Blood Diamonds Page 9
Ibrahim Abdullah and Patrick Muana, writing in a compendium of articles about African guerilla movements, describe the RUF’s goals, or lack thereof, as succinctly as anyone:The RUF has defied all available typolog ies on guerilla movements. It is neither a separatist uprising rooted in a specific demand, as in the case of Eritrea, nor a reformist movement with a radical agenda superior to the regime it sought to overthrow. Nor does it possess the kind of leadership that would be necessary to designate it as [a] warlord insurgency. The RUF has made history; it is a peculiar guerilla movement without any significant national following or ethnic support. Perhaps because of its lumpen social base and its lack of an emancipatory programme to garner support from other social groups, it has remained a bandit organization solely driven by the survivalist needs of its predominantly uneducated and alienated battle front and battle group commanders. Neither the peasantry, the natural ally of most revolutionary movements, nor the students, amongst whose ranks the RUF-to-be originated, lent any support to the organization during its [first] six years of fighting.9
The RUF’s almost instant alienation of the people they were purportedly fighting on behalf of allowed Momoh to rally a defense by dispatching the Sierra Leone Army to quell the uprising, a force that was bolstered with a formidable—but totally undisciplined—“volunteer brigade” of bums and criminals from Freetown.
Momoh acted as any head of state would have by dispatching the army to deal with the insurgency, but unlike most other heads of state, he neglected to pay his soldiers. And those soldiers got stomped. Sierra Leone has never been at war with anything other than itself and the army was poorly prepared to fight in the bush against the comparatively more astute and better-armed RUF, whose leaders had been trained in guerilla warfare by Libyan leader Qaddafi. In fact, other than participating in the odd coup once or twice a decade, Sierra Leone Army soldiers were mostly called upon to carry the national flag during federal holidays and march at arms at Lungi Airport when important foreign diplomats paid a visit. And now they were getting slaughtered in their own jungles and not getting paid for it.
In 1992, 27-year-old SLA Captain Valentine Strasser decided that enough was enough and marched a band of soldiers from the battlefield in the Kailahun District back to Freetown to demand their pay. When that failed within hours of arriving, he persuaded his followers to join him in overthrowing the government. The coup was popular in Freetown: Momoh had been promising a return to multiparty politics under mounting pressure from citizens who’d had enough ineffective one-party leadership, but he’d used the war with the RUF as an excuse to postpone elections. Strasser set up the National Provisional Ruling Council, the NPRC, and was sworn in as the youngest head of state in Sierra Leone’s history. Despite the fact that later in 1992 he executed twenty-five people suspected of plotting a countercoup, he was a popular leader. He instituted a monthly program called National Cleaning Day, during which the country virtually shuts down while residents clean their yards and roadways, successfully campaigned for residents to pay their income taxes, and promised elections and a return to civilian rule by 1995.
But these efforts paled in comparison to the ongoing slaughter taking place in the provinces. The RUF cranked up its efforts to capture diamond fields and, by 1994, the northern and eastern portions of the country had descended into complete anarchy, a murderous black hole where only the AK-47 held authority. Diamond fields fell one after the other and the RUF was on course to roll straight into Freetown before the end of the year. In 1995, Strasser made a bold and controversial decision that delayed the inevitable fall of Freetown: He hired a private army to fight the RUF.
The use of mercenaries in warfare is as old as human conflict itself. In the words of P. J. O’Rourke, war is a great asshole magnet, attracting all types of human flotsam to the battlefield for reasons of their own. American mercenaries fought with the Croatian Army in the Balkans while Russian soldiers of fortune fought for their enemies, the Serbs, on the other side of the front lines. In any conflict involving Muslim forces, mujahideen fighters trekked from Iran, Saudia Arabia, and Afghanistan to help the cause. Some do it for the money, some for the thrill of killing, some for ideology. In Africa, the man who symbolized the international diamond industry, De Beers founder Cecil Rhodes, used an army of mercenaries in 1893 to beat down the Matabele people in what is now Zimbabwe; each soldier who volunteered was given nine square miles of land and two gold claims, an amount that equaled roughly 10,000 pounds sterling. Rhodes conquered the territory for the sake of his British South Africa Company, a gold-mining venture, and he named the country Rhodesia, after himself.
But while mercenaries of old still exist—that is, men who will fight for any cause so long as the price is right—they tend to be both unreliable and unprofessional. Within the past few decades, some former soldiers have changed the face of “mercenaries” into legitimate private armies, run by companies with articles of incorporation, profits and losses, and strict codes of conduct. The first company Strasser hired was Gurkha Security Guards, under the leadership of American Vietnam veteran Robert MacKenzie. Ironically, prior to going to Sierra Leone, MacKenzie had served in the Rhodesian Army.
MacKenzie’s efforts in Sierra Leone didn’t bear much fruit. After two weeks of training SLA and Kamajor fighters in the bush, he was killed in an RUF ambush near Port Loko, near the coast. Rumor has it that his remains were eaten by the RUF. The remainder of the Gurkha force refused to mount a counteroffensive and their contract was quickly canceled.
Strasser turned next to Executive Outcomes, a South African security company that is to private armies what De Beers is to diamonds. Founded in 1989 by Eeben Barlow, a former South African special forces officer, EO is either the embodiment of all the worst things about mercenaries or a source of stability and security in a continent that has been effectively abandoned by Europe and America to fend for itself. It depends on whom you ask.
EO’s operations are necessarily shady. It’s known that the company has worked extensively in Angola against the UNITA rebels, who also illegally mine and sell diamonds, and in Papua New Guinea and perhaps Colombia. The company is capable of rapidly deploying a battalion-strength force almost anywhere in the world with impressive asset support. EO owns a slew of armored fighting vehicles: two Boeing 727s and a C-47, attack aircraft such as Mi-24 gunships and two MiG-23 /27 fighter planes, and all manner of light and medium artillery. According to its glossy brochures, EO provides its clients (either directly or through affiliated companies) military training and VIP protection; gold, diamond, and oil exploration and mining; airline transport; civil engineering; and even a chartered accountancy and offshore financial management services. Finally, EO also provides its own Russian technicians, medical support, intelligence, and infrared photo reconnaissance, and, before the company dissolved in 1999, was reportedly contracting with private firms to provide satellite imagery. With fourteen permanent staff at the time of its intervention in Sierra Leone, EO maintained a database of possible recruits numbering around 2,000.10
Hiring Executive Outcomes was not cheap, but if Strasser’s government lacked money, it surely had diamond mines and exploration concessions to give away. A contract was signed with EO that in effect legalized war bounty. If the company could rout the rebels from the diamond areas, the government would grant it rights to those mines. EO has done this before—most notably in Angola—and was familiar with handling the complexities of the arrangement. Sierra Leone quickly saw its only decisive military victory against the rebels. A mercenary force of about 200 men, supported by an Mi-24 gunship, retrained the SLA and in a matter of weeks drove the RUF back from the capital and recaptured the country’s diamond mines, including the most valuable ones in Kono. EO’s presence provided Freetown’s only period of stability and security—however brief—throughout the 1990s. The company established an effective intelligence service in Sierra Leone, which still operates; rebuilt supply and communications networks; and trained and eq
uipped the Kamajors.
The government paid EO in diamond-mining concessions and EO promptly sold the rights to a close “friend,” Branch Energy Limited. Branch Energy is incorporated through South Africa and the Isle of Man and is a wholly owned subsidiary of DiamondWorks, a Canadian exploration company. Not surprisingly, the company has a checkered past in African war zones. In Angola in 1997, Branch hired a security company called Teleservices that was owned by Executive Outcomes. Its responsibility was to secure future mining regions so that Branch could begin operations. Tele-service’s security apparatus was headed by South African J. C. Erasmus, a man the South African Weekly Mail & Guardian called a “former member of apartheid South Africa’s notorious Civil Co-operation Bureau death squad.” Erasmus told a reporter for the newspaper that Branch and EO were “good friends.”11
Combined with Branch’s new EO-gained holdings in Sierra Leone, the company owned two kimberlite complexes, four alluvial fields, two minor development projects, and one exploration project in two African war zones. The holdings were said to potentially yield 20 million carats, with production peaking at over a million carats per year.12 DiamondWorks later took over Branch’s Sierra Leone operations, but the company still maintains a presence. (British press reports that EO owned 40 percent of Branch Energy have been repeatedly and vociferously denied by DiamondWorks representatives, who claim that there is no connection at all between the mercenary company and their diamond companies.)
IN SPITE OF THE IMPRESSIVE RESULTS of the EO operation, many world leaders balked at the morality of hiring private soldiers to conduct war for governments. Never mind that for years Europe and America had been promising funds to train and equip a pan-African peacekeeping force that never materialized and that Executive Outcomes had prevented a coup against Strasser and an untold number of civilian deaths at the hands of the RUF, and had also effectively ended illegal diamond mining. The message from the world community was clear: Get rid of EO or else. That was more or less the directive from the International Monetary Fund, which was withholding financial aid on those very grounds.
Strasser capitulated and canceled the EO contract. The company’s helicopters were barely out of sight when chaos erupted again. In January 1996 he was overthrown in a coup led by Julius Bio and the RUF once again captured the diamond areas, including those in Kono. Nevertheless, previously scheduled elections were held two months later and Ahmad Tejan Kabbah was elected president, but he didn’t get a chance to lead for long. Another coup followed soon after he asked his citizens to “join hands for the future of Sierra Leone,” and bag after bag of amputated human hands began to appear on the steps of the presidential palace. This time the coup was led by Johnny Paul Koroma, who headed a new rebel group, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), a band of former army soldiers who were aligned with the RUF.
Less than a year and a half after EO’s departure, the capital fell to combined AFRC/RUF forces on May 25, 1997, in an unprecedented assault on Freetown’s civilian population and ECOMOG observers.
4
DEATH BY DIAMONDS: Operation No Living Thing
Freetown, Sierra Leone
Much of our wealth has come from things most people have little knowledge of. They should have been a blessing; instead they are a curse. They have torn Sierra Leone apart in a bloody civil war, because who controls them controls the country. They are diamonds.
SORIOUS SAMURA,
director of Cry Freetown
IF THINGS IN SIERRA LEONE were bad before 1997, they were destined to only get worse. By the time Johnny Paul Koroma’s AFRC junta had taken control of the government with the help of 600 criminals released from a Freetown prison by mutinous army soldiers, it seemed that everyone wanted to get their hands on Sierra Leone’s diamonds and would stop at nothing to do it. While the RUF quickly regained control of the diamond mines they’d lost to Executive Outcomes in the east, joint AFRC/RUF forces concentrated on securing the capital in a bid to take over the entire country. Still, the United Nations and the Western world did nothing; only a small force of ECOMOG soldiers and observers prevented complete anarchy.
Before the end of the decade, however, repercussions of the RUF diamond war would ripple across the world, creating turmoil in the UN Security Council, involving the fighting forces of some thirty countries that would contribute soldiers to a UN-led peacekeeping mission, and sparking political controversy in Great Britain. Countless diamonds were being openly stolen from the country’s eastern mines and sold unimpeded to the world market, and the chaos they sparked in Sierra Leone would eventually attract the world’s attention and start sucking the resources of developed nations into the morass.
On May 25, 1997, RUF and AFRC soldiers marched through Freetown’s downtown streets shooting at anything that moved, the opening assault of a bloody coup that would send President Kabbah into exile and leave the killers in control. The judiciary building at the center of town is still pockmarked from small-arms fire and the landmark City Hotel, where novelist Graham Greene wrote his celebrated book The Heart of the Matter, was flattened. The streets were filled with the sound of gunfire and the silhouettes of people scuttling into fire-blackened doorways while bullets and rockets ripped through the air around them. The ammunition and weapons were provided by sales of diamonds, which were giving the RUF millions of dollars of spending money a year. Fighters looted downtown stores and, drunk on a sense of invincibility, they donned women’s wigs to add further terror to their assault. They smoked marijuana between volleys of gunfire with ECOMOG troops, who were busily retreating west toward Aberdeen and the capital’s edge.
Once-vibrant markets were deserted, their tables overturned and their wares spilled into the street along with the sprawled bodies of the dead. Pandemonium broke out among Freetown’s population and people fled into the wooded hills surrounding the city or stole canoes to row out to the safety of the sea. U.S. Marines stationed in Monrovia flew helicopters to the Hotel Bintumani in Aberdeen to evacuate diplomats and U.S. citizens ahead of the wave of RUF advancing from the city center ten miles to the east. At the time, this was the extent of the West’s involvement in a country that provided it with millions of dollars worth of diamonds every year.
Meanwhile, ECOMOG, the country’s only hope, was cornered in the basement of the Mammy Yoko Hotel, surrounded on all sides by AFRC and RUF forces. The hotel was rocked with rocket-propelled grenades and chipped away by AK-47 rounds. Staff were forced to walk into the storm of bullets carrying bed sheets on which they’d written “We are RUF!” with black electrical tape in the hopes of escaping alive. Dozens of them made it, but most of the Nigerian ECOMOG soldiers trapped inside did not.
Further down the beach, the AFRC took over the Freetown Golf Club and installed an antiaircraft gun on the roof of the clubhouse to shoot at the Nigerian alpha jets that streaked in from the sea to bomb targets in the city.
Days into the coup, hundreds of bodies rotted in the street and in the surf and Freetown’s postcard-perfect beaches were littered with bones and skulls.
The bloodshed didn’t raise much publicity outside of West Africa. Most international media organizations wisely pulled their journalists out of the country and Sierra Leone’s descent into anarchy was given little more than perfunctory treatment in the U.S. press. Humbled by a disastrous African intervention in Somalia four years earlier—in which eighteen U.S. soldiers were killed in Mogadishu—there were no calls for humanitarian or military intervention from the United States. Another factor that probably lowered enthusiasm for involvement was that it was difficult to understand a motive for the bloodletting from afar; only those in the international diamond industry who understood that the war was simply an economic activity could place the warfare into an understandable context. Most of the world knew nothing of the connection between Sierra Leone’s diamonds and its war, however, and dismissed the conflict as a confusing and tragic waste.
Kabbah fled to neighboring Guinea and immediately
began desperate negotiations with arms dealers to equip an army that had been left gutted by EO’s withdrawal. Finding little support from developed countries, Kabbah was forced to look to the fringe of the military supply industry, and one of the men he dealt with was Rakesh Saxena, a man memorably described by UK foreign secretary Robin Cook as “an Indian businessman, traveling on the passport of a dead Serb, awaiting extradition from Canada for alleged embezzlement from a bank in Thailand.” The weapons were to be delivered to Kabbah’s soldiers—the remnants of the effectively disbanded SLA who fought alongside ECOMOG—through a private British arms dealer, Sandline International, a company with close ties to Executive Outcomes. Again, the guns were going to be paid for with diamond-mining concessions, the only thing of value in Sierra Leone and the one thing that kept the warfare at a high pitch.1
There was, however, a problem. In the wake of the coup ousting Kabbah, the UN drafted a poorly worded resolution that was mostly composed by British lawmakers imposing an arms embargo on Sierra Leone. But according to the wording of the resolution, the embargo applied not only to the occupying junta, but also to the legitimate government that the British supported and wanted to see returned to power. British lawmakers interpreted the resolution as a blanket ban on weapons to Sierra Leone, regardless of whom they were destined for.