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 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.