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 fifteen-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 it was prepared to do almost anything—including accept the rebels as part of the government—in order to bring an end to the war. The result was the Lome Peace Accord, which granted a blanket amnesty to all combatants, instituted a nationwide disarmament program, opened the door to eleven thousand UN 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 UN 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 RUF 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 UN 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 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, two hundred 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 UN couldn’t, which we took to mean that the Kamajors were busy rearming 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 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
