Blood Diamonds Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  GLOSSARY

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter 1 - FROM PITS OF DESPAIR TO ALTARS OF LOVE

  Chapter 2 - DIAMOND JUNCTION: A Smuggler’s Paradise

  Chapter 3 - THE GUN RUNNERS: From Tongo to Tiffany’s

  Chapter 4 - DEATH BY DIAMONDS: Operation No Living Thing

  Chapter 5 - THE SYNDICATE: A Diamond Is Forever

  Chapter 6 - WAGING PEACE: Taking the Conflict out of “Conflict Diamonds”

  Chapter 7 - THE WAY STATION: Next Stop, Liberia

  Chapter 8 - “THE BASE”: Osama’s War Chest

  Chapter 9 - THE ROUGH ROAD AHEAD: Mining for Peace

  Chapter 10 - TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION: Recovering from the Diamond War

  CODA - Koidu, Sierra Leone

  I

  II

  III

  Acknowledgments

  NOTES

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  Praise for Blood Diamonds

  “Blood Diamonds by Greg Campbell is first-rate journalistic sleuthing, tracing the violence-soaked webs that link the legitimate diamond trade, shady dealers, rebels without a conscience, and organizations such as Hizbollah and al-Qaeda.”

  —New Internationalist

  “Campbell punctures the myth that West Africa’s descent into hell flows solely from the hands of its warlords and juvenile killers. He locates the sources in London, Amsterdam, and New York, as well as in Freetown and Monrovia. In so doing, he makes the reader fully aware of West Africa’s dead-last nations, their hellholes and hecatombs. He also insures that the news from that part of the world will never read quite the same.”

  —Commonweal

  “In Blood Diamonds, a work of impeccable reportage and meticulous research, veteran journalist Greg Campbell argues that Sierra Leone’s diamonds have inflicted terrible suffering on the region and are now financing global terror.”

  —World and I

  “The book reads at times like surreal fiction, and Campbell’s skill with language comes through in this gruesome, real-life story. He sets the scene masterfully in the diamond region of eastern Sierra Leone and graphically describes the bizarre, horrific methods of intimidation of the population by the Revolutionary United Front.”

  —The Post and Courier

  For My Parents

  GLOSSARY

  AFRC The Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, a splinter-group of the Sierra Leone Army that staged a coup in 1997 and aligned with the RUF.

  De Beers Group The largest diamond mining and selling company in the world. Before it was purchased by insiders in 2001, De Beers Group was composed of two entities: De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd. and De Beers Centenary AG.

  DTC Diamond Trading Company, the London-based marketing arm of De Beers, which sells about 65 percent of the world production of rough diamonds.

  ECOMOG The ECOWAS Cease-Fire Monitoring Group, ECOWAS’s military arm.

  ECOWAS The Economic Community of West African States, a regional group of fifteen countries.

  EO Executive Outcomes, a South African private military company, dissolved in 1999.

  Kamajor A warrior sect of the Mende tribe, characterized by animist beliefs and superstition.

  LURD Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, a rebel group composed of an amalgamation of dissident factions fighting to topple the government of Charles Taylor.

  MLPA The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, an Angolan political party representing the majority government.

  MSF Médecins Sans Frontières, a nongovernmental organization that provides medical care to refugees and war victims.

  NPFL The National Patriotic Front of Liberia, the Liberian rebel group led by Charles Taylor, currently the president of Liberia; the NPFL overthrew the government of Samuel K. Doe in 1990.

  RUF The Revolutionary United Front, led by Foday Sankoh, is a Sierra Leone rebel group formed in 1991; trained in Libya with leaders of the NPFL, the two rebel groups have close ties.

  RUFP The Revolutionary United Front Party, the RUF’s political arm.

  SLA Sierra Leone Army.

  UNAMSIL The United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone.

  UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

  UNICEF United Nations Children’s Fund.

  UNITA The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, an Angolan rebel group formed in the early 1990s.

  O my mountain in the field,

  I will give thy substance and all thy treasures to the spoil,

  and thy high places for sin,

  throughout all thy borders.

  JEREMIAH17:1

  CYMBELINE:That diamond upon your finger, say

  How came it yours?

  IACHIMO:Thou’lt torture me to leave unspoken that

  Which to be spoke would torture thee.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Cymbeline

  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 ab
out 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.