transportation of diamonds out of the country. BECA and the RUF would split all profits.
The contract specified that the agreement would become null and void as soon as the government of Sierra Leone activated the Commission for the Management of Strategic Resources, National Reconstruction and Development, of which Sankoh was chairman. At that point, a new contract would be negotiated between BECA and the commission. Until then, however, mining in Sierra Leone was wide open to anyone who wanted to do business with the RUF.
Upon returning to the United States, Desaedeleer went to the embassy of Sierra Leone and met with John Leigh, the Sierra Leonean ambassador to the United States. He showed Leigh the contract and offered to sell it to him for ten million dollars, which he claimed was its value on the open market. In effect, he was trying to sell something to the government of Sierra Leone that Sankoh had no legal basis for giving away in the first place. Not only did the RUF have no legal claim to mining rights in Sierra Leone, but even in his capacity as chairman of the Strategic Resources commission, Sankoh did not have the authority to negotiate a contract by himself. At the very least, he needed the signatures of the other members of the commission, which he obviously did not have. Shocked at the proposal—and its price—Ambassador Leigh says he asked to make a photocopy of the document so that he could send it to his government. Desaedeleer refused, and Leigh asked him to leave the embassy immediately.
After that, Caldwell and Desaedeleer tried to sell the license to various mining companies—De Beers, Diamond Works, Rex, Rio Tinto—but were turned down by all of them. Finally, Desaedeleer says, he got the ear of Charles Finkelstein, a member of a prominent Antwerp diamond family. Finkelstein later denied any professional involvement with Desaedeleer, but at the time Desaedeleer seemed to think he had found a partner. At the very least, he may have thought that Finkelstein’s name would impress Sankoh.
“With Charles, we can BUY,” Desaedeleer wrote to Sankoh on April 6. “Charles has the financial ability to do anything, a private jet from Belgium to Kono or to Monrovia or to Freetown or any other solution…. What we have to solve: How will you convince the people in charge in Kono to bring everything to you instead of 10% and [if] it is not possible how are you going to convince them to sell those 90% to us instead of keeping it or selling it to the Lebanese or whoever?…Foday what I’m saying is this, the money is finally on the table, you make sure that the merchandise is available one way or another and all of us will be ok.”
Desaedeleer may have been vying with half a dozen other Western businessmen—all pursuing mining contracts—for Sankoh’s attention. In a sense these men were not the problem; they were just trying to exploit one. The real problem was that Sankoh was presiding over a system in which all the diamonds of Kono were being diverted from Freetown and smuggled out of the country. According to Ambassador Leigh, other documents found at Sankoh’s house corroborate this; one even specified that 10 percent of the Kono diamonds went to Sankoh, 10 percent to the rebel commander Sam Bockarie, and 30 percent was used to buy arms and ammunition. The rest went to Liberian president Charles Taylor.
Weapons were the key. Without them the rebels could not control the diamond-producing regions, and without diamonds the rebels could not buy weapons. And there was plenty of evidence that weapons were making it into Sierra Leone. The British press reported that shortly before the January 6 invasion, a forty-ton shipment of weapons from Bratislava, Slovakia, had been flown into rebel-held eastern Sierra Leone by two British transport companies. And according to the New York–based organization Human Rights Watch, in April 1999, the ECOMOG commander in Sierra Leone reported that sixty-eight tons of weapons—including Strela-3 surface-to-air missiles and Metis guided antitank missile systems—had been flown into Burkina Faso on a Ukrainian-registered transport plane. From there, ECOMOG claimed, they were loaded onto smaller planes and flown into RUF territory. The end user certificate stipulated that the weapons could not be exported to another country, but in the fast and loose world of international arms trading, that hardly mattered.
“The arms trade in Africa works through brokers,” a Belgian arms-trafficking authority named Johan Peleman told me before I arrived in Freetown. “They usually have a former intelligence or military background, but at the same time they are businessmen—commodity traders, for instance…. A typical broker would be a Belgian based in a French hotel room supplying guns from, I don’t know, Lithuania, to a country neighboring the conflict zone. Documents would all look perfectly legitimate, but the arms end up with a rebel movement.”
A couple of days before leaving Sierra Leone, we drove out to the front. The taxi driver wouldn’t go beyond the town of Waterloo, so we got out and waited at a Nigerian Army checkpoint until a truckload of Kamajors drove up. They were headed twenty miles up the road to Masiaka, where a big battle had just taken place. They pulled us on board and veered back onto the road. There were about twenty of them, leaning against the sides of the truck and passing a joint around while the jungle blurred by on either side. At the deserted towns, soldiers who had been stranded would run out to try to wave us down, and going up through Occra Hills, we slowed to a crawl on the inclines while groups of Westside Boys watched us pass, pumping their guns in the air and screaming. From time to time we saw ambushed trucks with their engine parts sprayed out across the road, and around Songo Junction there was the body of a rebel who’d been killed two days earlier. His corpse had turned foul so quickly on the hot asphalt that no one had bothered to drag him off.
Masiaka was at a crossroads that controlled access to the entire rest of the country; without it Freetown was basically under siege, and the rebels had held it for the past several days. But the Westside Boys had driven them out just hours earlier, and when we arrived, they were cranked out of their minds, either on coke or on the battle itself, and were milling around the town square, shooting their guns off. The Kamajors clambered down and joined in the shooting. Some government soldiers walked up, and within minutes an argument had broken out: something about who was doing the real fighting around here. An officer in the government forces began dressing down a Kamajor commander, and the Kamajor suddenly backed up a few steps and cocked his machine gun. The officer cocked his gun, and the Kamajors started cocking theirs, and suddenly everyone in the town square was screaming.
I glanced around for some cover, but all I could find was a concrete culvert along the road. We edged away and climbed into a pickup truck with some government soldiers. The rebels were in the bush a few miles away and a gun battle between Kamajors and government soldiers wasn’t even close to being out of the question; it was time to get out of there. We drove back through the destroyed towns of Magbuntoso and Jama and then past the Nigerian forward positions and the Jordanian defenses around the airfield. Freetown was crowded and loud, the markets thronged with people and the streets completely choked by traffic. A British warship was visible out in the harbor. British paratroopers had dug bunkers into the hillside next to Aberdeen Bridge.
Africa stopped at Aberdeen. Europe began. We sat down at the terrace of the Mammy Yoko Hotel and ordered cold beers while the sun set and off-duty soldiers swam laps in the pool. Within a day we were clearing customs in Conakry and boarding an overnight flight to Belgium. Sankoh was caught, in the end—spotted by an alert neighbor as he tried to sneak back into his house. Although the RUF released all the original UN hostages, they took more in June. Two foreign journalists, Kurt Schork of Reuters and Miguel Gil Morena de Mora of the Associated Press, were killed by rebels in a roadside ambush near Rogberi Junction. The rebels attacked Bo and Kenema and then withdrew to where they’d been three weeks earlier. The war continued up-country, although accounts of it rarely made it into the international press.
Very little had changed, really. Except that a few more people were dead.
THE LION IN WINTER
The fighters were down by the river, getting ready to cross over, and we drove out there in the late afternoon to see them off. We parked our truck behind a mud wall, where it was out of sight, and then walked one by one down to the position. In an hour or so, it would be dark, and they’d go over. Some were loading up an old Soviet truck with crates of ammunition, and some were cleaning their rifles, and some were just standing in loose bunches behind the trees, where the enemy couldn’t see them. They were wearing old snow parkas and blankets thrown over their shoulders, and some had old Soviet Army pants, and others didn’t have any shoes. They drew themselves into an uneven line when we walked up, and they stood there with their Kalashnikovs and their RPGs cradled in their arms, smiling shyly.
Across the floodplain, low, grassy hills turned purple as the sun sank behind them, and those were the hills these men were going to attack. They were fighting for Ahmad Shah Massoud—genius guerrilla leader, last hope of
