Blood Diamonds (28 page)

The diamond industry knows this. It hasn't been proven that Sierra Leone diamonds were specifically used to fund the hijackings, but it doesn't need to be. Uniformly, traders' and jewelers' organizations stampeded to condemn the connection.

Matthew Runci, president of Jewelers of America, and Eli Izhakoff, chairman of the World Diamond Council, released a joint statement that said: “It has been known for all too long that bandits masquerading as rebels have been using the proceeds from the sale of stolen diamonds to finance their criminal behavior in some
African countries. Nations involved in the diamond trade—as producers, processors and importers—must construct an effective monitoring system that protects the legitimate supply chain from the small percentage of illicit stones obtained by criminal elements.”
⁷

De Beers naturally weighed in as well: “[We] utterly condemn the way in which these [terrorist] organizations are preying on otherwise legitimate industries to further their criminal and murderous activities.” The statement also reiterated that De Beers had ended purchasing on the open market and that the percentage of diamonds emanating from conflict zones was “small, but significant.”
⁸

The most important thing about this slew of legislation and condemnations is that it comes too late. Trafficking in conflict diamonds is a well-established business with millions of dollars on the line. The money props up not only rebel insurgencies and the bank accounts of their leaders, but it represents a substantial amount of revenue for the president of Liberia, who doesn't appear to be prepared to leave office any time soon; the trafficking also generates enormous profits for the gunrunning industry, as well as for thousands of middle-tier diamond brokers.

The truth is that conflict diamonds will be bought as long as they're available. They may not be purchased by Tom Shane's jewelry company, at least directly, but that's because they won't be offered to him. They'll enter the diamond pipeline long before they become jewelry, at jungle meeting places, village backrooms, and Freetown bars when no one is looking. They'll make their way into the legitimate exports of sellers who want to pad their parcels cheaply, safely sheltered by certificates issued by lax or bribed officials. The documents required by the Kimberley Process and the Clean Diamond Act will not stop the traffic.

They'll just make it harder to detect.

 

 

 

 

I
N JANUARY 2002, UNAMSIL officially announced that the war in Sierra Leone was over and that the Revolutionary United Front no longer existed as a rebel group. I was in Lagos, Nigeria, at the time and you could almost hear the collective sigh of relief wafting down the coast from the west. For a time, it seemed that the last and most crucial step of the peace plan—disarming the Kono region and taking its diamond mines from the RUF's control for good—might never be accomplished. The original deadline for disarmament for Kono, Kailahun, and Kenema Districts had been November 30, 2001, but that deadline passed with only a handful of soldiers turning in their weapons. Through December, rebels continued to mine diamonds and launder them through Liberia, with UNAMSIL taking little notice. Masimba Tafirenyika, the acting UNAMSIL spokesperson,
was asked by a reporter two weeks after the deadline passed about the UN's response to the continued mining.

“This, including all other activities, are addressed by the government of Sierra Leone with the deployment of the Sierra Leone Police throughout the country,” he said. “The Sierra Leone Police have been deployed in Kono and will be deployed in other areas.”
¹

The deployment of the police—an organization historically as corrupt and inept as the SLA—did nothing to stop rival RUF miners from staging a riot in Koidu on December 18. Different mining factions threw stones at one another in the presence of police and UNAMSIL soldiers.

UNAMSIL stuck to its program of moderate diplomacy and employed the help of RUF Brigadier General Issa Sessay in appealing for peace and disarmament in the region, staging pep rallies and feel-good events in the contested areas. Until the end, Sessay used the continued occupation of the diamond regions as a trump card to try and negotiate the release of Foday Sankoh from his Bunce Island dungeon, claiming that only “Pa Sankoh” could get his children in the bush to give up their lives of rape and pillage for one of education and odd jobs, but neither UNAMSIL nor the government budged. One of the other reasons Sessay stalled for time, perhaps, was to allow his field commanders a little extra time to mine as many diamonds as possible before the inevitable end.

But eventually, the end did come, at least as far as UNAMSIL is concerned. In the last days of January 2002, the UN staged a bonfire event in which it burned more than 3,000 weapons confiscated from the rebels over the course of the last year and announced that peace had come once and for all to Sierra Leone.

Whether or not this is true, naturally, remains to be seen. The durability of the cease-fire in effect since March 2001, the fact that many areas of the country are now open to outsiders for the first
time in more than ten years, and the mutation of the RUF into a recognized political movement shouldn't be confused with smooth sailing. When the war was declared over, many problems still existed and threatened a return to Sierra Leone's old patterns of violence. For example, the Security Council announced in January 2002 the formation of a special war crimes court for Sierra Leone. Representing a new chapter in international jurisprudence, the special court constitutes a blend of international and local laws and takes legal precedence over local Sierra Leonean courts. Whereas courts for war crimes committed in Yugoslavia and Rwanda were established directly by the Security Council, the tribunal for Sierra Leone was requested by the government in Freetown.

From the beginning the court's main targets were Major General Sam “Mosquito” Bokarie, RUF founder Foday Sankoh, and AFRC junta leader Johnny Paul Koroma. Sankoh, despite the RUF's earnest efforts to see him freed, remained in jail in Freetown; Koroma also returned to the capital, now a born-again Christian preaching reconciliation.

Immediately after the war, the special court represents a dangerous double-edged blade to peace prospects in Sierra Leone. Clearly, most of those living there demand accountability for war crimes committed by these men and others who would eventually be indicted. An important pillar of any peace process is justice, and seeing the men who dragged Sierra Leone through a decade of horror publicly accused and tried under international law is a critical component of the healing and rebuilding process.

But it's also something that the RUF has never been inclined to accept. Remember that the Lomé Accords gave the rebels everything they could have wanted—a government position for Sankoh, control of the diamond mines, and immunity from prosecution for
war crimes—and it still failed miserably. UNAMSIL's bloody start can be attributed, at least in part, to the fact that with Secretary General Annan's public disagreement with Lomé's amnesty clause, RUF leaders preferred to fight the UN rather than risk being tried for war crimes. That the RUF's titular leader would be the first to stand before a UN-led tribunal when the RUF has tried everything from a prison break to diplomacy to see him freed seemed to provide a tailor-made excuse for them to abandon peace and renew the fight, especially for those RUF leaders who felt that they may eventually end up in the dock themselves. As Margaret Novicki of the UN mission once told me, a war crimes investigation would have to indict practically everyone. “Everyone's guilty,” she said.

On another level, if the tribunal is successful and is conducted with little dissent from the RUF, the majority of RUF leaders—including the current one, Sessay—could end up in jail, gutting the fledgling party of anyone in a position to lead it. With elections scheduled for May 2002, and the RUFP on the ballot, this meant the indictment of elected officials was a real possibility. This course of events would be fine for most Sierra Leoneans, but it seemed unlikely that the RUF would be willing to risk its complete erasure from the political scene.

These are only the most obvious hurdles. Though the warfare and the amputations may have stopped, the RUF has left behind a shattered nation filled with ruined souls. Rebuilding homes and towns and restarting lives are only the first painful steps to recovery. People will have to revive businesses, find jobs, and figure out how to pay income taxes. It will be decades before farmers can feed the country again. Medical care and education will have to be modernized, democratized, and spread into the bush to avoid a replay of the disenfranchisement that allowed the RUF to grow in the first
place. The military and police forces will have to be completely revamped and reeducated not only in standard law-enforcement techniques, but also in respect for human rights and international rules of law.

 

PARADOXICALLY, what destroyed Sierra Leone may be the only thing capable of saving it: diamonds.

For the first time in its turbulent history, Sierra Leone must manage its natural resources and mineral wealth. Diamond mining must be strictly controlled so that, for a change, the vast majority of the revenue will go to the people of the country, not to spoiled dictators and ruthless killers and their henchmen in Liberia and elsewhere. Important first steps in this regard are already being taken: Within a week of the UNAMSIL declaration of peace, Canadian mining company DiamondWorks announced that it would resume mining operations in Koidu, assured by President Kabbah that its permits and property titles acquired through Branch Energy (which acquired them thanks to the military efforts of Executive Outcomes) were valid. In a recent statement, DiamondWorks executives said, “This important step in the peace process has removed the remaining political obstacles to the re-establishment of the company's operations in Sierra Leone after an absence of nearly five years.”
²
Through Branch, DiamondWorks owns a 60 percent stake in a kimberlite pipe in Koidu, and two exploration permits for part of the Sewa River totaling 6,800 hectares of land.

The quick reestablishment of legitimate mining operations should be seen as a positive development and it would be a welcome investment if the country continued to stabilize enough for De Beers to play a role once again. The company's partnership with the government of Botswana, which has the fastest-growing
economy in the world, should be viewed as a shining example of what properly organized and regulated industry can do for the good of a country. Some critics will balk that a partnership between De Beers and Sierra Leone will add yet more decimal points to the company's wealth, but it's a far cry better than the utter anarchy that dominated the 1990s. If De Beers's greed for diamonds leads Sierra Leone's leaders to be greedy for the good of the nation, then who loses, other than those who may be paying too much for their jewelry downstream? In terms of free-market economics, they already pay too much. The only difference would be that they'd be paying it to legally employed miners, not men who cut off arms with machetes. In this case, greed can be good.

Stabilizing and controlling diamond exploration would have positive ripple effects that go beyond the end of one of the world's worst ongoing wars. There's no reason a country as beautiful as Sierra Leone shouldn't have tourism as one of its top five industries. Foreign and domestic exploration investment can create an economy of its own as mining companies will require far more than shovels and shake-shakes to delve fully into Sierra Leone's kimberlites; they'll require modern facilities, sorting and processing centers like those found in Namibia, South Africa, and Botswana. Running those facilities requires a skilled workforce and it's not unlikely that exploration companies would be willing to invest in the local education system for the sake of producing a labor pool from which to draw. De Beers has a good track record in this regard. The overwhelming majority of its employees are indigenous to the countries in which it operates.

The big risk to De Beers—and to Sierra Leone's diamond industry—is if Sierra Leone diamonds are tainted for good thanks to the RUF's war; but such a risk is minimal given the ability of De Beers,
through its marketing and advertising clout, to create and maintain any reality it wants for diamonds. Two years' worth of publicity about conflict diamonds from Global Witness, Amnesty International, and other groups; numerous media reports on such high-profile television shows as
20/20
and
Nova
; and legislation by the U.S. Congress have not been enough by a long shot to overcome more than 100 years of marketing strategy. Most consumers still have never heard about “blood” diamonds and the African wars fought over them.