Blood Diamonds Read online

  The life span of a mule was not long. Even if they avoided tripping, managed to keep up with the RUF, and somehow maintained enough health to keep going, it was only a matter of time before their bodies wore down. Osman began having debilitating back pain and severe arthritis in his arms and shoulders. He knew he was drawing closer to earning himself a bullet.

  Before he met that fate, however, on another munitions trading trip his mule train was mistaken for an RUF patrol and attacked by Kamajors who exploded from the jungle, belching horizontal fireworks from the carpet of foliage. Osman watched as a Kamajor, barefoot and clad only in camouflage shorts and a wool ski hat decorated with fetishes and shotgun shells, walked from the woods directly up to one of the other prisoners—who was frozen with shock and fear—and shot him in the face with a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun. He said he’d never seen anything as frightening as that attack. The Kamajors seemed unaware that the RUF soldiers were returning fire, as they were wildly killing most of those in the prisoner column and smearing their faces and chests with the blood of the vanquished. As he was about to be killed himself, by a man wielding a sword, he was recognized by one of the Kamajors. Osman explained that half the dead littering the footpath were prisoners and the Kamajors, after dispatching the RUF guards, turned the survivors free. They took a massive cache of diamonds from Man Friday’s body and bled back into the bush.

  Within a week of being turned loose by the Kamajors, Osman managed to hitch a ride to Freetown, where he embarked on his ongoing relationship with palm wine, gradually losing his mind to the things he’d seen.

  THE AK-47 ASSAULT RIFLE is the bread and butter of armed conflicts the world over. Now used by more than fifty armies, the weapon was invented in 1947 by Red Army soldier Mikhail Kalashnikov and adopted for regular use in the Soviet army in 1949. Its distinctive crescent-shaped magazine holds 30 rounds of 7.62 ×39-millimeter cartridges that can be fired at a rate of 400 rounds per minute, with a muzzle velocity of 2,240 feet per second. Loaded, the AK-47 weighs almost 11 pounds, light enough for a medium-sized child to carry with little difficulty, and because of the simple chamber /action design it is almost impossible to jam. Tooling standards were kept intentionally loose so it could withstand serious abuse on the battlefield; therefore, AKs tend to rattle a lot when fired on full automatic and they don’t even need to be properly assembled for them to function or even be reasonably accurate. Made from as much stamped metal and as little milled metal as possible to keep manufacturing costs low, AKs are cheap. Kalashnikov firearms are a guerilla’s best friend and Sierra Leone is awash in them.

  The United Nations has active arms embargoes on both Sierra Leone and Liberia, while the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has instituted an arms moratorium over all fifteen of its member states.1 Arms-producing countries have signed an agreement to voluntarily monitor and control their arms exports to unstable regions. Nevertheless, West Africa is up to its armpits in weapons.

  Because of their diamond wealth, throughout most of the war the RUF was better armed than its adversaries. Diamonds bought Kalashnikovs by the hundreds, Browning 12.7-millimeter heavy machine guns by the tens of dozens, and ammunition in million-block orders. Light artillery included rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, and SA-7 shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles. The RUF bought helicopters for resupply and, whenever they could, they stole trucks, armored fighting vehicles, and armored personnel carriers from the Sierra Leone Army and ECOMOG. The RUF funded all this with proceeds from illegal diamond mining.2

  In order to trade their diamonds for rifles and ammunition, RUF rebels had to rely on the sympathetic government of President Charles Taylor in Liberia. A Lebanese businessman named Talal El-Ndine, a close aide of Taylor’s, provided the vital link for weapons transactions: He not only distributed pay to Liberian and RUF diamond smugglers bringing goods across the border, but he then sold the goods to diamond merchants who in turn exported them to Belgium. El-Ndine paid cash to a small cadre of arms smugglers who flew weapons unimpeded from Eastern Europe to Liberia for use in Sierra Leone.3

  The process of running guns into West Africa seems to be as easy as smuggling diamonds out, although there are more strategic hurdles. Airspace over Africa’s west coast is largely as anonymous as it was before the invention of the airplane. Even some important regional airports lack such basic avionics as radar, allowing all sorts of planes from every imaginable origin to fly completely undetected anywhere they like. The only things that can see the entirety of West African airspace are U.S. spy satellites, but they can be avoided simply by flying at night. The precision and high degree of organization of the RUF’s gunrunning operations is a powerful testament to the financial might of the diamonds they mine and sell to unsuspecting jewelers and lovers throughout the world. Almost none of it would be possible without the active participation of Liberia and its despotic leader, President Taylor.

  For one thing, Liberia provides a safe harbor for anyone wishing to keep their aircraft sheltered from scrutiny, and a Liberian corporate identity can be obtained in one day without the need to list officers, owners, or shareholders. Once an airplane is registered in Liberia, it can be based in another country and used anywhere in the world, often leaving little evidence of its travels.

  At least fifteen aircraft identified by the UN as being involved in gunrunning, and purporting to be registered with Liberia’s Civil Aviation Regulatory Authority, weren’t among the mere seven planes the country claims to have registered. One of the missing planes is an Ilyushin 76, a Liberian “registered” plane based at the Sharjah Airport in the United Arab Emirates that is alleged to have couriered weapons to Angola, Congo, and Sierra Leone via Liberia throughout the 1990s. Owned by a Tajik-born former KGB officer named Victor Bout, the UN is aware of at least four flights this plane has made into Liberia in 2000 to deliver cargo that included military helicopters, spare rotors, antitank and antiaircraft systems, missiles, armored vehicles, machine guns, and ammunition. As a UN report notes: “It is difficult to conceal something the size of an Mi-17 military helicopter, and the supply of such items to Liberia cannot go undetected by customs authorities in originating countries unless there are false flight plans and end-user certificates, or unless customs officials at points of exit are paid to look the other way. The constant involvement of Bout’s aircraft in arms shipments from eastern Europe into African war zones suggests the latter.”4

  Liberia and Sierra Leone are two of the poorest countries on earth, and arranging illegal arms shipments from Eastern Europe is no inexpensive endeavor. The diamonds that Osman and hundreds of others helped ferret to the Liberian border are the only currency available to facilitate such a far-reaching scheme to deliver guns into remote jungles. The diamonds are either converted into hard cash—U.S. dollars or euros—through merchants who visit Monrovia regularly to buy diamonds and take them back to Belgium, or the gems themselves are used as payment to pilots like Bout, who finds his own markets for them.

  Bout is said to own about fifty aircraft through dozens of small airline companies. Though most of his aircraft stay in the UAE, he’s used the Liberian registry to, in a sense, launder their identity and thwart regulators. Prior to using the Liberian flag for his planes, he registered them through Swaziland unbeknown to that country’s government. When it discovered the fraud, Swaziland deregistered forty-three aircraft owned by Bout and reported the action to the civil registry of UAE because it suspected that they were used for weapons trafficking, noting that Bout’s airplanes “did not operate from Swaziland.”5

  The four known 2000 shipments were coordinated with the help of a Kenyan named Sanjivan Ruprah, who, like most others in the sordid diamonds-for-weapons tapestry, also has a colorful history of intrigue. Ruprah was associated with Branch Energy–Kenya, a company that in the late 1990s owned diamond-mining rights in Sierra Leone, which were acquired from the South African mercenary corporation Executive Outcomes.

  Ruprah was tapped by Ch
arles Taylor to act as his “Global Civil Aviation Agent Worldwide” for the Liberian Civil Aviation Regulatory Authority. Ostensibly, his job was to track down illegally registered airplanes like those owned by Bout; according to the UN, his job actually involved helping those aircraft deliver weapons to the RUF. In the summer of 2000, aircraft supposedly carrying attack helicopters bound for Ivory Coast landed in Abidjan under the authorization of a company called Abidjan Freight, a front company set up by Ruprah to disguise the routing of Bout’s cargo and its final destination. In truth, the planes were empty. The choppers had been off-loaded in Monrovia.6

  Bout is hardly alone in this business. Another major player is Israeli businessman Leonid Menin, a Ukrainian-born arms trafficker who uses the RUF-sympathetic government of Burkina Faso to facilitate his deliveries. An extensively documented case study of one delivery demonstrates both the complexity and the far-reaching nature of how AK-47s move from distant manufacturing plants to the bush, transactions that take place solely through the RUF’s sale of diamonds into legitimate trading channels.

  ON MAY 13, 1999, 68 TONS of weapons arrived in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. The manifest listed 715 crates of small arms and ammunition, antitank weapons, surface-to-air missiles, and RPG tubes and warheads. The shipment was part of a contract between a Gibraltar-based acquisitions company acting on behalf of the Burkina Faso Ministry of Defense and a Ukrainian arms manufacturer. A license for the sale was granted by the Ukrainian government after it received an end-user certificate for Burkina Faso. Legitimate arms sales must have such certificates, as well as a slew of other paperwork, such as an export license, an airway bill, and a detailed manifest of the cargo. The end-user certificate permitted the Gibraltar company to purchase the weapons on behalf of Burkina Faso and meant that only Burkina Faso could use the weapons. The certificate was signed by Lieutenant Colonel Gilbert Diendéré, head of Burkina Faso’s Presidential Guard. A British airline under contract with a Ukrainian freight company delivered the cargo to Ouagadougou.

  But it didn’t remain there long.

  While the shipment was being prepared in Ukraine, a BAC-111 owned by Menin flew from Ibiza, Spain, to Monrovia. The aircraft was a VIP jetliner that had been used in 1998 and 1999 as Taylor’s presidential jet. Taylor and Menin were close friends. An alleged art thief, mob boss, gunrunner, and money-launderer, Menin has been arrested dozens of times in several countries, travels under a variety of passports and aliases, and is barred from entering certain countries, including his home country, Ukraine. Menin’s plane stayed at Robertsfield Airport in Monrovia until May 15, two days after the weapons shipment had arrived in Burkina Faso. For the remainder of the month, the plane made at least eight runs between Liberia and Burkina Faso, ferrying the weapons from one country to the other. Then it returned to Spain.

  This wasn’t the first time the plane is believed to have been used for gunrunning. While in use as Taylor’s official diplomatic aircraft, it also made at least two flights to Niamey Airport in Niger, where it loaded up with weapons, and returned to Monrovia, where they were off-loaded onto Liberian military vehicles. This occurred only a few days before one of the RUF’s bloodiest assaults, the infamous Operation No Living Thing conducted in Freetown on January 6, 1999.

  While in Monrovia, the aircraft are stored in hangers at Robertsfield owned by Dutch national Gus Van Kouwenhoven, who had bought them from Emmanuel Shaw, Taylor’s former finance minister. Van Kouwenhoven also owns the Hotel Africa in Monrovia, a popular place for gunrunning pilots to bed down on overnight stays.

  Once the weapons are in Monrovia, they are driven to the Sierra Leone border in trucks owned by Van Kouwenhoven or Israeli businessman Simon Rosenblum. Both men own interests in timber companies operating within Liberia; Van Kouwenhoven’s is Malaysian, Rosenblum’s is based in Abidjan. Both companies are involved in building and maintaining roads within Liberia to facilitate timber traffic, and many of those roads are conveniently close to the Sierra Leone border and are used to transport weapons. Another close friend of Taylor, Rosenblum travels on a Liberian diplomatic passport.

  At the border, the weapons are either walked into Sierra Leone via human mule-train or loaded onto trucks and armored personnel vehicles the RUF has stolen from ECOMOG or UNAMSIL during ambushes. In the past, helicopters that were delivered by Victor Bout would fly the weapons from their jungle bases in Liberia to the RUF’s eastern Sierra Leone strongholds of Beudu or Kailahun.7

  Such an operation is immensely expensive. A buyer must pay not only for the weapons but also for freight, fuel, transport, labor, and equipment for several arduous legs of a cross-continent journey, and there would have to be substantial kickbacks for participating countries like Burkina Faso, since charges of sanction-busting are serious and could carry heavy international consequences. Every major player along the route, from the end-user signatory in Burkina Faso to the pilots to timber company representatives to the president of Liberia—as well as an untold number of government officials who provide cover through the issuance of diplomatic passports and aircraft registration—demands substantial compensation for their illegal work. And there was no lack of Sierra Leone’s wealth to be found in Liberia for just that purpose. Liberia has its own diamond fields, but according to a report issued by Partnership Africa Canada, “While the estimates of Liberian diamond mining output are between 100,000 and 150,000 carats, the [Diamond High Council, based in Antwerp] records Liberian imports into Belgium of over 31 million carats between 1994 and 1998—an average of over six million carats a year.”8

  Most of the cash transactions take place in El-Ndine’s office on Old Road in Monrovia. Pilots, arms traffickers, diamond smugglers, diamond buyers, and wheel-greasers of all shades meet there to get their cut of Sierra Leone’s smuggled wealth.

  ON THE OTHERS IDE of the front line, the Sierra Leone government was broke. It could barely afford to pay and feed its soldiers, much less equip them with top-notch military hardware.

  The war in Sierra Leone reached one of its many murky lows in 1995. Ignored by every country in the world, including its neighbors, which either had their own problems to contend with or were actively helping the rebels, Sierra Leone was bankrupt and in danger of being overrun by the RUF. Refugee movement was cyclonic; they roamed everywhere—even into Liberia and back as, indeed, many Liberians were doing—looking for a safe haven, then picked up and moved again when they found none. The army was a shambles and most battles in the bush involved different factions blindly firing magazines of ammo toward the other and then running for cover. The recently formed Kamajor militia was armed with axes, spears, and the odd shotgun or two, hardly the arsenal needed to deal with the RUF’s constantly resupplied stock of Kalashnikovs, FN rifles, and rocket launchers.

  Equally problematic was the fact that, since the RUF launched its first attack in 1991, the Sierra Leone government has been a revolving door for one inept military leader after another. When the RUF first struck, the government was headed by a man named Joseph Momoh, the head of the Sierra Leone armed forces since 1971 who, in 1989, inherited a one-party government, a nonexistent economy, and a highly agitated and disenfranchised citizenry from his dictatorial predecessor, Saika Stevens.

  By 1991, Sierra Leone was ripe for a revolution. Decades of government corruption and one-party rule under Stevens’s iron fist had ruined the national economy to the point where Sierra Leone was one of the poorest countries on earth. In the early 1990s, while Freetown enjoyed modern amenities such as paved streets, fairly reliable electricity, and regular imports of foreign goods, the remaining 95 percent of the country was still living in the dark ages. Only one 50-mile stretch of road in the bush (out of 7,000 miles of roads) is reasonably enough paved to allow vehicles to travel the speed limit. Electricity in the larger towns like Bo and Makeni was generally unreliable, and farther east it was nonexistent except through Honda generators. Medical facilities and schools were woefully inadequate, if they existed at all.
Slash-and-burn agriculture struggled to sustain a population that was multiplying with each passing year. Diseases like polio, malaria, and river blindness plagued those living in the bush and many felt that they’d been completely forgotten by their government in Freetown. And looming over all this unrest was the indignation of foreign-controlled diamond mines and the presence of wealthy Lebanese merchants. If these rocks were as valuable as everyone says they are, the sentiment was, then why aren’t the rural villagers benefiting from them?

  Along with three other Sierra Leoneans schooled in the “art of revolution” by Libyan president Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, former Sierra Leone Army (SLA) corporal Foday Sankoh trained about 100 men in northwestern Liberian camps run by Taylor’s rebellion, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL). In 1991, Sankoh’s soldiers of the newly formed Revolutionary United Front marched into Sierra Leone and captured Kailahun District.

  At first, the RUF was greeted as a heroic army that would return the country to a multiparty government that could achieve better equity in wealth distribution. The best way to get the current government’s attention, it seemed, was to capture some of their diamond mines, holding them for ransom for a more democratic system and a brighter future for the majority of the country’s citizens, who lived much like their ancestors had in the provinces.

  But instead of rolling into the diamond areas and seeking the support of the locals, the RUF killed and mutilated them. Composed of mostly uneducated youths with no other outlet for their sense of disenfranchisement, the RUF was quickly revealed as an army of murderous thugs rather than justice-seeking rebels. RUF fighters fueled this impression at every opportunity. Field commanders adopted nicknames that both inspired terror and revealed their ruthlessness. Soldiers were named Rambo, Blood Master, Blood Center, What Trouble, and Wicked to Women. Their “tactics” of warfare were unbelievably brutal. Sometimes, after capturing a village, RUF fighters would gather civilian prisoners in the town square and make them choose small strips of paper from the ground that described different forms of torture and death, such as “chop off hands,” “chop off head,” or simply “be killed.” Soldiers would bet with one another about the sex of pregnant women’s unborn children. Winners were determined after the baby had been removed from the womb with a bayonet. In one instance, a young boy was beaten and roasted nearly to death on a spit in front of his mother for refusing to kill her. The RUF’s depravity served a military strategy: It induced tectonic population shifts away from the diamond areas.