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, beginning 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
