BLOOD DIAMONDS.

(From Sierra Leone)

by Greg Campbell Greg

Campbell is the author of the forthcoming Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World's Most Precious Stones (Westview Press, 2002).

for Amnesty Now, Fall 2002, pp.4-7.

Illicit diamonds make fabulous profits for terrorists and corporations alike. The trade illustrates with the hard clarity of the gem itself that no matter where human rights violations occur, the world ignores them at its peril. A report from Sierra Leone. In April 2001, when Jusu Lahia was 15 years old, he was wounded by an exploding rocket-propelled grenade. A lieutenant in Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front (RUE), Labia was picked off during a battle in one of the most remote corners of the planet. He was among thousands of victims of a war fought for control of one of the world's most precious commodities: a fortune in raw diamonds that have made their way from the deadly jungles of Sierra Leone onto the rings and necklaces of happy lovers the world over.

Arms merchants, feeding on the diamond trade, bankrolled local armies and made fortunes for transnational corporations. The profits also filled the coffers of Al Qaeda, and possibly Hezbollah---terrorist organizations notorious for committing human rights violations, including crimes against humanity.

When Labia sprawled to the earth---shards of hot metal ripped his body from face to groin, destroying his left eye---few who eventually wore the gems he fought over could even locate Sierra Leone. And fewer still could find the Parrot's Beak, a small wedge of land that juts between the borders of neighboring Liberia and Guinea, directly into the line of fire between warring rebel factions in those countries. Rebel forces of all three nations were shooting it out with one another, as well as with the legitimate governments of all three countries and with an unknown number of local indigenous militias that were fighting for reasons of their own. The baffling and intense crossfire made the Parrot's Beak one of the deadliest so-square-mile plots of land on the planet in 2001, and when Labia went down in a hail of exploding schrapnel, he likely knew that he was far from the type of medical help that could save his life.

The RUE child soldier did not suffer alone. In the Parrot's Beak in mid-2001, some 50,000 refugees from Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea were steadily dying from starvation, disease, and war wounds. The region was too hot for even the most daredevil humanitarian relief organizations.

Labia was carried to a bare, fire-blackened hospital room in Kailahun, the RUF's stronghold in the Parrot's Beak, and dumped on a pile of hay that served as a bed. When I first saw him there, surrounded by chaos, heat, and filth, I found it hard to remember that the cause of all this suffering---thousands of doomed refugees, well-armed but illiterate and drugged combatants, fallen wounded like Labia, and injured civilian children---was brutally simple: the greed for diamonds. Certainly, there was nothing nearly as lustrous or awe-inspiring as a diamond in the blood-stained room where Labia was dying of a tetanus infection, next to another felled 15 year-old. Powerless to treat him, the RUE field medics had simply taped his wounds shut and left him wracked with sweats and shivers.

Amputation Is Forever

Sadly, Kailahun wasn't the worst of it. The RUF began its jewelry heist in 1991, using the support of neighboring Liberia to capture Sierra Leone's vast wealth of diamond mines. Since then, the rebels have carried out one of the most brutal military campaigns in recent history, to enrich themselves as well as the genteel captains of the diamond industry living far removed from the killing fields. The RUE's signature tactic was amputation of civilians: Over the course of the decade-long war, the rebels have mutilated some 20,000 people, hacking off their arms, legs, lips, and ears with machetes and axes. This campaign was the RUE's grotesquely ironic response to Sierra Leone President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah's 1996 plea for citizens to "join hands for peace." Another 50,000 to 75,000 have been killed. The RUE's goal was to terrorize the population and enjoy uncontested dominion over the diamond fields.

While the RUE terrorized and looted the countryside, thousands of prisoner-laborers, worked to exhaustion, digging up the gems from muddy open-pit mines. Many ended up in shallow graves, executed for suspected theft, for lack of production, or simply for sport.

The international diamond industry's trading centers in Europe funded this horror by buying up to $125 million worth of diamonds a year from the RUE, according to U.N. estimates. Few cared where the gems originated, or calculated the cost in lives lost rather than carats gained. The RUE used its profits to open foreign bank accounts for rebel leaders and to finance a complicated network of gunrunners who kept the rebels well-equipped with the modern military hardware they used to control Sierra Leone's diamonds. The weapons---and the gems the rebels sold unimpeded to terrorist and corporate trader alike---allowed the RUF to fight off government soldiers, hired mercenaries, peacekeepers from a regional West African reaction force, British paratroopers, and, until recently, the most expansive and expensive peace-keeping mission the U.N. has ever deployed.

Throughout most of the war from 1991 to January 2002, this drama played itself out in obscurity. During the RUF's worst assaults, international media pulled journalists out of the country in fear for their safety. Local citizens were left to fend for themselves against bloodthirsty and drugged child soldiers. Commanders often cut the children's arms and packed the wounds with cocaine; marijuana was everywhere.

Until the deployment of the U.N. mission in 1999, the developed countries also washed their hands of the situation, doing little more than imposing sanctions on diamond exports and weapons sales to the small country. These efforts did nothing to end the RUE's diamonds-for-guns trade because most of the RUE'S goods were smuggled out of Sierra Leone and sold into the mainstream from neighboring countries.

Home to-Roost

In a mistake that was to come home to roost, the West dismissed Sierra Leone's war as little more than a baffling and tragic waste of life that had little impact on their own economic interests---and even less on their national security.

Then on September11, 2001, the world saw horrifying evidence of the peril of ignoring such conflagrations and their related gross violations of human rights.

For years, terrorists had been exploiting both the world's disdain for intervening in Sierra Leone and the international diamond industry's tacit funding of war. At least three African wars---in Sierra Leone, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo---had been good for business, ensuring high and stable global prices for diamonds.

Beginning as early as 1998, the same year Al Qaeda operatives reportedly blew up U.S. embassies in Kenya and Sudan, Osama bin Laden's network began buying diamonds from the RUF of Sierra Leone, according to FBI sources quoted in the Washington Post.

The paper also reported that two of the Al Qaeda men implicated in those attacks---Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed---were in Sierra Leone in 2001, overseeing RUF diamond production.

As recently as mid-2001, a mere three months before the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, Al Qaeda had laundered millions of dollars by buying untraceable diamonds from the rebels. In the wake of Sept. ii, the United States and its allies in the "war on terrorism" froze more than $100 million worth of Al Qaeda assets world-wide. But the terrorists likely have an ace in the hole in the form of diamonds from Sierra Leone, wealth that can be easily and quickly sold and is virtually untraceable.

Unspinnable Disaster

Even before 9/11, the diamond merchants were getting nervous. Media and human rights groups began exposing the complicity of the romance industry in fueling wars. They also challenged the notion that Sierra Leone was simply another isolated post-cold war conflict that was troubling in its brutality but irrelevant to the national interests of developed countries.

Campaigns launched by Global Exchange and Amnesty International against conflict diamonds threatened to replace the image of a diamond sparkling on the graceful hand of a lover with that of the truncated stump of a child amputee's arm. One diamond company executive is rumored to have had nightmares in which the tag line at the end of De Beers television commercials read, "Amputation Is Forever."

The industry grew increasingly amenable to the idea of curtailing the flow of blood diamonds. In 2000, Global Witness, a San Francisco-based non-governmental organization, joined with diamond industry representatives and officials from diamond exporting and importing countries to form the Kimberley Process. Al soon joined the negotiating effort, but according to Adotei Akwei, AIUSA's senior advocacy director for Africa, "the NGOs never had much power. We were allowed at the table but were seldom diners."

Despite many meetings, the panel failed to reach a consensus on how to end the trade in blood diamonds. The U.S. Congress, too, faced intense lobbying. In 2000, Rep. Tony Hall (D-Ohio) introduced the Clean Diamond Act, a bill that sought to enact into law whatever import and export controls the Kimberley Process would adopt. The bill languished because of serious concerns over provisions added at the request of the Bush administration that---according to NGOs, the industry, and some senators---fatally compromised the bill.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks, along with a blistering Washington Post investigation by Doug Earrah into Al Qaeda's large purchases of Sierra Leone diamonds, raised the stakes. While associating with bloodthirsty rebels was a formidable PR challenge for the diamond industry, funding the terrorists who attacked the U.S. was simply unspinnable.

Last November, the Kimberley Process agreed to a set of regulations that would require that all cross-border diamond transactions be accompanied by a non-forgeable paper trail, indicating when and where every imported stone was discovered. The Clean Diamond Act followed suit and was passed by the House of Representatives 408-6. It is currently awaiting a vote in the Senate.

Unfortunately, neither action is halting the lucrative trade: "Efforts to end the trade in conflict diamonds ran into a major obstacle in the Bush administration, which has been reluctant to impede business in any way or have its hands tied by any international agreements, even when the U.S. diamond industry has called for it," says Akwei.

Nor is a better paper trail foolproof. Diamonds are sufficiently small and portable to make it unlikely that any regime of certificates or guarantees will ensure that diamonds originate in conflict-free areas. Indeed, it seems that the only sure-fire way to eradicate conflict diamonds is to see an end to the conflicts where diamonds are found. As evidence, we can look again at Sierra Leone, where the war was officially declared over in January. With hostilities ended and the RUE disarmed and disbanded, diamond production is once again in the hands of the government and international exploration companies. The trick now is to see if the government can adeptly handle the complexities of mining and taxing so that the majority of revenue is reinvested, and to ensure that Sierra Leone finally benefits from diamonds rather than being torn apart by them.

The Shame of It All

Throughout the 1990s, children like Jusu Lahia armed themselves with diamond-purchased AK-47s and, under the nose of the United Nations, helped the rebels sell the gems to terrorists. People had their hands chopped off by RUE units and were sent wandering hopelessly to spread the message of terror. West African "peacekeepers" were so inept in their defense of Sierra Leone's civilian population that charges of human rights violations are leveled at them as frequently as they are at the RUE. Nigerian soldiers serving a regional West African peace-keeping force killed civilians suspected of aiding RUE, tortured children suspected of being RUF, and slaughtered hospital patients in their efforts to rid Freetown of rebels. It is no stretch to say that Sierra Leone disintegrated during the 1990's into a murderous sinkhole of death and torture, all of it fueled by the sale of diamonds to respectable merchants throughout the world.

The shame of it all is that it took a catastrophic attack on American soil for anyone to notice. Developed nations bought Sierra Leone's blood-soaked diamonds without question throughout the 1990s, apparently untroubled that the sales affected millions of Africans in a mostly forgotten and impoverished jungle. Only after the effects of the RUE's diamond war were slammed home---like a blade through the bones of a forearm---did anyone sit up and take notice.

If nothing else, the story of Sierra Leone's diamond war has proved unequivocally that the world ignores Africa and its problems at its peril. Events far from home often have very tangible impacts, and Sierra Leone has shown the world that there is no longer any such thing as an "isolated, regional conflict."

Perhaps there never was..

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THE BUSINESS OF DIAMONDS

That the diamond industry turned a blind eye to the effects of diamond I purchases in war-torn regions is obvious from import/export statistics from the 1990s. While Sierra Leone's official diamond exports fell from a high of 2 million carats annually in the late 1960s to mere thousands of carats during the years of warfare in the 1990s, neighboring countries began inexplicably exporting to Belgium quantities of diamonds that were well beyond their production capacities.

Countries, including Liberia, Guinea, The Gambia, and Ivory Coast, laundered Sierra Leone's diamonds and sent them to the world's cutters and polishers, who claimed ignorance of their likely origins. The Gambia, for instance, has no diamond mines. Yet it managed to export more than $100 million of diamonds to Antwerp, Belgium, from 1996 to 1999, the height of RUF mining activity in Sierra Leone. Likewise, Liberia exported an annual average of six million carats to Belgium between 1994 and 1998, when its own modest mines were capable of producing a mere 200,000 carats annually. None of those stones were rejected as tainted with the blood of innocent Africans.

Diamonds were bought so willingly from war zones for two reasons. First, a century-old policy of hoarding diamonds by the De Beers cartel ensured that diamond prices stayed high despite fluctuations in demand. De Beers is the largest global buyer and seller of rough diamonds, controlling about 65 percent of all rough goods found in the world, and has long bought diamonds wherever they were found in order to avoid a glut on the market. In a 1996 statement from its chairperson contained in the company's annual report, the company boasted of buying diamonds from Angola---at a time when rebels controlled 70 percent of the country's diamond mines---as a means to support global diamond prices: "Purchases in 1996 reached record levels largely owing to the increased Angolan production," wrote De Beers then-chair Julian Thompson. "Angolan diamonds tend to be in the categories that are in demand, although in the main, these buying activities are a mechanism to support the market."

This practice meant that diamonds remained valuable throughout the world.

The second reason the RUF never had a problem finding buyers for its goods is that RUF diamonds generally sold for about 10 percent of what they would otherwise be worth, making them a highly liquid bargain. Even in late 2001, with the end of the war at hand, thanks to the efforts of a U.N. peace-keeping mission, smugglers employed by legitimate diamond houses across Europe clogged the seedy bars and hotels of Sierra Leone's decimated capital city, Freetown, hoping to deal with the RUF. Despite the presence of some 17,000 U.N. soldiers, and the efforts of industry---and NGO-representatives working to end the trade in blood diamonds, smuggling was so easy and lucrative that only the end of the war would end the trade for good.