Taylor repeatedly denied any involvement, but the statistics on diamond exports belied his claims. Liberia’s annual mining capacity had been 100,000 to 150,000 carats annually from 1995 through 2000, but the Diamond High Council in Antwerp, Belgium, recorded imports into that country from Liberia of more than 31 million carats. According to U.S. ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s testimony before the UN Security Council on July 31, 2000, the RUF gained $30 to $50 million annually, maybe as much as $125 million, from the illicit sale of diamonds. At the same time, exports from Sierra Leone slowed to a trickle, from $30.2 million in 1994 to $1.2 million in 1999.
The originating point of diamonds is pegged to their country of export, not the country of origin, so tracing is virtually impossible; however, Liberia’s diamonds could only have come from Sierra Leone. Taylor sold these “blood diamonds,” or “conflict diamonds,” as they became known, or traded them for small arms directly or through countries like Burkina Faso, Guinea, Ivory Coast, and Togo, whose exports of diamonds on the world scene also showed unexplainable increases. Arms dealer Leonid Minin also involved himself in the illegal diamond trade as a way to finance arms purchases for Taylor and others in West Africa.
As the years progressed, Taylor found many ways to escape detection for his arms transfers. In 2002, however, the United Nations officially documented a shipment of five thousand AKs from Serbia to Liberia in violation of an arms embargo. Although UN officials had been trying to obtain documented proof of illegal arms shipments to Taylor, hard evidence had always been difficult. In this one case, however, UN weapons inspector Alex Vines painstakingly traced the small arms, starting on the battlefield. He began his investigation in a no-man’s-land in the middle of the Mano River Union bridge between Sierra Leone and Liberia. “A rebel child soldier showed me his AK-47 assault rifle which was stamped with M-70 2002 and a serial number. I knew immediately that this weapon had been made in Serbia,” Vines said. The M-70 is the Yugoslav version of the AK. The child relayed that the weapon had recently been captured from a Liberian government soldier he killed. Discussions with officials in Belgrade showed a certificate on file for a sale to Nigeria, but close inspection revealed the document as a forgery. Further investigation showed that about five thousand AKs had traveled by plane to Libya where the plane was supposed to refuel en route to Nigeria. But instead of terminating in Nigeria as intended, the plane had continued on to Liberia.
ONE OF THE PROBLEMS ENCOUNTERED by officials trying to trace weapons was the almost indestructible nature of the AK. As AKs traveled from country to country, from war zone to war zone, their serial numbers often were obliterated through heavy usage or purposely erased, but the rifles remained usable and sellable. In one case, UN experts documented a cache of AKs that had seen action in Angola, Mozambique, and Sudan, recycled from conflict to conflict.
The shame of blood diamonds focused the world’s attention on the atrocities in Sierra Leone, and the United Nations in 1999 established a mission in that country with an initial force of six thousand soldiers. Horrific violence still continued, however, with incidents like the brazen capture of hundreds of these peacekeepers by RUF guerrillas, who reportedly skinned alive some of the hostages.
One incident, not publicized at the time, but known to political leaders, altered Western military protocol forever. Although child soldiers had been used in Liberia and even more commonly in Sierra Leone, they mainly engaged other rebel forces or government soldiers. On August 25, 2000, this changed.
Eleven soldiers from the Royal Irish Regiment (and their Sierra Leone liaison), part of a larger UN presence that had previously secured the capital city and assisted in the capture of Sankoh, were taken hostage by the West Side Boys, a group of rogue boy soldiers armed with AKs. The British cadre was surrounded and unwilling to fire on children. It was one of the first engagements by Western soldiers against child soldiers, and it challenged for the first time the way Western military leaders viewed underage enemy combatants.
According to later reports, the West Side Boys were a band of AK-armed youths, perpetually drugged and drunk, who looted villages as they roamed the countryside. They demanded the release of their leader, General Papa, from prison as well as food and medicine in exchange for the captured British troops.
British forces immediately launched a search but could not find their comrades. Over the coming weeks, five soldiers were released in exchange for a satellite phone and other supplies, but the West Side Boys held fast to their other demands. On September 5, more than a hundred elite paratroopers from the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment landed in Senegal to stage a rescue operation. Special Air Service operatives cased the West Side Boys’ camp and saw the rebels laugh as they carried out mock executions of the British soldiers.
Eavesdropping indicated that the rebels were planning to move their hostages to more dense jungle areas, so any rescue attempt had to be made soon. Prime Minister Tony Blair and the cabinet gave the go-ahead, and at dawn on September 11, 2000, three Chinook helicopters and two Westland Lynx gunships took off from Freetown airport and headed for Rokel Creek, the location of the rebel camp.
The Lynx gunships strafed the area, providing cover for the Chinooks, which landed about three hundred feet away to let off troops. Fierce firefights ensued, and in twelve minutes British troops overtook the Boys’ position on the south side of the creek at Magbeni. On the north side of the creek, British troops reached the hostages held in the village of Geri Bana, but as they ran to waiting Chinooks, the West Side Boys sprayed the area with AK and machine-gun fire, hitting one paratrooper, who later died. Other British troops suffered nonlethal injuries during their escape. The rebel group lost twenty-five fighters, and eighteen were captured. Hundreds more were captured in operations during the following days; others escaped into the dense jungle. Their leader, Foday Kallay, was taken prisoner and turned over to Sierra Leonean officials.
This operation has been studied by many Western military officials not only because of its surgical precision but because of the child soldiers involved. The incident set a new standard for Western military behavior. Now soldiers are trained and indoctrinated to consider children as legitimate targets during combat situations.
Although many countries have employed child soldiers, Sierra Leone is often the center of discussion because of its prominence during the civil war that officially lasted from 1991 to 2001. As many as 80 percent of all combatants were between seven and fourteen. In addition, unlike other conflicts, children were recruited—often by abduction and forcible service—early on, rather than being brought in later to bolster dwindling adult forces. The number of child soldiers used by all sides, including government forces, was close to ten thousand, making them the majority of fighters.
Nobody knows the actual number of people killed in Sierra Leone—the violence continues—but the United Nations estimates the number at between fifty thousand and seventy-five thousand, with as many as one hundred thousand people mutilated. More than a million people, a third of the population, became refugees. The economy is still in ruins. The country’s already feeble infrastructure has been destroyed, and the United Nations now considers Sierra Leone one of the poorest nations in the world.
The extent of the damage still is unfolding, made public through testimony during a war crimes trial, which began in March 2004 in Sierra Leone. The court is looking only at crimes committed after the November 30, 1996, Abidjan Accord between the government and rebels. So far, more than a dozen people have been indicted. RUF leader Sankoh died of a stroke in 2003, while Taylor, also indicted, sought safe haven in Nigeria and in early 2006 was extradited to Liberia to face war-crime charges. Gadhafi has been charged as a coconspirator.
Court testimony has stunned the world. One witness, a middle-aged woman identified only as TF-1196, said rebels used machetes to hack her husband’s limbs off before he died. Then a rebel “young enough to be her child” raped her. She showed the court the hacked-off ends of her arms
to illustrate why she could not sign court documents.
Child soldiers relayed how they called rebel leader Foday Sankoh “Pappy,” and how he gave them AKs, marijuana, cocaine, and amphetamines to bolster their courage and spur them to kill and maim in the most brutal ways their young minds could imagine.
One child, identified as TF-1199, was twelve when rebels abducted him in 1998. He testified that he was taught how to fire an AK, smoke marijuana, and rape. He raped a fifteen-year-old girl presented to him after his commander threatened to kill him if he did not do what he was told.
REPORTS FROM THE WAR CRIMES court showed how wrong the Western world had been to focus on larger weapons and dismiss the importance to world security of small arms, especially the AK. During the proceedings, court documents revealed that Taylor sold conflict diamonds to al-Qaeda operatives that may have been used to finance the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Diamonds and other gemstones are perfect for moving wealth around; they are small, hold their value, are universally acceptable as barter, don’t set off airport metal detectors, and can easily be converted to cash. Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Northern Alliance have a history of exploiting gemstones, such as those found in Afghanistan’s emerald fields.
They transferred this gem-selling acumen to Africa. Al-Qaeda reportedly operated in West Africa from 1998 and maintained a continuous presence through 2002, according to the office of war crimes prosecutor Dave Crane. Weak and corrupt governments made West Africa an ideal choice for terrorist bases. In the case of Liberia, Taylor ran the country as his own criminal enterprise. Because of his status as a legitimate government leader, he issued visas and passports, and offered protection to anyone within his country’s borders—for a fee. For example, he issued airplane registrations to arms dealer Victor Bout, who often took payment in diamonds for weapons.
Beginning in January 2001, al-Qaeda increased their purchases of diamonds, and continued until just before the September 11 attacks. According to a Belgian police report, the terrorist group purchased about $20 million worth of RUF diamonds during the fourteen months prior to 9/11. “The evidence suggests a rapid, large scale value transfer operation that allowed the terrorist group to move money out of traceable financial structures into untraceable commodities,” Douglas Farah, author of Blood from Stones, told Congress during his February 2005 testimony.
During the upheavals in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the United States and other Western nations dismissed Taylor’s activities—especially his dealings in diamonds and small arms—because they were not considered a direct threat to their security. With the attacks of 9/11, this has proven a dangerous assumption.
Just as Afghanistan and Pakistan were the arms bazaar of the Middle East, Liberia and Sierra Leone became the nexus of small-arms smuggling in Africa from the mid-1980s to the present day. But the scourge of AKs did not stop in these West African nations. Cheap and plentiful small arms plagued the people of Mozambique, Rwanda, Somalia, Congo, and South Africa, among others. Indeed, from 1990 through 2000, Africa experienced more than a hundred conflicts, twice the number of previous decades, fueled mainly by AKs. In a continent where the price of an AK was often less than ten dollars, it became not only a weapon, but a way to make a living through criminal behavior and barter as in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
In Somalia, the AK played a pivotal role in that country’s civil war and was at the root of unsuccessful efforts by the United Nations and U.S. forces to bring peace there.
IN 1992, SOMALIA WAS in the midst of a civil war that, coupled with a drought, brought widespread famine and disease. With the country in chaos and no single government emerging to take charge, a multinational military force under control of the United Nations in 1993 began humanitarian efforts to relieve hunger and aid displaced people. These troops’ efforts met with mixed results. Assaults directed against them often prevented food and water from reaching those in need.
As violence escalated, several areas of the country seceded and formed their own independent states. One warlord in particular, General Mohammed Farrah Aidid, was not afraid to engage UN troops, killing soldiers from Pakistan, the United States, and elsewhere with bombs and small-arms fire.
On October 3, 1993, in the hope of capturing leaders of Aidid’s rebel forces, U.S. Army Special Forces were deploying troops in Mogadishu when the assault force was fired upon. Two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters were shot down by rocket-propelled grenades and three others were disabled.
Most of the original assault force went to the first crash site, where about ninety Rangers found themselves under siege, mainly from massive small-arms fire, which kept them pinned down in the urban setting. They were stuck for the night while rebels and even Somali citizens angry at the United States and armed with AKs kept the GIs trapped. At the second crash site, two soldiers, dropped by helicopter to protect downed pilot Mike Durant from a street mob, were killed. Durant was taken hostage. By the next morning, the battle ended as reinforcements from the 10th Mountain Division and troops from Pakistan and Malaysia fought their way in and evacuated the remaining U.S. soldiers amid heavy gunfire and mobs firing AKs.
In the end, eighteen American soldiers were killed in action and seventy-nine sustained injuries. One Malaysian soldier was killed and seven injured. The Pakistanis suffered two injuries. Anywhere from three hundred to a thousand Somalis died, according to Pentagon estimates.
The incident, one of the most dramatic urban encounters endured by U.S. military forces, was chronicled in the popular book and movie entitled Black Hawk Down. The event’s significance went far beyond Hollywood, however. Although U.S. forces won the battle, they did not complete their mission: to provide continued food and medical supplies to Somalians. To be sure, the efforts did save lives, perhaps as many as two hundred thousand people, but after seeing dead American soldiers dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, as well as footage from the battle itself, the Clinton administration lost its will for the peacekeeping action in Somalia. In March 1994, U.S. public opinion turned against keeping troops in the war-torn nation, and they were brought home. The United Nations, no longer able to count on the more than twenty thousand American troops, also pulled out as the situation deteriorated. Current conditions remain unsettled as Somalia has since split into several countries seeking international recognition. Warlords and their militias continue to engage in low-level wars fueled by cheap small arms, mainly AKs.
Small-arms attacks often thwarted UN humanitarian efforts. In one incident in 2000, a small single-engine plane was fired upon by AKs, leading to the curtailment of aid to Kismayo in Southwest Somalia. This scene has been repeated in other areas since then.
Not only did the experience in Somalia fuel the debate over using U.S. forces in areas in which U.S. security was not directly threatened, but it also spurred Pentagon planners to think more about how well-trained American troops outfitted with the latest high-tech weaponry can win against poorly trained militia armed with simple, low-tech automatic rifles, especially in urban settings.
The battle of Mogadishu brought to the foreground the growing debate about “asymmetric warfare.” Although no single definition of the phrase exists, most military planners describe it as war between two dissimilar forces using vastly differing weapons and employing vastly different doctrines. On the surface, it would seem that the force with the best technology and best weapons would win quickly and decisively, but this is not always the case.
This was clearly the situation in Mogadishu. Commenting on Black Hawk Down, veteran BBC correspondent Yusuf Hassan noted, “It was sort of portraying the Americans as heroes, when in fact they had all the technology. It was a high-tech war—against people who only had AK-47 rifles.” (They also had RPGs.) Since Mogadishu, the Marine Corps has instituted its Urban Warrior Program, one facet being the familiarization of troops with the AK. This is the weapon they will face most in future conflicts.
In Somalia, as in many areas of the w
orld, the price of an AK can be an indication of social stability. In a sign of optimism, the price in Mogadishu of an AK dropped from $700 to between $300 and $400 after the Somali parliament in October 2004 elected Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed president. Although fighting continued among the other self-proclaimed independent areas of Puntland and Somaliland over disputed territories, and in Somalia itself, there was hope that the new president would bring stability to the region. In response, the perceived need for people to arm themselves dropped, bringing a subsequent drop in price of the AK.
Unfortunately, the price steadily rose as Ahmed and his prime minister, Ali Mohammed Ghedi, remained in Nairobi, Kenya, where they were inaugurated under the security of that country’s military and have lived ever since, running the government from exile.
THE SCOURGE OF LOW-COST AKS also spread to Rwanda as weapons poured in, fueling that country’s genocide in 1994, a systematic horror that had not been seen since the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia in the 1970s.
The animosity between the Hutu majority and the Tutsis had been ongoing since before the country was a German colony, which was ceded to Belgium after World War I. A Tutsi monarchy ruled the country until 1959, when a Hutu uprising forced the Tutsis from power. In the process, thousands of Tutsis were killed and many foreigners, especially Belgians, were driven from the country. The Hutus, now in power, with sponsorship from France, engaged in large-scale murders of Tutsis from 1959 to 1966, during which time between 20,000 and 100,000 Tutsi were killed and about 150,000 fled to neighboring countries including Burundi, Uganda, Zaire, and Tanzania. In these other countries, Hutu and Tutsi conflicts spilled over. For example, in 1972, Hutus attacked Tutsis in southern Burundi and in counterattacks more than 80,000 Hutus were killed.
AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War Page 10
