Fire

by Sebastian Junger

  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 fifty, wore pressed shirts and slacks despite the heat and carried all his mining documents—twenty years’ worth—in an old goat and snakeskin case. He said he had found his first diamond at age fifteen, when he stopped to relieve himself by the side of the road and realized he was pissing on a thirty-six-carat stone worth around twenty-eight thousand dollars. 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.

  Kokero worked in the business off and on for the next twenty 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 RUF 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 RUF 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 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 six-thirty the BBC came on the air and said that the UN had lost communication with some two hundred Zambian peacekeepers near Makeni, and that it was thought they had been surrounded and disarmed. Helicopter reconnaissance indicated that the RUF was now driving around in the Zambians’ armored vehicles. “The rebels appear to be on the move,” said UN 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 thirty dollars 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 seven billion dollars’ worth of the world’s gem diamonds produced every year and buys another 20 to 30 percent through its Central Selling Organization. The CSO 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.

  Approximately half 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 twenty-billion-dollar-a-year industry paid only eight million dollars 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 RUF 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, yet the Diamond High Council logged Liberian diamond imports averaging six 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 three billion dollars’ worth of illegally mined diamonds to fund a war that to date has killed half a million people.

  This has all come to light in the West in just the past few months, beginn
ing with a report about RUF diamond mining by a nonprofit group called Partnership Africa Canada. That was followed by a report from Robert Fowler, Canada’s ambassador to the UN. 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 RUF 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 UN proposed a ban on the export of all Sierra Leonean diamonds that have not cleared customs in Freetown. And the European Union decided to halt foreign aid to Liberia because of Liberian president Charles Taylor’s support of the RUF.

  Nonetheless, selling illicit diamonds in Antwerp is still just a matter of a few phone calls. And so for the past ten 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 RUF 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 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 burnovers 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 ninety-nine 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.

  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 Gregg 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 fifties, 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 thirty to fifty 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 RUF 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 five hundred peace-keepers 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 UN peacekeepers’ weapons, and it was a bad sign; it meant that the government had given up on the UN 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 me
n 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 do 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.

  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 UN 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 RUF 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 twenty miles away.