Sierra Leone officials call the papers evidence that Sankoh’s rebels traded illicit gems for guns–and that they were aided by two neighboring states, Liberia and Burkina Faso. The officials say Sankoh and the RUF pocketed funds from illicit diamond sales even after a highly controversial peace deal was signed last summer. (The deal–called the Lome accord–gave Sankoh a role in government as head of a proposed commission responsible for marketing the country’s diamonds.) Attorney General Solomon Berewa showed NEWSWEEK detailed ledgers from the looted villa that he said prove Sankoh logged more than 2,000 diamonds mined by the RUF during his 10 months in government–gems that were never reported to the authorities.
“Diamonds are forever,” the famous De Beers advertising slogan has it. And why not? In the legitimate diamond trade, which accounts for more than 96 percent of the total business, according to industry spokespeople, poorer countries benefit from a profitable resource. They mine the gems and trade them through official channels, and affluent people somewhere down the line get pretty keepsakes. But now, too often in war-torn Africa, diamonds can be deadly. Rebels fight over mining areas so they can plunder a country’s resources and pay for their weapons, among other things. Illicitly mined “hot rocks” at once fuel and fund wars from Sierra Leone to Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Two weeks ago the World Bank reported that the struggle for diamonds and other commodities had overtaken politics as the biggest cause of civil war globally. The deaths of countless Africans are now inextricably linked to the glittering object that has symbolized the promise of a lasting marriage.
Last week the mounting worldwide outrage over “conflict diamonds” approached critical mass. In London, Peter Hain, the British Foreign Office minister for Africa, hosted an unprecedented conference on proposals to keep suspicious diamonds off the world market. And in New York, the U.N. Security Council prepared to impose a boycott on any Sierra Leone diamonds not licensed for export by the Freetown government. “There is a gathering, tightening noose on these dreadful people,” says a senior U.S. official.
After months of resistance, the industry, led by South Africa’s giant De Beers, finally senses trouble. “They are trying to do to us what they did to fur,” says a leading gem trader in Antwerp, where most of the world’s diamonds are processed. Industry leaders now are rolling out several proposals aimed at countering the threat of a consumer boycott. Most prominent is a certification scheme that would restrict the trade to diamonds that arrive in sealed containers with government paperwork.
By far the most potent symbol of the suffering “conflict diamonds” can inflict are the amputees of Sierra Leone. Sankoh’s rebels cut the hands off defenseless civilians in order to sow terror and clear people out of diamond-rich areas. Later, long after a peace agreement had been signed, Sankoh’s forces attacked U.N. peacekeepers just as they were preparing to move into rebel-held diamond zones. That audacious assault clearly demonstrated just how important diamonds had become to the RUF.
Yet the diamond trade in Sierra Leone did not benefit just Sankoh and those loyal to him. The leaders of Burkina Faso and Liberia, together with Sankoh, effectively formed a diamond-smuggling cartel, according to Western officials. Liberian leader Charles Taylor, in particular, has leveraged his country’s historical role as a regional entrepot for smuggled diamonds. Liberia has become “a major center for massive diamond-related criminal activity, with connections to guns, drugs and money laundering throughout Africa,” according to a recent report issued by Partnership Africa Canada, a coalition of organizations that work to promote sustainable development. A Liberian government spokesman denies all accusations about trading in illicit diamonds as “pure fabrication.”
Sankoh himself isn’t talking–Sierra Leone authorities have held him without charge since May. But people who did business with him now are. One is Michel Desaedeleer, a Washington-based Belgian businessman who met with Sankoh’s wife, a Jersey City-based lawyer named Fatou. In faxes to Sankoh this year, he complained of having spent $1 million toward a contract with the RUF without result. He also wrote that Fatou showed him “stones” during their meeting this spring in New York, and that Desaedeleer thought he was supposed to work through an intermediary named “Ibrahim.” (Officials in Sierra Leone identify Ibrahim as an officer in the Burkina Faso military.) Desaedeleer showed NEWSWEEK the contract, which he said was totally aboveboard, for exclusive mining and development of diamonds in RUF-controlled areas of Sierra Leone. He insists that Fatou showed him “perhaps hundreds” of diamonds; Fatou, for her part, denies that, and says she only worked to support Sankoh’s political party by setting up a Web site, for instance. “I have never been involved in the diamond trade,” she told NEWSWEEK. “I have a very clean record.” She added that she had never even seen her husband deal diamonds.
The British have now taken the lead in demanding new rules in the diamond industry aimed at making it clear where diamonds come from. Importing countries last week agreed to consider a plan to accept legally mined rough diamonds only in sealed containers that state the country of extraction. The G8 countries will discuss the proposal at its summit in Okinawa, Japan, next month, and its point will be vividly clear to all attending: “You want to make sure,” says Hain, “that the diamond you are putting on your loved one’s finger did not help cut off the finger or hand of a child in Sierra Leone or Angola or Congo.”
