sheep before starting to work. They make sure the blood mixes with the river water to safeguard their lives.
“I started studying diamonds back in the States,” Lyell said. “Let’s just say that once upon a time I was a bad boy and found myself with a lot of time on my hands…. I’ll probably stay here for a while. I was supposed to go to Mali to buy some gold, but that didn’t happen.”
Lyell wore his hair cropped short in front with a ponytail and had the beginnings of a thin goatee. Like everyone else, he was sweating heavily in the afternoon heat. A truck filled with miners rattled by at one point, and Lyell pointed at it. “Tongo Field,” he said. “Trucks go up there every day.”
“Tongo Field?” I asked. “Isn’t that RUF territory?”
Lyell didn’t say anything. He just looked at me with an expression that I’d already begun to recognize: the expression of someone who has devoted his entire life to diamonds and finds himself dealing with someone who hasn’t.
By the time we left Kenema, three days later, the situation had deteriorated to the point where we’d begun to wonder if we’d even have trouble getting back into Freetown. As many as five hundred peace-keepers were now being held hostage around the country, a Guinean Army contingent had been forced to flee an important base called Rogberi Junction, and the rebels were rumored to have reached Hastings Airport, on the outskirts of Freetown. This last proved to be untrue, but just the rumors were enough to trigger widespread panic. It was starting to look like January 6 all over again.
There were checkpoints on the Bo–Kenema road every few miles now, and they were manned by Kamajors with guns. These were the first guns we’d seen in the country, apart from UN peacekeepers’ weapons, and it was a bad sign; it meant that the government had given up on the UN and had decided to take matters into its own hands. As soon as we drove into Bo, it was clear something was up; there were too many groups of men on the street, too many trucks rumbling in and out of town. We dropped our bags off at the hotel and walked back to the Civil Defense Headquarters, where we’d seen a crowd of several hundred Kamajors.
The commotion started as soon as we arrived.
That morning, apparently, several thousand protesters had gathered at Sankoh’s compound to protest the war, and Sankoh’s bodyguards had opened fire. Television footage showed teenage boys in civilian clothes emptying banana clips into the crowd. One bodyguard even fired off a rocket-propelled grenade. Some accounts had Sankoh pleading with his bodyguards not to shoot, and other accounts had him standing on the balcony with a machine pistol, directing the attack. Nineteen civilians were killed, and scores were wounded. Later that day a group of irregulars stormed the house and killed some of the bodyguards, but Sankoh himself had fled. There were rumors that he had escaped in a UN vehicle, or that he was hiding in Freetown, or that he’d fled into the bush and was making his way back to rebel lines. Government forces rounded up two dozen RUF officials in Freetown and detained them, and Kamajors had done the same thing in Bo. In the meantime the rebels were advancing down the road to Freetown and had hit a town called Waterloo, only twenty miles away.
“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 Siecle 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
