CIVIL WAR IN SIERRA LEONE – BLOOD DIAMONDS

(1) CIVIL WAR IN SIERRA LEONE – BLOOD DIAMONDS

I’m not sure what emotions we felt as a ship’s crew – fear or apprehension, perhaps.
For as the ship sailed into the heat and humidity of Freetown harbour, the rows of military Land Rovers parked on the quay – some painted with a distinctive Red Cross – were plain to see.

There were scores of them, on hand for the bitter civil war which had been raging for several years, but by this time was being countered by UN and British forces.

It was February 2000 and we’d sailed from the UK on a tanker loaded with six thousand tonnes of diesel oil for the peacekeeping forces there; it wouldn’t be a quick turnaround for the vessel either as she was being used as a floating storage unit, some of the fuel going into shoreside storage tanks whilst other consignments were taken up river as needed.

At the time Sierra Leone ranked 203 out of 206 in a ranking of the world’s poorest countries (1), a position only marginally better today.

Rich in natural resources including bauxite, gold, manganese, platinum, titanium and of course, diamonds – this latter providing about 4% of the country’s GDP (2) – added to renewables such as fishing and timber and it could reasonably be assumed there shouldn’t be a poverty problem at all.

We might say: what happened? But mismanagement of these resources especially at political level was reported in the form of bribes, secret bank accounts and double-accounting. (1) Furthermore Sierra Leone was beset with the ‘resource curse’ of diamonds, that problem resulting from a country’s over-dependence on a natural resource such as found with oil in Nigeria and Venezuela: commodity prices go up and down and development outcomes are less certain – never put all your eggs in one basket, as the old saying goes.

In the situation of diamonds, arguably it was even worse as the sales of diamonds were controlled worldwide in an artificial market by De Beers, a South African corporation.
Very briefly, the practice governed supply to keep prices high but it is obvious that producing countries such as Sierra Leone face interruptions in their foreign earnings due to this.

The signs are today that this type of control is diminishing, but in the year 2000 diamond smuggling was draining government coffers rapidly.

Which leads to us understanding the term ‘blood diamonds’ for what it suggests: diamonds mined in order to sell to wage war or insurrection.

And from 1991 the nation was clamouring for change after economic decline and a series of coups. In the diamond producing areas of the River Kono and Bo, miners would toil in mud and filthy river water for one dollar a day with perhaps another dollar for a find (2) ; citizens of these areas rarely received improved living standards despite it all.

So social unrest was ignited when a group of Sierra Leone ex-army regulars joined revolutionaries and disaffected youth to form the Revolutionary United Front to wrest control of the mining regions.

However noble their motives were for equality, justice and fairness, this soon spiralled out of control by the arrival of other actors including foreign mercenaries and Charles Taylor, the despot President of neighbouring Liberia who was eager to take some spoils of war.
A certain Colonel Qadaffi of Libya was rumoured to be financing and training RUF fighters too – altogether a murky business. (3)

The RUF were initially successful but at an appalling cost in human life as they rampaged through bush villages burning, looting, murdering and raping. Young women were sold in slavery whilst teenage boys were conscripted to fight for the RUF – the so-called ‘child soldiers’ – and it was obvious by this time that genocide was mounted against the people they were supposed to be helping.

According to Foday Sankeh, the rebels’ leader, his soldiers were told to ‘pay your own wages’, i.e., plunder whatever you can. (4)

But whilst armed with AK47’s and machetes probably the worst atrocity meted out to villagers was the amputations, or cutting off of limbs and whether this was done by drug-crazed soldiers on ‘poyo’ – a African drink made from fermented palms – or whether it was done to deprive villagers of the ability to vote for democracy or work their lands is not known, but the results were ghastly.

From the eastern regions the RUF surged through to Freetown, past UN peacekeeping troops and hijacking some of their vehicles on the way, but by this time the civil war had caught the world’s attention. At an emergency meeting, the secretary of the UN, Kofi Annan, called for Britain, as a former colonial power, to bolster the UN.

In Parliament, the Prime Minister of the day, Tony Blair won a vote to despatch troops to defend Freetown naming the RUF as “thugs and gangsters” (5) and very swiftly Parachute Regiment soldiers as well as Gurkhas defeated the RUF, sending them into the bush.

Asked for comment Prime Minister Blair said; “we have a moral duty – if we continue to ignore the sufferings of African nations, it would breed anger and frustration which would threaten global stability.” (6

But although Freetown was liberated the rebels were still around, and for us aboard the tanker life couldn’t have been more in contrast to what was happening elsewhere.

In common with the reserve and rear-echelon troops we were in Freetown harbour, the harbour itself surrounded by high security fencing. The city outside was ‘off-limits’ although it was rumoured that some did visit there.
All the same, it wasn’t such a bad place to be aboard a vessel; there was a postal and internet service on the quay, plus several shack-type bars, all of which did a roaring trade in selling ice-cold ‘Star’ lager.

But it wasn’t all down-time and one particular day we had to discharge some diesel onto ‘Mexefloats’ – a type of flat-bottom barge of the Royal Logistics Corps – the diesel being transported upriver to a UN field hospital.

As often in tropical river estuaries the flow was swift. but once eventually the barge was secured we spoke to some Ukrainian UN soldiers who said that, yes, atrocities had been confirmed and in fact there were swathes of blackened land where bush villages had once been.

The villages had been mainly self-supporting in the form of locals growing rice and raising chickens. Goats were also bred for milk and meat – altogether they were independent communities capable of nurturing the land.

However, no-one on ship had any desire to go to the bush, but all of us had a merchant seamen’s inquisitiveness to visit the city. We all felt the same: what was behind the wire? What secrets did it hold?

Eventually, and once it was established that the RUF had been chased out of town for good, restrictions began to relax and our skipper was keen to allow off-duty crew to take day-time visits to Lumley beach, a fine sweep of clean sand not too far away.

A UN truck took us on Sunday afternoons. The truck was escorted by armed Jordanian soldiers from the UN, four of them ‘riding shotgun’ – the Jordanians glad to be off-base and receiving cartons of cigarettes from us.

The only stipulation was that it must return before nightfall. All enjoyed these trips to the beach and signs that life was returning to normality was evident by the number of local hawkers of African art, usually carved teak figures of elephants and similar.

At Lumley beach a bar built of driftwood also stocked plentiful bottles of cold Star lager as well as fresh fish meals. The guys would order fish and chips and whilst the owner’s wife fried the chips, the guy would launch his dugout and pull in a fish, usually grouper or mackerel.

For a bit more money and time he’d land a 20 kg barracuda, cook it, and we’d share the food with local kids, right there on the sand.

At this point we noticed that some troops were going into the city for beers. We asked the routine of doing so and was told to “just walk through.” This we did being told to just “leave a name and expected time of return” – it really was that easy.

We looked for a bar deemed to be safe and was directed to ‘Paddy’s.’ A drab concrete building it didn’t look like a bar, in fact the only indications were Star lager and Coca-Cola signs behind a climber plant of blue ‘Morning Glory’ – magnificent in the equatorial sunshine.

Although only three pm, Paddys’ – a hot, sweaty place without air conditioning – fairly bounced to the rap, hip-hop and rock music of ‘Eminem’, ‘Hot Boyz’ and ‘Linkin Park.’ The Africans liked their own music though and I remember that music of Senegalese singer ‘Yousso N’dour’ was also popular whilst at weekends there were amazing bands playing what’s called ‘talking drums’, a collection of African drums each tuned and played to resemble human voices.

The local guys playing these drums were brilliant to watch and listen to. One player told us all of the talking drums as an African tradition, telling of the hopes and dreams of the people.
A very timely comment, we all thought.

The clientele of Paddys’ was always a motley collection including local princesses, troops, foreign aid workers and, of course, ourselves.
We shared views of the situation with aid workers from Oxfam who told us that funding from appeals in Britain and Ireland were especially generous; and that women were discriminated greatly in Sierra Leone – female literacy rates being less than a quarter of the whole population.

We felt that the Oxfam guys called in Paddys’ as a form of coping mechanism – that it gave them some relief from the massive workload they faced.

The beer priced at two bucks for a Star lager wasn’t particularly expensive to us, but to locals it represented two days’ pay – clearly Paddys’ was having a good war.

But we were conscious of getting back aboard before midnight as the dark hours were dangerous. Often we would ride the vehicle through darkened streets watching figures skulking under a dimmed street light or sleeping on the pavement; a UN jeep armed with machine guns would sweep around the corner, its headlamps blazing.
In fact, the dark city had a post-apocalyptic feel to it with fires flickering in the shadows and people just struggling for survival.

One daytime we walked through the city market to experience the opinions of local citizenry over the war. Evidently it was known that we were Brits and the response from locals was quite heart-warming as one after another asked us to “visit Tony Blair and thank him.”

One trader, selling a few meagre wares of guinea-fowl eggs and tomatoes described how his fourteen-year old daughter had been abducted and how he despaired of ever seeing her again. “Please”, he urged, “tell your police in London to help.”
This was one of the most heartbreaking conversations I had with Sierra Leoneans, whilst others, keen to express their thanks at liberation, were almost tearful – it really was humbling.

By this time refugees had flooded back into Freetown with many dressed in rags and barefoot. Soon we held a collection from crew members for ‘gash clothing’ and besides a few items of paint-splashed work clothes, we donated four bin-liners of fairly decent clothing and footwear, soap, shampoo, etc, through the local church.

Some locals worked for the army inside the docks and in this respect they were fortunate insofar as they received the going daily rate plus three meals.
At the end of the day though they would always stop at the ship’s garbage skip and load up carrier bags with waste food presumably to take back to their families. Food which had been mixed amongst rubbish, heated all day by the midday sun wasn’t overlooked at all.
What else, I thought, could underline the desperate plight of the people?

As in any war economy there were traders however.
Of the more benign types of trading, one local wanted old 205-litre oil drums; these are often used in developed countries for storage tanks, whilst cut and flattened they make good roofing sheets.
Anyway we negotiated a swap of four empty drums for approximately 20 kilos of mangoes and pineapples which, in turn, we shared with locals – much appreciated in the heat.

But there were also diamond traders. We figured these were locals touting for Lebanese traders and they were purporting to be selling rough diamonds, the type which would be later banned under a UN sanction – this commodity indeed being a major cause of the conflict.
The ‘diamonds’ were very similar in appearance to diamonds but probably quartz – a softer rock; in any case, mindful of the negative consequences of blood diamonds there were no takers.

And there was corruption too. Passing along a UN vehicle compound one day a government official beckoned us in to “look at the Landcruisers” and as the conversation developed he welcomed us to Sierra Leone, but mentioned that if we wanted to purchase a Toyota Landcruiser there were several available.

It was a huge white 4WD going cheap, but I mentioned that these Landcruisers were for the people and that, indeed, money for them was raised in the UK through voluntary subscriptions – from donations in churches and charity shops – that to buy one would be morally wrong.

But I guess that a government official on a small salary of less than US$100 p.m.may have problems relating to this.
And in the scenario with the Lebanese traders’ representatives, rough diamonds were also offered to us – a further reference to the endemic corruption.

It would be a few years later that blood diamonds were more widely understood and this through the medium of Hollywood: the Leonardo di Caprio movie ‘Blood Diamond.’
Closely relating to the terrible events around smuggling, the plot’s RUF abductee Salomon Vany (played by Djimon Hounsou) is forced to mine diamonds and finds a huge gem in the river.
The bad guys as well as the RUF are a cast of southern African white mercenaries who are hell-bent on stealing the diamond from Vandy. The conclusion is probably not the ending cinema-goers expected, but interesting is the movie release coincided with the signing of a diamond certification scheme – the purpose of which is to prevent blood diamond exploitation – by over forty countries.

But the reality is that the civil war cost over 50,000 lives with many more wounded as well as an astonishing 250,000 in refugees camps, 200,000 displaced and 400,000 trapped behind enemy lines – this latter unable to secure food and medical supplies.

Some justice was afforded to the people. One perpetrator the war, President Taylor of Liberia was arraigned in court in The Hague, accused of war crimes and given a 50 year sentence. Many other individuals served sentences from 15 to 50 years.

I never did return to Sierra Leone, but in the summer of 2000 I was back in the UK and thought hard about what I’d seen: of survivors traumatised ; of girls and women who had their hands hacked off and would never wear a ring of any description, let alone a diamond ring.

So I went into a few high street jewellers and asked if they were aware of blood diamonds.

One plush, upmarket shop knew nothing about them and the same response was echoed by another. In another well-known name shop, the well-dressed manager confirmed he did know of the term but was “waiting to hear from head office for further instructions.”

I thanked him, then thought about the locals in Freetown – ever grateful for their liberation – and by chance later that day read an editorial in ‘New Statesman’ magazine in which the writer opined that Tony Blair’s incursion into Sierra Leone was motivated to “help big business – not morals or democracy.” (7)

It was thought-provoking enough but given that even today Sierra Leoneans view Blair as an unquestioned hero, I could only suppose that the people there don’t see it that way.
To them they are just grateful to have their lives back.

(1) Jung, A. ‘Wealth but no Health’ (Dec 2012), D&C Development &Cooperation, dand.ceu
(2) ‘World Bank defines poverty’ (2000), http://www.worldbank.org.topic.poverty/2000
(3) Milton, K. ((2015), ‘Rebels in a Rotten State’, OUP (USA),
(4) Gbere, Lansana, (2006), ‘A Dirty War in West Africa’, OUP
(5) ‘Blair and Sierra Leone’, (2.10.01), http://www.bbcnews.co.uk
(6) Ibid
(7) ‘Our Soldiers aren’t in Sierra Leone for Morals’, (29.05.2000) http://www.newstatesman.com