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 By January 1996 Strasser had been replaced by Julius Maada Bio, who in turn was replaced by the current president, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, in a democratic election.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 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 Lomé 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.