I

“YOU WANT TO SEE STONES? Here, I will show them to you.”

He was a heavy man, sweating and squinting in the sun. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small paper parcel, carefully shaking into his palm three tiny diamonds that, considering the wide, clear-cut moonscape of the mine on whose banks we stood, looked rather paltry. Bare-chested men with shovels and shake-shakes were visible for hundreds of yards in every direction, splashing in muddy water and moving piles of dirt, dwarfed below a veritable mountain of mine tailings nearly 100 feet high. This was the Number 11 mine on the outskirts of Koidu, and it was considered tapped out as far back as the 1960s by the state-run National Diamond Mining Company, which chopped down the trees, dredged the soil, and left the pile of tailings to be reclaimed long ago by a carpet of grass and saplings. Although this dump pile was officially abandoned, the government donated it to the men who worked it, almost all of them former RUF soldiers and feared killers. The object was to keep them off the streets of Koidu and prevent them from terrorizing the citizens.

“All these guys are fighting for their survival,” said Mohammed Komba, the Kono District youth coordinator who’d smoothed the way for my visit and knew that this was the only job available for most of them. “It keeps them away from crime and armed robbery.”

Just barely, it seemed. As veterans of the civil war, most of the men toiling in the mine were in their thirties and early forties, and many bore the scars of their time fighting in the bush. They weren’t pleased at the sight of visiting white journalists, and my colleague Mike Seamans and I braved a few angry flare-ups resulting from our aimed cameras. Like people elsewhere in Sierra Leone, they were sensitive to the fact that somewhere along the line, we were paid to be there and that made our lot in life a far sight better than theirs. For these men, who once commanded field units and enjoyed the comparatively lavish lifestyles blood diamonds bestowed on them, survival now depended on finding shards of diamonds overlooked fifty years ago. Knowing that they can turn—and have turned in the recent past—to strong-arm tactics when diamonds weren’t being found put us on edge. In fact, the pit boss who proudly displayed his measly diamond chips quickly stuffed them back in his pocket and retreated to a nearby shack when I tried to photograph them. He’d assumed I was a buyer and wasn’t happy to learn I was a reporter. Komba nervously watched our backs for signs that the men’s indignation might turn to outright anger, and when things became tense, he negotiated a series of hasty payoffs to placate the former fighters.

These men were something of a concern in Koidu. Sierra Leone’s civil war had been over for nearly ten years when I could finally return and visit the Kono District, its wealthiest diamond area, which had been impossible to travel to in 2001. Kono was also home to the country’s largest concentration of former combatants, the majority of them unemployed and restless, and while most bands of RUF soldiers had long ago broken up and blended back into daily life, these men—all from the same unit and still loyal to their local commander—had not.

It was risky to visit the mine. Despite Koidu’s reputation as Sierra Leone’s crown jewel for diamond extraction, poverty there was at a dangerous, desperate level. Although the country has agreed to international standards for controlling diamond mining to avoid smuggling and theft, in some areas of the Kono region mining still occurred off the books and even government monitors dared not go there.¹ Some wise soul in Freetown saw the utility in simply giving this gang an old mine to plumb for leftovers—technically in exchange for guarding the tailings dump from unauthorized freelance diggers, but as everyone acknowledged, more to keep them occupied. Everyone knew it was only a temporary fix. This mine, like most other surface mines in the area, was all but depleted of treasure. The men would eventually dig through the whole mountain of tailings and wonder what’s next. But for now, the scheme seemed to work.

“You can work here for years and get nothing,” Komba said, summing up artisanal diamond-prospecting in a nutshell. “Then you can go tomorrow and find something. If they didn’t find them, they wouldn’t be here.”

Just as in the past, the men toiling in these mines can sometimes hear distant echoes of explosions rippling through the jungle from the direction of the city. This time, however, the explosions are from commerce, not warfare. With surface mines largely tapped out by the RUF a decade ago, almost all of the wealth in Koidu is held by a pair of international companies that own kimberlite complexes and guard their holdings behind razor wire and with heavily armed private security forces: South Africa–based Koidu Holdings runs the largest operation, Koidu Kimberlite Project, and a conglomerate of international investors runs a smaller site called the Thunderball Mine. Rumor has it that the best restaurant in the provinces is inside the Koidu Holdings compound, as is a state-of-the-art medical clinic and a well-stocked company store. We don’t know for sure, however; like almost everyone else in Koidu, we weren’t allowed inside. Outside the compound, poverty, unemployment, disease, and crime were the order of the day.

Companies like Koidu Holdings look for diamonds differently than the ragged-looking men at the Number 11 mine. They blast with dynamite down into the earth, following the paths of two kimberlite pipes, and use bulldozers and earthmovers to extract rocks and pulverize kimberlitic boulders. No one uses a shake-shake at Koidu Holdings, whose compound is near the outskirts of town and is visible from the downtown market. Dynamite shakes the rafters for miles in all directions.

The Number 11 mine isn’t completely without mining machinery; there’s a working Caterpillar backhoe parked in the middle of the dirt field, but it’s not being used. The cost to rent it and fuel it is $1,500 per day, we’re told, and no one in sight even remotely has so much money. So they use shovels and dig in its shadow.

We left once everyone was mollified with the equivalent of about $30. If the former RUF crowd that had gravitated around us divided it up evenly—which I doubted given that it all went into the pocket of the pit boss with the diamonds—they would each end up with about 50 cents. Everyone seemed to think that was a reasonable fee for the pictures we took, and we were gone before anyone had the chance to change his mind.

Anyone who doubts that the gap between diamonds’ marketing mythos as symbols of love and the realities of their origins was as wide as ever in 2011—even without warfare to exacerbate the difference—need only spend a few days in Koidu, a run-down collection of cinderblock buildings, mosques, and market kiosks still teetering in the wake of war, held together with bush sticks and clotheslines. Throughout the RUF war, Koidu got the worst of it and has yet to recover. Overrun and occupied by rebels practically throughout the 1990s, the town remained too dangerous to visit the last time I was here in 2001, even as peace was being negotiated. Rebels plundered the diamond mines and even dismantled houses to dig through the foundations in search of stones. More than anywhere in Sierra Leone, Koidu has proved worth kicking over the dirt at one’s feet; diamonds can be found everywhere, which might explain why the roads have never been paved.

The point was made early in my visit. In getting from my guesthouse on the edge of town to a Lebanese money changer in the center, I’d tried to outrun a gathering rainstorm but got caught in the downpour on the back of a hired motorcycle only about halfway there. Drenched, I waited out the deluge under a blue tarp strung over an alley with a knot of locals trying to keep their cigarettes dry. Two boys occupied themselves with a broom, pushing accumulated water out of the tarp overhead every few minutes, while the rest of us watched the hand-dug sewer paralleling the road fill with a muddy torrent of runoff. I was amazed at the volume of water that, like a flash flood in a desert arroyo, filled and soon overflowed the knee-deep trench. The sight captivated the others for a different reason.

“You see,” said a man at my elbow, “the rain will loosen the precious stones. Many people will follow the stream and look for diamonds.”

Considering the flotilla of garbage being borne on the tide, it seemed an unlikely source of the kind of gemstones one would see at Tiffany’s, but the man assured me it was true.

“You know the creek?” he said, referring to a stagnant cesspool a bit farther up the road. I referred to it as the Urinal based on how I’d seen the locals use it every time I drove past. He claimed it was the source of more than 700 carats of diamonds gifted to England when Sierra Leone gained its independence fifty years before.

At the moment, that was especially hard to believe. Just as during my last trip, I was staggered by the degree of poverty and desperation possible in a place that produced millions of dollars’ worth of precious gems from its very ground. But at least last time, there was an excuse—ten years of otherworldly warfare and inhumane butchery provided an easy means of explaining the misery.

Not anymore. The RUF was long gone, at least from the surface. Its leaders were either dead or convicted of war crimes by the UNBACKED Special Court for Sierra Leone. Charles Taylor, captured in 2006 after an attempt to escape from his home in exile in Nigeria, was awaiting a verdict at The Hague. Rank-and-file soldiers had drifted back into society. From what I could tell, the men at the Number 11 mine were the exception in that they were still loosely affiliated with one another, but whether that was for some vague future revolutionary purpose or just due to enduring kinship was impossible to say.

Yet there was clearly a tense frustration in the air around Koidu, a vague feeling of trouble brewing that took some time to identify as a deep-seated sense of injustice. In a place like Sierra Leone it’s sometimes too easy to take such a thing for granted. But gradually it sank in for me that I wasn’t alone in struggling to understand why—with regular TNT explosions rumbling the ground, announcing that Koidu Holdings was unearthing more of the country’s wealth within sight of where I stood shivering in the alley—there was still no electricity, no jobs, and no adequate health care for most people in a place teeming with riches.

These disparities, and these conditions, are identical to what led to the RUF war in the first place.

I LIT OUT FOR KOIDU soon after arriving in Freetown, my first trip to West Africa since I left in 2001. After ten years, I thought, this was the perfect time to return and answer a question that had pestered me since I left, one that I pondered earlier in these pages. What would a peaceful Sierra Leone do with itself? Could it rise to the potential—in its people, in its resources, in its natural beauty—that so impressed me a decade before? Could it take control of its future, having learned the harrowing lessons of its past?

From afar, it was tempting to get the impression that all was fine. No instances of large-scale violence had occurred since the 2002 election that marked the end of the war. Taylor is the last of the main actors to be dealt with, and though a verdict has yet to be announced in his long-running war crimes trial, few are worried that he’ll be given any second chances to prove himself as a statesman. The Sierra Leone Army had been so modernized and professionalized that the country sent soldiers on peacekeeping missions to Darfur, Sudan, and Somalia, setting milestones in the country’s military history. While politics sometimes resulted in headlines about riots and isolated unrest, the government appeared stable and business was booming. Diamond mining and other mineral extraction began again soon after the war, and—until the global financial crisis hit in 2008, dealing a blow to luxuries markets everywhere—diamond exports had been growing steadily, from $42 million in 2002 to $142 million in 2007. (They are again on the rebound as the recession fades, with $109 million exported in 2010, a 28 percent leap from the previous year—the latest figures available at this writing.) Competing with diamonds as a source of revenue are gold, iron ore, bauxite, and rutile, all of which have lured their own unique extractive industries. Sierra Leone’s total exports have climbed from $65 million in 2000 to $341.2 million in 2010, an impressive 48 percent increase over 2009. Oil was recently discovered offshore, adding to the country’s already impressive portfolio of riches.²

Other indicators seemed equally heartening. In 2010, Sierra Leone moved up twelve positions on the UN Human Development Index.³ Having been in last place for so long, the country had nowhere to go but up. Roads were rebuilt (or were in the process of being rebuilt) between major cities, including many in the provincial hinterlands, with funding from European Union nations and the World Bank.

Perhaps most critically, the issue that brought Sierra Leone to the attention of the world in the first place—the illicit sale of conflict diamonds by rebels into mainstream trading channels—appears by many measures to have ended. By definition, no conflict diamonds can be produced where there is no conflict. The Kimberley Process, the 2003 international agreement that bans blood diamonds from circulation, is assumed by most of the world to be appropriately policing the trade.

But I knew better than to accept impressions imparted by headlines and press releases, especially regarding the Kimberley Process, which I had been skeptical of from the beginning. I wanted to see for myself just how far Sierra Leone has come and where it continues to fall short. In a nation of contradictions, it shouldn’t have surprised me to find successes and failures in equal measure. The difference is that the successes pale in comparison to the failures—and as Sierra Leone itself has demonstrated so tragically, the price of failure can literally be a matter of life and death.

THERE WERE THUNDERSTORMS when Mike and I landed at Lungi International Airport at 3:30 A.M. in July 2011, on the cusp of the rainy season. My instinct that reality would differ from the cheerful impression given by bureaucratic reports and export statistics was reinforced with every step I took into the country, beginning with the airport. Lungi didn’t appear to have had so much as a fresh coat of paint since I was last there. Security officers barely glanced at my passport before stamping it and clearing the way to the baggage claim, which was lorded over by aggressive gangs of con artists stampeding to fill seats on boats, ferries, hovercraft, and taxicabs bound for the mainland.

The airport’s location across the wide Sierra Leone River from downtown Freetown could be called a joke if the river weren’t so arduous to cross, a task made all the more trying thanks to most airlines’ perplexing habit of scheduling arrivals and departures in the middle of the night. One’s choices for reaching Freetown include expensive taxis that take up to three hours to circle north through Port Loko or a fleet of rickety vessels that sink with alarming regularity. I had been hoping for the speed and relative convenience of a commercial helicopter, but they had been grounded after one too many crashes into the bay.

Seas were rough in the wake of the storm, and the water taxis’ floating wharf rolled in the surf like a funhouse ride. But the porters carried our luggage on their heads with no fear of slipping and sending the bags into the drink, their work lit crazily by the boat’s bobbing floodlight, which cut a golden prism through the downpour and helped, at least somewhat, to light the way for us less sure-footed passengers.

Across the river, Freetown loomed in the mist like the remnants of a dream that refuses to be forgotten. Dim lights sketched the rough outline of the coast and the mountains beyond the city. It took me a moment to figure out what was so familiar and yet so wrong about the city’s silhouette. The lights were clustered in one dense spot in the downtown area, giving the impression that Freetown was much smaller than I knew it to be. No lights in the outlying neighborhoods meant no power there: after a decade of reconstruction and international investment in Sierra Leone’s mineral industry, the government still couldn’t provide electricity outside the downtown district. In fact, only 8.5 percent of its households countrywide have electricity.⁴

Wandering Aberdeen in the daylight, I marveled that it was as choked as ever with garbage and misery. It smelled the same, a combination of fish and burning refuse. It was shockingly clear that whatever benefits Sierra Leone was deriving from its peacetime industries were not filtering down to where they were needed most. There were businessmen and schoolchildren walking the streets, as I had envisioned a decade before, but just as many drifters and beggars clogged the beaches and the roadsides, victims of double digits in both inflation and unemployment. I even recognized some of them; one of the first people I saw was Osman, the one-time wedding singer and former RUF prisoner who had been forced to mule-train weapons between RUF positions and the Liberian border during the war. He’d gone mad before I met him the first time, and he clearly hadn’t improved. He was half-naked, raving at ghosts and gesturing at unseen demons. I didn’t say hello.

Of course, some things had changed. UNAMSIL was long gone and the Mammy Yoko Hotel was closed for renovations. Paddy’s, the sweaty pit of a tavern that inspired the beach bar scenes in Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2006 movie Blood Diamond (scenes that wholly fail to capture the reeking milieu of base human motivations on display at the real thing), had been run out of business. The MSF Camp for Amputees and War Wounded, once home to more than four hundred war victims and their families, had been closed, with some of its residents having been relocated to another facility on the other side of town, but most having simply drifted off to make their way elsewhere in the world. One difference—surely meant as an improvement but that instead had an Orwellian effect—was a proliferation of advertising buzzwords for a mobile phone company that were plastered on everything: “growth,” “prosperity,” “health,” “progress.” That these were antonyms for everything in sight and served only to amplify the unavoidable wretchedness was clearly lost on the company.

In other words, Sierra Leone was just as forlorn as I’d left it, complete with a gang of shady Russian diamond dealers talking in whispers at the Solar Hotel’s breakfast table, and a cast of assorted ne’er-do-wells peering from the banana trees waiting for their opportunity to be my “friend.” I recalled quite clearly from my earlier visit that friendship between locals and foreigners doesn’t always mean what you think and, if you’re not careful, you could find yourself entwined in dealings you want no part of. At a minimum, you’ll end up with an entourage of beggarly hangers-on who all expect to be fed, supplied with beers, and provided with myriad and often unusual gifts. Some are more persistent than others. A young barber named Mohammed, who went by the nickname Fifty Cent, cornered Mike and me just outside the Solar’s entrance and, before I could fend him off, had asked me to buy him a Honda generator. When I politely told him I couldn’t afford it, he said he would settle for an electric razor.

I’d been in Sierra Leone for less than twelve hours and was already feeling antsy to leave Freetown. I wanted to get to Koidu, the epicenter of diamond production both then and now. But without the UN to act as my personal helicopter chauffeur, I had to find a vehicle. That wasn’t proving easy; strangers hanging out at the hotel demanded rip-off prices to hire an SUV. I decided to see if I could find an old source of help, a person who I knew could pull strings and help smooth the way. But I didn’t know if he was alive, much less whether he was still in the area. I turned to Fifty Cent and cut off his pleading with a raised hand.

“Do you know a man named Jango?” I asked. “Take me to him.”

JANGO, AS IT TURNED OUT, was just as much the leader of Aberdeen’s area boys as before, commanding the same degree of respect and deference as I remembered. We fell quickly back into stride, another instance when it seemed I’d entered a time warp. Catching up with me over beers, he looked as if he’d not aged a day. Although we hadn’t corresponded even once since we’d parted ways at the Diamond Airlines helipad a decade before, it was as if I’d only been gone for a few weeks. Even his means of employment was the same, though he brokered deals for diamonds less often than in the past. Cheap stones from conflict zones were still to be had, but required traveling closer to Côte d’Ivoire, where Forces Nouvelles rebels controlled the mines in the north and used proceeds to rearm for a conflict dating back to 2002. Jango had been dispatched to Ghana, one of the many way stations for Ivoirian diamonds on their way into legitimate channels, in attempts to broker deals for his old boss Jacob Singer, who still made frequent trips to Sierra Leone to shop for cheap goods that continue to circulate on the black market.

Technically, that shouldn’t be the case. When it was adopted in 2003, the Kimberley Process promised to end the trade in conflict diamonds, in large part by demanding that its participants rigorously monitor where the diamonds they export come from. When diamond parcels are issued their official KP certificates upon export, their guarantee depends on the assumption that local customs officials and diamond inspectors have done their jobs and accounted for the source of each gem being sent to market.

In reality, the process doesn’t work out nearly as well as hoped. “Although three of the five countries neighboring Côte d’Ivoire, namely Ghana, Guinea and Liberia, are Kimberley Process participants, those States continue to struggle with the implementation of the Scheme, and loopholes in their systems of internal controls continue to allow the circulation of Ivorian rough diamonds,” according to an April 2011 report by the UN Security Council, which has banned the import of Ivorian diamonds since 2005 due to their use in the conflict. “Information obtained by the Group indicates that local diamond dealers, in addition to a number of foreign nationals from neighbouring States, continue to purchase diamonds in Séguéla [Côte d’Ivoire], which are then transported to Bamako [Mali], Conakry, Dakar and Monrovia, from where they are exported to other international markets.”⁵

Due to weak internal controls in the surrounding transit countries, Ivorian conflict diamonds can easily be mixed with those that have been mined legitimately and then exported under the cover of a KP certificate. After that point, they’re never questioned again as to their true origin. The nongovernmental organization Partnership Africa Canada (PAC) reported in 2009 that half of the diamonds exported by the Democratic Republic of Congo couldn’t be traced; they were completely unaccounted for until they arrived in the capital for valuation prior to export. “For all intents and purposes, the DRC might as well label these diamonds ‘origin unknown,’” according to the PAC report, “Diamonds and Human Security.” The Kimberley Process has inarguably created an easier way of smuggling conflict diamonds than in the past, when claims of a diamond’s origin relied on an unofficial “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy between people buying and selling. Now, they’re slipped into the mainstream with the Kimberley Process’s official seal of approval.

What’s worse, the Kimberley Process has almost no mechanism for dealing with this problem. Site visits to review how participants are following the agreement’s dictates and principles are infrequent, and follow-up visits to ensure those falling short are tightening the screws can take years. Rogue participants can flaunt the system for years with no real worry that they’ll be sanctioned. There seems little will among Kimberley Process leadership to use its only punishment tools, suspension or expulsion from the club. And since the scheme’s chair changes year to year, it’s easy to dither long enough to pass off a problem state to the next leader.

“A lot of governments have been happy to use the Kimberley Process as a fig leaf of respectability, so they can say, ‘OK, look we’re doing something,’” Elly Harrowell of the NGO Global Witness, one of KP’s primary architects, told me when I began looking into this problem in 2009. “A lot of people, especially in the public, seem to think it’s case closed.”⁶

What had spurred my questions was the case of Zimbabwe, a stark illustration of how toothless the Kimberley Process has proved to be since it was adopted with much fanfare as the cure for blood diamonds. A KP participant, Zimbabwe had for years been ruthlessly using its state security units to force civilians to dig for diamonds at the Marange field near the border with Mozambique, a diamond area discovered in 2006. Armed forces of President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front party (ZANU-PF) violently took over the mines from local diggers after agreeing to a power-sharing arrangement with the opposition party Movement for Democratic Change. The diamond fields served as a sort of payment to Mugabe’s soldiers to ensure their loyalty; different brigades rotated to the area in order to spread the wealth. Unauthorized diggers were beaten and killed, with the death toll in the hundreds. Civilians, including children, mined the diamonds at gunpoint. Women reported being sexually assaulted. Many of the diamonds were smuggled out to Mozambique and then onward into the $72 billion diamond jewelry market.⁷

To most people who monitor the trade in conflict diamonds, this seemed an open-and-shut case of a KP participant blatantly violating its commitment to the program. Human Rights Watch and other NGOs decried the abuse and called on the Kimberley Process to level sanctions on Zimbabwean diamonds.

But the Kimberley Process, unbelievably, questioned whether the country’s actions violated the agreement. KP representatives argued that the diamonds from Zimbabwe weren’t conflict diamonds, in that rebels weren’t using them to wage war against the government. That the government was effectively waging war against its own citizens, and selling the bounty of that war into the multibillion-dollar international diamond market as perfectly clean stones approved by the Kimberley Process, seemed not to matter. The Kimberley Process operates by consensus, and the consensus was to cop out on a technicality—its official definition of conflict diamonds doesn’t include clear examples of gross human rights violations perpetrated on a country’s citizens by its own government. The Kimberley Process gave Zimbabwe a grace period to end the abuses rather than punishing it economically.

Not everyone agreed with this approach, including De Beers, still the most powerful name in diamonds. Bruised by allegations that it had been complicit in conflict-diamond trafficking during the 1990s, particularly by association with its fictional doppelganger in the DiCaprio movie, the company was as determined as ever to support strong measures to wipe out the illicit commerce, if only for the sake of public perception.

“Providing confidence about where these special symbols that mark moments in our lives come from is integral to their enduring value,” wrote De Beers chairman Nicky Oppenheimer in a Bloomberg op-ed in 2009, adding that he would have preferred the Kimberley Process take more “decisive action” against Zimbabwe.⁸

Bowing to international pressure, the KP temporarily banned diamonds from Marange, but allowed the government to continue mining and stockpiling them until a KP monitoring team could determine whether it had ended abuses and complied with other demands. The ban was lifted in 2010 after Mugabe’s government agreed to partner with private investors who promised mining would be done with respect for human rights, paving the way for Zimbabwe to sell a cache of more than a million carats. But the KP seems to have been the only organization to believe this promise. The New York–based RapNet, one of the world’s largest private diamond trading networks, run by Martin Rapaport, an outspoken Orthodox Jew who railed against the KP’s gutless response to the situation, called for a boycott against Marange diamonds even if they have Kimberley Process certificates. He threatened to expel from his trade network anyone caught dealing in them.

Despite this public, intra-industry vote of no confidence in the Kimberley Process, its chair unilaterally lifted all remaining restrictions on Zimbabwean diamonds in June 2011. Two months later, Human Rights Watch issued another report of rampant violence and abuses against unlicensed miners in Marange, this time at the hands of both the government’s and its private partners’ armed security forces.

“Zimbabwe police and private security guards employed by mining companies in the Marange diamond fields are shooting, beating and unleashing attack dogs on poor, local unlicensed miners,” the report reads. “Some members of the international diamond monitoring body, known as the Kimberley Process, have tried to argue that conditions in the areas controlled by joint ventures are not abusive, and that those diamonds should be certified and allowed onto international markets. But Human Rights Watch has found, on the contrary, evidence of serious abuse by private security guards patrolling the joint venture territory.”⁹

The report also quoted Tiseke Kasambala, Human Rights Watch’s senior Africa researcher, as saying, “The ongoing abuses at Marange underscore the need for the Kimberley Process to address human rights instead of capitulating to abusive governments and irresponsible companies. . . . The Kimberley Process appears to have lost touch with its mission to ensure that blood diamonds don’t make their way to consumers.”¹⁰

Two of the KP’s main architects even abandoned the program. Ian Smillie, one of the founders of Partnership Africa Canada, resigned in 2009 over what he called the scheme’s “pretence that failure is success.” In his 2010 book, Blood on the Stone: Greed, Corruption, and War in the Global Diamond Trade, Smillie expanded on the concerns that he shares with many people:

Can this trade in stolen and blood diamonds be stopped? The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme has helped to put a hold on the worst of it, but in the few cases where it has been tested—Côte d’Ivoire, Venezuela, Zimbabwe—it has stumbled. If a diamond-fuelled conflagration were to erupt in the Eastern DRC or anywhere else, there is little evidence that the Kimberley Process would be able to cope. It looks too much like the nearsighted Mr. Magoo, walking around in a fog, barely missing collisions with swinging girders and falling anvils through pure blind luck.

The Kimberley Process is failing, and it will fail outright if it does not come to grips with its dysfunctional decision-making and its unwillingness to deal quickly and decisively with non-compliance. African governments need to tighten their controls, and trading countries need to make sure there are no loopholes in theirs. The industry itself needs to be much more forthright in demanding protection and enforcement from the governments that have passed Kimberley Process laws aimed at doing precisely that. The campaigning NGOs are unlikely to go away, and sooner or later, consumers will get the message. If things don’t improve, the reputation of diamonds will fall, along with their attractiveness for engagement rings and other expressions of love.¹¹

And in December 2011, Global Witness—which was the first organization to bring the issue of conflict diamonds to light in 1998—followed Smillie’s lead, calling the Kimberley Process a lie and a failure in how it has reacted to Zimbabwe. The group quit the KP over fears that the Mugabe government would use its diamond revenue to fund a crackdown on political opponents in the months and weeks leading to 2012’s elections: “We don’t want to lend our credibility to, or be associated with, a scheme that could very well end up having blood on its hands if all this cash that KP has endorsed is used to fuel violence,” said Annie Dunneback, the organization’s senior campaigner. “We don’t want to be a part of that.”¹²

Rather than the watchdog the KP insists that it is, it’s actually proven to be a handy cover for dictators, insurgent groups, and smugglers moving goods from their origins as blood diamonds to the corner jewelry store, where its certificates assure even concerned consumers that they are buying legitimate diamonds for their loved ones.

It’s the same in Sierra Leone, Jango told me.

“I will show you,” he said. “When do we want to go to Koidu?”

I WANTED TO LEAVE immediately, but Jango turned out to be no better at finding cheap private transportation than I had. Inflation had grown from 12 percent to more than 16 percent between 2009 and 2010, and the leone was only half as valuable against the dollar as it had been during my previous visit.¹³ The weaker currency combined with higher prices for everything from gas to food to lodging makes Sierra Leone more expensive than in the past.

So, opting for a local approach to travel, very early one morning we made our way to a motor park to be shoehorned into a decrepit bus for the seven-hour drive to Koidu. Designed for twenty-five passengers, the bus wouldn’t budge until at least fifty were packed aboard, with children counting as half. It’s what made it cheap, at the equivalent of about seven dollars. Luggage was wedged under the seats and piled in the aisles, along with spare parts for the bus, livestock, and sacks of grain. As we waited in a humid downpour to see if the springs would crack or the rivets pop with each new suitcase jammed into place, the bus’s leaden, sweaty air felt like a disease incubator. I quickly learned that the only way to endure the ride was to pick one position you hoped wouldn’t constrict your circulation too badly for the next quarter of a day and meditate yourself into some happy place in a far-off land. You could move only once in that period, during the halfway stop for lunch, water, and fresh air. It took at least ten minutes for the passengers to untwist themselves from their neighbors and disembark.

Apart from the discomfort, the trip was uneventful until the second half of the journey, when the only road to Koidu degraded and became full of potholes. With every lurch, passengers cracked heads. Combined with the limb-numbing fetal position I was forced to sit in and the claustrophobia of being sealed in by windows closed due to the rain, the roller-coaster jerking began to make me stir-crazy. The feeling was shared by others, and I soon became aware, over the din of eight children sharing the seat behind me, of people arguing somewhere toward the front of the bus. I caught only snatches of the conversation, but it was clear that two men were shouting in frustration about the condition of the road. I clearly heard someone yell, “You have all the diamonds coming from Kono, but look at the schools, look at the hospital, look at this road! There is no power, there is no transportation. Where is the money going?”

Getting off the bus in Koidu was like arriving in a frontier town in an Old West movie, where the strangers stand on the train platform and eye the dusty streets and wonder what sort of trouble lies ahead. The longtime RUF stronghold was still filled with former RUF fighters, including many desperate for work. In the course of our stay, Jango recognized dozens of rebel veterans, including some he took pains to avoid encountering. I found myself doing mental math on everyone I interacted with: Men apparently within five years of my age I presumed to have been officer-grade RUF; odds were good that those in their late teens and early twenties had been child soldiers. It was strange to be deep in the Sierra Leone provinces again and have nothing to fear from kids up to age 17—they were too young to have fought in the war.

Koidu is loosely arranged like a wagon wheel, with the hub being a massive cotton tree known in the dark days as the “chopping tree” because its gnarly knee-high roots proved perfect for performing amputations. The city had been thoroughly pillaged as if by wild animals, but only partly put back together. It was easy to get the impression that the war had ended just the week before.

Our first task once we got settled was to find a Lebanese diamond merchant to help us get the lay of the land. We cold-called on a few, but none were willing to speak with journalists; we would learn later that the Lebanese did not get along as well with the Sierra Leoneans in Koidu as they had in Kenema ten years before. With unemployment and poverty so high, the Lebanese were regarded as foreign vultures who were exploiting Koidu’s diamond wealth, stealing it from those to whom it rightly belonged. The Lebanese, of course, had been a mainstay of Sierra Leonean diamond trading for decades; nevertheless a strong scent of distrust hung in the air that we would come to understand more fully in the coming days but that at the moment lent an uneasy vibe to our door-to-door wandering. Finally, one merchant told us to find Kassim Basma, their elder statesman and chair of the local Lebanese community.

We found his office hidden in a maze of dirty alleyways jammed with engine parts from a neighboring auto repair shop, and random, half-empty rooms furnished only with cracked and forgotten furniture. In the anteroom where we waited for a Russian flunky to announce our presence, one of a set of rusted handcuffs was locked to the iron grate covering the window. The other cuff dangled below, leading one to morbid speculation about what might have been done here during the war, before this became an elderly man’s office. With Basma, I was hoping to repeat my success in talking to Fawaz S. Fawaz in Kenema during my last visit to the country. Though he’d been cagey about showing off any diamonds, Fawaz had helped us get our bearings in a strange place.

“Ah, but Fawaz is dead,” Basma said when I dropped the only name I knew in the West African Lebanese diamond community. “If it’s the same man I’m thinking about, he died of a heart attack not too long ago. S. Fawaz, yes? From Kenema? Too bad. He was a young man.”

I didn’t remember him as particularly young, but I did vividly recall Fawaz’s towering pile of Marlboro butts and how quickly he added to them; I figured we must have been talking about the same person. If so, his demise didn’t surprise me, but I didn’t say so. Basma was also chain-smoking. The largest thing on his desk was a joke lighter the size of a pocket dictionary.

Basma was friendly, but wary of our questions. Like his late colleague, he insisted that business was slow and that there were no diamonds to display. As Mike and I continued to chat with him, doing our best to be disarming, he seemed to warm up. Like others who had described Kono’s mines to us, he complained that many of the old surface mines were washed up and competition was fierce among the Lebanese to trade with those who were still producing stones. The big exploration companies working the Koidu Kimberlite Project and the Thunderball Mine didn’t bother with men like Basma; they took care of their own exports and didn’t need him. He dealt more with small-scale diggers like those we would later see at the Number 11 mine, men hired by miners licensed by the government to explore a certain area for diamonds. When the transactions were made, he provided the seller with a receipt from a big notebook he kept, the cornerstone of what the Kimberley Process called “internal controls” on diamonds’ origins. The Government Gold and Diamond Office issues Basma the Kimberley Process certificates when he travels to Freetown to export the goods and pay his taxes; should a monitor show up to question him about the details of his parcels, as he said happened from time to time, he referred them to the notebook.

“The Kimberley Process works properly,” he said. “It decreased smuggling and increased exports.”

After a quick glance at his Russian friend, who sat silently in a chair next to the desk, he added, “It’s not bad, actually, as long as you’re a law-abiding citizen.”

I thought this an odd statement and took the chance to press him. “Isn’t it true, though, that there are still people selling diamonds who can’t prove where they’ve come from? Or who aren’t licensed to mine? Or who may have smuggled diamonds from, say, Côte d’Ivoire?”

He didn’t balk as I’d expected.

“Yes, yes, it’s true,” he said. “But I have not seen any Ivoirian diamonds lately. Stones like that come in from Guinea.”

“What do you when you’re offered stones like those?”

Basma smiled and held up his palms in a half-shrug as if to say, Let’s not fool each other here.

“Look, if you have illicit people coming here, you can’t refuse, because then they will smuggle it,” he said. “But if you buy it, as an official exporter, you can legalize it. Somebody will buy it if not me.”

This was an unexpected admission, so I asked him to explain. Basma argued that buying stones of unknown origin and mixing them with legitimate diamonds for export was a means of cleaning up the black market, a unique argument that I’d never heard anyone try before. He seemed trying to convince me that the purpose of the Kimberley Process was to put all diamonds under an umbrella of legitimacy no matter where they came from. But before we could continue, his friend, who looked alarmed at the turn our conversation had taken, abruptly left the room. Basma sat back as if that signaled the end of our conversation. Thanking him for his time, we showed ourselves out.

The moment we stepped onto the street, a cop who was marching our way stopped us. It was nothing serious, a low-grade hassling that involved us explaining our presence in town, but the officer was humorless and stern and the angry interrogation had me wondering if we had crossed some invisible local line. I was pretty sure it wasn’t a random stop, considering that white-skinned people were fairly common in Koidu and we hadn’t turned many other heads. Maybe we were being paranoid, but we assumed from that point on that certain people were keeping their eyes on us.

II

Before I left for Sierra Leone, I knew that I would find myself in situations that, if less dire than before, would still be strange and trying. The story had changed in ten years, and it was no longer about the RUF’s greed-fueled program of murder for control of diamonds; it was now about the government’s almost total inaction, in the RUF’s absence, in closing the yawning gulf between the value of Sierra Leone’s natural resources and the crushing poverty that continues to cripple the country. Moreover, it’s about the danger that situation poses. The country has been here before, and the outcome was cataclysmic. It is no mystery what led to one of the worst wars of the past fifty years. The government’s own Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigated the causes and came to an unambiguous conclusion: “The Commission finds that the central cause of the war was endemic greed, corruption and nepotism that deprived the nation of its dignity and reduced most people to a state of poverty.”¹⁴

While I expected to confront that poverty up close in an attempt to understand why the lesson hadn’t been learned, I did not expect to find myself clad in OR scrubs observing an operation in a hospital that has no power, no running water, and no modern equipment—an experience I had at the suggestion of a local doctor so that I could see just how great the divide was between Koidu’s poverty and the wealth being stripped out of its land just outside the city limits.

Dr. Bailor Barrie is a 2004 graduate of Sierra Leone’s only medical school and the founder, along with American Dr. Dan Kelly, of Wellbody, an organization that runs a free clinic for treating wartime amputees and their families. I met Barrie not at the clinic, but at Koidu’s main hospital, where we’d come for personal reasons rather than professional ones: It seemed that the bus ride from Freetown had felled one of our small band. Jango had been fine when he got on the bus, but seven hours later, his eyeballs were crusted over like Scotch eggs and he was shivering from chills and throwing up bright green bile the consistency of paint. He had malaria.

The day before our arrival in Koidu, the New York Times ran a promising article speculating that infant mortality rates would soon improve in Sierra Leone, thanks to a new, free health care program for pregnant women and children that had begun in 2010 and was being temporarily bankrolled by foreign donors. There is no such thing as socialized medicine or education in Sierra Leone. Aside from a handful of free clinics run by charities or foreign donors like Wellbody, even so much as scheduling an appointment with a doctor costs money, as Jango discovered when he was told he’d have to pay in advance just to get in line. And since health care is one of the many things Sierra Leoneans cannot afford, most women never see a doctor throughout their pregnancies and give birth at home. The Times piece was a cheerful story that expressed hope for a brighter, healthier future for newborns and mothers with high-risk pregnancies.

Our experience, however, was less cheerful than the article had led us to expect. For one thing, although the new program waived official fees charged by the hospital, it did nothing to address a long list of unofficial payments for everything from clean sheets to blood transfusions. As Alicia Lay, one of several American medical students who worked at the hospital as part of their study of tropical medicine, explained, the money goes not to the hospital, but to whoever collects the “fee.” It’s one of the most common forms of corruption and graft encountered in Sierra Leone—the random shakedown. It happens everywhere from the airport to the Freetown ATM, where the armed security guard expects a few bills for watching your back while you conduct your transaction. And heavily funded new medical program or no, it happens in the hospitals as well. In fact, we passed a sign taped to the wall outside one of the wards reading: “Notice! All deliveries are free. All Caesarean sections are free. Available drugs at the maternity are free. Therefore, patients are advice [sic] not to buy drugs from the nurses. By Management.”

When Lay and her colleagues introduced us to Barrie, I immediately recognized his voice. He had been one of the passengers on the bus arguing about the injustice of Koidu’s sad state considering the millions earned in diamond export taxes. Eager to pick up the conversation anew, he equated the situation to low-grade everyday graft, except on a much larger scale. The reason people go without medical care is the same reason entire communities are left without electricity—somewhere up the chain, someone is making off with what’s owed to those on the ground floor.

“My own personal view is that the government is corrupt,” he said. “The money [from diamond revenues meant for communities] goes into their pockets or their bank accounts. Kono is the wealthiest district in the country, but we don’t even have a college.”

The hospital was a fitting place for this conversation. The one-story government facility of concrete wards was a “hospital” only in that doctors and sick people frequented it. There were no X-ray, MRI, or CAT-scan machines, because those require electricity and the hospital has none. A collection of battery-powered ultrasound devices—which could have been recharged at any of the local kiosks in town that rent plug-in time for cell phones—sat on a shelf unused because no one knew how to operate them. Instruments were sanitized in an industrial pressure cooker heated on a propane burner; and because the plumbing didn’t work, the water came from a hand pump in the courtyard via bucket brigade, as did the water for flushing toilets and washing surgeons’ hands. It’s too risky to give surgery patients general anesthesia, Lay said, because they can’t intubate patients who stop breathing. The hospital has no pulse oximeters to ensure the blood is receiving sufficient oxygen.

The excuse for all this deficency is that the government has no money to pay for improvements and modern equipment, an argument that’s hard to buy with round-the-clock diamond production happening fewer than five miles away.

The following day, we accepted an invitation to watch a hysterectomy performed on a young woman who had a large fibrous mass around her uterus. As in the Wild West, a doctor had made the diagnosis by feeling her bloated abdomen and making an informed guess.

“Are you nervous?” I asked the surgeon, Dr. Bardu Abdulai.

“Of course not.”

“But isn’t this sort of a high-risk surgery?”

“I do them all the time.”

With that, we entered the OR. The patient, a 23-year-old woman, lay welded with dread to the operating table as if she was about to be executed by lethal injection. “The Macarena” was playing on a transistor radio. Lay was assisting Abdulai with the operation, along with three or four nurses and assorted helpers playing the roles of anesthesiologist, orderlies, and whatever else ORs generally require. Some of them wore flip-flops, but the doctor at least wore white Crocs sandals, which kept the blood off his feet when it started dripping off the operating table. Mike and I, our faces largely obscured behind surgical masks, were wide-eyed. In our time as journalists, we’d each run the long, ultimately fruitless gauntlet of U.S. hospital bureaucrats, HIPPA regulations, and insurance companies in attempts to observe surgeries for various stories over the years and had never even dented the iron wall of privacy surrounding patients’ rights, even when the patients wanted us to be there. Here, we weren’t even asked to wash our hands before we began creeping between the doctors for a better shot with our cameras.

The patient was given sedatives and a local anesthetic, and just before the first incision was made, we were asked not to stand between the patient and the window—the doctors needed the sunlight to see what they were doing.

IT WOULD BE ONE THING if Sierra Leone had to make do in this way because the country was truly hopeless, if there was nothing available except direct charity to pay for the nation’s most basic needs. But regularly timed explosions serve as a constant reminder that Sierra Leone has more than enough resources to afford a more comfortable and dignified life for its people. Those resources, however, are sealed off from those living in Koidu by physical barriers and armed guards.

The Koidu Holdings project is a massive undertaking to excavate two kimberlite pipes known as K1 and K2. I’d never seen an industrial mine before and was awed by the scale of the operation. I got no closer than the locals, however; I was turned away at the gatehouse because I hadn’t made an appointment in advance. Despite several phone calls made during my week’s stay in Koidu to the company’s media relations department—itself an odd concept in the heart of the West African jungle—no one was available to accommodate a reporter showing up unannounced. Company representatives vetted my professional credentials in the process. They asked me to give details about what I’d written about Koidu Holdings in the past, which included only one short article in The Economist about diamonds in general, in which I mentioned the company’s scaled-down production (as well as that of many other diamond companies, including De Beers) during the global economic crisis. I went through the same process with representatives of the Thunderball Mine, who asked for references to my past work. After I pointed them to my professional website (which includes links and material related to this book), they initially gave me clearance to visit. But when our small fleet of hired motorcycles arrived outside the barbed-wire fence surrounding the pit, the foreman and an armed security guard turned us away. Someone in the company had called from Freetown and nixed our appointment at the last moment.

While we waited for permission to visit Koidu Holdings, we were hassled again by the police, who followed us as we walked past the police station and peppered us with questions on our way to inquire at the mine. It was disconcerting enough that we decided to hire motorcycles to whisk us past that short section of road on our return. I chalked it up to underpaid civil servants trying to intimidate foreigners into paying a bribe, but Jango, more in tune with local subtleties, wasn’t so sure. I had trouble buying the idea that police and PR stooges alike were actively discouraging our inquiries, but I had equal trouble understanding how over the course of a week no one could spare an hour to chat face-to-face. Even when I offered to return to Koidu later in the month, I got nowhere.

In any event, I didn’t need to get into the mine to gauge its magnitude. Every time I traveled from our room at Uncle Ben’s Guest House on the outskirts of town to the city center, it dominated the view to the south. Giant earthmovers crawled across a steep mesa of waste tailings and dirt. I often mistook the scheduled blasting for thunder. And the mine’s plans to expand its operations were on everyone’s lips.

The Koidu Kimberlite Project processes fifty tons of kimberlitic rock an hour and produces about 120,000 carats of diamonds a year; by 2015, the K1 mine will reach more than 1,000 feet into the ground and the K2 mine will be 800 feet deep. The South Africa–based company employs nearly eight hundred workers, 90 percent of them Sierra Leoneans.¹⁵ But it hasn’t exactly been welcome in Koidu. For one thing, the diamond mines were located at the edge of existing villages on the outskirts of the city—and getting to the diamonds involved getting rid of those who lived in the villages. With the blessing of the government and the local chief, the company “relocated” 284 households, which affected 2,380 people. ¹⁶ The plan was to build an entirely new village for these residents beginning in 2005 and to move them during a series of so-called “rolling resettlements.” But the company began blasting apart the kimberlite before everyone safely moved, leading to massive protests against the company. On December 13, 2007, police faced off with hundreds of unarmed demonstrators assembled outside the gates leading to the mine to protest the detonations, yet Koidu Holdings proceeded with blasting as scheduled that day. When the protesters went wild at what they considered a provocation, police opened fire in a manner later described by government investigators as “indiscriminate, disproportionate and reck less.” Two people were killed and ten were wounded. The same commission reported that had Koidu Holdings “shown a little bit of restraint and sensitivity towards the demonstrators . . . by not proceeding with the blasting,” the outcome might have been different.¹⁷

Tensions have eased in the intervening years, but they’re likely to flare anew. Koidu Holdings has proposed a $150 million expansion that will allow it to tunnel below its current mines and find more diamonds. Improvements in the operation will allow it to ramp up processing in order to churn through 180 tons of rock per hour and produce more than half a million carats of diamonds a year.¹⁸

However, the plans require the company to expand its “blast envelope”—a mining euphemism for widening its borders—and as a result, residents of another 660 Koidu households will be displaced and moved to a new resettlement camp. As before, the company will build them new homes far from where they now live and compensate them for lost crops. Sierra Leonean newspapers often refer to the affected residents as “victims.”

Koidu’s relationship with its largest employer is complicated. On one hand, a palpable resentment toward the South African firm is not hard to detect: Living by the light of cell phones and flashlights after the sun goes down simply feels unfair while electricity courses round the clock through the Koidu Holdings compound as it mines diamonds worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Knowing that there is a fully staffed modern medical clinic inside the razor wire breeds contempt when local doctors have to boil their scalpels in pots of well water. On the other hand, everyone wants a job with Koidu Holdings and is envious of anyone who has one.

“You’re dealing with a country where there is a 10 to 15 percent literacy rate and very high expectations,” said Paul Ngaba Saquee, the paramount chief of Tankoro Chiefdom, where Koidu Holdings mines are located. “They want everything done by Koidu Holdings and that’s not possible.

“Every time they hear a blast, they say, ‘My God, they’re taking all of our diamonds,’” he continued with a laugh. “I admit, Koidu Holdings is not good at marketing themselves. The one year they were shut down [while the 2007 shootings were being investigated], the crime rate went up, prostitution went up, divorce rates went up [due to unemployment]. We need to increase economic opportunities. The fact of the matter is, this outfit is good, and I’m speaking not in absolute terms, but in relative terms. We have to create an enabling environment for their business.”

These opinions are not widely held in Koidu, and they’ve done little for the chief ’s popularity. A few months earlier, Saquee was mobbed by a group of students organized to protest at a community meeting where the company’s latest expansion plans were being discussed. Saquee stood in support of company representatives, and as he attempted to leave, angry students surrounded his car and began banging on the hood and doors. Saquee’s driver panicked and tried to flee in reverse, colliding with a car belonging to the secretary of the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, badly damaging both vehicles.

Although Saquee was born and raised in Koidu, prior to his election as chief, he worked in the United States as a supervisor for a long-haul trucking company. He returned to Sierra Leone and campaigned for the top job in the chiefdom after his predecessor, his father, died. Being chief is difficult to begin with, but it’s much more so when one is such a vocal supporter of the city’s most controversial company. Saquee has been called a sellout and worse. He chalks it up as shortsightedness among his people, who have lost everything in the war and prefer immediate returns over long-range vision.

“We’ve been taken for a ride for a long time,” said Saquee’s lieutenant, Dr. Tamba Kpetewama, who summarizes critics’ attitudes as “we deserve something in return.”

“We’re not saying everything is great,” Kpetewama said, “but certainly it would have been worse without Koidu Holdings. This place was destroyed because of the war, but Koidu Holdings was the first company to come back in. They fixed roads, they fixed bridges, but when you’re talking about Koidu Holdings, most people are not very objective. Koidu Holdings is a much better situation. This is one of the best things to ever happen to our country.”

Like other diamond exporters, Koidu Holdings pays a 3 percent federal tax on the value of its diamonds, which in its case amounts to $3 million of governmental revenue. Its mining lease agreement requires it to set aside 0.25 percent of its gross revenue from exports for use exclusively for community development, another 0.1 percent of gross revenue for agricultural development, and $100,000 annually for scholarships and skills training. It has a local profit-sharing arrangement (though, as of this writing, the company has yet to be profitable) in which 5 percent of annual profits will go to the Tankoro Chiefdom, 3 percent to the Kono District Council, and 2 percent to the Koidu City Council. The company also pays annual surface rent to landowners and local councils.¹⁹

“The impact of this project on the local community and economy is huge,” Koidu Holdings CEO Jan Joubert claimed in a company press release. “We are currently one of the largest contributors to government revenues in terms of taxes, royalties and contributions to development programs.”²⁰

Those living in the company’s shadow clearly haven’t gotten their share of this avowed largesse. That this disparity echoes 1991, when the RUF leveraged simmering resentment into early support for its rebellion, seems to be dangerously absent from most conversations. Dr. Barrie is one of the few people I met who expressed concern about it.

“Honestly, to me it’s the same as before the war,” he said. “There’s a lot of things, a lot of unemployment, a lot of suffering, while these stones are taken from right here. These are all things that were here before the war. It’s all the same.”

Critically, it’s no illusion that the game is stacked to benefit industry and its enablers in the government. It’s clear to most which people among them benefit most handsomely from the diamonds being mined around them. For those in the Tankoro Chiefdom, they need look no further than their own chief.

When I met Saquee, we spoke in a courtyard inside his walled residential compound, which included two buildings, a concrete gazebo, and a carport for his Land Rover. Although it’s part of the resettlement village, his is the nicest home in the neighborhood—all of it (including the car and driver) provided by the mining company. Moreover, Saquee personally receives a sizable chunk of the surface rent the company pays, $4,350 per year. In a country where the average annual income is $150 to $200, that’s a fortune. When the company expands, the payment will double. To many in Saquee’s community, it’s no mystery why he’s such a fan of Koidu Holdings.

“The truth is,” Barrie said earlier, speaking about the government in general, “it’s all about corruption.”

FRAUD, BRIBERY, NEPOTISM, graft, and outright theft are so rampant among governmental institutions and elected leaders in Sierra Leone that it’s dangerously easy to assume they’re as intractable in the local culture as palm wine and kola nuts. A confidential report commissioned by President Ernest Bai Koroma shortly after his election in 2007 called corruption in government “the greatest impediment to the country’s development.”²¹ Here’s a small sampling: The country’s former ombudsman, Francis Gabbidon, was convicted and jailed in 2009 on 168 counts of misappropriation of public funds.²² A WikiLeaks cable hinted that senior members of the military spent a $1.9 million aid grant on flat-screen TVs and hunting rifles.²³ The former agriculture minister was convicted of stealing $1.5 million of World Bank development funds; the judge who sentenced him by imposing a mere fine of $250 was convicted in turn for being bribed into giving him a light sentence.²⁴

As former chief justice Desmond Luke has said, “If you have been here for some time, you will know that anybody and everybody is stealing everything.”²⁵

In many countries, corruption in government is often considered a punch line, but in Sierra Leone, it’s no laughing matter. In fact, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up in the late 1990s to create a historical record of the causes of the civil war, identified corruption as the number-one factor. Everything else—the influence of Muammar Qaddafi on the RUF’s leaders, Charles Taylor’s disruptive hand in regional destabilization, weak controls on the diamond industry—was secondary:

The Commission came to the conclusion that it was years of bad governance, endemic corruption and the denial of basic human rights that created the deplorable conditions that made conflict inevitable. Successive regimes became increasingly impervious to the wishes and needs of the majority. Instead of implementing positive and progressive policies, each regime perpetuated the ills and self-serving machinations left behind by its predecessor. By the start of the conflict, the nation had been stripped of its dignity. Institutional collapse reduced the vast majority of people into a state of deprivation. Government accountability was non-existent. Political expression and dissent had been crushed. Democracy and the rule of law were dead.²⁶

The Anti-Corruption Commission, established in Freetown in 2000, was deemed so ineffective that Britain, Sierra Leone’s largest foreign donor, ended direct budgetary aid to the country in 2007. In spite of a string of recent investigations that snared some big-name grifters, Sierra Leone still ranks 134th out of 178 countries listed on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index.²⁷

“When you talk about corruption, I don’t know where to begin,” said Sahr F. S. Kaimachiande, the Kono District parliamentary chief. “You call it corruption. I call it petty thievery.”

In one example he gave, he’d arranged for the delivery of seventeen truckloads of mosquito netting to be donated to the hospital from an aid organization. They never made it to the hospital.

“Do you know where I found them?” he asked. “In the market being sold.”

For nearly an hour, while we sat on a second story balcony of a spacious stone house filled with people waiting for an audience with him, Kaimachiande ran through a litany of such examples. As the parliamentary chief, he represented the Kono District in the government in Freetown, much like a member of the United States Congress, and he had many people lobbying for his time and attention. A question I asked spurred his complaints. Someone had mentioned that Kono is the most corrupt of all the country’s districts, and I wanted to know his view.

The problem, he said, is that elected leaders in Sierra Leone are more interested in retaining power and accumulating wealth than fighting for change. “It’s more perpetual politics than governance,” he said. Representatives are too scared to stand up to the president and speak their minds. Sierra Leoneans have a deep-seated instinct for self-preservation that makes them myopic. Those who lived through so much death and suffering during the war and who still struggle to survive from day to day tend to think only in terms of their immediate needs. Planning for the future doesn’t often enter the equation.

Kaimachiande gestured toward the road below us, indicating along its shoulder a long earthen berm from which ragged trenches had been dug. We’d seen many roads in the same condition throughout Koidu, as well as piles of construction material for sidewalks and seemingly abandoned Bobcat bulldozers parked on street corners. Pedestrians trying to get to many businesses had to cross these trenches over planks and navigate around rusted spikes of rebar left lying about and threatening to impale someone. But we hadn’t seen any actual work taking place. That, Kaimachiande explained, was because the project was between contractors. The first three or four had simply collected money and done nothing but tear up the road and leave town. That coup may have solved their immediate needs for money, but they would never be trusted with a road project in Koidu again, something they either didn’t consider or didn’t care about.

“What am I going to do? Should I drive the bulldozer?” Kaimachiande joked.

I thought it was a good question.

“What are you going to do?” I asked. “I mean you’re a member of Parliament. Can’t you fight for change?”

He looked at me as if I hadn’t been listening. Politicians don’t agitate, because they don’t want to risk losing their jobs. That included him.

“Do you know what they call me in the newspapers in Freetown? The Honorable Chief Rubber Stamp.”

III

BY THE TIME I got back to Freetown, I was in need of some good news. Ten years had been a long enough time for me to forget just how mentally taxing Sierra Leone could be. After visiting Koidu, I’d drawn a dark scenario for its future. When I was here last, the big question had been whether or not the war was really over. Back then, you could practically still smell the gun smoke in the air, and the injuries—both physical and mental—were still freshly written on everyone I passed. I hoped that the war would truly end, if only so that Sierra Leoneans could have some breathing room and an opportunity to resume their prewar lives. With enough distance from the horrors of the 1990s, I felt, they would finally have a chance to get on a track leading them away from such nightmares forever. The potential for such a future was obvious to everyone.

Instead, I returned to find that opportunity being squandered. The record needle has skipped all the way back to the late 1980s, and the same tunes are lined up to be played again. Perhaps most frustrating, no one seemed to know how to stop this reversal, or even agreed that it should be stopped. In one ear, a friend of President Koroma’s was telling me that the government has made great strides and that increasing investment in Sierra Leone by businesses as varied as diamond companies and international hotels proves the future is promising. And in the other ear, a candidate for the Sierra Leone People’s Party who’d fled to Norway during the war said the country is actually worse than it was in 2002, when the country was little more than a rubble pile filled with bones and spent ammunition.

More than ever, the time-warp sensation was overpowering. Only, instead of feeling as though I’d been transported back to when I was here last, at the end of the war, I felt as if I’d gone even further and was visiting the country at the beginning of the war. Sierra Leone of 1991 must have been a lot like Sierra Leone of 2011. It has all the ingredients: a weak central government riven with corruption, greed-blinded chiefs in the provinces selling out their own people for cash, resource industries run with no transparency or accountability, and a citizenry yet again disenfranchised and starting to feel its resentment rise. The country I visited in 2011 seems exactly like the country described by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: “Endemic greed, corruption and nepotism . . . deprived the nation of its dignity and reduced most people to a state of poverty.” All that’s lacking is a warlord to spark the flames, and West Africa has never been short of those.

I felt the need to measure my impression against a knowledgeable third party, afraid that having been away for so long was giving me a jaundiced view of things. Was I expecting too much in too little time? I called Michael Owen, the U.S. ambassador to Sierra Leone, who assured me that I was seeing things accurately. In fact, he had trouble settling on which of Sierra Leone’s problems poses the most significant threat to its future. He was particularly concerned about youth unemployment in combination with the conditions in Kono and Kailahaun Districts. In fact, Kailahaun is arguably worse than Kono; Owen said there are no doctors in the district, none of the roads have been paved since the end of the war, and the economy is “moribund.”

“The conditions there are indeed terrible,” he said. “They have not improved much since the end of the war. The infrastructure is bad, the schools are bad, health care is bad, doctors are not there, doctors don’t show up, teachers don’t show up, they have a lot of unemployed youth. . . . The situation in both districts is really very, very bad, and I don’t see frankly much sign of improvement in the near term.”

Owen believed that President Koroma, while motivated and committed to change, was hampered by a lack of “human capital.” A large Sierra Leonean diaspora occurred during the war, when many educated people fled the country, particularly to the United States. While some are returning and bringing home their experiences in America in business and government, “there’s really very little [that government institutions] have in terms of people who can actually carry out programs,” Owen said. “The capacity constraints in all the ministries are really quite severe.”

As an example, he points to Sierra Leone’s attempt to join the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a global effort to improve governance over mining industries in resource-rich countries by instituting standards that all signatory countries must adhere to. Sierra Leone has fallen woefully behind schedule.

“They’re having enormous difficulty pulling everything together to adhere to the requirements of the EITI, and they’ve been put on notice that time is running out,” he said. “That goes back to that lack of capacity. They just don’t have the sort of midlevel management in their government to put in the system they need to meet the requirements of EITI.”

This deficit manifests itself in tangible ways, particularly in how the government manages, or fails to manage, extractive industries mining diamonds, gold, iron ore, and other valuable minerals—in other words, the lifeblood of Sierra Leone’s future. The government, according to Owen, has yet to control so much as one of its most important industries—diamonds—much less figure out how to maximize revenue from it.

“From all I hear, there are still large segments of the diamond sector that are entirely unregulated and unpoliced,” he said. “There are areas in the Kono District that are off limits to everybody, and I’m not entirely clear what’s going on there. In spite of the fact that they’ve signed on to the Kimberley Process and made all these pledges, enforcement is still a major issue.”

Owen ticked off a checklist of deficiencies as if reading the ingredients from a recipe for revolt, one that’s been followed before. Dire poverty, endemic corruption, paramount chiefs on the take from foreign investors (not just in diamonds but agribusiness as well), untreated post-traumatic stress disorder in former child soldiers, a pending health-care crisis if the government can’t find revenue to take over the free medical program once donor funding dries up.

I tried to find something that we could agree was a positive sign. I asked Owen about forgiveness and reconciliation. Before my arrival, I’d expected to find hostility between former rebel soldiers and their victims. But it hardly ever came up. Jango was adamant that internecine violence was over. “We took care of that a long time ago,” he said. “It’s no problem now.”

In the words of one man: “We may not ever be able to forget what happened, but we can forgive.”

This was an amazing sentiment, repeated often. I wanted to believe that no matter how bad things got, there wouldn’t be a return to the sort of deadly violence that had brought me here in the first place. Owen, however, couldn’t offer any reassurance.

“This unemployed youth thing, that’s a major problem, nationwide and here in Freetown particularly,” he said. “You have a lot of former child soldiers who’ve never really recovered from the trauma of war. Many of them never went to school and have very limited skills. They’re probably suffering from PTSD, and I think the presence of a large number of these young men is really a risk factor for the future.

“I still do worry,” he continued after giving it some thought. “There’s a lot of anger underneath the surface in a lot of people. Under the wrong set of circumstances, that could come out again. Things seem calm on the surface, but I’m just a little concerned that there’s still some definite anger underneath.”

I DID FIND MY glimmer of hope, but where I least expected it: on the side of a steep hill east of Freetown, surrounded by the poorest and most desperate people I’d met yet. They are child miners who crush rocks in order to afford enough food to go on living. They aren’t looking for diamonds—they are simply crushing rocks, big ones into little ones and then the little ones into gravel, with the hope of selling piles of them to construction companies for use in making concrete. There is an entire colony of these child laborers and their families, living as squatters on hills offering a clear view of Freetown’s white sand beaches and another road construction project that politicians showcase as evidence of progress.

I found these hill dwellers completely by accident, after allowing myself to be hailed on the street outside the Solar Hotel by a passerby. “Are you a journalist?” he asked, in the same manner one would ask a person with a stethoscope if he is a doctor. He was pointing to the camera slung on my shoulder.

He told an amazing story. He worked at a school near Lakka Beach that offered free education to children so poor that their only hope for survival was through backbreaking labor in ad hoc gravel quarries. He described little kids, some of them orphans, swinging hammers as if on a chain gang, perfectly hopeless until discovered by the headmaster, who searched the hills continuously for new pupils, like Jesus looking for lost lambs. Would I like to meet him and visit the school? Naturally, I said yes, even though I suspected he’d exaggerated the story to make me more interested.

But I was wrong. The founder and headmaster is a man named Foday Mansaray, a fit man in his early forties. He was all business when he showed up at the Solar Hotel the next morning to meet Mike and me for breakfast. He brought along enough supporting material to apply for a World Bank loan—receipts, report cards, photos, even an audio file of a radio show that had been done on the children that aired in Holland.

Throughout his presentation I kept expecting an appeal for funds, but it never came.

“I just want you to tell the story,” he said. We piled into a taxi and headed toward the hills with Mansaray explaining that these rock quarry colonies were a result of the war, when rural families fled the provinces to the perceived safety of Freetown, usually with no skills, no education, and nothing more than what they could carry. But without the means to return home when the war was over, they were forced to innovate. They’d been crushing rocks for more than a decade, eking out the barest of existences. From the road, we could see tumbledown shanties and lean-tos built with zinc siding and bush sticks teetering on the hillsides. As we began our climb, the tinny sound of hammers on rocks pinged down to meet us.

The life of a rock breaker is as hard as it sounds. There are no jackhammers or bulldozers; everything is done by hand. Men with shovels start by removing soil to expose large granite boulders, some the size of small cars. They burn wood or tires to heat the boulders and make them easier to split into chunks with chisels and sledgehammers. Once the rubble is small enough to lug downhill, the women and children take over. Older kids use mallets and small sledges to crush the rock into pebbles, while very small children use ball-peen hammers. On our way up the hill, we passed a three-year-old girl who used a rusty old hammerhead on a stick to smash rocks held in place by her tiny foot, which was clad only in a flip-flop. Mansaray had never seen her before.

“You see,” he said, “I always find more children. Every time I find more.”

Speaking gently to the toddler, he learned her name and those of her parents. She pointed in the direction of her home, and Mansaray told me he would come back tomorrow to speak with the parents, hoping they would agree to send the girl to his school and get her out of the quarry. Usually such conversations were straightforward. The parents may be uneducated and illiterate, but they were smart enough to know that there was no future for their children in what they were doing. But others were harder to convince because every swinging hammer meant more gravel they could sell. On a few occasions during our visit, Mansaray spotted students crushing rocks who should have been in school. Some tried to hide, knowing they were in for a scolding, but Mansaray had eyes like a hawk.

Not only is gravel mining a hopeless existence with no prospects for improvement, but it’s also dangerous. Children often miss the rocks and hammer their toes and shins, and most miners have had gravel shards hit their eyes and cut their faces. Most of the schoolchildren have injuries. Mariatu Sesay, an eight-year-old girl, fell and broke her arm at the elbow a year ago. Although set by a doctor, the bone healed at an odd angle and is permanently deformed.

As the rocks get smashed smaller and smaller, they’re moved closer to the road along a chain of crushing stations, until eventually the pea-sized gravel is piled in knee-high cones that can be spotted by passing construction trucks in need of material for concrete. When buyers come, as often as twice a week or as infrequently as twice a month, the gravel is measured into a pan the size of a large skillet and sold for 1,300 leones per panful. That’s about 30 U.S. cents, to be split by everyone along the chain. An industrious rock crusher can fill about ten pans per week, but whether anyone buys that much is out of his control. All along the road from Freetown, we saw many piles of gravel for sale.

We also saw many new homes being constructed, some along the very paths the rock breakers used to bring the stones down the mountain. To Mansaray, they were monstrosities. He’d tried to convince some of the future homeowners—most of whom were wealthy businessmen, he said—to donate money to his school so that tiny children didn’t have to produce the raw material for their homes through the sort of hard labor usually reserved for prisoners, but he’d never had much success.

Of course, Sierra Leone has laws prohibiting child labor, and the country’s Family Services Unit, which is charged with enforcing it, has an office less than two miles from the quarry. But it didn’t surprise me to learn from Mansaray that officers would investigate his complaints only if he paid a “fee” for their transportation to look into it. He quickly gave up on help from the government and decided simply to rescue the children himself.²⁸ He keeps a copy of the child labor law in his pocket to read to skeptical parents.

The school itself, situated across the road from the hills where the children live, is easy to overlook if you aren’t paying attention. It’s nothing more than two small tentlike structures made of tarpaulins stretched around a frame of tree limbs with a zinc panel on top. The floors are dirt.

About 250 children are enrolled in the Borbor Pain Charity School of Hope, “Borbor Pain” meaning “suffering children.” On the day we visited, school was already out for the older children, and it was the last day of instruction for the seventy or so smaller kids who greeted us with rehearsed songs reserved for special visitors. Mansaray said the school takes a break from classes during the month of August, which is the rainiest month of the rainy season and usually proves too miserable for either teaching or learning. Mansaray needed the break himself so he could work full-time to solve an immediate funding crisis—two of his four teachers were threatening to quit because of overdue wages.

While the children took turns reciting the alphabet, Mansaray recited a long list of needs. Not only was there no money to pay his teachers, who were owed the equivalent of about $150, but there was none for notebooks, pencils, report cards, or chalk. The school needed new desks and chairs; as it was, the children sat on driftwood benches and wrote at crudely constructed tables, and there weren’t enough of either for all the students. Eventually, he wanted to offer them lunch, but with all of the school’s more pressing needs, it just wasn’t in the cards yet. When he wasn’t looking for new children to bring down from the mountain in hope for a better future, he was in Freetown chasing money by dropping in on businesses, emailing practically everyone he’d ever met who could send $50 through Western Union, or not infrequently, simply appealing to strangers. In such a corrupt country, he tried to encourage trust by promising to share receipts with donors down to the penny, so that they would know where their money was spent. That meant extra time at painfully slow computers at Internet cafés, scanning documents and emailing them around the world, but he was determined to prove that there were still people in Sierra Leone who could be trusted to put donated money to the uses for which they were meant.

In spite of the school’s needs, he emphasized repeatedly that the one group he wouldn’t harass for money in his effort to keep the school running were the students’ parents.

“Everything is free for the children,” he said. “Everything.”

Before the war, Mansaray lived in Freetown and held a variety of odd jobs, from ditch digger to cell phone salesman. When fighting began, he joined the cyclonic movement of refugees who fled from place to place hoping to find a safe haven from the RUF’s guns and blades. He survived a brief capture by RUF soldiers in Kono and eventually made his way back to Freetown. He was in the city during Operation No Living Thing, an attack so brutal that he decided it was time to flee the country. He spent years living in refugee camps in Guinea.

Mansaray and his school form but one example of people in this small community who have stopped waiting for the government to improve their lives. Alfred George, who worked for 12 years with the Environmental Foundation for Africa but who is now unemployed, uses his experience with ecological issues to try to end the gravel mining. It may be hard to imagine community members caring about environmental degradation from clear-cutting trees when there’s no telling where the next meal will come from, but there are tangible reasons to address it. Digging boulders out of the hillsides has resulted in an infestation of snails on the flatlands; with their natural ecosystem disturbed, the snails’ eggs wash downhill during the rainy season. Snails destroy crops. In addition, to help prevent large-scale deforestation, George promotes what he calls an eco-stove; made of clay, it requires fewer pieces of coal or firewood to heat water than a typical campfire.

And a woman named Abbey Kamara who lives next to the school does her part as well. She and her husband, Ibrahim, adopted a two-month-old baby boy when his mother, who was single and had no other known relatives, died of a throat infection while breaking stones across the road. His twin sister fell ill and died soon after. The couple already has three small children, but Ibrahim told me that there had never been any question that they would adopt the baby. Like Mansaray, he said God told him it was the right thing to do.

After my visit to the school, I saw Mansaray frequently in Freetown, meeting him occasionally for coffee or lunch, but just as often by happenstance, as he was hustling to or from funding meetings or school suppliers. I saw him on my last day in town, as he was coming out of a copy center with a fresh batch of report cards for the new semester. He’d just finished studiously blacking out the line on the front where other headmasters would fill in the fee for attending school. As he did every time we met, Mansaray reminded me that Borbor Pain was free, and so its report cards didn’t need that line.

Mansaray provided me with the thread of hope I had been looking for. In a country rich in precious stones, it’s inexcusable that children have to mine common ones in order to survive, but here was someone who had learned the lessons of the past and was trying hard not to repeat them, at least in the lives of some.

“All this hardship that I went through with the war prompted me, and the word of God prompted me, to establish this kind of thing because I don’t want children to go in pain,” he said. “I think education is the key because the children are the future of Sierra Leone.

“If you let these children go down astray, then the country is going down astray.”