Blood Diamonds, Revised Edition

ABOUT 50 MILES NORTH of the pit in Bomboma, a British geologist named J. D. Pollett made a discovery in 1930 similar to ours. He found diamonds on the bank of the Gbobora River, not realizing at the time that he had stumbled onto one of West Africa’s most valuable diamond deposits that would, over the next 40 years, produce more than 50 million carats of diamonds, half of which were of astounding gem quality.¹ Pollett estimated that the diamond field he discovered extended over an area of perhaps 3,000 square miles, bounded on the west by the Sewa River and extending east into Liberia. Towns within that area—Kenema, Yengema, Koidu, Tongo Field, and Bo—would be transformed within two decades from sleepy bush villages in the middle of a rain forest that few people would ever care to visit to centers of violent intrigue and international commerce, both legal and illegal. On that day in 1930, Sierra Leone officially became diamondiferous, a designation that has always been both a blessing and a curse for any nation with a similar geology; the promise of vast wealth invariably invites chaos. The discovery of those diamonds—which, until then, had been deemed to be just another worthless piece of gravel by the locals—placed Sierra Leone on a course that would effectively destroy the entire country by the end of the century.

At the time of the discovery, Sierra Leone had been a British colony for 50 years. Founded by former North American slaves freed for fighting on behalf of England in the Revolutionary War, the country was still 80 percent unexplored when Pollett and other teams of geologists forged into the bush to survey its lands and resources. The vast majority of trade, commerce, and political activity took place in Freetown, home to former slaves and captives from across West Africa and the Americas. Freetown’s population was composed of people who became known collectively as Krios, and since very few, if any, originally came from Sierra Leone, they didn’t stray far from the capital and enjoyed the modernity that flowed from their British rulers.

The Africans who lived in the bush had no idea of the wealth that they trampled and ignored daily. To them, diamonds held no value whatsoever. It’s easy to imagine that the people of the Temne, Mende, and Kru tribes—who lived agrarian lives based on animist beliefs and rituals, much like their ancient ancestors had—were probably amused by the sight of white men digging excitedly for stones that they considered utterly worthless. That attitude was destined to be short-lived.

As far back as the sixteenth century, some societies had viewed diamonds as talismans of strength, fortitude, and courage, attributes undoubtedly derived from the stones’ hardness, transparency, and purity. Since diamonds were even more rare then than they are now, it’s not surprising that they quickly were ascribed magical qualities. Diamonds were said to reveal the guilt or innocence of accused criminals and adulterers by the colors they reflected. They were said to reanimate the dead and render the virtuous invisible. The stones were also believed to bring the wearer all forms of good fortune, unless it had a blood-red flaw in the middle, in which case it meant certain death.²

Theories about the origins of diamonds were no less fantastical. Fourteenth-century alchemists revealed the shortcomings of mineral sciences of the day by suggesting that male and female diamonds reproduce “and bring forth small children that multiply and grow all the year,” in the words of the author Sir John Mandeville: “I have oftentimes tried the experiment that if a man keep with them a little of the rock and water them with May dew often, they shall grow every year and the small will grow great,” he once wrote.

Several cultures passed along the story of the great Valley of Diamonds, supposedly located on the island of Ceylon. In one version of the tale, Sindbad the Sailor is accidentally deposited there after piggybacking on a huge raptor in an attempt to escape one of the many life-threatening situations he frequently found himself in. But instead of being whisked to freedom, he was dropped in a high-walled gorge, the floor of which was covered in gorgeous diamonds. The trouble was that there was no way out and the diamonds were guarded by gigantic serpents whose gaze caused instant death. Fortunately for Sindbad, ingenuity was an early quality of diamond merchants and the men of Ceylon had invented a crafty system to get the goods. Traders would skin the carcass of a sheep and hurl it into the valley. When it hit bottom, the gemstones would adhere to the flesh and prove to be a tantalizing treat for the oversized eagles that nested on the valley’s edge. An eagle would retrieve the sheep—and the diamonds attached to it—and return to its nest, where the traders would converge to scare it into flight and collect the bounty. Sindbad tied himself to a sheep carcass with his unwound turban and was thus lifted to freedom on the talons of an eagle, but not before stuffing his pockets with all the diamonds he could carry.

Diamonds are, in fact, the products of heat and pressure. About 120 miles below the earth’s surface, carbon atoms are superheated at 3,600 degrees and compressed under incredible pressures in what’s called the diamond-stability field, the level within the earth that possesses the right pressure and temperature to turn carbon into diamonds. Geologists surmise that this superhard carbon material was then driven toward the surface at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour during an explosive geological event, carried along with magma and gas to a much cooler depth that prevented the diamonds from being reheated into a more common carbon form such as graphite. These volcanic eruptions originated far below the diamond-stability field, punching through layer after layer of earth, picking up anything and everything that they intersected, resulting in a bubbling stew of geological debris that, when hardened, is known as kimberlite. Many kimberlites didn’t make it to the surface, but for those that got close, the lessening pressure of overhead rock allowed the eruption to pick up speed. Gaseous explosions probably blew through the jungle canopy as the pipes surfaced, showering diamonds and everything else for miles around like so much birdshot.

Kimberlite pipes are found all over the world, but not all of them contain diamonds, as many a would-be millionaire has discovered in places like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Ithaca, New York, both home to kimberlites that have yielded no diamonds. But the kimberlites that blasted into what would eventually become Sierra Leone—two small chimneys that are about a billion years old and likely stood more than 1,500 feet above the plains—bore beautiful, innumerable diamonds. Millennia of erosion and lavish summer rains on the tropical forests that grip Africa from The Gambia to Somalia have hidden the diamonds under the region’s red and yellow dirt like so many undiscovered Easter eggs.³

All who have ever coveted this wealth—government regimes, smugglers, lovers, merchants—have historically never cared where they were found or under what conditions they were extracted so long as they could turn a profit or showcase one, or several, on a golden band or necklace. Although diamonds are no longer believed to cure disease or act as crystal balls, they still symbolize wealth, power, love, and honor.

Only in the past two years—as public knowledge has increased about the bloodbaths being waged over the control of Sierra Leone’s vast wealth—have people begun to learn that diamonds found in their local jewelry stores may have begun their journey in the hands of those who have tortured and killed to gain them.

“FOR EIGHT MONTHS LAST YEAR, I sat in this office and I didn’t buy a single diamond,” complained Fawaz S. Fawaz, a heavyset beer-barrel of a man, as he lit a fresh Marlboro off the smoldering butt of his last one. “There are no good diamonds coming in.”

He balanced the smoke on top of a pile of crushed filters burying an ashtray on the countertop and continued his clumsy surgery on a tropical bird bought from a little boy on the street. The colorful, scared creature was a gift for Fawaz’s young son and once he’d clipped the wings, he untied the twine on its legs and handed it off to a servant, who scurried away to deliver it.

Fawaz is a Lebanese diamond merchant, one of scores whose signs clog the main pothole-ridden road through Kenema, the smoking, popping, wheezing hub of diamond commerce in the heart of the Sierra Leone jungle.

Given its reputation as a diamond capital, it was no surprise when Kenema was attacked by the RUF and its mines captured in 1993. The town was then on the front lines of the diamond war and it was briefly recaptured by government forces in 1994, only to have the RUF win it back a few months later. Kenema stayed under RUF control until 1998, when ECOMOG forces reclaimed it for good. Three years later, in the summer of 2001, it was difficult to imagine that full-scale diamond production had ever been interrupted. Indeed it really hadn’t: It was simply conducted by the rebels and many Lebanese endured the threat of dying in a gun battle or artillery barrage to remain behind to deal with them for their diamonds. Unlike other liberated towns that are characterized by the sleepy drudgery of rural life, Kenema is a hectic, overcrowded anthill of nonstop commercial activity. Guarded by a battalion of Zambian soldiers serving with the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) and a remote base to what seems like every nongovernmental organization ever incorporated, Kenema is proof that properly motivated and controlled greed can overcome the threats of warfare.

The main thoroughfare, Hangha Road, is littered with Lebanese storefronts with large signs announcing “Diamond Merchant” in hand-painted letters. Every merchant’s logo is a jumbo-sized brilliant-cut diamond, but the images add little luster to the garbage-strewn streets filled with beggars and refugees who still hang onto the old gambler’s notion that they are just one lucky find away from eternal wealth. In the early days, that was certainly the case. Diamonds turned up in garden patches, latrines, and the middle of the streets. Like most other places in Sierra Leone, Kenema hid its dollar-value well: The town smelled like stagnant water and untreated wounds and clouds of disease-bearing mosquitoes hung in the air like a cartoon’s crowded thought balloons.

Still, Kenema was more pleasant than most places emerging from the war. On a road parallel to Hangha, a mile-long marketplace seemed to explode with wares: Everything from doorknobs to underwear was on sale. On the other side of town, a food market was hip-to-elbow with colorfully dressed women selling mounds of cassava powder by the cupful and endless rows of tables assembled helter-skelter offering fish meat that had been sitting in the sun all day, attracting battalions of huge black flies. A stroll through the food market certainly took care of your appetite; the reeking fish alone were enough to make most visitors swear off eating for the foreseeable future. In an alley, a group of men assembled shake-shakes from freshly cut pine, imported wire mesh, and ten-penny nails, banging them together much as their grandfathers had in the 1930s and 1940s. The finished products were stacked like oversized poker chips next to a towering pile of used shovels and picks for sale. And it wouldn’t have been Africa if every other square foot of roadway wasn’t occupied by salesmen hawking rare parrots, fish heads, tablecloths, camouflage T-shirts, and black-market cigarettes.

All the Lebanese shops were nearly identical: Each offered racks and racks of cheap Japanese boom boxes for sale, along with shortwave radios, Sony Walkmans, and various other electronic products. But that was just window dressing and giveaways, throwbacks to the time when Lebanese families made their living selling consumer goods in Freetown; the real business happened in the back rooms, usually past a phalanx of slender young men in Tupac Shakur T-shirts guarding the doorway. In these rooms, whose decorations didn’t extend beyond the proprietor’s state diamond license and maybe a grainy photo of an olive-skinned family on a rare visit to Lebanon, was where the real wheeling and dealing transpired. There was always a desk with a white velvet pad in the center, a low-hanging lamp directly overhead, a full ashtray, seven or eight magnifying lenses of different powers, and an array of jeweler’s loupes. From the despairing tone of some of the Lebanese traders we visited, it seemed as though there was probably a thick film of dust on most of those lenses.

“All of the good diamonds are in Kono,” Fawaz said, waving his hand to indicate the area 50 miles to the north where the RUF still reigned. He’d invited me and Hondros into his storefront for a cup of Lebanese coffee, which he ordered by simply shouting into the throng on the street, seemingly to no one. Dressed in gray polyester slacks and a tissue-thin 1950s-era button-down short-sleeved shirt—left unbuttoned near the neck to reveal a jet-black carpet of chest hair and a thick gold chain—the 50-plus-year-old Fawaz looked more like a counterman in a Philadelphia deli during the 1960s than a wealthy merchant in the jungles of Sierra Leone, through whose hands countless valuable gemstones have flowed. The Fawaz name was emblazoned on billboards up and down Hangha Road, but he insisted that the network of Fawaz cousins and brothers that operated in Kenema and other diamond villages was small compared to other merchants in town. But at the time of our visit, they were all pretty much muttering the same complaint: No good diamonds have been coming in from the fields.

Whether that was true or whether Fawaz simply didn’t want to show us any goods is beside the point. One of Sierra Leone’s most important diamond areas—Tongo Field—was a mere 30 miles away from where we sat and under complete control of the RUF. It was universally assumed that rebel couriers sold diamonds in Kenema. We’d seen diamonds everywhere there—including a large, eight-sided rough stone that an old man wandering in the market had popped out of his mouth—and it’s likely that many of the stones skirted the legitimate channels. While the official currency is the leone (worth 2,000 to the U.S. dollar), in places like Kenema the currency of choice for anything beyond food and clothing was diamonds. If you needed a new car or motorcycle, you paid in diamonds because they were often easier to come by—and easier to carry—than a mountain of leones. If you owed your friend a favor for watching out for your family during the war, you gave him a nice piece of rough. Even a school for children orphaned by the war, in Freetown’s Aberdeen district, sells RUF-mined diamonds to reporters and personnel from nongovernmental organizations and the UN so that they can buy food and books for the students.

Fawaz and those like him are important middlemen in the legitimate diamond trade. Licensed by the Sierra Leone government, they’re the first purchasers along a lengthy chain of buyers that ends with consumers in developed countries shopping for tennis bracelets. Out here, amid the sweltering heat and the potential of renewed RUF gunfire, he buys and sells diamonds that will be cherished as keepsakes forever by people whose only experience with such treacherous environments is gleaned from rare three-minute reports on CNN.

Like Fawaz, the majority of such dealers are Lebanese whose parents and grandparents moved to West Africa by the thousands in the wake of World War II to sell consumer goods and general merchandise. Some 120,000 Lebanese are estimated to live throughout West Africa, most of them in the import–export business. ⁴ When diamonds were discovered in Sierra Leone they were well positioned to enter the gem business, because soon after the war the country was thrown into its first significant bout of internal turmoil over the precious stones.

UNTIL THE EARLY 1950s, diamond production in Sierra Leone was dominated by one company, Sierra Leone Selection Trust (SLST), a branch of the London-based exploration company West African Selection Trust. The company had holdings in gold mines in Ghana and was owned by the South African diamond powerhouse, De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd. SLST was founded in Freetown in 1934, after De Beers’s vanguard of miners had plucked more than 32,000 carats of stones from the Sierra Leone jungle by hand. The company convinced the government—which was still administered by England—to grant it an exclusive mining concession, meaning that all the diamonds found in the rain forest went to one company.

That was the theory at least. In truth, Sierra Leone provided a horrible mining environment. The deposits were located in the heart of an unexplored jungle, scattered among chieftaincies and villages that weren’t used to the sight of white men digging for rocks. The tropical vegetation in the bush grows as thick as anywhere on earth, communications with Freetown were almost non-existent, and travel into the provinces—often with heavy equipment and supplies—was a days-long endeavor from origin to destination. This harsh reality of jungle mining immediately raised concerns about security. The diamond-bearing region was so extensive and dense with vegetation, wild animals, and villages that few SLST officers were optimistic about being able to control one of diamond mining’s inherent costs of business: theft through illicit mining.

In fact, the problem was worse than anyone anticipated. At first, mining went smoothly and SLST built a then-modern processing facility in Yengema, a town in the Kono District. Labor was abundant as the locals took advantage of endless opportunities to mine rivers and wash gravel.

Things changed drastically in the wake of World War II, when Sierra Leoneans serving the British in the Royal West African Frontier Force returned from the battlefields of Burma, having learned the value of the innocuous stones that were being mined out from beneath the feet of villagers. It’s not surprising what happened after tales of limitless fortunes began circulating through the bush: Miners abandoned their jobs and became independent operators. They were also illegal operators, since only SLST had the right to mine for diamonds in Sierra Leone.

But that hardly mattered. In the postwar years, Sierra Leone saw a massive diamond rush as thousands of locals and an equal number of neighboring Liberian and Guinean hopefuls struck out into SLST’s private reserve of diamond mines. The boom very nearly sank the country in the mid-1950s as farmers ignored their fields and instead washed gravel day in and day out, usually under the cover of night when they were less likely to be discovered. A food shortage struck the interior and, for the first time, Sierra Leone had to import staples like rice, a grain that was usually so abundant that the country normally exported it. More than an estimated 30,000 illegal miners were operating in 1954, a human tide that was almost impossible to stem.⁵ Many of these miners were supported by wealthy Lebanese financiers, most of whom had moved to Freetown in the wake of the war to sell general merchandise. Their business clout and expertise, their possession of import / export licenses, and their ties to supplies in Freetown made them natural partners for the men toiling in the bush.

The Sierra Leone Army, a 1,300-strong force of soldiers whose general duties consisted of little more than guarding their own barracks in Freetown, was dispatched to the Kono District to provide security for SLST, which began to form its own militias, often from the ranks of the local police forces. Violent clashes between miners and these militias became regular events, but even the threat of gun battles didn’t slow the illicit trade; the returns provided by illegal mining far outweighed the risks.

The majority of stones were smuggled out of the country. By 1955, it became obvious that there was no way SLST—even with the help of the army and a growing paramilitary police force—could control the smuggling situation. SLST and the government eventually dissolved the single-concession agreement and implemented an aggressive licensing program for indigenous diggers. But even with the dissolution of SLST’s private concession and new laws allowing independent operators to sell their goods in Sierra Leone, most miners had already developed contacts outside the country, which also allowed them to avoid export taxes.

With the help of Saika Stevens, the minister of mines for Sierra Leone’s government-elect, De Beers instituted the Diamond Corporation of Sierra Leone (DCSL), a company that would buy diamonds from those who were at the time “stealing” them from SLST and selling them in Monrovia, the nearby capital of neighboring Liberia. In turn, DCSL would transport the diamonds to the Diamond Trading Company (DTC) in London, another De Beers concern, which was part of the Central Selling Organization (CSO), the global diamond funnel established by De Beers in the 1930s. At the time, the CSO sold 80 percent of the world’s diamonds to the retail marketplace.

For the scheme to work, however, De Beers had to buy the diamonds in the bush in order to compete directly with the illicit traffickers. In real terms, what this meant was that some brave soul—who would have to be an expert in evaluating diamonds—would have to leave the comfort and safety of a downtown office and set off into the heart of an unmapped jungle with a backpack crammed with cash. At the diamond mines and in countless villages he would then compete with savvy local middlemen and smugglers who likely wouldn’t be too inclined to share their lucrative turf with the legitimate diamond cartel.

In the beginning, things didn’t work out too well. The handful of London buyers who agreed to this risky assignment were up against hundreds of traffickers who outbid them for the diamonds in order to keep a loyal customer base among the diggers. The DCSL buyers were also constrained by rates dictated from London. It took five years and the creation of a new government office before the diamond buyers were able to offer rates similar to those offered in Monrovia. Although illicit sales of diamonds were never halted, by 1960 the estimated loss to the illicit market fell to its lowest point since the diamond rush began.

The job of buying diamonds in the bush fell almost exclusively to the Lebanese traders once the system worked through all of its initial kinks. They were revered in diamond offices in Freetown. “After all, they accomplished the most dangerous part of the buyer’s mission, for the idea of walking through the forest carrying large sums of cash appealed to no one,” writes Jacques Legrand in Diamonds: Myth, Magic, and Reality. “All things considered, the profits made by the Lebanese were commensurate with the work they performed and an equilibrium was established to everyone’s satisfaction.” ⁶

Diamonds only added to the increasing political tension of pre-independence Sierra Leone. Those who would be charged with assuming the mantle of government from the British in 1961 faced both an economic windfall as well as a witch’s brew of serious political and economic issues that would challenge any well-seasoned government. Sierra Leoneans, with the oversight of a British administration, had experienced no success in harnessing the country’s most valuable natural resource, as the diamond boom of the 1950s had shown. More diamonds were smuggled away than were exported, robbing the country of taxes and contracts that could have been used to build roads, utilities, and medical and educational facilities. Control of the diamond fields would require an incredibly delicate and astute, yet forceful and uncompromising government. The head of state would have to adopt strict border policies with Liberia, modernize export laws, and establish creative trade and labor agreements with diamond exploration companies. The entire monetary system should probably have been overhauled prior to independence. One of the reasons smugglers went to Monrovia was because Liberia’s dollar was fixed to the value of the U.S. dollar until 1997, making it the equivalent of hard currency. The much softer currency of Sierra Leone was good only in Sierra Leone.

None of these measures was taken, however, and the smuggling did not stop once Sierra Leone was granted independence on April 27, 1961. Maintaining the diamond infrastructure was left to the Lebanese traders in towns like Kenema and Bo, and they had organized it in the first place to address the needs of smugglers.

The system employed by people like Fawaz is simple and dates back to the early diamond-rush days of the 1950s. Individual miners obtain a license from the government to dig on a certain plot of land or riverbank. Since the license is extremely expensive to the average would-be miner—who also needs to pay off the inevitable series of bribes—he often needs to find a sponsor, usually a Lebanese merchant. The merchant provides shovels, gasoline-powered water pumps, sieves, food, and pay for the miner’s hired diggers. In exchange, the diamonds are sold to the merchant, minus the overhead. Fawaz himself, though he works in one of Africa’s most valuable diamondiferous regions and is a conduit for what is eventually hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gemstones, has never even visited a mine.

When war broke out in 1991, the system was so well established—and the profits so lucrative—that many Lebanese abandoned their businesses only under the most threatening circumstances. Even at the height of the RUF conflict, with the sounds of rocket blasts echoing off Kenema’s high hills, many merchants continued to man their offices and buy stones from the rebels. Official diamond exports from Sierra Leone practically ceased in the mid-1990s—whereas 2 million carats per year were exported in the 1960s, a paltry 9,000 carats were exported in 1999—but the old smuggling routes to Monrovia were still open for business.

And there was certainly no lack of buyers. Everyone from legitimate brokers employed by Belgian cutting houses to agents of the Iranian-backed Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah crowded the streets and hotels of Monrovia, eager for the chance to buy diamonds from the RUF. Monrovia was a no-man’s-land of freewheeling dealing in diamonds that had been soaked in the blood of innocent Sierra Leoneans. For the legitimate brokers, it meant cheap goods and high profits; for the terrorists, it presented a picture-perfect opportunity to launder vast amounts of money undetected, an important development in the role diamonds would come to play in international terrorism in the beginning of the new century.