Blood Diamonds - The African Conflict
Diamonds; timeless, beautiful, symbols of love, they are the world’s most precious and sought after gems. But in Africa, during the 1990s, these beautiful stones became blood diamonds, named. not for their colour but, for their cost in human conflict and suffering. Children were kidnapped and turned into killers. When the story broke, a global industry would come under fire fearing that diamonds would become the new fur, that people would boycott diamonds which would become the most politically incorrect gemstones.
Sierra Leone is one of the poorest nations on Earth. The average income of its people is little more than $100 per year. Yet, beneath its soil lies a treasure trove of diamonds.
Patrick Smith, editor of Africa Confidential says “Sierra Leone diamonds are legendary for their value and their beauty. Its the size, the colour, the refractive nature of the stone”. Diamonds should have made Sierra Leone a paradise, instead it made it a hell.
Revolutionary United Front (RUF)
From 1991 to 2001 a brutal war has raged between the government and the rebel group called the RUF, the Revolutionary United Front. A war funded in part by diamonds. The country and its people still bear the scar of diamond fuelled warfare. During the war, Ibrahim Fofana worked in one of the many mines in Eastern Sierra Leone pulling rough diamonds from the ground.
In April 1998 the RUF attacked his village. Rebels confronted his neighbour demanding diamonds, when he said he had none he was shot and killed. A different fate awaited Ibrahim, they chopped his hands off. In Sierra Leone, over 10,000 people suffered a similar fate. Amputation became the trade-mark atrocity of the RUF.
Greg Campbell, author of Blood Diamond tells us “They committed every war crime under the Geneva Convention and then invented one of their own, in intentional mutilation of non-combatant civilians. The whole purpose of it was to serve a military strategy, to induce population flow away from the areas the RUF wanted under its control”.
As the people of Sierra Leone suffered the horrors of civil war, diamonds mined illegally by the rebels flowed freely into the world diamond market. The estimate is that, maybe, 15% of the world diamond market was made up by blood diamonds. Blood diamonds mined in the 1990s still grace the hands and necks of unsuspecting customers all over the world.
Diamonds also funded two other brutal civil wars in Africa during the 1990s. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Angola, and it was in Angola that the horrors of blood diamonds first came to world attention
Matthew Hart, author of Diamond, comments “Angola has everything, off-shore oil reserves, diamonds and other resources. It is a sad tale of human greed and the most revolting conditions of exploitation”.
Unita Rebels
From the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s a bitter civil war had raged between government troops and rebel forces known as Unita. While the government relied on oil reserves, the rebels turned to diamonds. By 1992, the rebels controlled nearly 70% of Angola’s diamond mines.
Hart tells us “The war was funded, in one part, by the sale of diamonds extracted by people, often, in conditions of enslavement”. They had little trouble in finding buyers for their illicit stones.
Dealers from the diamond dealing world would come to Unita, those diamonds went straight into the market in Antwerp and they got an enormous amount of money for them. 3.7 billion dollars worth of diamonds from Angola went through Unita’s hands in the 1990s.
Often, deals were done without cash changing hands. Arms dealers would fly in and directly negotiate arms for diamonds. Illegal diamond revenue sustained Unita’s vicious war machine. For the people of Angola the horror seemed to have no end. Close to a million people lost their lives in the conflict in Angola.
The war sparked an investigation by Global Witness, a small London-based pressure group focusing on human rights abuses and environmental issues. In 1998, Global Witness published an exposé on conflict diamonds entitle A Rough Trade. The reaction was explosive, basically consumers were funding the war in Angola. The report’s greatest criticism was levelled at De Beers. De Beers have dominated the market in African diamonds for a hundred years. Their philosophy was simple, control diamond supply and you control diamond prices.
Ian Smillie a research coordinator with Partnership Africa-Canada explains “We have an idea that diamonds are rare; they’re not. What created the value of diamonds was withholding the supply to ensure it was regulated. Which is what De Beers did right from the beginning”.
De Beers Diamond Trade
With supply under their control, De Beers, under the inspired leadership of their chairman Ernest Oppenheimer, launched a brilliant ad campaign in 1948 designed to increase demand. But, the blood diamond scandal that Global Witness had unleashed, threatened the De Beers business as never before. De Beers was very prominent in buying diamonds that came from Angola and Unita.
De Beers defends its purchase of Angolan diamonds, stating that they have never bought blood diamonds. They dispute that conflict diamonds even existed before 1998. Only when the UN imposed sanctions did De Beers recognise the problem.
In October 1999, De Beers took decisive action and announced the closure of their Angolan offices, but the blood diamonds story wasn’t over. In Sierra Leone, the war stood on the verge of new horrors.
The rebels, under the leadership of former army corporal Foday Sankoh, had captured the mines and now they needed miners. A new campaign of terror was launched to turn Sierra Leone’s diamond mines into slave labour camps. Before the start of the civil war, Usman Conteh was a typical teenager, but when he was just seventeen he was abducted during a rebel raid on his home town. Usman Conteh had expected to be executed, but as one of a group of a hundred he was taken to the mines and forced to work at gunpoint, day and night. Rebels hovered over each captive, guarding against escape or theft.
The diamonds were whisked out of the country along smuggling routes that had been set up decades before. RUF control of the mines served another strategic purpose, it starved the government and its army of finances to operate. As anarchy reigned in Sierra Leone, the children would soon be drawn into the conflict. Some were killed, others did the killing.
The conflict in Sierra Leone took on a horrifying new aspect when the RUF began kidnapping children. Patrick Smith, the editor of Africa Confidential explains the horrors of this development “They would capture the children in a specific area, drug the children, brainwash the children and show them Rambo movies, fill them full of cocaine, marijuana, cheap liquor and say ‘Your parents have betrayed you, they’ve betrayed the country, they’re your enemies, you’ve got to go and kill your parents”. During the war nearly 20,000 boys and girls aged mostly between 8 and 15 were turned into sex slaves of killing machines.
Lovette Freeman was just fourteen when she was abducted by the RUF. She was sexually abused and beaten; she did what she was told. She held a woman at gunpoint and abducted her baby. She was sad when the baby died.
Executive Outcome - A Mercenary Army
By the end of 1994, with much of Sierra Leone in chaos, the government hired a South African mercenary army, Executive Outcomes, to restore order. The soldiers for hire were promised diamonds as pay. In just one month, Executive Outcomes drove the RUF out of most of the diamond-rich east. The resulting peace brought elections in 1996, but the RUF refused to participate.
Ahmad Tejan Kabbah was elected president. At the urging of the UN, Kabbah terminated the contract with Executive Outcomes. With no military force to stop them, the RUF rose up again. To punish those who had voted for President Kabbah, the RUF exacted horrific revenge on the people of Sierra Leone.
In 1996, the war entered its sixth year. Illicit diamonds had helped sustain a conflict that might otherwise have ended quickly. Alexander Yearsley of Global Witness considers “The amount of money that the RUF made from the diamonds in Sierra Leone is between 50 and 125 million dollars per annum for the time they had control of the diamond fields.
The RUF were about to get more rich pickings. The army overthrew the president and invited the rebels into Freetown, as allies. Almost immediately, the RUF set about pillaging the capital in an operation they, cynically, called ‘Pay Yourself’. Houses were looted, the occupants brutalised and the women raped in front of their children and husbands. The horror ended only when a Nigerian led intervention force drove the RUF out of the capital, but by then 6,000 people had perished and the once vibrant city was in ruins.
International Intervention
Finally, the international community intervened. The warring parties met at Lome, Togo in July 1999 and signed a peace accord. To the horror of many in Sierra Leone, Fodey Sankoh, leader of the RUF, was handed the vice-presidency. As vice-president, Sankoh was granted official oversight of Sierra Leone’s diamond mine, the very objective he’s sought through eight years of war.
However, the RUF broke the cease-fire and were on the rise once again. But, this time the world was determined to defeat them once and for all. In May 2000, a British intervention force landed on the shores of Sierra Leone, together with UN troops they crushed the RUF and arrested their leader Fodey Sankoh.
The peace in Sierra Leone was an uneasy one. Full amnesty had been granted to the RUF combatants so the war victims and the rebels who had terrorised them are once again neighbours being encouraged to forgive and forget.
Sierra Leone’s, UN backed, War Crimes Tribunal will only deal with those who bear the greatest responsibility for the war’s worst atrocities. Fodey Sankoh was charged with crimes against humanity but died in prison before he could be sentenced.
External Links
Blood Diamonds - Wikipedia Page
CREDITS: All of the above information came from the UK Channel 5 “The True Story” Documentary Series.
Further Reading
[amazon asin=0813342201&template=add to cart] Blood Diamonds - Greg Canpbell
[amazon asin=0802713688&template=add to cart] Diamond - Matthew Hart
[amazon asin=0966585410&template=add to cart] Rough Diamonds: A Practical Guide - Nizam Peters
