Blood Diamonds, Revised Edition

When the United Nations finally succeeded in disarming the vast majority of those fighting in Sierra Leone’s jungles, entire swaths of the country that had for the past decade been closed to anyone without a machine gun were once again open for travel, at least to UN monitors and humanitarian organizations. Only then was the destruction wrought by one of Africa’s most brutal modern wars finally clear. Once thriving villages and towns had been erased from existence. Where there were formerly fields of cassava and simple farming habitations, there were now crude graves and weather-ravaged skeletons of homes and buildings. Human bones littered the roadsides. Tens of thousands of refugees clung to life all along the Sierra Leone border with Liberia and Guinea, starving, wounded, and diseased.

And still, diamonds brought weapons to the region. Less than two weeks after the election, 30 tons of rifles and ammunition were smuggled into Monrovia from Belgium through Nice, France. The consignment was paid for by Aziz Nassour, the Lebanese Al Qaeda go-between, and the arms were turned over to Sam “Mosquito” Bokarie, the former RUF field commander. Little more than a month later, another shipment of 15 tons arrived. Even though Al Qaeda’s organized diamond deals were in disarray, RUF leaders, Qaeda operatives, and corrupt government leaders (including Charles Taylor’s wife, Jewel Taylor) met in Burkina Faso in June 2002 to discuss how to continue their diamonds-for-guns schemes. The war may have been over, but it’s clear that Sierra Leone’s diamonds were still being smuggled away and used to buy weapons.² Exploitation of the mines by sundry smugglers and criminals continued to be a problem that wouldn’t soon go away.

With the disarmament completed in Kailahun District, UNHCR kicked its relief efforts into high gear in early 2002 only to find that it didn’t have enough trucks to move the refugees swiftly to repatriation camps. The effort was made more difficult when Liberian president Charles Taylor declared a state of emergency on February 8, 2002, in the wake of renewed fighting around Monrovia against rebel forces of Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy. Sierra Leoneans who’d fled to Liberia to escape the RUF now fled back across the border with thousands of Liberians. Between February 8 and February 12, 5,000 Sierra Leoneans and 6,000 Liberians seeking asylum straggled into the border towns. This was only a small portion of Sierra Leone refugees still stranded in neighboring countries, however. In all, UNHCR operated six camps in Liberia with approximately 35,000 refugees from Sierra Leone. Another 55,000 Sierra Leoneans were camped in Guinea and 8,000 more in The Gambia. The organization was only capable of moving about 1,200 people per week from the border of Liberia to temporary camps within Sierra Leone, and another 500 per week from Guinea.³

By March 2002, 47,000 fighters—both RUF and Kamajors—had been disarmed in Sierra Leone, 25,000 weapons had been destroyed, and UNAMSIL’s mandate had been extended by the Security Council until September 2002.⁴ But the number that carried the most significance was the 2.27 million people who’d registered to vote in the May 14 election, in itself an astonishing count considering what happened the last time Sierra Leoneans cast their votes. The question that hung over the city streets and village paths of Sierra Leone: What exactly would these people do? Would they vote with their hearts, as they’d done in 1996, the election that saw President Kabbah voted into office only to be run out on a wave of violence and amputation? Or would they succumb to voting for the reviled Revolutionary United Front Party in the hopes of avoiding another disaster, frightened into giving their vote to killers and thieves by the party’s thinly veiled threat of a campaign slogan: “Only the RUFP can ensure peace.”

Given the state of Sierra Leone by the time elections came up on May 14, it’s hardly surprising that one of the UN monitors tasked with overseeing the vote told a reporter that “it’s nothing short of miraculous” that the election was conducted without violence and in a manner that was consistently fair and trouble-free. This sentiment was hardly melodramatic; in fact, this characterization may have been understated. In the end, 80 percent of registered voters—constituting an estimated 40 percent of the population—showed up at the polls and 70 percent of them voted for Kabbah to be reelected to another five-year term. Considering what happened the last time elections were held, when hundreds of thousands of people were mutilated by the RUF, pictures of amputees struggling to cast their votes with smooth stumps were nothing less than a reaffirmation of the human spirit.

The contest itself was no less dramatic. The favored candidate was President Kabbah, representing the Sierra Leone People’s Party. He was widely favored over the competition, although in truth there was little the man could point to in his past that qualified him to lead the nation. His previous presidency was interrupted after only a few months in office and it was during his tenure that the RUF overran Freetown not once, but twice. Kabbah proved himself a statesman by adhering to the world community’s desire to face the RUF with ECOMOG rather than a force of mercenaries, thus winning Sierra Leone favor with the World Bank, IMF, the United Nations, and ECOWAS. Because of this—as well as the fact that the field of competitors running against him collectively had less to offer—the voters and the UN administrators who wanted to see him reelected were willing to overlook the man’s other flaws, such as his approval of a series of extrajudicial executions of suspected AFRC coup-plotters once he was returned to office in 1998.

Facing Kabbah on the ballot was the AFRC’s main coup-plotter himself, Johnny Paul Koroma, the junta’s former leader who campaigned as “J.P.,” a born-again Christian. The man who had been exiled to Liberia at gunpoint by RUF leaders Mosquito and Sessay, J.P. claims to have found God and been saved; his religious conversion compelled him to return to Sierra Leone to preach reconciliation and run for president. As New York Times reporter Nori Onitshi wrote in May 2002, Koroma was a notably different man, having fired his old security detail—led by a heavy man named Hiroshima Bomb, who wore skirts, a bowler, and jewelry made of machine-gun ammunition—in favor of suited men with black sunglasses.

Rounding out the bizarre roster of presidential hopefuls was the RUFP’s last-minute, lame-duck candidate, a hitherto unknown RUF member named Pallo Bangura. Having failed to secure Sankoh’s release, the RUF apparently had difficulty finding a replacement. Gabrill Massaqoui and Omrie Golley, the RUF’s military and civilian spokesmen, respectively, both turned down the opportunity and grew more and more scarce around Freetown, perhaps realizing that the RUF was singing its swan song. Bangura was hustled onto the ballot at the last moment. His platform consisted of a single plank—his claim that he didn’t know anything about the RUF’s crimes against humanity.

As for the RUF, their hopes disintegrated in the face of endemic disorganization, failing to receive enough votes to even register beyond pollsters’ margins of error. Their support, such that it was, collapsed everywhere. They even failed to earn a significant percentage of votes in Makeni, their northern heartland.

Things never improved for the rebel group. Less than a year after losing the election by a landslide, the Special Court for Sierra Leone began nailing the RUF’s coffin lid shut, returning indictments against all of the top players in the war, including of course Foday Sankoh, who had remained in custody since May 2000, and Sam Bokarie, who was still on the loose in Liberia. In the opinion of many, Mosquito was working for Charles Taylor in his fight against LURD rebels. Also indicted were Brigadier Issa Sessay; J.P. Koroma, who vanished shortly after the elections and is reported to have been murdered; Sam Hinga Norman, the head of the country’s civil defense forces and a former AFRC leader; Moinina Fofana, the Director of War Operations for the Kamajors; and Allieu Kondewa, the former Kamajor high priest.

Sankoh was indicted on seventeen criminal counts, including “extermination,” murder, rape, pillage, sexual slavery, abductions, forced labor, use of child soldiers, and “outrages upon personal dignity,” the charge that detailed the amputation and mutilation campaigns. At its heart, the indictment states that all of the atrocities that occurred in Sierra Leone since 1991 happened as a result of the criminal diamond-smuggling enterprise overseen by Sankoh and conducted with the full support and encouragement of Charles Taylor.

The RUF, including the accused, and the AFRC shared a common plan, purpose or design (joint criminal enterprise) which was to take any actions necessary to gain and exercise political power and control over the territory of Sierra Leone, in particular the diamond mining areas. The natural resources of Sierra Leone, in particular the diamonds, were to be provided to persons outside Sierra Leone in return for assistance in carrying out the joint criminal enterprise.

The joint criminal enterprise includes gaining and exercising control over the population of Sierra Leone in order to prevent or minimize resistance to their geographic control, and to use members of the population to provide support to the members of the joint criminal enterprise. The acts alleged in this Indictment, including but not limited to acts of terrorism, collective punishments, unlawful killings, abductions, forced labour, physical and sexual violence, use of child soldiers, looting and burning of civilian structures, were either actions within the joint criminal enterprise or were a reasonably foreseeable consequence of the joint criminal enterprise.

The court acted with vigor in its indictments, partly because its limited budget demanded that it move as quickly as possible to meet its mandated three-year term, but natural events intervened to rob Sierra Leoneans of the satisfaction of seeing those who’d destroyed the nation stand trial: Sankoh, increasingly demented and out-of-touch due to a stroke he suffered in jail, died in custody on July 29, 2003. It was an ungracious end. Sankoh’s few court appearances prior to his death were dramatic only because it was clear that the RUF leader had gone insane. Confined to a wheelchair and in steel handcuffs, he mumbled spastically during his last court appearance in June 2003, his matted gray dreadlocks reaching almost to the floor. “I’m a god,” he muttered in his last public statement. “I am an inner god. I am the leader of Sierra Leone.”

The court had no better luck landing Mosquito in the dock. The battle-group commander’s indictment was a carbon copy of Sankoh’s and his prosecution was at least as anticipated. But the Liberian government announced in the summer of 2003 that the dreaded RUF commander had died in a battle with LURD rebels as they moved decisively on Monrovia. Almost unanimously, the Sierra Leone media condemned the announcement as a fraud and David Crane, the court’s lead prosecutor, demanded physical proof. It was long in coming, however, since Monrovia soon fell into chaos: LURD rebels advanced to within small-arms range of downtown, besieging the capital for three long and bloody weeks, making the legal showdown over Mosquito’s remains take a back seat to the actual showdown between rebels, Charles Taylor, and the rest of the world.

Photojournalist Chris Hondros was there for it and, when he could, he reported back to me on scenes that rivaled Sierra Leone’s nightmares. “It’s another long day of horrors, one after another,” he wrote in an e-mail to me in August 2003. The fighting in Monrovia was intense, pitting government “soldiers”—some as young as twelve years old—against rebels who fired light artillery indiscriminately into the city, killing scores of civilian men, women, and children. Typically, soldiers fought stoned and dressed in campy costumes, lending a surreal air to the street fighting. It was the sort of flash-fire human rights catastrophe that has for so long occurred in Africa with little notice from the United States. But the Special Court for Sierra Leone helped land the conflict on the front pages around the world. The flare-up was made more critical to the world community after the court unsealed a secret indictment against Charles Taylor for war crimes resulting from his support of the RUF’s war.

The indictment was a bold and welcome move for the tribunal, and it was heralded as a decisive step in the effort to assign responsibility for a decade of horrors inflicted on Sierra Leoneans while helping to remove from power a ruthless dictator who, if his past record was any indication, would surely be responsible for more death and destruction in the future. Crane put out an international arrest warrant for Taylor through Interpol.

Yet Taylor was in Ghana when his indictment was made public, and despite pleas from the United Nations to execute the warrant, Ghanaian authorities allowed Taylor not only to attend an ECOWAS meeting regarding the crisis in Monrovia, but to slip back into Liberia afterward, where he hunkered down to consider his moves.

Observers, myself included, began counting down the days until Taylor either attempted to flee to a friendly country like Libya or Burkina Faso or was captured and executed on the beach in the fashion of Samuel Doe, an outcome that would have disappointed few people. Even President Bush, who had been under mounting pressure to commit troops to end the conflict, called for Taylor’s surrender to the Sierra Leone court.

At the time of the offer, it was regarded as a pretty good idea. Monrovia was being obliterated in the fighting. Hour after hour, Hondros watched children die from flying shrapnel and errant gunfire. Hundreds were dying from war wounds and diseases; thousands more would soon die of starvation as food supplies dwindled and refugees became more and more desperate. Bush was being pressed to send U.S. Marines to end the fighting just as he and his military planners were sorting out their flimsy justifications for the invasion of Iraq. His critics wanted him to prove that their run at Saddam Hussein was more than just a personal vendetta. In other words, Bush’s critics seemed to be saying that if invading Iraq was justifiable in a humanitarian sense, then clearly so too was invading Liberia to end the bloodshed. Not only were dozens of people dying daily—and their bodies were stacked outside the U.S. embassy in protest of the United States’ inaction in the face of undeniable humanitarian need—but the leader of the country was indicted by a UN-backed tribunal for more than a decade’s worth of war crimes. If ever there was a time to invade a country on behalf of its citizens to oust a bloodthirsty leader, this was it.

But Bush decided otherwise. The U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln—complete with Harrier aircraft, Blackhawk helicopters, and hundreds of U.S. Marines that could have ended the fighting in an estimated twelve hours if they had been deployed—staged in the Atlantic Ocean and did nothing. Bush preferred that ECOWAS handle the perilous situation, and the negotiations about the shape and content of a peacekeeping force plodded on and on. Taylor used the world’s indecision to his advantage, announcing that he’d accept Nigeria’s offer of exile, but only once a peacekeeping force was deployed. Bush and other world leaders said that they’d deploy a peacekeeping force—headed by Nigerian soldiers under ECOMOG command—but only after Taylor had accepted exile. While this ridiculous standoff was playing out, people in Monrovia continued to die in horrible explosions during daily shelling raids. Finally, after about three weeks of intense street-to-street fighting that had killed hundreds, a small vanguard of ECOMOG soldiers landed at Roberts International Airport in Monrovia in early September 2003. Taylor boarded his VIP jet and flew two hours to Nigeria, where he was greeted as a guest of the state by Obasanjo. Taylor is currently enjoying his exile in a private house in Calabar, a seaside city in Nigeria that has the convenience of being located on the border of Cameroon, should the need for another quick escape become necessary. Given his VIP status in Nigeria, it seems unlikely that Taylor will be testifying before the Special Court of Sierra Leone anytime soon.

In the wake of Taylor’s departure, another small drama ensued: The purported body of Sam “Mosquito” Bokarie, badly decomposed, was finally delivered to the court in Freetown. As of this writing, in October 2003, the court is awaiting the results of DNA testing that will determine once and for all whether or not the dreaded rebel leader is dead.

Although Sierra Leoneans have so far been robbed of the chance to see their tormentors tried for the crimes that destroyed the country over the past eleven years, the deaths of Sankoh and Mosquito and the forced exile of Taylor mark the end of their “joint criminal enterprise.” Peace has indeed taken hold in the country, the first time in its 40-plus-year history since independence. The question now is: How long will it last and how will the government deal with new threats to its stability?

The question is not an idle one. UNAMSIL’s mandate has been extended again and again by the Security Council, but the latest phase-out date of December 2004 seems to be the one that is embraced by most international observers as the true end of international involvement in the troubled country. Many question whether Sierra Leone will be ready by that time to govern itself or if it will simply be ripe for another insurgency.

Particularly troublesome is the fact that since the elections, Kabbah’s government has done precious little to implement promised reforms. The police force is nowhere near capable of providing local security, especially in the diamond-mining regions, and the military has yet to show that it can independently provide adequate border security.⁵ Of particular concern is the fact that the DDR program—which sought to provide job skills to demobilizing combatants—is largely considered a failure; even in the situations where former fighters successfully completed their training, they’ve been released into a job market in which unemployment is the only growth category. There are precious few jobs in Sierra Leone, creating yet again a population of semiskilled youths who are disenfranchised and alienated with the government of Freetown. Adding to this tension are the Kamajors, who have steadfastly refused to demobilize and stand ready to fight again at a moment’s notice.⁶

Lastly, and most significantly, even though organized rebel exploitation of the diamond mines has ended, Sierra Leone has had little to no success in ending smuggling. Even though the Kimberley Process has since been adopted by seventy countries that ostensibly monitor diamond exports, Sierra Leone’s diamond regions are poorly watched. According to a September 2003 report by the International Crisis Group: “The diamond mines, now often considered a curse rather than a blessing by the population, remain poorly monitored and managed, and illegal alluvial mining costs the government tens of millions of U.S. dollars in revenue each year.”

On April 22, 2002, what would be the second largest diamond ever found was rumored to have been pulled from the ground in eastern Sierra Leone. Supposedly weighing in at a whopping 1,000 carats, the stone promptly disappeared, leading the government to put border guards on high alert, assuming that the massive find was bound for the old smuggling routes. A cryptic report by Reuters News Agency quoted Foday Yukella, deputy minister of natural resources, as saying that no one knew where the stone was, where it was discovered, or if, in fact, it actually existed. But the government wasn’t taking any chances.

“As a government we are undertaking a massive search for the whereabouts of such a diamond,” he told the news agency. “The ministry has been informed some top diamond magnates in West Africa have entered Sierra Leone with the aim of getting the alleged diamond out. . . . Border security forces together with the immigration authorities have also been put on alert.”⁷

When I read the news item, I couldn’t help but think of Jango, Jacob Singer, and his Polish sponsor, Valdy. I wondered what they were doing at the time of the find. As far as I know, no blood diamonds entered circulation due to their efforts, at least not in late 2001. Shortly before I left Sierra Leone for the last time on October 4, 2001, their half-million-dollar deal to land Kono diamonds was on shaky ground. It seemed that Jango couldn’t convince any of his Kono District sources to travel to Freetown with such a valuable cache of goods with the end of the war near at hand and UNAMSIL more actively deployed through the country than at any other time in its two-year history. As was his peculiar mode of operation, Singer refused to leave Freetown and Valdy wasn’t about to make a trip to Conakry for $500,000 in $100 bills to give to Jango to travel to Kono himself and retrieve the diamonds. He offered him $300 to travel to Koidu and bring back a sample of the goods the RUF proposed to sell. Jango refused.

When I finally boarded a helicopter to take me to Lungi Airport and my flight to Ghana and eventually home, the trio of smugglers had reached an impasse. Valdy sulked under the banana trees near the Solar’s outdoor bar, talking to no one and angrily smoking one cigarette after another. Singer was seen more frequently in the company of hookers than smugglers, and Jango only came around to hang out with me and other journalists rather than those he supposedly worked for.

In spite of the fact that it seemed they’d failed to smuggle diamonds out of Sierra Leone, I was under no illusion that smuggling had been eradicated, or even made appreciably more difficult with the coming of peace and the adoption of new import/export protocols. When I read about the rumored 1,000-carat find, I knew that if someone was determined enough to smuggle it away, it would be done, even though the logistics would be more difficult; after all, the thing would be the size of a softball if it existed. Something that big would be hard to pass around the diamond centers without drawing a great deal of attention . . . until it was cut into smaller stones, that is. Then, like all the blood diamonds that had been smuggled out of Sierra Leone before it, they would be anonymous and untraceable, as elusive as Osama bin Laden and impossible to identify.

Stones stolen from Sierra Leone at the tip of a machete and the barrel of an AK-47 could literally be anywhere, from safehouses in Monrovia to safe deposit boxes in Belgium to the display cases of jewelry stores in the neighborhood mall. Until international export controls such as those suggested by the Clean Diamond Act and the Kimberley Process are implemented and enforced to screen legitimate diamonds from those tainted by warfare and brutality—and until peace comes and takes hold in impoverished, desperate countries where diamonds are found—there will be no way to tell whether or not a cherished diamond ring was once washed in the blood of innocent Africans.

If nothing else, the story of Sierra Leone’s diamond war has proven unequivocally that the world ignores Africa and her problems at its peril. Just like global commerce and the widening reach of terrorism, events far from home often have very tangible impacts. Sierra Leone has shown the world that there is no longer any such thing as an “isolated, regional conflict.”