Blood Diamonds, Revised Edition

The man who uttered those words, a wrinkled fighter named Eric Senesi, was a lieutenant colonel in the Revolutionary United Front. I was sitting next to him on a thin wooden bench, surrounded by RUF soldiers, and I could feel his silent, internal laughter convulsing his body as he tried to maintain a straight face. He was speaking to Ralph Swanson, a tall Sierra Leonean radio reporter who was holding a microphone in Senesi’s face. When he claimed ignorance of diamonds, Senesi tented his fingers and held them to his chest in a “Who, me?” gesture of innocence, unconsciously drawing attention to his pale yellow T-shirt, which depicted the silhouette of an AK-47 assault rifle in a circle with a slash across it, under the words “RUF for Peace.”

Like the shirt, his statement was a stab at improving public relations for the rebel group, which was trying to transform itself from a bloodthirsty band of murderers into a legitimate political movement. Unlike the T-shirt, the statement couldn’t hold up under Swanson’s unwavering gaze and, aware of how ludicrous the lie must have sounded not just to the reporters present but also to his assembled troops, Senesi couldn’t stop a delirious smile from spreading across his face. It was either that or burst out laughing. It had a ripple effect; giggles vibrated through the crowd of RUF and even Swanson had to smile sardonically. It was a way of acknowledging the obvious without having to admit it on tape. Diamonds? No diamonds here. Nothing here but us peaceful rebels. . . .

By the time we spoke to Senesi, photojournalist Chris Hondros and I had spent four days in Kailahun District with GhanBatt-3, a contingent of Ghanaian soldiers serving UNAMSIL. We had been suffering under their institutional ineptness that was so thorough as to be almost poetic; we toiled around with them, lost in the jungle between four different warring factions, trying to save refugees and avoid getting stuck in the mud, eating cassava and frogs spawned from the rain. After being manipulated by the UN, we were determined to return to Kailahun to experience the contrast between a PR event and the real thing, and boy, did we ever.

Kailahun is the gateway to a place called the Parrot’s Beak, a wedge of Sierra Leone that juts between Liberia and Guinea. Rebel groups of all three countries are effectively at war with one another and the Liberians and Guineans find it convenient to attack one another by skirting through Sierra Leone, dodging through RUF defenses before launching their attacks and running back across their borders. Such maneuvers obviously attract retaliatory attacks into Sierra Leone, since those being shot at generally don’t know who’s doing the shooting, only where it’s coming from.

The fighting was spurred mostly by a Liberian rebel group called LURD, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, a ragtag assortment of various factions disenfranchised under Charles Taylor’s government, but they seemed to spend most of their time fighting not the government in Monrovia, but other groups in Sierra Leone and Guinea, some of which may have aligned with LURD; no one seemed to know. Complicating matters further was the presence of an estimated 2,000 Kamajor fighters ringing Kailahun.

For anyone new to the Sierra Leone diamond war, it would have been easy to believe that Senesi had in fact never laid eyes on a diamond. Clearly, none of the wealth being stolen from the jungle was making its way to the estimated 10,000 people trapped and starving to death in Kailahun. The clues were in the small details: commanders wearing expensive boots that could have only come from Guinea or Liberia, an AK-47 so new it still smelled of the lubricant Cosmoline, a satellite telephone linking field commanders to RUF High Command in Freetown. Whether Senesi saw them or not, millions of dollars worth of diamonds had flowed through Kailahun since the early days of the war, en route to Monrovia, and eventually to Antwerp, London, and retail jewelers around the world. In the mid-1990s, helicopters flew from staging areas in Liberia to deliver weapons directly to Kailahun in exchange for the diamonds. They landed in a soccer field on the outskirts of town, the same one now used by the UN to evacuate the RUF’s child soldiers.

The Ghanaians with UNAMSIL had tried to drive into this mess to visit Kailahun a few weeks before we joined them in June 2001, but had been repelled by Kamajor sniper fire and drunken RUF checkpoint commanders, little kids as young as 10 with heavy weapons and permission to kill anyone they pleased for whatever reason they wanted. The UN had been under mounting criticism for not yet fully deploying across a country that it was ostensibly demobilizing and rebuilding; therefore, establishing a permanent presence in Kailahun and other RUF strongholds was critical to the continuation of the disarmament process. When the Ghanaians were ready to try again, Hondros and I, along with six Sierra Leonean reporters, decided to travel with them, part of the first vanguard of the two-year-old UN mission to probe so far into the RUF hinterland.

By the time we arrived anyone there who could once have been called a civilian had long since been recategorized. Now they were called refugees, war victims, prisoners of war, and child combatants. Kailahun was a depressing human collage of teenage soldiers nearly blind from lifelong bouts with malaria smirking dementedly at graffiti-spoiled walls; naked toddlers abandoned to the whims of luck, fear, grief, and hunger; and the vacant stares of drooling amputees who were no more than a few hours from death’s welcome embrace. All of this stumbling life took place, of course, at the point of a bayonet, the barrel of an assault rifle, and the stainless-steel explosive tips of thundering 120-mm artillery shells careening in from Liberia to blow holes in the jungle carpet. It was as stark an illustration of the impact of the diamond war on Sierra Leone’s rural population as one could imagine. Nor could we have found a more appropriate microcosm of the UN’s bumbling efforts in the war-whipped country, as our experience with the Ghanaian Army unit made us rethink the common characterization of the RUF as being disorganized. Compared to GhanBatt-3, the RUF could have been a crack team of U.S. Special Forces.

Somehow, despite the presumed leverage of the United Nations and the resources of UNAMSIL, once in Kailahun we seemed doomed to become refugees ourselves even though GhanBatt-3 had ostensibly come to this shattered, dangerous collection of roofless buildings deep in the jungle to rescue people, people we quickly came to resemble: dirty, depressed, hungry, and losing hope by the minute.

The irony of our situation was ever present: We drove into the village with thirteen troop carriers, six armored personnel carriers, four Toyota 4Runners, four Nissan HiLux pickup trucks, two tankers of water and fuel, and 200 soldiers. We were a formidable procession, accompanied for a portion of our journey from the UN base in Daru by an Mi-24 helicopter gunship that flew in deafening patterns just over the palm trees at 150 miles per hour. When we rolled into Kailahun at noon on day one under 100-degree skies, we were given a hero’s welcome, the bedraggled and war-beaten refugees from Liberia and Guinea assuming that we’d come to save them from starvation.

Apparently not used to hosting journalists in their long-range patrols, the Ghanaians didn’t go out of their way to make us comfortable, and that included making us fend for ourselves for food, which we didn’t expect to do. Meals with the UN occurred once a day and each occasion was a stark reminder of the desperate situation in Kailahun. The Ghanaian cooks prepared nothing but “chicken stew”—although I’m not sure it was either chicken or stew; it was more like bones boiled in grease—and they didn’t have the foresight to prepare it in a tent, beyond the view of those starving on Kailahun’s streets. Every time they cooked it up in a large black cauldron, the smell of food attracted a crowd of silent, desperate spectators, who ringed the cooking area, mouths agape, eyes staring as ladlefuls of reddish goop were distributed to the troops. Having eaten nothing but grass and mangos for weeks, their hunger was palpable.

The locals—both refugees and fighters—turned on us the moment they realized that we carried no aid food or medicine. The UN’s “authority” as administrators of the country’s government and military security was quickly surrendered for the simple reason that there was no other choice. In terms of military assets, it was pretty much a draw. Even though the Ghanaians had the ability to order up air support in the event of a firefight with the local RUF squads, the Ghanaians were in no mood to fight. It would have gone against the entire purpose of the mission, which was to scout out the region, get a grip on how bad the refugee situation was, and prep the RUF for eventually handing in their weapons and ending the war. So we went from traveling with the world’s premier peacekeeping force to being a traveling sideshow in about an hour.

Kailahun was no-man’s-land, a place where fighting between RUF and the Kamajors was so fierce that farming was impossible and hunting was useless; there hasn’t been game near Kailahun in ten years. The thousands of refugees clogging the town had stripped every banana, coconut, and mango tree in a three-mile radius. Going deeper into the jungle to search for food was suicidal since the Kamajor units were tightening around the area like a noose. Kailahun was off the radars of even the most daredevil aid organizations; driving a truck laden with food anywhere near the Parrot’s Beak would have been like driving off a cliff, as it was likely to be hijacked within minutes of departing on its mission.

Hondros and I were contemplating our situation, sitting under a piece of balcony held onto a mortar-shattered building by a few strands of rusted rebar, the only refuge we could find from an explosion of rain that had apparently destroyed the Ghanaians’ already thin grasp on control. When the rain hit, the mission descended into chaos, the force scattered throughout the town, everyone soaked and struggling with conflicting orders, darkness descending, pale eyes watching from empty windows.

A woman emerged from the gloom and motioned for us to follow her. Locals boiled frogs and rice for us, and in a darkened basement stinking of urine, we ate them by hand, a flickering candle offering barely enough light for them to see the gratitude on our faces.

KAILAHUN LOOKS BETTER at night without electricity in a teeming thunderstorm than it does during the day. Under the harsh light of the equatorial sun, it’s hard to call the collection of caved-in, bullet-warped buildings a “village.” It’s more like a junkyard for houses caught in crossfire, a place where people can dump structures that have been destroyed by warfare, with only the barest evidence of its past as a peaceful place discernible through the destruction. In the middle of the main intersection, it takes hours of debate to agree that a slab of concrete and a rusty white pole were once part of a gas station. Decades-old paint valiantly struggles from beneath RUF graffiti to identify one building as a former municipal center. An eye clinic can only be identified by a lone piece of a long-since-shot-out sign hanging over the entrance, which nowadays is stuffed with sick and dying refugees and their doomed newborns.

People were everywhere: Slick RUF officers wearing Tommy Hilfiger clothing and Vuarnet sunglasses, an old Liberian man in tribal colors limping on a wounded foot swollen with gangrene, children of all ages wearing shirts and shorts composed more of holes than cloth, Kamajor infiltrators in burlap sacks and dreadlocks, men with guns, women without feet, a young female secret society initiate adorned in black palm leaves and a black ceremonial mask depicting a screaming woman. Added to this motley mix were those of us with the UN mission: journalists, soldiers in Carolina-blue body armor and helmets, Belgian relief workers, a Russian “security consultant” to the United Nations, and men and women working for UNICEF who looked like they’d be more at home at a bridge game in West Palm Beach.

We spent the days driving through the jungle toward the very tip of the Parrot’s Beak, our trucks crunching over boulders and through mud bogs until we reached the end of the line at Koindu, a frontline town a mile from the borders of both Guinea and Liberia, first stop for refugees who decided that war-torn Sierra Leone was better than either bordering country. Guarded by a battalion of weary RUF children, Koindu made Kailahun look mildly troubled in comparison. They were burned out from combat, fighting off Kamajors sneaking up from behind, Liberians on one side and Guineans on the other, both forces crossing regularly into Sierra Leone to attack the other from its borders. His head resting on the barrel of an AK-47, the 25-year-old commanding officer stared at his boots and told us that, on days when there was no shelling, at least 10 of the 30,000 or so refugees crammed into the village died every day from war wounds, starvation, or disease. How often is there no shelling? we asked.

Security prevented us from spending more than half an hour in Koindu. One of the Ghanaian soldiers had thrown a package of crackers to a little boy on the side of the road from one of the large troop carriers and had sparked a brief riot among those clogging the roadside, who thought they were being fed. RUF brought the uproar under control with swift cracks of their rifle butts and several short bursts of gunfire overhead. The Ghanaians were nervous that we’d be taken hostage, held ransom for food and medical aid, so we left. Liberians shelled our convoy on the way back to Kailahun.

ON DAY FOUR, Hondros and I awoke in the back of one of the two-ton troop carriers surrounded by crates of rifle ammunition. We’d opted to spend the night on the wooden slats of the truck bed—where soldiers had slaughtered a captured goat the day before, bounty from the jungle that supplemented their daily rations—because a swarm of insects had infested our temporary quarters. In their attempt to provide us with a modicum of comfort, the Ghanaians had rigged an abandoned house with a portable generator, and by the time we returned from Koindu, a single high-wattage lightbulb had been burning all night, the only one in miles, providing a beacon for every flying insect in West Africa. There was no furniture in the house and no extra sleeping bags. So the options were to try to sleep on a writhing black carpet of flying ants, termites, wasps, and millipedes or retreat to the truck and take our chances with malarial mosquitoes.

Day four was a scorcher. We awoke to quickly ascending 85-plus-degree temperatures at 7 A.M. and a mob scene on the broad red-dirt road that pierced the town. Hysterical Liberians and Guineans were trying to get their names on a manifest for an evacuation helicopter that would, hopefully, arrive later in the day to fly them to safety, medical care, and—most importantly—food. Unbeknown to anyone at the time, the Guinean refugees were actually prisoners of the RUF, captured months before in a cross-border raid into Guéckédou, and most of them feared that the evacuation flight was their last hope for survival. But there was limited room and the RUF had only permitted UNHCR to take the most critically ill or injured. Christine Hambrouck, a Belgian with UNHCR, struggled to keep her head above the crowd, which seemed on the verge of pummeling her. Kids got trampled, and plastic bags filled with clothes and other possessions were ripped open, their contents spilled in the dirt. Everyone was yelling, trying to be heard over the din.

Surprisingly, the Ghanaians seemed fairly well organized that morning, apparently energized into competence by their unexpected success in convincing RUF High Command in Freetown to release some of Kailahun’s prisoners and refugees. Those negotiations had been going on since our arrival, a maddening merry-go-round of false promises, patronization, vague threats, and appeals to morality. In Kailahun, no one could do anything without clearance from the on-site RUF commander. Everything the Ghanaians did—whether it was deciding to camp or occupy abandoned buildings, interview child combatants, or leave—required his approval.

Who the RUF allows to be evacuated is up to the RUF alone and the reasons are all theirs, a sweaty, bearded New Zealander with UNHCR told me as we slumped in the hot dirt watching the maelstrom surrounding Hambrouck. Shortly after sunrise, he’d received word that the RUF would allow UNHCR to take up to 200 refugees. Yet thousands more were to be left behind, some of whom died later that day from malnutrition, disease, or any of the hundreds of other things that were fatal about living in Kailahun. In fact, an infant girl died in the mob of refugees as we watched, helpless to do anything. She’d been registered to leave on the aid flight and succumbed to starvation within minutes of having her name added to the manifest. Hambrouck simply scratched out her name and that of her mother, who decided to stay and bury her child. A woman who had somehow survived a Cesarean-section delivery without anesthesia or medical instruments—her operation had probably been done with a machete—took her place.

Even the children-advocacy organizations were rewarded that day: RUF allowed fifty child soldiers to check their weapons with Save the Children and UNICEF and wait for an evac chopper. There are few things more terrifying than having a blank-eyed 12-year-old girl stick the barrel of a loaded AK-58 in your stomach, but there are also few things more satisfying than seeing her drop the weapon and squeal with long-lost childhood joy at the news that she’ll soon be flying away from the frontline. But fifty kids are a drop in the bucket. For every preteen whose name was written on the manifest—in an even more chaotic shouting match between the child fighters and aid workers—there were twenty or thirty more who would be ordered into battle once we flew away with the lucky ones. Two of those kids almost certainly died within days of our eventual departure: 15-year-old lieutenants wounded in combat who lay slowly dying in a bleak and filthy RUF “field hospital” on the edge of town.

We discovered this place while resting in an overgrown soccer field where the Ghanaians first considered camping when we arrived in Kailahun. We lay out flat on the long grass where RUF resupply helicopters used to land to deliver ammunition and weapons from Liberia, smoking and evaluating our wisdom in throwing our well-being in with GhanBatt-3. Suddenly the rains fell, a slaking detonation of water in the air. I was drenched before I even got my eyes open. Hondros and I dashed for the trees and the minimal protection they offered. We spotted a low building with fire-blackened windows staring like dead eyes and darted between the birches and banana trees until we were somewhat protected by a low patio roof on the side of the building. Slumped in a corner, a young man wearing a Michael Jordan basketball jersey cradled an AK-47 and smiled at us through a haze of marijuana smoke.

We soon discovered that the boy was a security guard for the building, which was a makeshift hospital. Through the gloom created by the rain clouds, we could see shadowy figures limping through the hospital’s halls; we cautiously pushed our way inside.

We followed the voice into a small room, where a billowing patterned curtain provided minimal privacy. A bare-chested young man was sprawled on a filthy mattress, both of his feet heavily wrapped in gauze that had begun to turn brown. The concrete floor was covered in bloody footprints as if we’d walked into some sort of maniacal dance studio. Under the heavy thrum of the rain, the boy explained that he’d stepped on a crude land mine a few weeks before that blew off both of his heels. He could hobble around and felt that he was improving.

Other rooms were not filled with the strange mirth of pending dementia, but were instead gravid with fear and grief. At 22 years old, the mine victim was the elder patient in the hospital, an echoing, fire-blackened maze of narrow graffiti-crazed corridors and garbage-littered chambers that were void of furniture, power, and running water. As we poked our heads into another curtain-covered doorway, a voice boomed from the darkness of the hallway.

A short boy in an orange Hawaiian shirt and matching shorts emerged from the shadows. A handgun was tucked into his waist. When we told him that we’d just ducked out of the rain and that we were journalists, he introduced himself as RUF Corporal James Morphison, local field medic.

“We have no medicine. No clean field dressings. We do what we can,” he said, leading the way into the room we’d been about to enter. The room was dark and the walls had been painted gray long ago. Sprawled on the floor on rattan mats that had been placed on piles of wet rotting hay were two young boys. Both were near death, as much victims of the world’s manufactured hunger for diamonds—and the RUF’s willingness to feed that hunger—as victims of their enemy’s weapons. The boy on the left, Jusu Lahia, lay on his back with his arms and legs bent into the air. He’d stiffened up like curing jerky thanks to a tetanus infection that was eventually going to kill him. About two months before, he was nearly cut in half by a Kamajor rocket that exploded next to him and peppered him with fragmentation wounds. One piece of exploding steel blew through his face just under the left eye, blinding it. Other pieces embedded in his shoulder, side, groin, and leg, all on the left side. A flower-patterned bowl filled with congealed blood sat on the floor and there were long, smeared bloodstains on the gray wall next to his hay-pile. A rusted wheelchair lay in the corner, looking like a fallen combatant itself.

Nearer the door lay Matthew Sween, propped against the wall wearing a hole-filled Mickey Mouse T-shirt. Sween was more animated, but only with dread and terror. During the same Kamajor attack that had ruined Lahia, a bullet punched through the small of his back, ricocheted off something inside him, and exited through the front of his right thigh. He sweated profusely and shivered with chills. Morphison and another medic had simply taped his wounds shut. There was no way they could operate on him.

“They will both die,” Morphison said plainly, not bothering to lower his voice for the sake of his patients or Sween’s young sister, who lay on the floor beside him, mopping his brow with a rain-wettened rag. No one in the room seemed surprised to hear the prognosis.

Sween stared with wide, unblinking eyes, obviously hoping that we’d come to help. The only thing we had, however, were four Cipro pills, a powerful antibiotic. We gave them to Morphison, although we knew they would be of little help to either of the wounded boys.

Soon, news spread that two white journalists were touring the hospital and dispensing pharmaceuticals. From the mounting gloom, crippled, emaciated patients oozing disease began plodding toward us like the undead. One was a 12-year-old civilian girl whose arm had been nearly shot off in crossfire. Another was shot in the knee, forced to lean on the wall with both hands in order to move closer to us. A retarded boy with severe polio simply sat in an ever darkening hallway corner, the whites of his staring eyes practically the only part of him that were visible.

The moans and creaks of the dim hospital soon proved too unnerving to endure much longer and we left. Morphison stood in the doorway watching us leave, the only person we’d met there who had clean clothing. “Come and visit again before you leave,” he called after us.

Neither did the Save The Children reps or the UNICEF people, whose chopper swooped so fast out of the sky to avoid attracting gunfire that it seemed to simply materialize in front of us, a sudden tornado of rotor wash filling our eyes with dirt. It was explained to us that the RUF didn’t allow wounded children to be evacuated because it conflicted with their earnest testimony that the rebel group didn’t use children in combat. In Kailahun, such an assertion was demonstrably false, but denying the obvious was an RUF pastime. Again, the duty fell to Lieutenant Colonel Senesi to explain, in the presence of child soldiers, that the RUF had no child soldiers.

The UNICEF helicopter landed on the soccer field next to a UN Mi-26, a massive personnel helicopter that must have been three stories tall. There’s no question that Sween, Lahia, and the other injured kids could hear the excited chattering of those chosen to leave as they endured a last minute photo-op for the sake of a National Geographic photographer who’d flown in from Freetown for the event. Hondros and I hunkered in the woods, out of the heat of the sun, looking like bearded, disheveled bums, too tired and uninterested in participating in a group shot of the now-former child combatants, many of whom had threatened and menaced us over the course of the past four days. Besides, we had more pressing things to deal with.

“I’m getting on that fucking helicopter,” I announced. The look on Hondros’s face said good luck trying. Although we were registered correspondents with respected U.S. media outlets, accredited through the United Nations and generally well-organized people, not a single excursion on a UN chopper, pickup truck, or troop carrier was without its share of mind-numbing complications that soon made us seriously contemplate buying our own vehicle and taking our chances in the bush, something we would have done in Kailahun if there had been any operable vehicles. Traveling on a helicopter was impossible without an MOP, a “movement of personnel” form that’s meant to keep track of who’s going where so that if one of the helicopters crashes or is shot out of the sky, the responsible UN person back at headquarters would know whose parents to call to claim the bodies, assuming they weren’t eaten by hungry Kamajors. Needless to say, we didn’t have MOPs.

But I was willing to risk a fistfight with the Ukrainian pilots to avoid being stranded with the Ghanaians a moment longer. So far, it had taken four days to accomplish a portion of the mission that had been estimated back in the comfort of the base at Daru to take 12 to 14 hours.

Rotor wash is hypnotizing, invisible waves of superspeed air that flattens long grass and makes palm trees move like disco dancers. It seemed that all of the refugees and RUF defenders were in the trees around the soccer field to watch some of their young colleagues fly off to a deprogramming center. Some waved, some stood still as statues until the blast of air became too powerful to face, and as we lifted off, quickly and into a turn before we were even fifteen feet off the ground, everyone had their heads buried in their elbows. The deafening roar of the chopper was welcome indeed and we craned our heads out the portholes to look down on Kailahun, the little roofless buildings fading rapidly into the jungle, challenging you to believe that some of the best gems sold throughout the world in the last seven or eight years had passed through this shelled and hopeless bush village.