cover for plundering the diamond fields for the sake of its commanders and their Liberian patrons, it’s easy to see how uneducated youths with few prospects for the future could be lured into armed rebellion and brainwashed into thinking that they were fighting for a better future. Morrison spoke with pride about his command of fifty soldiers in the RUF’s 5th Battalion, D Company, which fought near Yengema in Kono.

“Sometimes we’d go out on patrol and if we heard about government movements, we’d lay our ambushes and put the situation under complete control,” he said, making a motion with his hands as if he were smoothing out bedsheets. The purpose of his unit was purely combat, providing forward and perimeter defenses for the diamond operations in Kono. The short, beefy commander had never even seen a diamond, he said, but he’d been a beneficiary of their revenues. His company was often resupplied with ammunition, food, and marijuana by the human mule-trains ferrying diamonds to the Liberian border. Most of their other supplies were stolen from SLA and ECOMOG units they ambushed. But after seven years in the rebellion without seeing any tangible political or social benefits, he had grown disillusioned with the cause. No one in command seemed interested in political dialogue, just diamond sales, he said. He thought about deserting, but had been in the RUF long enough to know what that meant if he were later caught.

So when he heard that a peace deal had been signed by Sessay and UNAMSIL in March 2001, he ordered his men that day to unload their weapons and travel with him to Daru. Out of the fifty under his command, only eight complied. Several of them I met in Daru were barely capable of articulating why they obeyed Morrison’s order, their reasons for wanting peace being as mysterious and esoteric as their reasons for going to war. “Now they say it is time for us to come in from the bush,” explained 19-year-old Mammy Massaquoi, a second lieutenant. Her face was covered in acne, accentuated with a shrapnel wound perforating her left cheek. “All is the work of Satan. That is why brother fought brother, but now the Lord has come and brought peace.”

All of them fear reprisal for leaving the rebellion’s ranks, a trait they shared with the Kamajors who lived side by side with them in the camp. On their own initiative, about 300 combatants and their families had received permission from the UN to construct a village next door to the camp, a sort of temporary home while they waited for their former villages and towns to be disarmed. Surprisingly, former RUF and Kamajor fighters seemed to live quite peacefully in the geometric grid of stick-and-mud homes.

While Patrick mingled with the Kamajor fighters from the unit he’d marched with, Tyler and I strolled through the town, dubbed Peace Village by the residents. We met retired combatants from both forces who seemed to have accepted the new reality of living side by side with those they’d been trying to kill only weeks before. Their conversion appeared so complete that it was difficult to believe. A Kamajor named Lahaji Bila hunted RUF in Kono; now he was the village’s blacksmith. RUF Major Daniel Kallon defected from the Sierra Leone Army to the RUF after Kamajors killed his brothers in Yengema, but now he was building houses for his former enemies. I didn’t understand how the members of the two forces could so easily forget, or at least overlook, the brutality of the war in which many of them had fought for years until I spoke to the camp adjutant. Ghanaian Lieutenant Charles Bendemba summed up his theory simply: “Hunger makes men see maybe war is not so good.”

Could it be that simple? The prospect of regular meals for six weeks in the equivalent of a detention camp—even if it was simple rice and cassava leaves—could entice battle-hardened men and women to lay down arms and live in harmony? Bendemba wasn’t being quite that simplistic, of course, but what he meant was clear enough. The RUF war was conducted not for any ideological dogma, noble cause, or even for retribution by a long-aggrieved people, but purely for the economics of diamond mining. Even the brainwashed could see that a choice between suffering in the jungle and risking death for the financial benefit of their commanders or taking the opportunity to try and live a normal life wasn’t a difficult choice at all. In the end, many fighters were simply too tired to keep on battling one another. The civil war had reached the fatigue point for many. Morrison, for instance, had seen combat and death for almost eight years and was ready for a change. “It is not worth my life anymore,” he said. “I am young. I am strong. This is my country and I want to make use of it now and make a better life.”

But if all it takes is a hot bowl of rice to convince fighters to stop fighting, it probably wouldn’t take that much to change their minds and decide to once again start carrying weapons. Bendemba was worried about the future waiting beyond the camp gates for his charges. Fifteen bucks didn’t seem like much of a financial incentive to keep former fighters who had been protecting millions of dollars in diamonds on the straight and narrow. He equated fighting with the RUF with a drug addiction. If all your friends are addicts, you live in a crack neighborhood, and all you’ve known for years is getting high, it wouldn’t take much to shove you over the edge once out of rehab.

“You go from here with an empty stomach and empty pockets,” he said. “You must depend on your parents, your friends or maybe you have some precious stones for survival. Someone who is 18 and a general or a major in the bush thinks that he is a big man. He can have women, drugs, money, respect. Once you leave here, you’re just like every other man.”

When these men and women leave the DDR camp, the options are to head to their former homes, most of which in Daru’s district were are still armed and dangerous, or to head to the capital to avoid retribution from those who kept their AK-47s.

“Me and my men are going straight to Freetown,” said Morrison.

HE’S HARDLY ALONE. Freetown’s population of former and current RUF combatants is rivaled only by the population of the RUF’s victims. The RUF has formed a political party, the RUFP (the Revolutionary United Front Party), and although its headquarters is in Makeni, its campaigners are by necessity in Freetown. Freetown is now home to nearly a quarter of the country’s population.

“The RUF has a lot of support,” said a young man named Jonathan on the street near the Cockle Bay Guest House. “But they better not come to this place.”

“This place” was the MSF Camp for Amputees and War Wounded, Freetown’s repository for those with the most horrific of the war’s tales. It was the only place for people like Jonathan, Ismael Dalramy, and other amputation victims to go, if they were lucky enough to find room. MSF volunteer doctors fitted camp residents with donated prostheses and treated them for illnesses, at least as much as funding permitted. There were some poorly attended workshops for people without arms to try to develop work skills with their prostheses, but what seemed to provide the only distraction from their suffering was soccer practice, held daily in the softening late-afternoon light. Every Saturday, there was a match between amputees and polio victims on the beach, and most of the camp’s residents attended. Besides that, the only thing to do was recount their tales of horror to one another, their neighbors being the only people in the world capable of understanding what they went through.

Kabba Jalloh, for instance, lost his hands in Koinadugu, a haphazard collection of mud huts and zinc-roofed buildings in the mountainous jungle about 50 miles northwest of Koidu, but he feels lucky to have kept his life. Speaking in Temne through a translator—another man without hands—he stoically recounted how he was tortured by men who now wanted political legitimacy and his vote in upcoming elections.

He awoke one morning in the summer of 1996 in his field of cassava to find men in camouflage uniforms making their way through the bush on all sides of his small plot. He stood, confused. There was no telling who the men were, but they seemed to be moving easily and assuredly, seemingly uninterested in him. But there was a spark of fear in Jalloh. Men with weapons in Koinadugu couldn’t mean anything good. It was time to leave.

As he gathered his children and two wives from the small thatched-roof hut in the center of his cassava farm, he didn’t realize that the time to leave had passed him by in the night. Under the moon, hundreds of RUF soldiers had encircled Koinadugu. Thinking that he was escaping a trap instead of already being ensnared in one, Jalloh sheathed his cutlass used to harvest cassava and put his smallest daughter on his shoulders. They started walking toward the village center. They walked about ten feet before they were ordered to stop.

Several small boys armed with rifles approached from the bush. Don’t worry, they said. We’re with ECOMOG and we’ll protect you. Come with us.

Jalloh couldn’t read or write. He’d been a farmer his entire life. But he had enough common sense to suspect that ECOMOG didn’t use children in its ranks. He began to sweat with fear.

Jalloh and his family did as they were told and eventually joined about fifty other residents, farmers and their families from nearby fields, at the local barrie, an open-walled concrete structure in the middle of the village used for community meetings and gatherings. They were outnumbered by soldiers, who surrounded them and separated the men and women.

Only seconds before the shooting started did one of the commanders finally laugh and admit that the villagers were going to be killed not by ECOMOG, but by the RUF. All of the men were machine-gunned to death, the women and children screaming in terror as their husbands and brothers and fathers vanished in a pink stew of pulp on the barrie floor.

Among the men, only Jalloh was spared, for reasons he can’t explain. While his friends and relatives were being massacred, he was held off to the side, gaping wide-eyed, amazed that he’d awoken only thirty minutes before to a day he assumed would be as normal as all the rest stacked up behind it, filled with the typical hard labor of farming cassava. But nothing in his life would ever be the same and it was about to get worse.

When the last of the bodies stopped twitching, the RUF yelled at the women to run for their lives. Screaming and crying, they dragged their children into the bush, Jalloh’s family among them. Soon he was alone with about 200 rebels.

“You will be the messenger,” said the commander, ordering his men into action. Two men grabbed his left wrist and pulled his arm taut while a third grabbed him in a stranglehold from behind. A fourth grabbed the cutlass from Jalloh’s waist and in one swift, savage blow, hacked off his arm just below the elbow. The blow was so clean that the men holding the hand fell to the ground, clutching the dismembered limb, provoking laughter from the watching rebels. The two fell into a bit of macabre comedy, dancing around the now screaming Jalloh, hoisting his arm into the air, jubilant.

His screams of pain and protest were ignored, and the other arm came off the same way.

Jalloh’s arms were placed in a plastic bag and tucked into one of the soldier’s backpacks. “We’ll send those to your president,” the commander told him.

After a short time, Jalloh was hoisted to his feet and a hand-lettered sign was placed around his neck. It read: “I am a victim of RUF. Leave now.”

He was placed on the road to the next village and told to spread his message.

NOW THE RUF is trying to spread a different message, a political one. In spite of young Jonathan’s opinion that it wouldn’t be very effective for the RUF to campaign at the MSF camp, there are RUFP political posters glued to the cement walls of the camp’s gates. To say that camp residents are bitter is a drastic understatement.

“But what can I do?” said Jonathan with a morbid laugh, holding up two arms that ended in stumps at his elbows. “Kick a grenade at someone?”

It’s this blunt reality that the UN seems to actively avoid addressing, the fact that the brutality of the RUF war was so acute that it will take years before any semblance of normalcy can be expected in the lives of those who suffered under the RUF’s guns and blades. Everyone I encountered was overjoyed that the shooting had finally stopped, but their moods were countered by a feeling of uncertain dread about the future, as if the current cease-fire were nothing more than a temporary respite from the horror they’d become accustomed to. They’d seen so many hopeful prospects die in a hail of renewed gunfire that very few seemed willing to be as optimistic as UNAMSIL that things would soon normalize.

To date, the UNAMSIL mission is the largest and costliest that the United Nations has ever fielded, comprising 17,500 soldiers and costing in excess of $612 million for 2001 alone. It’s a massive test of the UN’s ability to end conflict and, given the humiliations it suffered early on, “fixing” Sierra Leone seems to be as much a priority for the sake of saving face as it is for humanitarian and security reasons.

A good example of UNAMSIL’s public relations efforts were the staged “child disarmament” ceremonies that disappointed every journalist who attended one. Through an agreement with UNICEF, it was decided that reporters wouldn’t be allowed within 100 yards of any child with a weapon when UNAMSIL was present for fear that they might be photographed and thus—the theory was—further traumatized by having their images published in foreign newspapers and magazines. It was never properly explained how photographing child soldiers with weapons could possibly traumatize them any further than being kidnapped, drugged, and forced into combat, but those were the rules. So whenever UNAMSIL announced a disarmament event for children, it was guaranteed that the children had been disarmed well before the announcement.

We attended one of these events and that was mostly by mistake. Still eager to find quick transportation out to RUF diamond territory, we agreed to fly to Kailahun with UNAMSIL to cover one of the ceremonies. In truth, we intended to ditch the UN as soon as the choppers touched down and find a ride to Tongo Field with locals. By that point, UNAMSIL had handled us so thoroughly that we couldn’t escape its clutches, constantly being hustled from one prepared encounter to another so that the only view we had of Sierra Leone was the one they wanted us to have. Although disarming children was a major facet of the peace agreement, we were eager to get out on our own because I was interested more in the reasons why children were fighting in the first place: the RUF’s diamond economy. We brought a lot of money with us and were prepared to buy a car or truck on the spot in Kailahun and take our chances driving through RUF territory into their diamond regions if we could only escape from the UN.

The problem with our plan was that we’d never been to Kailahun before and didn’t realize that a working vehicle was as rare there as hope and happiness. Kailahun was a withered, war-shattered corpse of a village that was only a few more rainy seasons away from being completely reclaimed by the sweating jungle that breathed its humidity in every direction; it had known nothing but the rebel war since 1991. Kailahun was the first major town to fall before the RUF when its hundred or so original members marched across the Liberian border five miles to the east. It had been under their control for ten years by the time we arrived there and it looked it. In peacetime, Kailahun could comfortably house about 500 people; at the tail end of the war, more than 10,000 refugees fleeing combat on all sides of the village crammed its streets and were slowly starving to death.

After we’d dropped from the sky and marched with Ghanaian soldiers and the UN entourage to the town center, we split from the group and started asking around about transportation. After an hour, in a town of at least 10,000 hot and desperate souls, we could only produce a motorcycle, not enough for me, Hondros, Tyler, and all of our gear.

We sat for awhile on the steps of a wrecked mosque across the square from the ceremony, listening to shells fired at us from Guinea falling a half mile away. Novicki, the UNAMSIL spokeswoman, kept craning her neck at us, no doubt wondering why the only international journalists on the mission were ignoring a ceremony being conducted purely for our sake. With nothing better to do, we wandered over to take an obligatory photo or two.

According to the script, the children being sent from the battlefield to a reprogramming center had already been identified, classified, and stripped of weapons and uniforms. An RUF commander shouted into a bullhorn and kids would come up to have their names checked off a manifest. Then there was a tribal dance and a bonfire of old uniforms that we were supposed to believe was an impromptu display of passion at being freed from the RUF’s ranks, but it was clear to everyone that the entire display was devoid of anything impromptu. If any of those children had tried to be in any way spontaneous—especially by starting a fire—they would have been shot on the spot.

I stood in the shade, away from the dispersing crowds, settling into a profound funk about having to return to Freetown with the UN’s dog-and-pony promoters when a hand settled on my shoulder. I turned to stare into a familiar face: Gabril Kallon.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

He smiled broadly and pointed to his ID badge. I had forgotten. The killer had been hired by UNICEF.