Remembering January 6, 1999: THE TERROR IN SIERRA LEONE

THE TERROR OF SIERRA LEONE
After a decade of vicious conflict, the war in Sierra Leone is still shocking in its sheer atrocity: rebel troops of drug-crazed teenagers have hacked the limbs off thousands of civilians, including women and babies. U.N. peacekeeping forces have been powerless to intervene. Cold-blooded calculation fuels the rebels’ insanity—the struggle for control of the country’s diamond mines—including a secret agreement between international investors and the man who has terrorized a people.
BY SEBASTIAN JUNGER
DECEMBER 8, 2006
The Terror of Sierra Leone
The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond. —Jeremiah 17:1

Josephus, the son of an up-country diamond trader, checked over his shoulder and pulled a pack of 555-brand cigarettes out of his pocket. He opened the top and shook two diamonds into his palm, a 25-carat coffee-colored industrial and a 3-carat white gem. They looked like rock candy. We were at the Cape Sierra Hotel, one of the few safe places in Freetown, and Josephus wanted to do business.

“How do I know they’re real?” I asked.

Josephus picked up a beer glass and dragged a long scratch down the side with the white. Very few things are hard enough to scratch glass, and a diamond is one of them. Josephus said that his father was a local chief in Kono and had large mining concessions there. Kono, a district in the northeastern corner of the country, is the richest diamond-producing area in Sierra Leone and—not coincidentally—is still under rebel control. Every two weeks, Josephus said, he flew to Freetown to sell diamonds and returned with rice and palm oil for the miners. The miners were paid a dollar a day, and if they found any stones they got a commission.

I could sense the bartender watching us. Josephus slid the stones back into their hiding place and said he could get more if I was interested. I told him I had to think about it. I was in Sierra Leone to write about the diamond trade, but being taken for an investor was virtually unavoidable. No one believed for a second that my photographer, Teun Voeten, and I were just journalists; Sierra Leone has been run as a mining scheme for the last 70 years, and there was no reason we should see it any differently. Before we arrived, a London contact had set up a meeting for us with one of the most powerful men in the Sierra Leonean military. Not for an interview, which he never would have consented to, but for a diamond deal.

Of all days for business, though, this was a bad one. Word had just gotten out that U.N. peacekeepers had surrounded Foday Sankoh’s house in retaliation for rebel attacks elsewhere in the country. Sankoh is head of the R.U.F.—the Revolutionary United Front—as the rebels call themselves, and under the U.N.-sanctioned Lomé Peace Accord of July 1999 he was given a government position and a compound outside Freetown. The day before, his forces in the field—possibly without consulting him—had encircled a U.N. disarmament camp in the town of Makeni and demanded that the Kenyan peacekeepers turn over 10 rebels who had voluntarily surrendered their weapons. The commander refused, shooting broke out, and seven U.N. personnel were taken prisoner. The rest were still surrounded. The last time Sankoh was arrested, the government sentenced him to death in 1998, and the R.U.F. overran Freetown.

I told Josephus I’d look him up in a few days, and then I paid the tab and walked out of the hotel. The sudden thick dusk of the tropics had just dropped, and I could see garbage fires winking on the hillside above town. I dodged the crowd of hookers in front of the hotel and got into a hired car and told the driver to take me to Sankoh’s house. The driver hesitated and then said he’d have to double his usual rate. We drove out across Aberdeen Bridge and through the roadside markets and shantytowns of Lumley, on the outskirts. Sankoh’s compound was on a hill overlooking town; it consisted of an ugly yellow villa with a wall around it and a gutted concrete structure that served as a bunker. We pulled up to a flimsy checkpoint in the driveway, and a single U.N. peacekeeper stepped forward and asked us what we wanted. There were no other peacekeeping troops, no white-painted U.N. vehicles—the place was deserted. Suddenly a dozen young toughs in street clothes came running out of the bunker.

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“Who are you? What do you want?” they shouted, pushing the peacekeeper aside. I explained that I was a journalist and had come to talk to Sankoh, but that was clearly not the right answer. They screamed that he wasn’t in, and one of them started pounding on the roof of the car.

“Turn around,” I told the driver. “Get us out of here.”

The driver threw a fast U-turn, and we raced back the way we came. Halfway down the hill we pulled over to make way for a convoy of pickup trucks filled with more of Sankoh’s boys. They weren’t armed, but they were singing and pumping their fists in the air, as if they knew something.

As it turned out, they did.

The R.U.F. started quietly and brutally when a hundred or so lightly armed guerrillas crossed into Sierra Leone from war-torn Liberia in late March 1991. Their intent was to overthrow the one-party system of Joseph Saidu Momoh, but the force included a large number of mercenaries from Liberia and Burkina Faso, and the campaign quickly devolved into an excuse to loot and kill. Playing off traditional male initiation rites, the rebels abducted children and teenagers, took them into the bush, and tattooed them with identifying marks so that they couldn’t return to society unnoticed.

The rebels’ leader, Foday Saybana Sankoh, was a Sierra Leone Army corporal who had been jailed for seven years for his suspected involvement in a 1971 plot to overthrow the government. After getting out of prison he set up a photography business in Kailahun District, on the Liberian border, and spent the next decade traveling around the diamond fields of eastern Sierra Leone. At first Sankoh claimed simply to want to rid the country of one-party rule, but his forces quickly distinguished themselves with a brutality that was exceptional even by the standards of African warfare. Their trademark was amputations, mostly of hands, as a tactic to terrorize the local population. It was one of the only uses of mass amputations in the history of warfare, and it gave the R.U.F.—a small, poorly armed force that had no real backing—a power disproportionate to its size.

Announcing their attacks beforehand to inspire terror, the rebels swept through southern and eastern Sierra Leone in a matter of months. The national army was too small, too disorganized, and too corrupt to offer much resistance. Some of them even joined forces with the rebels to loot. By 1995 the rebels were on the outskirts of Freetown, and President Valentine Strasser—a 29-year-old army officer who himself had seized power three years earlier—hired the South African security firm Executive Outcomes to deal with the problem. Making great use of several MI-24 helicopter gunships, Executive Outcomes took only a matter of weeks to drive the rebels out of Freetown and then out of Kono—although they neglected to destroy every last rebel base. (That would later prove to have been a mistake.) The gunships reportedly were so effective that the rebels offered a $75,000 reward—payable in diamonds—to anyone who destroyed one.

Utterly beholden to Executive Outcomes, the country was reported to have given up huge mining concessions in the face of a bill supposedly equal to half its annual defense budget. (Executive Outcomes denied having received concessions.) By January 1996 Strasser had been replaced by Julius Maada Bio, who in turn was replaced by the current president, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, in a democratic election. In many other countries this would have been the end of the story, but not in Sierra Leone. Disgruntled army officers who hadn’t been paid in months ousted Kabbah in 1997, released 600 inmates from Pademba Road prison, brought the rebels into the government, and instituted their own brutal regime. They, in turn, were thrown out by ECOMOG, a Nigerian-led regional peacekeeping force which managed to reinstate Kabbah as president in early 1998. Kabbah, however, then made the mistake of executing 24 disloyal army officers and bringing Sankoh up on charges of treason. The charges stemmed from a 1997 arms-buying trip Sankoh had made to Nigeria on behalf of the R.U.F. The rebel leader was quickly found guilty, but before his death sentence could be carried out, a sketchy alliance of rebels and army irregulars staged another attack on Freetown.

Three-year-old Memuna Mansarah at a refugee camp in Freetown. Her arm was cut off by rebels in one of the only widespread uses of amputation in the history of warfare.
War does not get worse than January 6, 1999. Teenage soldiers, out of their minds on drugs, rounded up entire neighborhoods and machine-gunned them or burned them alive in their houses. They tracked down anyone whom they deemed to be an enemy—journalists, Nigerians, doctors who treated wounded civilians—and tortured and killed them. They killed people who refused to give them money, or people who didn’t give enough money, or people who looked at them wrong. They raped women and killed nuns and abducted priests and drugged children to turn them into fighters. They favored Tupac T-shirts and fancy haircuts and spoke Krio—the common language of Freetown—to one another because they didn’t share a tribal language. Some were mercenaries from Liberia and Burkina Faso, a few were white men thought to be from Ukraine, but most were just from the bush. They had been fighting since they were eight or nine, some of them, and sported names such as Colonel Bloodshed, Commander Cut Hands, Superman, Mr. Die, and Captain Backblast. They fought their way west in Freetown, neighborhood by neighborhood, through Calaba Town and Wellington and Kissy, and they weren’t stopped until they had nearly overrun the ECOMOG headquarters at Wilberforce Barracks.

Eventually the Nigerian-led military machine set itself in motion. It attacked with heavy artillery and Alpha jets and helicopter gunships. Some of the gunships were piloted by white South Africans who just threw mortars out of the gun bays when they ran out of ammunition. Slowly, the rebels fell back. Realizing that they were going to lose the city, they started rounding up people and detaining them until special amputation squads could arrive. The squads were made up of teenagers and even children, many of whom wore bandages where incisions had been made to pack cocaine under their skin. They did their work with rusty machetes and axes and seemed to choose their victims completely at random. “You, you, and you,” they would say, picking people out of a line. There were stories of hands’ being taken away in blood-soaked grain bags. There were stories of hands’ being hung in trees. There were stories of hands’ being eaten.

“They marched us at gunpoint to the hill near Kissy Mental,” one 15-year-old girl named Ramatu later told human-rights investigators. “They didn’t say why they were taking us but we knew.… They had us get down on our knees and put our arms on a concrete slab.… One rebel did all the cutting. A few had both hands cut off; others just one. And then they walked away. I couldn’t even bury my arm.”

It took several weeks, but the Nigerians eventually drove the rebels out of Freetown and back up-country. Six thousand people had died in Freetown. Although the rebel assault had failed militarily, it had so traumatized the civilian population that they were prepared to do almost anything—including accept the rebels as part of their government—in order to bring an end to the war. The result was the Lomé Peace Accord, which granted a blanket amnesty to all combatants, instituted a nationwide disarmament program, opened the door to 11,000 U.N. peacekeepers, and assigned government posts to rebel commanders. Sankoh was made vice president of the country, as well as chairman of the Commission for the Management of Strategic Resources, National Reconstruction and Development.

That was a lot of words to say that he was now the diamond czar of Sierra Leone.

Everyone’s fear—that the U.N. would surround Sankoh’s house and arrest him—turned out to be unfounded, but the night I’d driven up there, the mood in the city was as tight as a piano wire. By dark the streets were empty, and around midnight bursts of automatic gunfire were heard in the hills outside Freetown. It turned out to be just skittish security forces shooting at one another. There were rumored to be thousands of R.U.F. within the city itself, waiting for the signal to rise up, and no one knew when that moment would come. Teun and I were supposed to travel to the diamond fields up-country, and we were worried that if things got any worse the planes would stop flying and we’d be stuck in Freetown. A contingent of rogue soldiers known as the Westside Boys had blocked the only road out of the city, and the U.N. was on the verge of suspending all internal flights because of the deteriorating security situation up-country. If Teun and I were going anywhere, we had to do it in a hurry.

The next morning we drove to a bullet-peppered airfield outside of town and boarded an old twin-prop that flew us up Bunce River and over the Moyamba Hills to the diamond-trading town of Bo, 200 miles to the east. The first thing we did on the ground was check in with the commander of the Kamajors, a civil-defense force made up of tribal hunters from the eastern part of the country. The Kamajors were wild fighters who terrified everybody, including the people they were defending, and until recently they had gone into battle wearing marine life jackets for effect. The Kamajors were supposed to be immune to bullets, and the rebels were so intimidated by Kamajor magic that in a sense it worked.

The commander assured us that God would take care of whatever the U.N. couldn’t, which we took to mean that the Kamajors were busy re-arming themselves, and then we wandered through town to talk to the diamond traders. Most of them had Lebanese names—Mansour, Jamil, Ahmad—and their offices were in small, brightly lit rooms tucked behind stores that sold radios and tools and dry goods and cloth—almost anything you’d want if you didn’t want diamonds.

Teun and I were traveling with a longtime diamond miner named James Kokero, who had made and lost several small fortunes in Kono. His surname means “eagle,” and among his associates he was known as the Eagle of Kono. Kokero, who was 50, wore pressed shirts and slacks despite the heat and carried all his mining documents—20 years’ worth—in an old goat-and-snake-skin case. He said he had found his first diamond at age 15 when he stopped to relieve himself by the side of the road and realized he was pissing on a 36-carat stone worth around $28,000. His father, who was already in the mining business, lost all the money from the sale of the stone on exploratory mining, so Kokero dropped out of school and wound up joining a gang called the Born Losers, which specialized in stealing gravel from the diamond fields. In Sierra Leone, gravel is money: wash it and sometimes there are diamonds in it. The Born Losers sold their gravel to Lebanese diamond traders who paid them a percentage of whatever stones turned up.

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Kokero worked in the business off and on for the next 20 years, graduating to large foreign companies that invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in draglines and bulldozers for deep alluvial mining. Several times his operation was sabotaged, and his life was even threatened by Lebanese traders who were said to have had a very close relationship with the local authorities. When the war came, Kokero was working with an American named Mike Taylor up in Kono. One day a group of irregular soldiers seized their equipment and told the two miners that they were going to be killed. “Would you rather be shot or buried alive?” they asked. Taylor chose to be shot, so the soldiers stood them against a wall, and three men stepped up and cocked their machine guns. Kokero and Taylor both burst out laughing—it was all they could think to do—and this so puzzled their executioners that they demanded to know why they weren’t scared.

“I’m a human being, like you,” Kokero said. “We’re brothers. If you kill me, you lose because you’ve killed a brother. For me, it’s over, I’m gone. You’re the one left with the problem.”

The soldiers were so impressed with their fearlessness that they let the two men go. Kokero was a survivor, in other words, and our plan was to take him up to Kono and see if we could get a look at some of the illegal mining that the R.U.F. was up to. The prospects looked bad, though. In Freetown we’d talked to an English photographer named Marcus Bleasdale, who was one of the few—and certainly the last—Western journalists to get into Kono. He and two Dutch reporters had driven through rebel roadblocks waving a letter from Sankoh himself, but when they arrived in Koido, the largest town in Kono, the local R.U.F. commander told them straight out that the letter meant nothing. “Sankoh doesn’t decide things here, I do,” he said. He didn’t let the reporters anywhere near the major diamond fields outside of town, but small-scale mining was going on everywhere—along roads, behind mosques, anywhere they could find gravel. Locals would set up washing plants and sift through the gravel for diamonds, then the rebel command would come in and take its share.

It was the beginning of the rainy season, and the thunderstorms came in over Bo at the end of the afternoon, heavy towers of cumulus that turned the air yellow and rattled rain down so hard you couldn’t see across the street. Men and women ducked under corrugated zinc awnings, and boys tore their shirts off and darted through the torrent like fish. At 6:30 the BBC came on the air and said that the U.N. had lost communication with some 200 Zambian peacekeepers near Makeni, and that it was thought they had been surrounded and disarmed. Helicopter reconnaissance indicated that the R.U.F. was now driving around in the Zambians’ armored vehicles. “The rebels appear to be on the move,” said U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard on the broadcast. “But we don’t know where.”

Diamonds are not particularly rare geologically, and not particularly valuable intrinsically—they mainly cut things well, which makes them worth up to about $30 a carat for most industrial applications. What gives diamonds tremendous economic power is the fact that 70 to 80 percent of the world’s gem-quality diamonds flow through a group of companies collectively known as De Beers, which regulates the availability of diamonds so that prices remain high. In the late 1920s, when the diamond industry was in complete disarray, Sir Ernest Oppenheimer soaked up most of the world’s supply and began price-setting in such a way that the industry remained profitable. Today De Beers mines 50 percent of the nearly $7 billion worth of the world’s gem diamonds produced every year, and buys another 20 to 30 percent through its Central Selling Organization. The C.S.O. takes these diamonds, sorts them into shoebox-size parcels, and then sells them to a total of about 120 “sightholders” throughout the world. The sightholders often do not see the stones before they buy them and pay whatever price De Beers asks.

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Approximately half of the De Beers sightholders are based in Antwerp, Belgium, Europe’s traditional diamond hub. Until recently a value-added tax—a small fee levied on raw materials when they are processed—was so easy to dodge that a $20-billion-a-year industry paid only $8 million a year in taxes. The industry is regulated by the Hoge Raad voor Diamant, the Belgian Diamond High Council, which serves both to represent Antwerp in the international market and to monitor the industry on behalf of the Belgian government. The council is charged with evaluating diamond imports and certifying their country of origin. For the purposes of the Diamond High Council, the country of origin is simply where the stone was last exported from. That clause—in a nutshell—is the heart of the illegal diamond trade.

Under the laws of Sierra Leone—which Sankoh was charged with upholding—every diamond mined in the country must be brought to a Government Gold and Diamond Office to be weighed, classified, and assigned a value. If the licensed exporter wants to sell the stone, he pays a 2.5 percent tax, and the stone or parcel of stones is sealed in a box and stamped. The box is not supposed to be opened again until it reaches its destination. Foreigners often team up with citizens of Sierra Leone who hold mining licenses, and then make arrangements with landowners to mine their land in exchange for a portion—usually between a third and a half—of whatever diamonds are found.

One of the reasons the export tax on diamonds is so low is that, to some degree, it is a voluntary tax. Diamonds are the most concentrated form of wealth in the world: millions of dollars’ worth can fit into a pack of cigarettes. Diamonds are so small, so valuable, and so easy to conceal that if taxes on them rise above a certain level, overall revenue falls because people simply start smuggling. Some people hide the stones on their person and board a plane for Belgium; others transport them overland to Guinea or Liberia and sell them on the local black market. The places to hide a diamond are almost limitless. They are heated and dropped into tins of lard. They are sewn into the hems of skirts. They are encased in wax and taken as suppositories. They are swallowed, hidden under the tongue, burrowed into the navel, or slipped into an open wound that is then allowed to heal.

A rebel group such as the R.U.F. would not bother to resort to any of those measures; it would simply smuggle them overland. Diamonds are carried out on foot over the maze of jungle paths that connect Sierra Leone to Liberia, or they are taken out by light airplane. Marcus Bleasdale said that when he was in Kono he heard planes landing and taking off regularly, though he wasn’t allowed anywhere near the airstrip. Once in Liberia—or Guinea, or Burkina Faso—the stones are passed off as domestic and shipped to the international markets of Antwerp and Tel Aviv. According to reports by the United States Geologic Survey, the total output from all of Liberia’s diamond mines is only 100,000 to 150,000 carats a year, and yet the Diamond High Council logged Liberian diamond imports averaging 6 million carats a year between 1994 and 1998 alone. It is no mystery where the discrepancy comes from, and the same problem exists in Angola, where UNITA rebels have sold around $3 billion worth of illegally mined diamonds to fund a war that to date has killed half a million people.

A dealer in Kenema displays three uncut diamonds.

This has all come to light in the West in just the past few months, beginning with a report about R.U.F. diamond mining by a nonprofit group called Partnership Africa Canada. That was followed by a report from Robert Fowler, Canada’s ambassador to the U.N. Both papers made it quite clear: if international diamond brokers made a concerted effort to avoid buying illicitly mined diamonds, groups such as UNITA and the R.U.F. would have a much, much harder time bankrolling their wars. Since then, De Beers has urged punitive action against any dealers trafficking in so-called “conflict” diamonds. By mid-June, the U.N. had proposed a ban on the export of all Sierra Leonean diamonds that have not cleared customs in Freetown. And the European Union had decided to halt foreign aid to Liberia because of Liberian president Charles Taylor’s support of the R.U.F.

Nonetheless, selling illicit diamonds in Antwerp is still just a matter of a few phone calls. And so for the past 10 years, Sierra Leonean diamonds have flowed unchecked across the porous border of Taylor’s corrupt little country. Not surprisingly, Taylor was one of the original supporters of Sankoh back in 1991, when the first hundred R.U.F. fighters crossed over the Mano River. Equally unsurprising, Sankoh’s posting as head of the Commission for the Management of Strategic Resources—diamonds, essentially—did absolutely nothing to stem the flow.

The diamond fields start right outside of Bo—you can see them alongside the road east to Kenema. They’re just gravel pits carved out of the jungle, dotted with teenage boys in their underwear shoveling mud. We drove out there the following day with James Kokero, racing along one of the only good highways in the country, past mud-walled villages and upland farms hacked out of the bush. Some clearings were still smoking from the burn-overs that precede planting season. “I used to farm,” said Kokero sourly, “farm and mine. You mine for the money; you farm to eat.”

The young miners were friendly, stopping their work to ask for cigarettes when we pulled over. They worked in shifts in the hammering sun, digging down into the diamond-bearing gravel and piling it up on the side to be sorted. Alluvial mining is not dramatic or dangerous or even costly; it just requires a lot of people digging. Larger operations use draglines and bulldozers to get through what is known as the overburden, but people interested in those kinds of investments have mostly disappeared from Sierra Leone.

Almost anyone, however, can set up a small-scale alluvial-mining operation. The diggers are fed rice twice a day, paid a nominal amount of money, and given a share of whatever diamonds are found. The gravel gets shoveled out of steep-sided pits and then pumped into small steel washing plants that are run off a generator. There it is mechanically sorted for size, sluiced for gold, and then carted off to a secluded area—usually behind a rattan fence—to be picked through for diamonds. Typically, a third of the stones are turned over to the workers, a third are kept by the financial backers, and a third are given to the landowner. Obviously, it’s a system full of opportunities to steal someone blind.

Sierra Leone was founded in 1787 as a colony for slaves freed by the British during the American Revolution. Diamonds were discovered there in 1930. Legend has it that, when word got around, the British started telling locals that the stones were electric and dangerous to touch. Their advice was to leave them alone until a white man could get there. On a larger scale, that was essentially how the colonial government of Sierra Leone handled its newfound wealth: in 1937 it sold a De Beers–owned company exclusive mining rights to the entire country for the next 99 years. De Beers quickly got production levels up to a million carats a year, but it was only a matter of time before the locals realized that instead of working for De Beers they could just find diamonds on their own. Soon there were tens of thousands of illicit miners in Kono washing river gravel in homemade sieves and selling whatever they found to Lebanese and Mandingo traders. At first, the traders sold their stones in Freetown, but then, when that got too difficult, they smuggled them across the Mano River into Liberia.

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By the 1950s, 20 percent of the stones on the world market were thought to have been smuggled out of Sierra Leone, mostly through Liberia. De Beers found itself facing a choice: lose control altogether of the Sierra Leone diamond trade or open an office in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, to buy back all the stones that were being mined illegally. Of course, they set up the buying office. In the end the licensing system proved untenable, and in 1963 the newly independent government of Sierra Leone bought back most of the mining rights to the country. For the first time, diamond licenses were made available to the locals, and a patronage system developed whereby diamond buyers—Lebanese, for the most part—fronted people money to start mining operations and then bought the stones that were found.

In the 1980s, De Beers closed its buying office in Liberia, but that has done little to impede the flow of Sierra Leonean diamonds to Antwerp. Now the majority of people running mining operations up-country are local Lebanese and a handful of foreigners. We found Greg Lyell drinking a Coke at the Capitol Bar in Kenema. Kokero—who seemed to know everybody—spotted him and brought him over. Lyell, now in his 50s, is an American who came to Sierra Leone several years ago to buy diamonds and wound up staying. He married a local woman and sat out the 1997 coup in Freetown with a gun on his lap. Now he was running a dredge mine that sucked gravel off the bottom of the Sewa River between Kenema and Bo.

“Dredge mining is all hit-or-miss,” Lyell explained. “The divers take a propane bottle and an air compressor, stick a hose in it, tie a rag around their eyes to keep the dirt out, and go down and dredge. You pump everything into a canoe, drag it to shore, and go through it with a kicker”—a sieve—”and then flip that over on the bank. Diamonds are heavier than most other stones, so the ones that worked their way down to the bottom of the kicker will now be on top.”

Dredging can be dangerous, but that’s where the diamonds collect—in the gravel along the river bottom. There are supposed to be enormous diamond deposits off the coast, at the mouths of the Sewa and Mano Rivers, but seabed dredging is extremely expensive. Lyell said his divers worked 30 to 50 feet down for half an hour at a time and wore sandbag weight belts to keep themselves on the river bottom. Some divers are known to sacrifice sheep before starting to work. They make sure the blood mixes with the river water to safeguard their lives.

“I started studying diamonds back in the States,” Lyell said. “Let’s just say that once upon a time I was a bad boy and found myself with a lot of time on my hands.… I’ll probably stay here for a while—I was supposed to go to Mali to buy some gold, but that didn’t happen.”

Lyell wore his hair cropped short in front with a ponytail and had the beginnings of a thin goatee. Like everyone else, he was sweating heavily in the afternoon heat. A truck filled with miners rattled by at one point, and Lyell pointed at it. “Tongo Field,” he said. “Trucks go up there every day.”

“Tongo Field?” I asked. “Isn’t that R.U.F. territory?”

Lyell didn’t say anything. He just looked at me with an expression that I’d already begun to recognize: the expression of someone who has devoted his entire life to diamonds and finds himself dealing with someone who hasn’t.

By the time we left Kenema, three days later, the situation had deteriorated to the point where we’d begun to wonder if we’d even have trouble getting back into Freetown. As many as 500 peacekeepers were now being held hostage around the country, a Guinean Army contingent had been forced to flee an important base called Rogberi Junction, and the rebels were rumored to have reached Hastings Airport, on the outskirts of Freetown. This last proved to be untrue, but just the rumors were enough to trigger widespread panic. It was starting to look like January 6 all over again.

There were checkpoints on the Bo– Kenema road every few miles now, and they were manned by Kamajors with guns. These were the first guns we’d seen in the country, apart from U.N. peacekeepers’ weapons, and it was a bad sign; it meant that the government had given up on the U.N. and had decided to take matters into its own hands. As soon as we drove into Bo it was clear something was up; there were too many groups of men on the street, too many trucks rumbling in and out of town. We dropped our bags off at the hotel and walked back to the Civil Defense Headquarters, where we’d seen a crowd of several hundred Kamajors.

The commotion started as soon as we arrived: “we de go kill dem! we de go kill dem!” one Kamajor started shouting in Krio, jamming a round into his grenade launcher. He climbed into a car with five or six others and sped off down the street. The weapons had materialized out of nowhere, and every man had one: rocket-propelled- grenade launchers and Kalashnikovs and sleek black FN assault rifles and even old shotguns and sabers left over from colonial days. They had come from the bush, these men, and they’d brought with them their protective magic and their claims of special powers. They wore sackcloth tunics and fishnet shirts studded with crocheted pouches that were supposed to stop bullets. They sewed cowrie shells onto their clothing and wore bone necklaces that hung down over their ammo belts and clacked against their guns. One guy had nothing on but shorts and a pink ski-parka hood. Another had a headband made of live machine-gun rounds. They stood in angry little clusters around shortwave radios listening to the afternoon BBC report and slapping ammo clips into their guns.

A soldier guards the residence of retired lieutenant colonel Johnny Paul Koroma, whose renegade army helped overthrow the government in 1997.

That morning, apparently, several thousand protesters had gathered at Sankoh’s compound to protest the war, and Sankoh’s bodyguards had opened fire. Television footage showed teenage boys in civilian clothes emptying banana clips into the crowd. One bodyguard even fired off a rocket-propelled grenade. Some accounts had Sankoh pleading with his bodyguards not to shoot, and other accounts had him standing on the balcony with a machine pistol, directing the attack. Nineteen civilians were killed, and scores were wounded. Later that day a group of irregulars stormed the house and killed some of the bodyguards, but Sankoh himself had fled. There were rumors that he had escaped in a U.N. vehicle, or that he was hiding in Freetown, or that he’d fled into the bush and was making his way back to rebel lines. Government forces rounded up two dozen R.U.F. officials in Freetown and detained them, and Kamajors had done the same thing in Bo. In the meantime the rebels were advancing down the road to Freetown and had hit a town called Waterloo, only 20 miles away.

“You didn’t hear it from me,” a U.N. military observer near Bo told me that afternoon, “but it’s going to be like the fall of Saigon when we pull out.”

The next morning, British S.A.S. in two big Chinook helicopters came pounding in low from the south and landed at the dirt airfield outside Bo. They took on 20 or 30 foreign-passport holders—including Teun and me—and then roared back to Freetown. They flew 20 feet above the forest canopy, and when we passed over little villages we could see people run out of their huts to watch.

The first place Teun and I went when we got back to Freetown was Sankoh’s house. It was early morning and there was no one there; the gate had been torn off its hinges, and twisted clothes and spent bullets littered the yard. We stepped inside and sloshed through water that was three inches deep over the marble floors. Somewhere it was still running, gurgling out of a pipe where protesters had torn the plumbing out of the walls. There were women’s panties and bras on the towel rack in the bathroom, as well as an empty bottle of 1998 Laurent Grand Siècle Ferme. In the upstairs bedroom there was an empty box of 70-mm. ammo. Papers were scattered everywhere, and syringes—thousands of them, used and unused—lay piled in the corners like drifted snow.

Long before we’d gotten there, other journalists and Sierra Leonean detectives had scoured the premises for incriminating documents. According to Minister of Information Julius Spencer, they found evidence that Sankoh had organized a coup for Tuesday, May 9, but the protest at his compound the day before had derailed it. A number of rebel commanders, including Denis “Superman” Mingo, Colonel Akim, and Brigadier Issa Sesay, and at least one Ukrainian mercenary, had infiltrated the city to coordinate the uprising. Some of these men were killed or arrested in the days following the massacre. The bodyguards I’d seen driving up the hill to Sankoh’s house, pumping their fists and singing … they had all been thinking that within days their leader would be in control of the capital. In that light, their bravado made perfect sense.

More important than evidence of a planned coup, however, were secret R.U.F. reports on mining operations in Kono. A blue composition book appears to list every diamond collected by just one R.U.F. officer between October 30, 1998, and July 31, 1999. The book had been meant for use by schoolchildren and had “God Bless the Teacher” and “PEACE” printed on the cover. For NAME the owner had written in careful script, “Capt Joseph ‘K’ Bakundu.” For SCHOOL he’d written, “R.U.F. Minning Unite.” And for CLASS he’d written, “Black guard.”

The Blackguards were Sankoh’s elite bodyguard unit. Bakundu apparently was responsible for collecting diamonds from about 15 rebel dealers up in Kono and Tongo Field, and they in turn had presumably collected them from diggers in the bush. Some of the names on the list—Sam Bockarie (known as “Mosquito”), Colonel Akim—were those of well-known rebel commanders. The book lists a nine-month haul of about 786 carats of white diamonds and 887 carats of industrials. The stones included a 17-carat orange, a 9-carat white, and numerous others between 1 and 6 carats. The R.U.F. is thought to be exporting about half a million carats a year, which would suggest there were about 300 guys like Bakundu gathering diamonds for Sankoh.

Not only was the R.U.F. mining diamonds, they were also in contact with Western businessmen. In his official capacity as chairman of the Strategic Resources commission, Sankoh had drawn up an agreement to buy and sell precious stones with Samuel Isidoor Weinberger of London. Sankoh had also negotiated with Raymond Clive Kramer of the Kramer Group of Companies in South Africa about expert consulting on mining operations. There was a letter from Patrick Everarts de Velp, the Walloon trade representative in Washington (Wallonia is part of Belgium), who was trying to arrange for the sale of some mining equipment to Sankoh. “It is always a great honour and a privilege to help you,” de Velp wrote.

And there were many, many letters from an American named John Caldwell. Caldwell, the president of the U.S. Trading & Investment Company, in Washington, D.C., had tried to arrange agricultural deals through Sankoh, including a $32 million food shipment. (Sankoh had opposed that particular deal because he didn’t want the food to be handled by international relief organizations—presumably because they would not favor the R.U.F. in their distribution.) Caldwell is a French-born naturalized American who served in NATO intelligence in the mid-1960s and then became vice president of international affairs for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Last October, he and his business partner, a Belgian named Michel Desaedeleer, went to Freetown to negotiate what they say was a comprehensive development program for Sierra Leone. They claim that their idea was to bring in an international mining firm, such as De Beers, and use the revenue to fund agricultural projects in rural areas.
In order to broker a deal of that magnitude, however, they needed to have something to offer, and last October 23, they got it. Sankoh signed a contract that gave them a monopoly on all gold and diamond mining in the rebel-controlled territory of Sierra Leone. The contract was between the R.U.F. and the BECA Group, an offshore company registered in Tortola, British Virgin Islands, which listed Desaedeleer and Caldwell as directors. BECA was to run all mining operations in the R.U.F.-controlled areas and handle all export and sale of diamonds on the international market. The R.U.F. was to provide security and labor for the mining operations and facilitate the transportation of diamonds out of the country. BECA and the R.U.F. would split all profits.

The contract specified that the agreement would become null and void as soon as the government of Sierra Leone activated the Commission for the Management of Strategic Resources, National Reconstruction and Development—of which Sankoh was chairman. At that point, a new contract would be negotiated between BECA and the commission. Until then, however, mining in Sierra Leone was wide open to anyone who wanted to do business with the R.U.F.

Upon returning to the United States, Desaedeleer went to the embassy of Sierra Leone and met with John Leigh, the Sierra Leonean ambassador to the U.S. He showed Leigh the contract and offered to sell it to him for $10 million, which he claimed was its value on the open market. In effect, he was trying to sell something to the government of Sierra Leone that Sankoh had no legal basis for giving away in the first place. Not only did the R.U.F. have no legal claim to mining rights in Sierra Leone, but, even in his capacity as chairman of the Strategic Resources commission, Sankoh did not have the authority to negotiate a contract by himself. At the very least, he needed the signatures of the other members of the commission, which he obviously did not have. Shocked at the proposal—and its price—Ambassador Leigh says he asked to make a photocopy of the document so that he could send it to his government, but Desaedeleer refused, and Leigh asked him to leave.

After that, Caldwell and Desaedeleer tried to sell the license to various mining companies—De Beers, DiamondWorks, Rex, Rio Tinto—but were turned down by all of them. Finally, Desaedeleer says, he got the ear of Charles Finkelstein, a member of a prominent Antwerp diamond family. Finkelstein later denied any professional involvement with Desaedeleer, but at the time, Desaedeleer seemed to think he had found a partner. At the very least, he may have thought that Finkelstein’s name would impress Sankoh.

“With Charles, we can BUY,” Desaedeleer wrote to Sankoh on April 6. “Charles has the financial ability to do anything, a private jet from Belgium to Kono or to Monrovia or to Freetown or any other solution.… What we have to solve: How will you convince the people in charge in Kono to bring everything to you instead of 10% and [if] it is not possible how are you going to convince them to sell those 90% to us instead of keeping it or selling it to the Lebanese or whoever? … Foday what I’m saying is this, the money is finally on the table, you make sure that the merchandise is available one way or another and all of us will be ok.”

Desaedeleer may have been vying with half a dozen other Western businessmen—all pursuing mining contracts—for Sankoh’s attention. In a sense these men were not the problem; they were just trying to exploit one. The real problem was that Sankoh was presiding over a system in which all the diamonds of Kono were being diverted from Freetown and smuggled out of the country. According to Ambassador Leigh, other documents found at Sankoh’s house corroborate this; one even specified that 10 percent of the Kono diamonds went to Sankoh, 10 percent to the rebel commander Sam Bockarie, and 30 percent was used to buy arms and ammunition. The rest went to Liberian president Charles Taylor.

Weapons were the key: without them the rebels could not control the diamond-producing regions, and without diamonds the rebels could not buy weapons. And there was plenty of evidence that weapons were making it into Sierra Leone. The British press reported that shortly before the January 6 invasion, a 40-ton shipment of weapons from Bratislava, Slovakia, had been flown into rebel-held eastern Sierra Leone by two British transport companies. And, according to the New York– based organization Human Rights Watch, in April 1999, the ECOMOG commander in Sierra Leone reported that 68 tons of weapons—including Strela-3 surface-to-air missiles and Metis guided antitank missile systems—had been flown into Burkina Faso on a Ukrainian-registered transport plane. From there, ECOMOG claimed, they were loaded onto smaller planes and flown into R.U.F. territory. The end-user certificate stipulated that the weapons could not be exported to another country, but in the fast-and-loose world of international arms trading, that hardly mattered.

“The arms trade in Africa works through brokers,” a Belgian arms-trafficking authority named Johan Peleman told me before I arrived in Freetown. “They usually have a former intelligence or military background, but at the same time they are businessmen —commodity traders, for instance.… A typical broker would be a Belgian based in a French hotel room supplying guns from, I don’t know, Lithuania, to a country neighboring the conflict zone. Documents would all look perfectly legitimate, but the arms end up with a rebel movement.”

A couple of days before leaving Sierra Leone, we drove out to the front. The taxi driver wouldn’t go beyond the town of Waterloo, so we got out and waited at a Nigerian Army checkpoint until a truckload of Kamajors drove up. They were headed 20 miles up the road to Masiaka, where a big battle had just taken place. They pulled us on board and veered back onto the road. There were about 20 of them, leaning against the sides of the truck and passing a joint around while the jungle blurred by on either side. At the deserted towns, soldiers who had been stranded would run out to try to wave us down, and going up through Occra Hills we slowed to a crawl on the inclines while groups of Westside Boys watched us pass, pumping their guns in the air and screaming. From time to time we saw ambushed trucks with their engine parts sprayed out across the road, and around Songo Junction there was the body of a rebel who’d been killed two days earlier. His corpse had turned foul so quickly on the hot asphalt that no one had bothered to drag him off.

Masiaka was at a crossroads that controlled access to the entire rest of the country; without it Freetown was basically under siege, and the rebels had held it for the past several days. But the Westside Boys had driven them out just hours earlier, and when we arrived they were cranked out of their minds, either on coke or on the battle itself, and were milling around the town square shooting their guns off. The Kamajors clambered down and joined in the shooting. Some government soldiers walked up, and within minutes an argument had broken out—something about who was doing the real fighting around here. An officer in the government forces began dressing down a Kamajor commander, and the Kamajor suddenly backed up a few steps and cocked his machine gun. The officer cocked his gun, and the Kamajors started cocking theirs, and suddenly everyone in the town square was screaming.

I glanced around for some cover, but all I could find was a concrete culvert along the road. We edged away and climbed into a pickup truck with some government soldiers. The rebels were in the bush a few miles away and a gun battle between Kamajors and government soldiers wasn’t even close to being out of the question; it was time to get out of there. We drove back through the destroyed towns of Magbuntoso and Jama and then past the Nigerian forward positions and the Jordanian defenses around the airfield. Freetown was crowded and loud, the markets thronged with people and the streets completely choked by traffic. A British warship was visible out in the harbor. British paratroopers had dug bunkers into the hillside next to Aberdeen Bridge.

Africa stopped at Aberdeen. Europe began. We sat down at the terrace of the Mammy Yoko hotel and ordered cold beers while the sun set and off-duty soldiers swam laps in the pool. Within a day we were clearing customs in Conakry and boarding an overnight flight to Belgium. Sankoh was caught, in the end—spotted by an alert neighbor as he tried to sneak back into his house. Although the R.U.F. released all the original U.N. hostages, they took more in June. Two foreign journalists, Kurt Schork of Reuters and Miguel Gil Morena de Mora of the Associated Press, were killed by rebels in a roadside ambush near Rogberi Junction. The rebels attacked Bo and Kenema and then withdrew to where they’d been three weeks earlier. The war continued up-country, although accounts of it rarely made it into the international press.

Very little had changed, really. Except that a few more people are dead.

Sebastian Junger is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

Remembering January 6, 1999: THE TERROR IN SIERRA LEONE

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