Blood Diamonds Read online

  Smuggling one or two small stones out of Freetown is one thing—smuggling a half a million dollars worth is something else entirely. If caught with an attaché case filled with rough at the airport, at best you’ll lose your loot; at worst you’ll be arrested and prosecuted. Smuggling large parcels out of Freetown requires a bit more cloak-and-dagger than hiding the goods in body cavities.

  “The way it will work,” Singer explained one night at the Solar over Star beers in the bar, “is that we’ll look at the goods here, agree on a price, and then meet in Conakry to complete the deal.” Like most nights, the place was almost deserted except for the staff and a few guests who’d gathered under the tin-and-thatch roof to watch CNN. A string of pale yellow lightbulbs gave the scene a jaundiced look and bamboo curtains were partially rolled down around the circumference in anticipation of the nightly rains. Valdy lounged in another booth nearby, smoking and watching TV.

  Conakry, the capital of neighboring Guinea, has long been the location of informal conflict-diamond trades. Usually Sierra Leonean combatants will trade small pieces of rough in Guinea for rice or fuel, but there have been allegations of weapons deals being conducted between the RUF and Guinean military officials. One such deal that was said to have gone sour in the summer of 2000 resulted in the RUF attacking Pamelap, the Guinean border town on the road between Freetown and Conakry. The Guinean military retaliated, firing artillery shells into Kambia, on the Sierra Leone side of the border, with the result that more innocent civilians were sent to Freetown’s MSF camp.

  Guinea’s guilt as a diamond conduit is reflected in discrepancies between what it exports to Belgium and what Belgium says is imported from Guinea. For example, from 1993 to 1997, Guinea reported 2.6 million carats of official diamond exports at an average of $96 per carat to Belgium. During the same period, Belgium—through the Diamond High Council, the diamond industry’s self-appointed watchdog organization—reported imports from Guinea of 4.8 million carats averaging $167 each. “In other words,” reported the UN in December 2000, “Belgium appears to import almost double the volume that is exported from Guinea, and the per-carat-value is almost 75 per cent higher than what leaves Guinea.”5

  People like Singer account for the discrepancy. By doing nothing more than shaking hands in Freetown, Singer doesn’t have to carry any cash into the country or carry any diamonds out. Getting the diamonds to Conakry is the RUF’s “problem,” even though it’s not any more difficult than U.S. citizens’ traveling across state lines to buy fireworks for their Fourth of July celebrations. If the deal is solidified in Freetown, RUF brokers often take the goods to the Guinean capital via ferry after bribing customs officials to ignore certain items of luggage. Bribery in West Africa is such a part of the culture that it’s like tipping a waiter after a meal—I did it myself on arrival in Freetown, paying a customs official a mere $5 to avoid a time-consuming search of my incoming luggage, which, as far as he knew, could have been filled with pistols and $100 bills.

  If the deal is made in the bush, the broker takes a backpack filled with diamonds on a motorcycle from Koidu, for instance, through bush trails across the border and on to Conakry. The trip can be made in a day during the dry season. The RUF representative goes to a bank in Conakry and deposits the parcel in a safe deposit box. Buyers like Singer will then meet them in a café, adjourn to inspect the goods, and the money will be wired from Poland to be converted into cash at the same bank. In some circumstances, Singer said, the RUF rep will prefer to have the money deposited in a numbered account in Copenhagen for use later.

  Guinean customs then inspects the diamonds and issues a certificate of authenticity that they originated in Guinea and—voilà—conflict diamonds magically become legitimate. If all goes according to plan, Valdy’s company will send a twelve-seat private jet the same day to pick them up and the diamonds will be in Europe by nightfall, squeaky clean as far as the Diamond High Council is concerned.

  “But they didn’t originate in Guinea,” I said.

  “So?”

  “So how do you get customs to say that they did?”

  He looked at me as if I hadn’t learned a thing. He rubbed his fingers together, the universal sign language for “bribery.”

  The certificate accompanying the diamonds is supposed to be the guarantee that the diamonds came from legitimate sources, but obviously such a guarantee is relative, and it’s not just an African problem. Perhaps aware that some stones coming into Belgium are from questionable sources, the Diamond High Council in Antwerp until recently recorded the origin of diamond imports as the last country to ship the goods to the city’s cutters and polishers. Therefore, a package of rough that began in the forests of Sierra Leone and was smuggled to Liberia before being exported to Belgium was recorded as being filled with Liberian diamonds. This is how Liberia can defy the laws of nature and outproduce South Africa by exporting 6 million carats of gemstones a year, when it can actually produce, at best, 200,000 carats of industrial diamonds from its existing mines.6 And this is also how the entire issue of conflict diamonds has remained in the dark for so long, allowing the RUF to launder Sierra Leone diamonds under a cover provided by the diamond industry itself.

  “I’ve been doing this in Sierra Leone since 1995,” said Singer. “It’s not hard. In fact, it’s almost impossible to get caught.”

  If he has any moral qualms about buying diamonds from people who are going to use the money for weapons to kill innocent civilians and kidnap children into their ranks, he doesn’t show it. In fact, he’s never strayed from Freetown during all of his years doing illicit business in Sierra Leone, so he has no first-hand knowledge of what upcountry conditions are like.

  But that’s not to say he doesn’t know what the rebels are capable of; in fact, he carries a small photo album of corpses that have been mutilated by the rebels to show to anyone unfamiliar with the horrors of the war. He squirreled it out one night, sliding it conspiratorially across the tiled tabletop at me. Four nude female corpses laying in the highway, hands and feet chopped off and laying nearby, genitals mutilated with a tree branch. A disembodied head laying on a table. A corpse minus its head and arms, which were arranged in a macabre pose some feet away.

  “Listen here,” he said, wagging a finger for emphasis, “if the government made it easier to buy legitimate diamonds, people like me wouldn’t have to deal with these savages. But I’m a businessman. What else can I do?”

  Unmentioned, but widely understood in these circles, is that rebel diamonds are far less expensive than diamonds that go through official channels. RUF diamonds normally sell in the bush for 10 percent of what the same stones would otherwise cost through a licensed exporter, making them highly liquid and prized by people like Singer who can sell them at a large markup in Europe’s diamond centers.7

  The way it should work is through the Fawaz model. The government issues mining and exporting licenses good for a year to people who apply for them and pass a rudimentary background inspection. The license holder is allowed to employ a certain number of upcountry miners, diggers, and buyers who are also licensed by the government. In theory, the exporter will bring diamonds to Freetown that have been dug up legitimately, and he’ll provide proof of that through a series of receipts and invoices detailing the discovery of every gem he wishes to export. The package is valued, taxed, and sealed in a box at the Government Gold and Diamond Office (GGDO) in town with a numbered certificate of origin printed on security paper, the government’s official stamp of approval that the package is “clean.” The parcel is also photographed with a digital camera and recorded in an electronic database, which is updated when the parcel is delivered to its stated destination. Once leaving the GGDO, the exporter is then free to leave the country without having to open the package again at the airport for inspection.

  This is the system that was put in place as a result of UN Security Council Resolution 1306, an embargo on diamond imports from Sierra Leone adopted in July 2000 until such a
scheme for certifying official diamond exports was adopted. But it’s not likely that this action did much, if anything, to help stem trafficking in conflict diamonds. Clearly, the RUF didn’t use official channels to sell its stones. For example, between 1997 and 1999, a mere 36,000 carats were officially exported from Sierra Leone, from a high of 2 million in the late 1960s.8 Although the war has prevented experts from forecasting Sierra Leone’s diamond reserves, it’s undisputed that annual output is much higher than the official export numbers indicate. When the embargo was placed on Sierra Leone diamonds, all it truly meant was that the traders who legally exported the 9,320 carats9 recorded in 1999 would have to smuggle their goods instead to Liberia or Guinea, which had no restrictions or certification requirements. During the period when the embargo was in place, everyone mining diamonds in Sierra Leone became a smuggler.

  The problem, even under the new official arrangement, is that the RUF has Kono and Tongo Field, which have the best stones and the best prices. Anyone wishing to buy them in the bush can do so, even requesting a forged “receipt” to show to customs officials. There’s no guarantee just because someone has a license that the diamonds presented to the GGDO in Freetown were mined by his employees instead of bought from rebels in Tongo Field. In the end, it’s just easier to smuggle them; smugglers don’t pay any license fees or the 3 percent export tax.

  Most of my meetings with Singer were cut short, usually by someone appearing in the shadows beyond the dim light cast from the bar, motioning for him to follow.

  “Right,” he’d say with a Father Christmas smile. “Gotta go meet some people. You’ll be around right? Goodonya.”

  He and Valdy would be swallowed by the night.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, Singer and I were engaged in our usual sunset activity: smoking, drinking, talking diamonds, and watching the news at the bar. At the time, the news was mostly coverage of America’s war on terrorism in the wake of the September 11 Al Qaeda attacks. We were fortunate to watch even that; the bartenders had long tired of the coverage and had begun to play a cartoon videotape featuring Alvin and the Chipmunks in protest. After the initial shock of the attacks had worn off, the locals began to look forward to watching the tape instead of the repetitive reports on CNN; earlier I had asked to watch the news and was resoundingly voted down, twelve Sierra Leoneans to one American. But on this night, the foreigners outnumbered the locals and CNN reigned, even though we were as bored of the coverage as they were.

  As usual, Valdy was off to the side by himself. Singer was complaining about the unreliability of most RUF salesmen. “There’s no such thing as an office or a phone number you can call to get a hold of them, you know,” he said.

  On top of that, many “salesmen” were con artists trying to hawk glass to rich fools. The scam was simple, but bold: You’d pay your $100 for what you were told was a 2.5-carat diamond from a mine in Bo and think that you were going to make your girlfriend the happiest woman in town once you had the thing cut, polished, and set in jewelry. And just as you were thinking about how much money you could make doing this for a living, there would be a knock on the door and a phalanx of blue-suited Sierra Leone police would have you on your face on the floor of the guest house. You’d be dragged off as a smuggler captured thanks to a tip from an “informant” and jerked out of the hotel in front of the friendly people at the front desk. As you’re half-carried through the lobby you yell at them to please take care of your luggage, your return plane tickets, and your passport, which are all laying in a huge mess in the room, which, of course, hadn’t been paid for yet since you planned to spend a few more days there. You’d be shoved into one of their white-yellow-and-blue Range Rovers and taken to a sweat-tank at the station, and there subjected to threatening grilling from customs and the Ministry of Mines and Natural Resources. Your demands to talk to someone at the embassy are ignored and you’re given a few good whacks to the face. You’re fucked, you’re told, because you bought a diamond without having a license to do so. And then, amid the panic in your mind, a bubble of desperate lucidity comes to the surface: Can I buy a license now?

  Ah, yes . . . postures ease . . . of course you can. It will be a license just to get out of their hands and onto the nearest plane out of Sierra Leone, though. How much money do you have? Six hundred dollars? But a license costs a thousand (unless you have a thousand, in which case it costs two), resulting in more whacks to the head. Okay, today’s your lucky day; we’ll take the $600, but you’d better leave the country immediately.

  Indeed. What a scene: Dumped on the streets without even cab fare back to the room you now can’t pay for, where all your possessions are being kept hostage by the innkeeper, reduced to begging to the U.S. ambassador or your friends in the press corps.

  People like Singer were invaluable because they’d already screened such riffraff.

  “You’ve got to have good contacts and fortunately I’ve been doing this long enough that I’ve got them. That’s why he needs me.” He pointed to Valdy, whose Polish diamond-cutting company hired Singer to acquire cheap quality stones from the rebels.

  “Say, you want to meet one of them? Name’s Jango. He can tell you all about RUF mining,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  We headed into the night, the sound of UN helicopters carried to us on the ocean breeze that moved the leaves overhead like bored hand-waving from a local parade. There are few functional streetlights in Freetown and the short walk to Jango’s compound took us through an eerie collage of shadowy figures lit by the greasy flames of oil-lamps at sheet-plastic-and-timber roadside kiosks. Glaring headlights from UN Expeditions and Land Rovers speeding their occupants to Paddy’s periodically blinded us; when we finally arrived, we were seeing stars and tripping over our own feet.

  Jango’s neighborhood was typical of most squatter housing in Freetown. Crumbling concrete housing blocks waved colorful laundry like Tibetan prayer flags. Black cauldrons bubbled with rice and cassava, creating a mist of cook-smoke that caught the firelight in a medieval light show. Streams of sewage and rainwater mingled underfoot in the pasty mud. From the shadows, the only thing visible of the people slumped on the porches and tree stumps were the whites of their eyes. Community activity centered around a slapdash kiosk composed of tree branches and UNHCR plastic sheeting. About a half dozen hard-eyed teens lurked inside around a battered boom box that was playing The Spice Girls at deafening volume, sipping tea. Naked children stopped in midstride to stare at the spectacle of two white men arriving unannounced on their doorstep after dark.

  “Ha de body?” Singer said cheerfully. “Run get Jango for us.”

  At the mention of Jango’s name, the spell was broken and two of the teens broke off to be absorbed into the night in search of him. Jango apparently carried some weight among his neighbors.

  It’s not hard to see why. Though physically unremarkable—at 29, he has a typical African physique born of backbreaking labor, a wide friendly face, and a collection of scars from shrapnel and bullet wounds—his history as a longtime prisoner of the RUF has afforded him a certain degree of respect among his peers. And the fact that he now helps the RUF sell their diamonds to people like Singer has only added to his mystique, now seen as a man willing to overlook the atrocities of the war to become a businessman. The only business worth doing in a place like Freetown, as everyone knew, was brokering illegal diamonds. If those diamonds came from people who beat and tortured him for 18 months in the bush, well . . . the money to be earned was well worth putting that aside.

  Singer introduced me and soon left to conduct other business. Jango showed me to his room: As narrow as a closet, the door opened against the bed just enough to allow a thin person to squeeze inside. A tattered American flag was hung over the bars on the window as a curtain and a small shelf held a collection of personal belongings: toothbrush, cassette player, ashtray.

  In the gloom, he showed me his wounds and told me about his time with the RUF.

  WITHIN A FEW D
AYS of the commencement of Operation Clean Sweep, the 1996 operation in which Ismael Dalramy lost his hands to an RUF ax, Jango was awakened in the middle of the night by a rocket blast. He was sleeping in the open, huddled under a palm tree and some bushes, near an open pit diamond mine, forced by his RUF captors to sleep far from the rest of the prisoners because he snored so loudly that they feared detection. But on this night, his snoring may have saved his life. The Kamajors had consulted their jungle gods and were told that success in attacking the RUF position was imminent. There’s no light in the depth of the jungle at night, not even starlight because of the canopy, and Jango was dead blind when the first detonation rippled through the trees. He sprang to his feet to flee into the night, running instinctively toward the rest of the RUF contingent, simply because they had guns and he didn’t and, as their prisoner, he was worth protecting. He hoped.

  He never found out. Streaking through the forest suddenly alive with the hammering of automatic weapons fire and the mad designs of tracer bullets ricocheting off coconut trees, he heard a whoosh that was getting louder than all the other sounds. He turned just in time to see a rocket-propelled grenade sailing toward him like a neon football. Only random luck saved his life: His forward momentum carried him behind a tree, which immediately exploded with the rocket’s impact, blasting shards of wood into his upper left arm. Jango flew into a hole, a small pit he and his fellow prisoners had just begun excavating for diamond exploration, reeling headfirst into the muddy water, just as the tree toppled behind him with a deafening crunch. He screamed underwater and surfaced to the sound of bullets zipping over the hole like supercharged hummingbirds, rockets pulverizing trees, screams of death from his captors and their enemies, a strobe-light world where there was no up or down.

  He passed out from the pain in his arm sometime around dawn, when the shooting slowed, but was replaced with the more menacing sounds of Mende whispers—the language of the Kamajors. Hours later, however, he awoke to find everyone gone and the water in the hole tinged pink from the blood he’d pumped into it. Jango was in big trouble.