Fire

by Sebastian Junger

  “You didn’t hear it from me,” a UN 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 SAS in two big Chinook helicopters came pounding in low from the south and landed at the dirt airfield outside Bo. They took on twenty or thirty foreign-passport holders, including Teun and me, and then roared back to Freetown. They flew twenty 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 all had 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 RUF reports on mining operations in Kono. A blue composition book appeared to list every diamond collected by just one RUF 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 fifteen 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 RUF is thought to be exporting about half a million carats a year, which would suggest there were about three hundred guys like Bakundu gathering diamonds for Sankoh.

  Not only was the RUF mining diamonds, but it was 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 thirty-two-million-dollar 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 RUF 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 RUF 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 RUF-controlled areas and handle all export and sale of diamonds on the international market. The RUF was to provide security and labor for the mining operations and facilitate the transportation of diamonds out of the country. BECA and the RUF 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 RUF.

  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 United States. He showed Leigh the contract and offered to sell it to him for ten million dollars, 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 RUF 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. Desaedeleer refused, and Leigh asked him to leave the embassy immediately.

  After that, Caldwell and Desaedeleer tried to sell the license to various mining companies—De Beers, Diamond Works, 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 forty-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 sixty-eight 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 RUF 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 twenty 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 twenty 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 RUF released all the original UN 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 were dead.

  THE LION IN WINTER

  2001

  The fighters were down by the river, getting ready to cross over, and we drove out there in the late afternoon to see them off. We parked our truck behind a mud wall, where it was out of sight, and then walked one by one down to the position. In an hour or so, it would be dark, and they’d go over. Some were loading up an old Soviet truck with crates of ammunition, and some were cleaning their rifles, and some were just standing in loose bunches behind the trees, where the enemy couldn’t see them. They were wearing old snow parkas and blankets thrown over their shoulders, and some had old Soviet Army pants, and others didn’t have any shoes. They drew themselves into an uneven line when we walked up, and they stood there with their Kalashnikovs and their RPGs cradled in their arms, smiling shyly.

  Across the floodplain, low, grassy hills turned purple as the sun sank behind them, and those were the hills these men were going to attack. They were fighting for Ahmad Shah Massoud—genius guerrilla leader, last hope of the shattered Afghan government—and all along those hills were trenches filled with Taliban soldiers. The Taliban had grown out of the madrasahs, or religious schools, that had sprung up in Pakistan during the Soviet invasion, and they had emerged in 1994 as Afghanistan sank into anarchy following the Soviet withdrawal. Armed and trained by Pakistan and driven by moral principles so extreme that many Muslims feel they can only be described as a perversion of Islam, the Taliban quickly overran most of the country and imposed their ironfisted version of koranic law. Adulterers faced stoning; women’s rights became nonexistent. Only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates recognize their government as legitimate, but it is generally thought that the rest of the world will have to follow suit if the Taliban complete their takeover of the country. The only thing that still stands in their way are the last-ditch defenses of Ahmad Shah Massoud.

  The sun set, and the valley edged into darkness. It was a clear, cold November night, and we could see artillery rounds flashing against the ridgeline in the distance. Hundreds of Taliban soldiers were dug in up there, waiting to be attacked, and hundreds of Massoud’s soldiers were down here along the Kowkcheh River, waiting to attack them. In a few hours, they would cross the river by truck and make their way through the fields and destroyed villages of no-man’s-land. Then it would begin.

  We wished Massoud’s men well and walked back to the truck. The stars had come out, and the only sound was of dogs baying in the distance. Then the whole front line, from the Tajik border to Farkhar Gorge, rumbled to life.

  I’d wanted to meet Massoud for years, ever since I’d first heard of his remarkable defense of Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s. A brilliant strategist and an uncompromising fighter, Massoud had been the bane of the Soviet Army’s existence and had been largely responsible for finally d
riving them out of the country. He was fiercely independent, accepting little, if any, direction from Pakistan, which controlled the flow of American arms to the mujahidin. His independence made it impossible for the CIA to trust him, but agency officials grudgingly admitted that he was an almost mythological figure among many Afghans. He was a native of the Panjshir Valley, north of Kabul, the third of six sons born to an ethnic Tajik army officer. In 1974, he went to college to study engineering, but he dropped out in his first year to join a student resistance movement. After a crackdown on dissidents, Massoud fled to Pakistan, where he underwent military training. By 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up the teetering Communist government, Massoud had already collected a small band of resistance fighters in the Panjshir Valley.

  As a guerrilla base the Panjshir couldn’t have been better. Protected by the mountain ranges of the Hindu Kush and blocked at the entrance by a narrow gorge named Dalan Sang, the seventy-mile-long valley was the perfect staging area for raids against a highway that supplied the Soviet bases around Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital. Massoud quickly organized his Panjshiri fighters, rumored to number as few as three thousand men, into defense groups comprising four or five villages each. The groups were self-sufficient and could call in mobile units if they were threatened with being overrun. Whenever a Soviet convoy rumbled up the highway, the mujahidin would mine the road, then wait in ambush. Most of the fighters would provide covering fire while a few insanely brave men worked their way in close to the convoy and tried to take out the first and last vehicles with rocket-propelled grenades. With the convoy pinned down, the rest of the unit would pepper it with gunfire and then retreat. They rarely stood and fought, and the Soviets rarely pursued them beyond the protection of their armored vehicles. It was classic guerrilla warfare, and if anything, Massoud was amazed at how easy it was. For his defense of the valley, Massoud became known as the Lion of Panjshir.