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 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.