THE TERROR OF SIERRA LEONE
The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond.
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 twenty-five-carat coffee-colored industrial and a three-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 seventy 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 UN peacekeepers had surrounded Foday Sankoh’s house in retaliation for rebel attacks elsewhere in the country. Sankoh is head of the RUF—the Revolutionary United Front—as the rebels call themselves, and under the UN-sanctioned Lome 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 UN disarmament camp in the town of Makeni and demanded that the Kenyan peacekeepers turn over ten rebels who had voluntarily surrendered their weapons. The commander refused, shooting broke out, and seven UN personnel were taken prisoner. The rest were still surrounded.
The last time Sankoh was arrested, the government had sentenced him to death. In response, the RUF nearly 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 UN peacekeeper stepped forward and asked us what we wanted. There were no other peacekeeping troops, no white-painted UN vehicles; the place was deserted. Suddenly a dozen young toughs in street clothes came running out of the bunker.
“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 RUF 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 RUF, 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 twenty-nine-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 seventy-five- thousand-dollar 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 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 six hundred 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 that managed to reinstate Kabbah as president in early 1998. Kabbah, however, then made the mistake of executing twenty-four 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 RUF. 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.
War does not get much 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 such names as Colonel Bloodshed, Commander Cut Hands, Superman, Mr. Die, and Captain Backblast. They fought their way west in Freetown, neighborhood by
