Greg Campbell’s Blood Diamonds is not the novel behind the 2006 Leonardo DiCaprio film. It is reportage by a journalist who went to Sierra Leone to trace conflict diamonds, and its story has little direct connection to the movie’s plot. The full title is Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World’s Most Precious Stones.
The book opens with Dalramy, a Sierra Leonean man in Koidu, a diamond-rich area that armed groups fight over. This time the town had fallen to the RUF, the Revolutionary United Front, which had a reputation for unrestrained cruelty. RUF fighters raped women and tortured civilians to terrorize the population. Because the president had called on people to join hands for peace, the RUF often amputated hands in occupied areas—along with ears, lips, noses and legs. Dalramy and other captured miners queued to have their hands cut off while teenage soldiers kept order and screams rose around them.
Dalramy did not resist. Before his turn came, he managed to hide a diamond ring in his pocket—the last task his hands performed. Then an axe cut off both hands and threw them into the bush. He raised his arms to try to stop the bleeding while the next man screamed behind him. He walked about 15 miles before collapsing, was helped by good Samaritans, and eventually found a local hospital experienced in axe amputations. He left Koidu for Freetown, leaving behind the hands he had lived with for 40 years, his family and all his relatives.
The RUF called this Operation Clean Sweep. From 1996 onward it sold millions of dollars’ worth of rough stones on the international market, and the couples who eventually bought the polished diamonds had no idea what lay behind the sparkle. In 2001 the reporters met Dalramy in Freetown, in a UN-run settlement for amputees that functioned as a refugee camp. More than 200 families lived there. The youngest amputee was less than a year old. Children learned to eat with their stumps; mothers used knees and elbows to hold babies to the breast. People wore clothes donated by charities from around the world, including T-shirts printed with a Titanic poster.
It is hard to connect Sierra Leone with a global diamond industry worth $6 billion a year. According to UN figures, male life expectancy was 42 and female life expectancy 48; infant mortality was 146 per 1,000. Of a population of 5 million, 80 percent were displaced. Military conflict and political assassinations came and went; the only constant was the diamond industry.
Unlike many other former European colonies in Africa, Sierra Leone is rich in diamonds, oil, gold and rubies. It looked as if it might become an African Saudi Arabia. It did not. After diamonds were discovered in the 1930s, plunder by big companies, thieves and armed groups never stopped. The RUF was estimated to make $25 million to $125 million a year from selling rough stones. It was not the only armed group; various Sierra Leonean militias supplied about 5 percent of the world’s rough diamonds. Stones from conflict zones whose profits were used to strengthen armed groups became known as conflict diamonds, or blood diamonds. The international diamond industry was dominated by De Beers, which had built a century-long myth around the stone.
In mines controlled by the government or by less vicious armed groups, a worker earned two cups of rice and 50 cents a day. Large finds brought bonuses—depending on the owner’s conscience. A quarter-carat diamond might sell for about $1,000 once set in jewelry in Europe. The mine owner received about $5 for it. The worker who dug it up got nothing extra, because the stone was not large enough to qualify for a bonus.
Freetown was full of boys who had escaped the RUF. One had been abducted at nine, given rudimentary training and sent into battle with an AK-58. Boys who refused to become child soldiers were executed on the spot. Asked whether he had carried out amputations, he said no, but he had supervised them. He was 17 and had escaped a year earlier; unable to find work, he begged. An old man begged with his granddaughter. He had once traded diamonds; the RUF decided he was rich, arrested him, cut off his hands and gouged out his eyes. Now the granddaughter begged for him.
Freetown was full of such refugees. UN relief supplies were insufficient, thieves operated freely, and beggars seized on every outsider. Restaurant waiters either wanted to sell you diamonds or introduce you to their sisters. Vaccines were scarce; polio victims begged everywhere. If an amputee stopped you, you had to put money into his pocket yourself—or harden your heart and pretend he did not exist.
Freetown’s name came from the colonial British. During the American Revolution, the British promised enslaved people freedom if they fought on the British side. After the war the British kept the promise, and an official transported freed slaves and prostitutes to Sierra Leone so they could start new lives. Freetown was once like an African New York, where people of many colors and ethnicities lived in harmony—until diamonds were discovered.
Campbell and another journalist accidentally fell into conversation with a diamond smuggler when they entered Freetown, and afterward an RUF-linked smuggler kept harassing them. They did not dare buy from him: once word spread that they were buyers, their lodgings would fill with people selling diamonds, drugs and sex. Almost every outsider in Freetown was connected to the diamond trade, and no matter how often the reporters insisted they were not buying, nobody believed them.
The reporters got to know two smugglers, Singer and Valdy, and learned some of the trade’s practical details. A small smuggler who wanted to move stones across a border could simply swallow them; diamonds under 2.5 carats were best suited to this. Local people had other tricks. A woman who had lost an eye in a car accident hid diamonds behind her glass eye.
Conflict diamonds were defined as stones mined in war zones by armed groups opposed to an internationally recognized government, with profits generally used to buy weapons and prolong war. In 2002 the Kimberley Process certification scheme imposed stricter controls on the diamond trade—there had been some before, but 2002 made them tighter. In a place where bribery was routine, laundering conflict diamonds through a neighboring country and obtaining legal authorization was easy.
Smuggling was a mature chain in Africa’s war economies, and diamonds were harder currency than dollars or guns. Sierra Leone’s conflict diamonds moved most reliably through Guinea. From 1993 to 1997, Guinea officially reported selling 2.6 million carats to Belgium at an average of $96 a carat; Belgium recorded 4.8 million carats from Guinea at an average of $167 a carat. In Gambia, estimates suggested 90 percent of diamond exports actually came from Sierra Leone. Ivory Coast, with annual production of only 75,000 carats, exported 13 times that amount between 1994 and 1999. The gap was conflict diamonds. How were they laundered? Singer rubbed two fingers together—the universal gesture for a bribe. The RUF and similar rebels sold stones at one-tenth the government price; a little money bought authorization in a neighboring country, and the stones still moved below normal market prices. European buyers knew the stones were not clean, but the profit was better.
In the 1960s Sierra Leone exported 2 million carats a year. From 1997 to 1999, only 36,000 carats were sold through the government. Estimates suggested that mining had not decreased at all. The reason was simple: the RUF controlled the best diamond areas.
Singer also explained a common scam aimed at foreigners. You buy a two-carat stone on the street for $100, imagining you will have it cut and set at home to please your girlfriend. Then the police arrive, beat you, tell you diamond dealing is a serious crime—and offer to sell you authorization. You bargain, and finally pay $600.
Singer introduced the reporters to Jango, who had escaped from RUF territory. After the 1996 Clean Sweep, Jango wandered into an RUF-controlled area without knowing who was in charge. On the street he saw two RUF soldiers arguing. A male fighter was harassing a female fighter because he thought she was a prostitute; he offered her diamonds to go back and sleep with his battalion. She was furious, raised her AK-47 at his groin and said she would shoot his balls off. Nobody realized she was serious until she pulled the trigger.
Soon afterward Jango was captured and sent to the mines. To prevent escapes, the RUF often starved workers. Even if you had the strength to run, you might run into another RUF unit whose fighters would take your arm, leg or eye on a whim. Stealing diamonds was worse. One miner tried to swallow a stone; a guard immediately stabbed a knife through his pregnant wife’s belly. The baby died, the woman bled to death, and the three bodies were tied together, doused with gasoline and burned. Even so, the temptation was so great that workers kept trying. Jango used his skills to accumulate six diamonds. One day he found an abandoned bicycle near a village, seized the chance and rode away. He later became a middleman between RUF areas and Freetown dealers such as Singer.
The AK-47 was simple, easy to operate and popular with guerrillas; in Sierra Leone it was a favorite weapon of armed groups. Thanks to conflict-diamond profits, the RUF was often better equipped than the government army and other militias. African airspace was poorly controlled. American spy satellites existed, but night flights were easy to hide. Liberian president Charles Taylor—sentenced in 2012 to 50 years in prison—was keen on arms trafficking and gave the RUF considerable help.
Sierra Leone had been a British colony and became independent in 1961. One-party dictatorship followed. The country was desperately poor, one of the poorest in the world; outside Freetown much of it relied on slash-and-burn agriculture. Corruption and dictatorship led to a revolution in 1991. The RUF was founded in Libya, and its leaders received military training from Qaddafi.
When the RUF entered Sierra Leone in 1991, it was welcomed like a heroic force. People hoped it would establish a democratic multi-party system and distribute wealth more fairly. Instead the RUF joined the scramble for diamond mines and quickly outdid other guerrilla groups in brutality. In occupied areas, fighters wrote punishments such as “cut hands” and “cut head” on playing cards and let civilians choose. Soldiers bet on the sex of unborn babies, then cut pregnant women open to check the result.
In 1992 a young officer, Valentine Strasser, angry about unpaid wages, staged a coup and took temporary power. The RUF advanced; when Freetown was close to falling, Strasser hired mercenaries, retook several mining areas and paid the mercenaries with mining rights. In 1996 Julius Bio overthrew Strasser, and the RUF came back. The RUF’s military campaign failed by 2000, and it transformed into a political party; it eventually closed in 2007, and three senior figures were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Strasser survived. He studied at Coventry in Britain but did not graduate, and later ran a computer-skills school for young people near Freetown.
If Sierra Leone before 1997 was bad, after 1997 it was worse. On May 27, 1997, RUF and AFRC soldiers—the AFRC was another rebel group allied with the RUF—looted Freetown and shot anything that moved. ECOMOG, the West African monitoring force, became the last hope. RUF fighters surrounded ECOMOG soldiers; most were killed, and only a few broke out. The massacre drew little international response. Major news organizations had pulled their reporters out early. The United States was unwilling to intervene again after Somalia, where 19 American soldiers were killed, more than 70 wounded, and the body of a special forces soldier was dragged through the streets. Another reason was that countries capable of sending troops did not understand why Sierra Leone’s war had erupted—elsewhere wars were explained by politics, ethnicity or religion, but in Sierra Leone the fight was ultimately over diamond mines—and they were unsure whom to support.
On January 6, 1999, the RUF launched Operation No Living Thing in Freetown. Joseph Kamara, a survivor, lost his entire family and both hands. He heard gunfire outside, opened the door and saw RUF soldiers at the gate. His brother was killed on the spot. Joseph shouted for his wife, two daughters and son to run, but his six-year-old son hid behind the wreck of a car and would not leave. Joseph wanted to warn the boy but feared that this would reveal his hiding place. The RUF cut off Joseph’s hands and burned his house. When he woke, he never saw any of his family again; whether they lived or died was unknown.
Why were would-be interveners unsure whom to support? ECOMOG’s behavior in Sierra Leone was not much better than the RUF’s. Often the RUF massacred its way through an area, and then ECOMOG massacred its way back. Anyone suspected of rebel sympathies was killed, including nine-year-old children. Sierra Leoneans called ECOMOG “Every Car or Moving Object Gone.”
While Sierra Leone bled, Clinton was being impeached for perjury, NATO was bombing Yugoslavia, and others were worrying about the millennium bug. Then the United Nations stepped in. The 1999 Lomé Peace Agreement granted amnesty for all crimes committed by all groups, turned everyone into government soldiers and gave them a legal share of the diamond mines. For the RUF this was almost too good. Susan Rice, then US assistant secretary of state, explained the agreement by saying that without a solution to the root cause of the conflict, peace would never come. So even an apparently absurd peace deal stopped the fighting. The UN peacekeeping force that followed was another story—a mess.
Before diamonds were found in South Africa in the 1870s, most came from India and Brazil. The South African rush began in 1866 when a shepherd boy picked up a pretty stone that turned out to be 21.25 carats. Then an 85-carat stone was found and named the Star of South Africa. Cecil Rhodes arrived after the rush had begun. He bought a hilltop mine from two brothers named Johanners De Beer and Diedrish De Beer; the area later produced more mines and became known as Kimberley Mine—the name later given to the Kimberley Process.
By 1880 South Africa was producing 3 million carats a year, more than Brazil, while diamond consumption in the United States and Germany soared. Cutting and polishing were concentrated in Europe, with Belgium at the center. In the early years of the rush, international diamond prices were fairly stable, but Cecil Rhodes did not think that would last. He wanted an empire. He realized that more mines might be found; if everyone dug frantically and output exceeded demand, prices would fall. His goal was to control the source: the mines. Control the mines and you control output, keeping supply just enough to meet demand and prices high and stable.
After long and hard commercial battles, Rhodes controlled 90 percent of world diamond production in 1888, at the age of 35, and founded De Beers Consolidated Mining, Ltd. In the twentieth century De Beers adopted an even blunter strategy: buy every new mine it could and concentrate the global diamond trade in London. Its other key strategy was to manufacture demand. Early consumers bought diamonds as jewelry, no different in substance from other jewelry. De Beers thought that was not enough. The result was one of the most famous marketing campaigns in history: “A diamond is forever.” Another well-known line was “Show her that you’ll love her for another thousand years.” The message was simple: men buy diamonds for women. Over decades De Beers planted the idea that marriage requires a diamond ring and turned the diamond proposal into a tradition. In the United States, 80 percent of men were willing to spend two months’ salary on an engagement ring.
Rhodes boasted that as long as men and women fell in love, his diamond kingdom would stand. In fact, the diamond engagement ring became entrenched as a tradition nearly half a century after his death. Rhodes never married and was suspected of being gay, possibly involved with his private male secretary. He devoted his life to expanding the British Empire and established the Rhodes Scholarship for American students—Clinton was one beneficiary—hoping to cultivate pro-British sentiment and perhaps one day bring the United States back into the empire.
If every diamond were sold on an open market, prices might be closer to those of emeralds, rubies and sapphires. De Beers controlled the source and kept prices high. Conflict diamonds challenged that monopoly, and De Beers hated them; the company itself coined the term. Armed groups mined without restraint: they did not control output, and they sold cheap—at one-tenth of official prices. That made it harder for De Beers to buy up all output and allowed other dealers to obtain cheap stones.
De Beers pushed for the Kimberley Process to curb purchases of cheap stones and built an image that every De Beers diamond was clean. Yet almost no one in the chain believed De Beers truly refused to buy blood diamonds; the company mainly tried to stop others from buying them directly. There was an odd interlude: De Beers’s price manipulation was illegal in the United States, but its diamond trade was centered in London. As long as it did not conduct commercial activity inside the United States, the US Department of Justice could not touch it. American antitrust law had an operational loophole: to detain senior executives, three of them had to be conducting business in the United States at the same time. De Beers therefore carefully kept fewer than three senior officers in the country at once—if the boss wanted a US vacation, the company first cleared the ground.
De Beers’s sales system was another curiosity. It did not sell publicly or without limit. It designated 120 sightholders and held centralized sales every five weeks, ten times a year. The process was opaque: you paid, you received goods, and you were not guaranteed the goods you wanted. Take it or leave it; anyone who objected was expelled from the sightholder list forever. Challengers were retaliated against immediately or later.
Many people proposed systems to guarantee clean diamonds, but most were impractical. Once a diamond is cut and polished, there is no way to identify its origin. The rules on “origin” were also strange: a stone only had to be labeled with the country from which it was imported. If Switzerland imported a batch from Britain, it could call them British diamonds; if Britain shipped them back, they became Swiss diamonds. Various methods of identifying diamond origin were difficult to apply. Every link in the chain bore De Beers’s imprint; in the end, De Beers decided what counted as a conflict diamond. Another author who wrote about diamonds said that a brave person would admit that whatever was done about war diamonds, the only consistent winner was De Beers.
At the turn of the century, as more mines were discovered, De Beers’s control over supply weakened. In 1999 it accepted advice from financial consultants and adjusted its business model; in 2001 it partnered with LVMH and moved into diamond jewelry retail. After the change it accounted for about 40 percent of global diamond mining and trade, but its profit margins were higher than when it had 80 percent of the market.
The later chapters follow the peace process after Lomé. RUF soldiers could exchange AK-47s for food and money, while RUF leaders entered the government. After the September 11 attacks, evidence suggested that part of al-Qaeda’s funding had come from buying RUF diamonds and reselling them. The RUF tried to distance itself from al-Qaeda, but the US Congress passed a law giving the president power to ban diamond imports from conflict countries when necessary. The root solution to conflict diamonds was not more provenance rules but ending conflict at the source. Neither the Kimberley Process nor the Clean Diamond Act stopped conflict diamonds; they only made them harder to identify.
In 2002 UNAMSIL declared the Sierra Leone civil war over. The RUF was no longer an armed group but a legal political party. In May, former president Kabbah won re-election—not because his previous record was good, but because he seemed less bad than the other candidates. The RUF failed to put up a credible candidate. After a disarmament program that exchanged weapons for food and money, RUF leaders were indicted by international courts. After a crushing election defeat, the RUF fell apart and never recovered.
In 2002, people like Dalramy—men and women whose hands or feet had been cut off by the RUF in the name of joining hands for peace—went into the streets and voted. Sierra Leone’s reconstruction was long. Disarmed young men had no jobs; diamond brokers did poor business. The shadow of war had lifted, but prosperity was still far away.