Blood Diamonds Page 7

  The main problem is that he had no idea where he was. He’d been kidnapped in Sefadu, a Kono District diamond-mining village that is Koidu’s adjacent sister town, nearly a month before the attack and had been marched through the woods from one mine to another so often that he had no idea how far he’d walked or in which direction. He may have had a better sense of where he was if he’d been selected to be one of the RUF’s mules, men who do nothing but walk back and forth to the Liberian border, carrying diamonds one way and returning with shiny new RPG tubes and crates of rifle ammunition. But he was just a digger and he didn’t know if he was in RUF territory or Kamajor territory. And he had no idea where to find help for his injured arm. Sitting in his Freetown bedroom, he pointed to the mass of scar tissue on his upper arm and said he spent three weeks staggering lost in the bush, eating nothing but mangos, hiding from voices and approaching footsteps.

  Eventually, he made his way to a village. From his vantage point in the trees, it was clear there was no one there but RUF, young men and women lounging on eviscerated pickup trucks and on the crumbling cinderblock walls of front porches, their rifles and machine guns slung on their backs recklessly, the scene highlighted with the soft orange glow of cook-fires in the early evening. Things seemed calm enough, Jango thought, and he’d already decided that he would take his chances with the RUF if he ran across them. His only option was to continue wandering in the forest. The smell of cooking chicken made his decision all the easier.

  He nervously left the thick bush and walked into the town. Some people stared at him and his now-infected wound and some didn’t pay him any attention at all. He made it to the barrie, an open-walled structure in the center of town used for community gatherings in more peaceful times, and lay down on the ground in an attempt to be inconspicuous, evaluating his next move.

  The mood was tense; many of the fighters seemed drunk and boisterous, sucking on “gin-blasters,” little plastic sleeves of alcohol like thawed freezer popsicles. Diamond smugglers from the Mandingo tribe hung out in the shadows, ready to deal with the RUF for their stones, to negotiate a trade or arrange a shipment. A female RUF fighter was arguing with a young man. Cheap transistor radios played rap music at a volume that completely distorted the tunes.

  Jango was considering retreat. He knew that the moment he approached anyone for help he would be the center of the rebels’ drunken attention. Before he had time to decide what to do, all of his choices were taken away.

  The two arguing RUF fighters escalated their disagreement. The man was mocking the woman because he recognized her as a prostitute from Freetown. He was offering her diamonds to sleep with the entire battalion and everyone in earshot was laughing at her.

  Drunk on gin and power, the girl—not older than 16 or 17—whipped her AK-47 off her shoulder and chambered a round. “I’m going to blow your fucking balls off,” she announced casually and aimed at his crotch.

  What happened next took less than a second, Jango recalls: Laughter cut off immediately, as if everyone in the square realized at the same moment that she was serious. The man standing at the end of the barrel twirled, his right foot lifted. He knocked the barrel aside just as she pulled the trigger. The round flew across the square and blew a hole in Jango’s right calf. It was the first time anyone noticed that he was there and he screamed into the night, suddenly surrounded by RUF, all of them screaming right back at him: “Who the fuck are you?” “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  Jango opened his eyes to see a smiling Mandingo face next to his. “Hey boy,” the man whispered, “they’re trying to kill you because they think you have diamonds. Sell them to me right now and it will save your life. I’ll give you a good price.”

  Telling me the story later, Jango said he regretted that he was jerked away so quickly that he couldn’t even tell the man to go fuck himself.

  SOON AFTER HE WAS SHOT and recaptured by this new band of RUF, Jango was back at work, stripped to his blue brief underwear and standing up to his thighs in muddy water, slinging rocks and dirt around and around in a circular shake-shake. He churned the water with an abandon to task that is all too often found only in young children and prisoners of war. With four or five other prisoners, he was washing away the silt and clay from the stones, eyes trained to look for the gray, opaque ones.

  On the banks of the shallow pit where he toiled, men with guns guarded his work, smoking. Other prisoners brought water and food, or just lingered, squatting in the shade of banana trees, staring at a group of soldiers kicking a soccer ball that sometimes caromed off a bare foot and into the water.

  When the wind blew from the east, it sometimes carried the sound of small and highly maneuverable Nigerian alpha jets assigned to the ECOMOG force and the flat patter of small-arms fire.

  If he heard these things, Jango didn’t reveal it. He was there to find the special rocks, not listen to the wind. Even the pain in his leg and arm didn’t distract him from the job. He’d given up, determined to do his job well and hope that he would eat that day. He was working on the “two-pile” system, an RUF digging regimen that allowed prisoners to keep any diamonds found in a pile of gravel he was allowed to wash for himself, but he suspected that it was rigged. He’d not found a diamond in weeks in the piles of gravel designated as “his,” but he’d been finding quite a few in those designated as RUF piles.

  Around and around and around. Finally, he stopped sloshing his sieve, staring down into the soup of mud and gravel it contained. The sudden presence of four AK barrels shoved into his face confirmed what his eyes suspected. A hand reached in and plucked out a stone and dipped it in the water, rubbing away the stubborn clay. In the rebel’s hand was a medium-sized rock, gray and white in color, about the size of a small marble. Jango knew from experience that it was probably six or seven carats.

  “Boss!” the guard yelled, holding it up between his finger and thumb.

  A man on the bank smiled and winked at the boy as the gem was carefully passed to him from hand to hand. The man snatched it up and held it to the sun.

  Another diamond began its journey.

  REBEL FIELD WORKERS are lucky to end their days exhausted and hungry. Many have ended them in a shallow grave. Workers sleep by the sides of the mine and wake at first light to begin the day’s digging. Except for the fact that the labor isn’t voluntary and men with rifles guard the prisoners’ every move, the process of extracting the jewels from the ground is identical to that in the licensed mines.

  Capturing a diamond mine is as easy as showing up with a rifle and ordering everyone in the pit to start handing their discoveries over to the new bosses. The RUF sometimes sweetens the deal by offering to share the loot with the diggers, an arrangement that seems to the workers like a better offer than the rice and pennies they get from their legitimate bosses, as long as they overlook the fact that their bosses won’t kill them if they refuse. In addition to the “two-pile” method, which was favored by those who guarded Jango, some units instead allowed prisoners to dig for four days for the RUF, two days for themselves, and have one day off. Even then, however, most diamonds the diggers were allowed to keep were comparatively worthless industrial-grade stones or very small gemstones worth little in the bush. The good stones, it was clear, went to the RUF. Those who refused or argued faced being shot on the spot. Walking away was not an option. Most diggers complied quickly. But given the frequent alcohol- and drug-fueled rages of their captors, thoughts immediately turned to escape.

  Running away was a near impossibility, although it had been done. Within days, the RUF captors have broken the men physically by denying them food and water and working them to exhaustion. Few prisoners would have been able to run far and, even if they could, a sprint into the forest would only lead to another RUF unit that might not be as willing to allow them to keep their hands, feet, or lives. But in the bush, diamonds are a currency even more valuable than guns, loyalty to a tribe of warriors, or belief in an ideology. If a digger was clever e
nough to steal or earn a cache of rough, and lucky enough to offer them to the right person, he may be able to buy himself out of slavery.

  Stealing from the RUF is an often fatal practice, however, essentially an African form of Russian roulette. Jango recalled one man who was found with a large diamond tucked into his lip. RUF soldiers slashed open the belly of his pregnant wife and removed the fetus with a bayonet. The fetus died immediately and the wife soon bled to death. The man was tied to the corpses, doused with gasoline, and set ablaze, all on the edge of the mine, in view of the remaining diggers, who were forced to continue their work.

  Stealing the good diamonds before they made it into the hands of the RUF overseers was a risky but irresistible undertaking. One technique was particularly ingenious. When learning to wash gravel in the shake-shakes, one of the first tricks a digger learns is to flip a sieve-full of water onto his face without losing all the gravel, a quick way to cool off under the African sun without having to pause work. Seeing the men dousing themselves with mine water was a common enough sight, but RUF prisoners learned to also flip diamonds into the air with the water and catch them in their mouths, whereupon they were instantly swallowed.

  Swallowing the diamond is only part of the chore, of course. Retrieving it and keeping it hidden were also difficult.

  Over the course of 18 months—after he was recaptured and accidentally shot in the leg—Jango managed to amass six pieces, mostly through the dangerous practice of simply palming the stones once he found them and sliding them into his mouth when the opportunity presented itself. He later hid them in a cigarette pack that he buried in the ground near where he slept.

  He’d already begun talking to some of the Mandingo traders who visited Kono, middlemen who organized the transactions between the RUF field commanders and banks, arms dealers, and expatriate rebel bosses in Conakry and Monrovia. Depending on the greed of individual RUF commanders, the needs of the fighting force, and the deals that were cut from day to day, the diamonds were sold in the bush to Mandingos or they were physically walked to Liberia to be traded at the border for weapons. The weapons deals were much more tightly organized—a mule team of twenty-five prisoners guarded by five RUF would hike to the border, load up with weapons, and hike back.

  If a commander wanted a retirement fund, fresh clothes, or a new car, however, he dealt with the Mandingos. The system is ridiculously easy. A few good stones are passed in the jungle and a new car—or clothes or electronics—is purchased for cash in Conakry. The merchandise can be delivered to the buyer in the forest or it can be stored in Guinea for later pickup.

  The nomadic Mandingos were also largely responsible, according to the UN, for trafficking Sierra Leone diamonds to points on the west coast beyond Conakry and Monrovia, as if they get cleaner the farther they’re moved from the scene of the crime. Places like The Gambia are as notorious as Liberia in terms of its reputation as a conflict-diamond laundry. The Gambia has no diamond mines and yet managed to export to Belgium some $100 million worth of diamonds between 1996 and 1999, the height of RUF mining activity. Every one of the Belgian companies that imports stones from The Gambia also imports them from Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. The explanation is that there are nomadic traders like Mandingos wandering the coast looking for buyers—for some reason, they often find their way to The Gambia, which has been described as a mini-Antwerp by the UN—and the Gambian exporters are simply and legally buying rough on the open market. But the only reason the diamonds would be in The Gambia, one unidentified company admitted to UN investigators, is because they were smuggled there to avoid export taxes in another country or to hide their pedigree as conflict goods. One estimate put 90 percent of all goods exported from The Gambia as likely coming from Sierra Leone.

  Farther to the east, the same is true of Ivory Coast: The country is capable of producing about 75,000 carats a year from its modest mines but somehow managed to export thirteen times that amount from 1994 to 1999. The Mandingos represent a subcom-munity of illicit traffickers and they didn’t care who they dealt with, captor or prisoner, if it meant getting good stones. If you wanted to escape forced labor in an RUF mine, you traded diamonds to the Mandingos for your life.10

  But before Jango was able to take the final step of offering a few of his stones to one of the dealers in exchange for being ferreted out of the mine, he was presented with another opportunity: a brand new mountain bike, left recklessly in one of the small hamlets near the mining complex by its owner. Seizing the chance, Jango walked as casually as he could over to the bike, calmly mounted it, and rode away on it, six hot rocks in his pocket.

  But his escape wasn’t to be without some drama. After peddling all day through the green tunnel of the rain forest, he stopped to rest at another village. He still had no idea where he was, but the bristling barrels of AK-47s jutting from over most shoulders told him that he was still deep in RUF territory. Jango managed to blend in and everyone assumed that he was also a rebel. After a meal and some water, he prepared to mount his bike and continue the journey. A soldier asked him for a cigarette and, perhaps lulled into a sense of safety by his good luck, Jango withdrew a battered pack of 555 cigarettes. Three diamonds fell out of a hole in the bottom of the pack as he was reaching in for a smoke.

  Instinctively, Jango slid his foot over the stones lying on the ground, but the soldier had seen them too. Like a cheerleader nimbly handling a baton, the rebel whipped his AK off his shoulder and drew the bolt.

  “Move your foot,” he ordered quietly. No one else was paying attention; the sight of people pointing guns at one another, even those in the same unit, was common enough among the RUF. Jango did as he was told and the stones glittered up, reflecting the equatorial sunlight as only diamonds can.

  The soldier bent down and picked them up. “Good stones,” he said, rolling them around in the palm of his hand. Jango nodded.

  “What do you want for them?”

  On the run, fresh from imprisonment, certain he would die before the end of the day, Jango made his first diamond sale. With that one transaction, he became a businessman, arranging sales between the RUF in Kono and smugglers like Singer in Freetown.

  3

  THE GUN RUNNERS: From Tongo to Tiffany’s

  Monrovia, Liberia

  OSMAN WAS A MAN whose malignancy ensured him an invisible bubble of personal space. Everywhere he went, people moved out of the way. Children scattered before him like chickens, glancing quickly over their shoulders to see if he was going to follow them into stone doorways or around corners. A small but powerful-looking man with a face like a wrinkled sponge, Osman was a heavy drinker who liked to brandish sharp knives, and there was no telling when he would reach the point of inebriation that would cause him to whip out a blade and scream that he was the baddest former RUF soldier in Freetown. His reputation was so fierce that his battle-group name was General Motherfucker.

  The fact that this was not true only increased the berth people give him. Only a lunatic, they figured, would proudly claim to have fought with the RUF when in fact he was their prisoner for nearly two years. In his lucid moments, when he was not menacing neighbors with knives and cutlasses, even Osman himself would admit that he was probably quite insane. He only purported to have been RUF, he said, because admitting to being a victim was too humiliating.

  It’s easy to see that Osman was once a powerful man; his body has maintained the shape and muscle tone, but now he’s stooped and steps gingerly, as if in constant pain. A miner by trade, Osman was popular in Kono before the war because of his beautiful singing voice. Instead of trading diamonds to profess their love, couples preparing for marriage would hire Osman to sing tribal love songs at their ceremonies. Like Jango, Osman was captured by the RUF during Operation Clean Sweep.

  When Jango and hundreds like him found diamonds, the stones were placed in leather bags and delivered to units like the one that imprisoned Osman. He was a prisoner of the so-called Bastard Brigade—it was composed of
orphans—and his commander was a man who called himself Man Friday. Osman’s job was simple: He walked nonstop from the Kono mines to the Liberian border near Kailahun—a 50-mile round-trip—and back again, repeatedly, for two years. He and twenty-four other mules were guarded by five heavily armed RUF soldiers who threatened to chop their Achilles tendons with machetes if they didn’t keep up a quick pace through the forest. On the way to Liberia, the prisoners carried only food and water. The RUF carried the diamonds and Osman has still never laid eyes on one. “Prisoners were never allowed to see the stones,” he said.

  Once at the border, they would meet Liberians with crates of ammunition and weapons in the beds of pickup trucks and larger trucks belonging to timber companies, whose owners had close connections to Liberian president Charles Taylor. They traded the diamonds for the guns, a simple transaction in which the bag of diamonds was given to whomever was in charge of the Liberian group. Once everything was in order, Osman and the other prisoners would be loaded up. They carried brand new rifles and RPG tubes at the head of the line, while the ammo and grenades were carried at the rear so that the prisoners would be less likely to stage a revolt. Then they would cross back into Sierra Leone and return to the mines, the most difficult and dangerous part of the journey. The mules were required to carry up to 100 kilos of equipment each, and a twisted ankle, fatigue, or even a slow pace was enough of an excuse for their RUF captors to shoot them and dump their bodies in the woods. Then the others would have to divide the unfortunate man’s load, making it all the more difficult for them to avoid a similar fate.