PROLOGUE

Impact: The Price of Diamonds

Médecins Sans Frontières Camp for Amputees and
War Wounded, Freetown, Sierra Leone, Summer 2001

 

 

 

 

ISMAEL DALRAMY lost his hands in 1996 with two quick blows of an ax. He didn’t—or couldn’t—recall the pain of the blows. But he remembered being ordered at gunpoint to place his wrists on a wooden stump dripping with the blood of his neighbors who were writhing on the ground around him trying to stem the flow of blood from their arms or staggering away.

Dalramy does recall that it was quick and methodical—the victim in line in front of him was swiftly kicked away and suddenly he faced a bloody wooden block and an impatient gang of heavily armed teens eager to be done with their day’s orders. He didn’t fight his captors or beg for mercy. Instead, he removed a crude metal ring made by his son from one of the fingers on his left hand and put it in his pocket, one of the last acts his hands performed for him.

Until that morning, when the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) attacked the town with rockets and rifles, speeding through the streets in pickup trucks whose cab roofs had been sawed off to convert them into roofless killing vehicles, it had been easy to think that there would be plenty of time to escape if the need arose. The humid jungle village of Koidu, where Dalramy’s family had lived for generations, is an epicenter of raw diamond production in eastern Sierra Leone. In the months leading up to the day that Dalramy’s hands were amputated by the RUF, Koidu had been increasingly surrounded by rebel forces who crept through the jungle’s dense mesh of palm trees and banana bushes. RUF bandits would enter the town sporadically to steal food and supplies and menace its inhabitants, but an all-out assault seemed unlikely. Though you would never know by looking at it—Koidu is like many bush villages in Sierra Leone, composed of brown shacks and red-dirt streets—the area around the village had long been fiercely coveted in the war that has torn apart this West African nation since 1991. Ever since British geologists first discovered diamonds in Sierra Leone’s jungles in the 1930s, miners had been extracting some of the most valuable diamond wealth in the world from small muddy pits scattered throughout the surrounding rain forest. These small chunks and bits of milky-white carbon crystals are transformed into precious jewelry displayed on the hands, wrists, necks, and ears of people around the world, many of whom have probably never heard of Sierra Leone. During the RUF war, people like Dalramy paid for this distant luxury with their own hands.

The RUF wasn’t the only armed group around Koidu at the time Dalramy was captured. Both Sierra Leonean government soldiers and West African peacekeepers from a regional security force called the ECOWAS Cease-Fire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) fought to keep the diamond mines out of the RUF’s control. A fourth group—a tribal militia of Mende warriors called Kamajors—added to the confusion and bloodshed, fighting the RUF’s assault rifles and rocket launchers with machetes, spears, and ancient mystical battle rituals that they hoped would make them invisible to their enemies and impervious to bullets. Koidu was at the center of these variously disciplined forces, and constant skirmishes and full-out assaults among them were common.

But the RUF had terror on its side. Composed almost entirely of illiterate and drugged teenagers, the rebels respected no boundaries in conducting the war. Mass rape, torture, random executions, looting, and cannibalism were among their strategic resources. But their signature war crime was amputation. In response to Sierra Leone president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah’s 1996 plea for his countrymen to “join hands” for peace, the RUF began dismembering their victims and dumping the body parts on the steps of the presidential palace. Although hands were the most common limb severed, the RUF also sliced off civilians’ lips, ears, legs, breasts, and tongues to inspire terror. Their battle-group names—General Babykiller, Queen Chop Hands—seem to have been plucked from poorly written and unimaginative comic books, and commanders named their missions to leave little doubt of their intentions. From Operation Pay Yourself, a looting spree, to the chillingly self-explanatory Operation No Living Thing, rebel assaults were as effectively terrorizing in their descriptions as they were in their executions. Though he didn’t know it at the time, Dalramy was a victim of Operation Clean Sweep, a plan to exert brutal dominion over the Kono region, a district that included Koidu. RUF soldiers cut a bloody swath through the forest, murdering and mutilating anyone in the way, all so they could control the millions of dollars waiting to be mined from the diamond fields; it was the only thing the RUF has ever wanted—gems to sell for guns and retirement funds.

Like the others who stayed in their cinder block and zinc-roofed homes, Dalramy thought the RUF would be content to occupy the town, using its menacing presence to keep both government soldiers and the Kamajor fighters at bay. The RUF had captured Kono years before, but a private mercenary force hired from South Africa by the Sierra Leone government had won the town back in exchange for the right to mine and sell diamonds. As a result, many families had returned to their homes.

But on that particular morning, instead of awakening to a typical scene of bustling traffic weaving through the crowds growing around the market, Dalramy saw the streets begin to fill with the splayed bodies of his dead neighbors amid a rising chorus of the “pop” of small-arms fire ricocheting off hardened mud walls. He raced out the back of his house and, instead of slipping into the relative safety of the jungle as he’d planned, ran right into the arms of a squad of RUF soldiers dressed in camouflage T-shirts and flip-flops, their crude bayonets aimed at him from under the barrels of battle-worn AK-47s. He was taken to the village police station, which had been commandeered by RUF soldiers, and thrown in with a group of frantic civilians being held at gunpoint. As the sound of gunshots outside slowed, the prisoners—about eight men and women—were taken behind the building and told to form a line facing a man with an ax. The powerful-looking rebel wore no shirt, Dalramy remembers, only black jeans, a black scarf wrapped around his bare skull, and mirrored plastic sunglasses. He twirled the ax in his hands. The first victim was dragged forward and forced to kneel before a stump. As the man screamed, he severed first one limb, then the next.

Those lined up behind him went hysterical, their wails of terror nearly drowning out the wet crunch of the ax’s blade meeting flesh and bone. About five young boys guarded the waiting victims, jabbing people with the butts of their rifles or poking them with their bayonets, maintaining the line by giving the captured civilians a quick choice between mutilation or instant death. The RUF commander’s sweat-slicked chest became speckled with blood droplets as he moved from one victim to the next.

Dalramy was shoved to his knees in the red dirt, and as one of the young rebels tossed the amputated hands of the previous victim into the thick brush—twirling them in a spray of blood toward a solid wall of green leaves, where they disappeared like food into the mouth of a giant beast—his left wrist was placed palm up in a thick puddle of blood oozing off the stump like wax from a long-burning candle. An AK-47 barrel was pressed to his left temple. Dalramy looked at the indentation around his third finger where he’d just removed his son’s ring. There was a quick glint of sunlight on the blade of the homemade ax, and Dalramy squeezed his eyes tight against the blow. The blade slammed through the bones of his arm just above the wrist. The hand came off with one clean chop, a blessing considering many such crude amputations required more than a dozen blows to sever a limb. He saw his hand bounce off the edge of the stump, gleaming white ulna bone seeing the sun for the first time.

The rebels obviously also chopped off his other hand, but Dalramy doesn’t remember it. His next recollection is of seeing dirt next to his eyes and hearing the dull arrhythmic sound of ax blows through the screams of the victims who were lined up behind him, a sickening, unsteady metronome of blinding terror.

He staggered to his feet, trying to keep his flowing stumps from collecting too much dirt, and wandered away from the carnage and the growing pile of bleeding limbs. His shirt and pants were soaked in blood. He doesn’t remember what was going on around him at this point and he has no idea if anyone tried to stop him. He just knew he should keep his arms raised high over his head, mainly so gravity would slow his blood loss but also to indicate to the dozens of RUF soldiers he passed that he already paid his dues.

He blindly followed the red-dirt road leading away from Koidu. There were no government soldiers, ECOMOG troops, or Kamajor fighters along the way; he didn’t know it at the time, but the RUF assault had routed them from the Kono District almost entirely and Koidu’s government defenders were either dead or in full retreat. Dalramy estimates that he stumbled perhaps 15 miles before collapsing, a distance that may seem unlikely for someone who just had both hands chopped off, but cleanly amputated limbs don’t bleed as much as may be expected. The elasticity of veins and arteries causes them to shrink into the limb and, to a certain degree, self-cauterize.

Someone, perhaps a benevolent villager risking the loss of his or her own arms or legs, dragged Dalramy into a hut and cinched off the blood flow with string tourniquets and torn cloth. With the blood flow stemmed, Dalramy rested for a short while and then continued to stagger down the dirt road. He eventually made his way to a bush hospital, one that was likely all too familiar with treating ax amputations. Within days, he left the diamond-rich Kono District and managed to flee to Freetown, leaving behind not only his 40-year-old hands, but his life as a farmer, his home, and his relatives.

Since the grisly execution of Operation Clean Sweep in 1996, RUF rebels have sold millions of dollars worth of Kono’s diamonds into the world’s marketing channels, diamonds that are now undoubtedly treasured and adored by husbands and wives who have no idea of their brutal origins.

 

I MET DALRAMY in Sierra Leone’s seaside wasteland of a capital, Freetown, in the summer of 2001.

He and hundreds of others like him live in the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Camp for Amputees and War Wounded, a barren plot of clay dirt and leafless, drooping, Dali-esque trees located on the side of the only road between the city center and the beach district. Formerly a school compound, the MSF camp is now a squalid collection of ten-foot-square shacks made of sea timber and the ubiquitous blue-and-white all-weather plastic sheeting distributed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), a sort of refugee Saran Wrap that keeps out the rain but intensifies the heat, which reaches well into the nineties and beyond in the summer months. More than two hundred families live there, crammed into the shacks with as many as ten relatives.

Children mob you the moment you walk in the gates, begging for money, to the point where you have to wrestle them off of you before you’re dragged down. Little kids, some less than a year old, hobble about on one leg, while others learn to eat with arms that end in smooth stumps. On a crude porch a man smokes a cigarette with a homemade prosthesis—tattered Velcro fastens the twisted remains of a coat hanger to his arm and the cigarette is jammed between the wire twists. Others have fashioned spoon-prostheses so that they can eat unaided. Buttoning a shirt, however, still requires the help of a loved one. Therefore, most amputees wear T-shirts handed out by aid organizations, many bearing out-of-place designs; one man wore a silk-screened shirt advertising the movie Titanic, another wore a threadbare shirt touting a St. Patrick’s Day celebration at an Ohio bar. Like Dalramy, all of them have terrible stories, but not all of them are victims of the RUF’s mass amputation campaigns. The MSF camp is a living museum to the atrocities Sierra Leoneans have suffered during a decade of fighting between at least four forces who at times were indistinguishable in their tactics of atrocities. Ducking through garbage-choked alleys, I passed a three-year-old whose leg had been blasted off by a Guinean mortar, a man with no ears or arms who had been mutilated by ECOMOG soldiers who had tortured captives as brutally as the RUF, and a limbless mother carefully cradling a newborn to her breasts with her knees and elbows.

Neither on paper nor in person does Sierra Leone look like a country that produces some of the most beautiful and valuable diamonds sold by the $6 billion per year international diamond industry, a luxury market that sells 80 percent of its products to American consumers. Actually, to refer to Sierra Leone as a “country” at all is only a matter of geographical convenience. In fact, it’s a vacuum of violence, poverty, warlords, and misery, a tiny corner of West Africa where the wheels have fallen completely off and left no one in charge except whoever happens to be best armed at the moment. The country comes in dead last on the United Nations Human Development Index and life expectancies are among the lowest in the world: Men born in Sierra Leone can expect to live to an average age of 43, women to age 48.¹ The infant mortality rate is one of the worst in Africa, with 146 deaths per 1,000 live births.² Nearly 80 percent of the country’s 5 million people have been displaced and the government has suffered so many coups, counter-coups, rigged elections, political assassinations, and fractious political fights that it has been rendered almost completely ineffectual. The only thing that seems to have remained constant where everything else has fallen apart is diamond production. In fact, the sale of diamonds to customers around the world is what has kept the war churning.

Prior to the deployment of a United Nations peacekeeping mission in 1999, Sierra Leone had been almost entirely ignored by the powerful nations of the world, even though they were eager buyers of the diamonds that helped drive a decade’s worth of death and torture. It’s not difficult to see why Sierra Leone is low on most people’s list of places in which to intervene. Not only is it hard for most people to find on a map, but like many African countries, Sierra Leone has been consumed by corruption, dictatorial governments, and illiterate and thuggish leaders and victimized by breathtaking displays of otherworldly butchery. The climate is also horrible: Muggy and humid throughout the year, the tropical landscape is an incubator for malarial mosquitoes, polio, yellow fever, river blindness, and dozens of other deadly diseases. During the rainy season, everything—whether indoors or outdoors—remains wet for five months. During the dry season, harmattan winds from the Sahel and Sahara Deserts sandblast the country and the sunlight seems to be focused by a huge magnifying glass. The raw and unrelenting natural environment is reflected in the people and the actions of some of them in times of war.

Unlike the countries of the former Yugoslavia, for example, there is no centuries-old ethnic conflict fueling the bloodshed; the people of Sierra Leone are a mix of indigenous tribes who still practice their animist beliefs and descendants of freed North American slaves. Prior to the RUF war, Sierra Leoneans lived relatively peacefully with one another. When the RUF first invaded the country from neighboring Liberia in 1991, the rebellion was ostensibly a peasants’ revolution against the perceived plundering of natural resources for the benefit of the ruling class in Freetown. But then the RUF and its Libyan-trained and Liberian-backed leader Foday Sankoh developed a taste for diamonds, and the “rebellion” was revealed as nothing more than a savage struggle to control diamond mining. The fact that such violence was occurring in an African country lowered the enthusiasm for international intervention all the more. African wars—thanks to a vacuum of media coverage that almost completely ignores sub-Saharan countries except in times of natural or man-made disasters—seem remote and incomprehensible to most consumers in developed nations. The vast majority of television programming from Africa seen around the world is composed of wildlife shows. In these panoramic and celebratory films actual Africans are largely absent.

What makes Sierra Leone unique among former European colonies that have endured the painful transition to independence is its incredible natural wealth. Not only is the country rich in gem-quality diamonds, but it’s also a repository for oil, rubies, gold, rutile, and bauxite. It should be the Saudi Arabia of Africa, but it’s not.

Most of those who live in Sierra Leone’s dense rain forests are farmers who have never set eyes on a diamond, but they have felt the stone’s impacts. Ever since diamonds were first discovered here in the 1930s the government has been unable to control the wealth for the benefit of its citizens, nor has it tried very hard to do so. Instead, the diamond fields have been plundered almost since they were first discovered, first by corporations, then by common thieves, and most recently by the armed thugs of the RUF. Estimates are difficult to come by but it’s believed that the RUF profited by between $25 million and $125 million per year by delivering rough gem-quality diamonds into the insatiable maw of the world’s diamond market.³

The RUF is not alone in this endeavor. Rebels in Angola, whose Portuguese name forms the acronym UNITA, have raided diamond fields and oil operations to fund their decades-old war. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is in the midst of a baffling civil war between armed forces of several neighboring countries and ideologies; here too, diamonds are the prize for whichever group controls the areas where they’re found. Between these three countries, it’s estimated that rebel groups have sold enough diamonds to amount to 4 or 5 percent of the global output. Though this figure may seem reassuringly small—after all, 95 percent of diamonds sold around the world come from legitimate sources—it’s a testament to the power of their allure and value that such a small percentage is sufficient to cause an estimated 3.7 million deaths and displace 6 million people in these African war zones.⁴

Diamonds are suited all too well for exploitation by organizations with nefarious goals. They are the most portable form of wealth known to man; it’s an often-repeated truth that enough diamonds can be carried on a person’s naked body to ensure a lifetime of riches, so stealing and smuggling millions of dollars worth from the battlefield to the marketplace is an easy and practically unstoppable practice. As the rebel groups have discovered, there is no lack of buyers for their goods and, until recently, there was little concern about where they originated or the amount of suffering their sellers had inflicted on innocent people.

 

I MADE A NUMBER OF TRIPS to Sierra Leone in 2001 to document the country’s implosion from the trade of what has come to be known as “blood diamonds.” I planned to follow the murky trail of the diamonds from the time they’re mined to when they enter the mainstream trading channels. I wanted to see for myself the shocking contrast between the insufferable living conditions of the majority of Sierra Leone citizens and the beguiling allure of the diamonds being pulled from the muddy earth of the rain forests. Sierra Leone hosts the world’s largest and most expensive deployment of United Nations peacekeepers in history—more than 17,500 soldiers from 31 countries are stationed in a nation the size of South Carolina, and $612 million was spent on the mission in 2001 alone.⁵ I wanted to see if the diplomacy, military aid, and money being spent on a country that has been torn apart over diamonds were having any effect on the rampant bloodshed, inhumanity, and corruption.

Before I arrived in Sierra Leone, like most people, I had no idea where the world’s most valuable gemstones came from. I knew little more than what I was told by television commercials, that diamonds were apparently forever, that they were rare, and that many of them were priceless. But since 1999, reports had been circulating that some diamonds weren’t as pure as their reputation proclaimed. The term “conflict diamonds” was bandied about and it gradually became known that some stones carried the blood of innocent victims, killed or mutilated by rebel groups in Africa who used the profits of diamond sales to continue their campaigns of brutality and inhumanity.

Like almost anyone else who buys diamond rings or necklaces, I didn’t realize that the small stones’ invaluable reputation was nothing more than a 100-year-old parlor trick born of the greed of one company, De Beers Group, the largest diamond mining company in the world, which has completely manufactured both the worth of diamonds and the demand for them. I had no idea that De Beers’s monopolistic policies put in place more than a century ago enabled a band of ruthless killers to wrest diamonds from the heart of an untamed jungle and sell them to willing buyers with connections to respectable diamond centers from London to Antwerp to Bombay. I didn’t know that the proceeds from diamond sales funded not only the RUF’s war against its government, but also Hezbollah terrorism against Israel and Al Qaeda attacks against the United States. Nor could I have imagined that I would discover such a complicated and far-reaching network of smugglers, gunrunners, terrorists, corporate manipulaters, and corrupt governments that made such sales possible.

And I certainly had no idea that the jewelry worn by hundreds of thousands of people around the world was bought at the expense of innocent and mutilated Africans who will never be able to wear jewelry of their own. I went to Sierra Leone to see for myself how the trade worked, to speak with the victims, and to discover how it was possible that the world’s premiere symbol of love and devotion could have been used to fund one of the most atrocious wars of the 1990s.