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Conflict in Sierra Leone: Impact of Illegal Diamond Trade on Regional Stability
Andrey ORDASH
In the past few years the global community has stepped up efforts to tackle the problem of conflict diamonds, which is fuelling ethnic conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially Sierra Leone. The conflict in this country of 4.5 million has killed more than 100,000 people over the past ten years and created 1.3 million refugees.
Sierra Leone is a classic example of the ties between the diamond and weapons markets, and an indicator of how, in the absence of political mechanisms for resolving ethnic tensions and with weak central government, income from illegal production and sales of diamonds can serve as a source of financing for rebel movements.
History of the conflict
The former British colony Sierra Leone was founded at the end of the 18th century as a home for freed British slaves, the descendants of which now make up a separate ethnic group, the Creole. After the declaration of independence in 1961, the situation in the country, despite several relatively bloodless attempted military coups, remained on the whole fairly stable compared to other regions of Africa torn apart by war and conflict. But at the beginning of the 1990s this small nation was pulled into one of the cruelest civil wars on the continent.
In 1989 the inter-clan tensions that had simmered in neighboring Liberia for the previous ten years boiled over into an open armed revolt against the regime of then-President Samuel Doe by the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), led by the then still obscure Charles Taylor. A year later Doe was deposed by Taylor's forces. A fierce war began in Liberia between five factions, the largest of which was still the NPFL that controlled the western parts of the country with the silent support of Cote d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso. An attempt by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to snuff out the conflict by creating the regional peacemaking force ECOMOG (ECOWAS Monitoring Group) only complicated the Liberian conflict further.
Meanwhile, the strengthened Taylor needed funds to continue the war he had started. The closest and most accessible source of cash for him was, of course, diamonds in neighboring Sierra Leone. This pushed him to stoke new flames of tension, especially since he was unhappy with the policies of Sierra Leonean President Joseph Saidu Momo, who allowed Freetown to be used as a base for the deployment of ECOMOG forces in Liberia, and whose troops were then taking an active part in the peace force.
Thus in March 1991 an armed group of emigrants financed by Taylor and headed by Foday Sankoh, a former corporal in the Sierra Leone army, crossed the Liberia-Sierra Leone border and within a month gained full control over the area around Kailahun. This later became the main base for the rebels, who adopted the name of Revolutionary United Front (RUF). Their leader Sankoh had at one time been convicted by the Sierra Leone authorities for taking part in the failed 1971 coup against Momo's predecessor Siaka Stevens. Although the RUF proclaimed that their goal was to topple the regime in Freetown, in actual fact it did not have any political program and was initially made up of common criminals from various ethnic groups. Nonetheless, the idea of fighting the government party, the All People's Congress, which had been in power for more than 20 years and had become completely discredited, turned out to be attractive to many young Sierra Leoneans, who voluntarily joined the RUF. Also, in areas under their control the rebels terrorized civilians, including children, into joining the ranks of the Front.
The rebel movement grew rapidly, and the government of Momo, which was unprepared to resist its spread in the eastern part of the country, was deposed in April 1992 by a group of army officers headed by Captain Valentine Strasser. The group formed the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC). Momo took refuge in neighboring Guinea. The only way that the new junta could fight the RUF was to sharply increase the size of the national armed forces over the next four years from 3,000 to 16,000 soldiers. Eventually, the authorities did not even know exactly how many soldiers they had in their army, the money for whose maintenance the impoverished country did not have. By the end of the NPRC's rule, a new term entered Sierra Leone's lexicon: sobels (soldier rebels), which was used to define the bands of hungry soldiers whose treatment of the civilian population differed little from the methods of the RUF.
The authorities unsuccessfully tried to use professional mercenaries from Israel and Nepal against the rebels. Only with the arrival of a group of 200 commandos brought in from South Africa by Executive Outcomes did the government manage to stop the RUF from penetrating a number of diamond mining areas.1 Some divisions of ECOMOG (mostly Nigerian and Guinean) were also transferred to the country from Liberia.
At this time a third force emerged in the country, the so-called kamajors, self-defense militias organized by the rural population to defend civilians from both the rebels and army soldiers. Their ranks were, as a rule, filled by representatives of Sierra Leone's biggest ethnic group, the Mende, which live in the country's south.
In January 1996 Strasser was removed in a coup and fled to Conakry. The new head of the NPRC Brigadier General Julius Maada Bio, not without pressure from the West, held the country's first free presidential and parliamentary elections that April, which brought the Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP) to power. The new government, headed by President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, a former UN official, immediately took steps to make peace with the RUF.
When the first peace accord with the government was signed in December 1996 in the former Cote d'Ivoire capital Abidjan, the Front had achieved its main goal. The northeastern, eastern and central parts of the country, including the Kono diamond-mining center, were under its complete control, and Sankoh had sufficient funds to buy weapons for both his own fighters and the forces of his "godfather" Taylor. The RUF forces numbered 20,000 according to some estimates. Also, more than 2,000 Liberians were fighting on the side of the Front. Kailahun turned into a base for opposition forces from the whole sub-region.
The government did not have the means to disarm such a large number of armed people and return them to civilian life, so throughout the first half of 1997 the rebels frustrated efforts to implement the Abidjan agreements. This was no small thanks to Taylor, who that year came to power in Liberia following elections that ended the Liberian conflict, and who needed the Sierra Leonean "diamond feeding trough" like never before.
Kabbah began to actively finance the divisions of kamajors, whose numbers by the beginning of 1997 approached those of the RUF, though they were not as well armed. Such disregard towards the army on the part of the president resulted in another coup in May 1997. The head of the newly created Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) Major (and then Lt. Colonel) Johnny Paul Koromah took a radical step: in a single day he suspended all armed action against the RUF and invited Front representatives to join the government. Thus, the army and rebels merged. Field commander Sam Bokari became the effective head of the Front at this time. Sankoh was arrested in Lagos by the Nigerian special services.
But the Sierra Leone president, though he did take refuge in Conakry, began to take decisive action unlike his predecessors. Following the collapse of negotiations with the junta and successful diplomatic initiatives by the government in exile, the Nigerian contingent of ECOMOG, which controlled the approaches to Freetown, began to be built up. In February 1998 it successfully stormed the capital, forcing almost the whole of the now former Sierra Leone 16,000-strong army (with the exception of divisions numbering 1,000 soldiers who remained loyal to Kabbah) to retreat into the jungle with the rebel forces.
In 1998 there was a relative lull in the fighting. The RUF used the summer rainy season to rearm with proceeds from the sale of diamonds, and in January 1999 surprised Kabbah and the command of the Nigerian contingent that practically ran the country, with an attack on Freetown. More than 7,000 people died in two weeks of fighting in the city. The Nigerians only managed to turn the situation around and repulse the rebels by bringing in an additional 10,000 troops.
Kabbah realized the difficult situation he was in, as his position in power depended only on the willingness of the Nigerian commanders to protect him. He agreed to new negotiations with the Front and former army officers. The peace treaty signed in Lome, the capital of Togo, in July 1999 was more realistic than the Abidjan accord. ECOMOG forces were gradually replaced with the UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSL). Under the treaty, Sankoh was freed from prison and was given a specially created government post allowing him to control all diamond mining. The RUF was transformed into a political party. International organizations acted as guarantors for the implementation of the disarmament program and social reintegration of combatants. However, as recent events show the Lome treaty, which remains the core document of the peace process, could meet the same fate as the Abidjan accord. And among the whole range of reasons for such a possible turn of events, the problem of conflict diamonds continues to dominate.
Sierra Leone diamonds: who's who?
Ever since diamonds were first discovered in Sierra Leone in 1930, official production in peacetime never exceeded 2 million carats per year2 (annual global production of rough diamonds currently totals about 250 million carats). Sierra Leone diamonds are characterized by their high quality according to all the main parameters: size, color, transparency, absence of line and point defects, and convenient shape for polishing. On average, there are one or two reports every year about the discovery of 200-250 carat diamonds here (the gem Star of Sierra Leone weighed in at 969 carats). The average price for Sierra Leone diamonds is about $270 per carat (for reference: on the world market the price of diamonds ranges from $12 per carat for industrial diamonds to $2,000 for unusual gems). The main diamond fields in Sierra Leone are located, as was mentioned above, in the eastern part of the country in the region of Kono and in the area around the towns of Tongo and Yengema.
At present, the lion's share of all diamond mining in the country is done illegally and is primarily in the hands of the RUF. The rebels mine their diamonds using the forced labor of local residents, who are herded into special camps. According to various estimates, the Front sells $70 million to $125 million worth of diamonds annually at far below their actual value. Although these figures seem small compared to global figures, the money earned is still sufficient for both the personal enrichment of field commanders and to supply fighters with a constant flow of firearms and ammunition.
Liberia remains the main transit country for the resale of Sierra-Leonean diamonds. Both diamonds bought by Liberians from the RUF for subsequent resale and diamonds mined directly by supporters of President Taylor on Sierra Leonean territory pass through this country. The following figures point to the scale of the illegal diamond trade in this country. In 1998 alone Liberia officially exported 8,000 carats for just $800,000. In the same year, Belgium's Diamond High Council in Antwerp registered the import of 2.56 million carats ($217 million) from Liberia by 26 different companies. According to some estimates, in some years in the course of its conflict Liberia sold up to 6 million carats, while the diamond fields in Liberia itself cannot produce more than 150,000 carats annually.
The second largest channel for illegal exports of diamonds from Sierra Leone is smuggling through the still porous border with Guinea. Although the authorities in Conakry are making attempts to introduce a system to certify them, they do not have the financial and manpower resources necessary for effective control. Also, many Guinean officials have their own material interests to protect when it comes to the trade in Sierra Leonean diamonds. The problem of stemming the flow of diamond money to the RUF is most acute for Guinea because in the region this country carries the bulk of the burden of the Sierra Leonean conflict. It is home to about 400,000 refugees from Sierra Leone, and rebels make regular forays into Guinean border regions in order to steal.
The Gambian capital of Banjul is a kind of West African Antwerp. The country, which has had close ties with Sierra Leone since colonial times, does not produce any diamonds at all. Nonetheless, Belgium registered diamond imports from Gambia in 1998 totaling 449,000 carats ($78.3 million). True, in 2000 this figure fell to 82,000 carats ($17.6 million) thanks to effective control. The trail of conflict diamonds from Sierra Leone also leads through Cote d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso.
In general, illegal trade in Sierra Leonean gems would have been quite difficult without the collusion of major diamond companies. The globally renowned De Beers does not officially take part in the diamond business in Sierra Leone and shut down its operations in this country before the outbreak of the conflict. Nonetheless, it continues to maintain its representative offices in Guinea, Liberia and Cote d'Ivoire, where diamond production is quite insignificant. The obvious reason is the proximity to the Sierra Leonean border. Several firms registered in Canada have government licenses to mine diamonds in Sierra Leone: Rex Diamond, AmCan Minerals and Diamond Works. The question of their relations with De Beers and operations in Sierra Leone remains open. An indirect destructive role is played by the Belgian Diamond High Council, which closes its eyes to the origin of diamonds that are resold through Antwerp.
To be fair, it should be noted that the RUF is not the only diamond smuggler in Sierra Leone. Legal diamond production in areas controlled by the government (mostly in the south of the country) amounted to just 37,000 carats in 1997-1999. Given this, the question arises as to the source of the money for the rearming of the kamajors (officially called the Civil Defense Forces) loyal to Kabbah, who always controlled a number of less important diamond fields compared to the Kono region, and for the payment of the services of various mercenaries. Besides the appearance of reports in the Sierra Leonean press about the unlicensed sale of diamonds abroad by the leader of the kamajors, Deputy Defense Minister Sam Hinga Norman, and other top-ranking officials, reports have emerged linking the command of the Nigerian contingent of ECOMOG to the diamond trade.
Arms for gems
Despite the imposition of UN sanctions, the money the rebels earn from diamond sales is spent primarily on small arms for the RUF. As with the diamonds themselves, the main intermediary link for weapons shipments to Sierra Leone is Liberia. The number of weapons that make it through to the rebels cannot be estimated due to the opacity of Taylor's regime and the continuing explosive situation in Liberia itself. Officially, the authorities in Monrovia categorically deny any part in arms shipments for the RUF.
The Sierra Leonean authorities have said the Liberians use helicopters, and sometimes sea transport (the country's southern coast is currently controlled by the kamajors) to deliver weapons. Also, there are several narrow-gauge railroads on the border between the two countries that have been preserved since colonial times and are now so overgrown by the surrounding jungle that they have become like tunnels. It is virtually impossible for the UNAMSL forces to observe movements along them from the air.
Here one should also note that there are camps in Liberia for training Sierra Leonean fighters, the largest of which is located near the Liberian city of Gbanga. The Sierra Leonean press has published reports that instructors at these camps include citizens of Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Libya, South Africa and Ukraine.
As a rule, the lion's share of the illegal weapons shipments into Sierra Leone are arranged by businessmen close to Taylor, including persons of non-African origin and often wanted by the police in their own countries.
From 1997 to 1999, reports were repeatedly published in both Sierra Leone and in western publications about deliveries of large shipments of weapons to the RUF from Libya and Ukraine, by air through Burkina Faso with subsequent delivery to Liberian airstrips.3 In 1998, two such planes landed directly on Sierra Leonean territory on two airstrips that were especially cut out of the jungle for this purpose near the population centers of Yengema and Magburaka. In December 1998, on the eve of the tragic events in Freetown, the airport in the Niger capital Niamey was used as a transit point for the delivery of a large shipment of weapons.
In January 1999, an airplane owned by a small Belgian airline delivered weapons from Bratislava to Monrovia via the capital of Gambia that were then, as suspected, sent on to the city of Kenema in the north of the country, which was then controlled by the rebels. In July of the same year, there was a delivery of weapons of Bulgarian origin.
Besides Liberia, another source of weapons for the RUF rebels is arms seizures from ECOMOG troops and from UNAMSL, which has a very restricted mandate to use force in Sierra Leone. The most important such incident occurred in May 2000, when fighters disarmed the Zambian UNAMSL contingent, securing about 500 AK-47 assault rifles, mortars and several tones of ammunition. Kenyan peacekeepers lost eight armored personnel carriers in similar circumstances. The question of whether a BM-21 heavy artillery system belonging to the Guinean contingent fell into the rebels' hands remains open to dispute.
As for the types of weapons in the hands of the rebels, the results of the disarmament process show that the AK-47 rifle remains the most popular. This is in large part due to the fact that it was the basic small arms of the Sierra Leonean army, which initially lost rifles on the battlefield and then joined the RUF along with its combat equipment in 1998. The Front also has large numbers of G-3, FN-FAL and SLR automatic rifles, grenade launchers and various types of light mortars.
To sum up, one can say with certainty that the RUF's access to arms markets in the face of UN sanctions rests on six factors:
the strong purchasing power of diamonds;
Liberia's interest in destabilizing the situation in neighboring countries;
weak control over the certification of the final customer in making weapons shipments in the region;
indifference on the part of a number of diamond trading firms as to the diamonds' country of origin;
the inability of Sierra Leone and neighboring countries to control their borders and airspace;
the high level of corruption in West Africa.
The government of Kabbah, for its part, receives the lion's share of the weapons for arming the kamajors and rebuilding its army from Britain, which also finances a number of programs to train Sierra Leonean soldiers and police. In 2000 alone, London delivered 10,000 SLR rifles, 4,000 light mortars and 10 million rounds of ammunition to Sierra Leone. In 1998, when UN sanctions applied to all parties in the Sierra Leonean conflict, the government in exile bought 35 tones of weapons and ammunition of Bulgarian origin from British company Sandline International that was supposedly intended to support the ECOMOG operation, which caused a major uproar in Britain. The matter went all the way to the House of Commons. It is difficult to say whether this delivery was used to equip the kamajors who were becoming active at the time.
China also supplies Sierra Leone with arms, though in much smaller amounts (mostly Chinese-made AK-47s, as well as light coastal defense boats). This is in large part motivated by a desire to prevent Taylor, who has recognized Taiwan, from strengthening his position in the region.
Freetown has also received a number of commercial offers to help equip the rebuilding army from companies in a number of other countries, including South Africa and Bulgaria.
A fragile peace
The two years that have passed since the peace agreement was reached with the RUF in Lome have demonstrated that it could meet the same fate as most similar documents signed in Africa. Besides the diamond problem and the Liberian factor, the fragile peace in Sierra Leone is coming under severe pressure from the clear lack of funds provided by international organizations for the government program to disarm and demobilize combatants and reintegrate them into society. Rejected in their native villages, rebels who have handed in their weapons have a difficult time returning to civilian life. This is keeping most of the fighters who have remained in the jungle from surrendering their weapons. Following the direct orders of radical field commanders, regular rebels are as a rule surrendering either old or defective weapons. The kamajors, seeing the RUF's attitude to the implementation of the Lome treaty, are also in no hurry to turn up at demobilization camps.
Furthermore, the Front no longer has the previous unified command. There are divisions acting under the orders of the official RUF leadership, which are more willingly surrendering weapons, as well as groups subordinate to field commanders who have become independent or do not answer to anyone at all. Recently tensions have also escalated between the actual rebels and former Sierra Leonean soldiers who, in a twist of fate, fought on their side beginning in 1998 and who are more eager to see a speedy end to the war. This already convoluted picture is complicated further by the recent arrival of Guinean opposition forces, which based themselves in the same unstable area around Kailahun and under the patronage of Taylor.
All this boiled over at the end of 2000 into another explosion of violence in the north and east of Sierra Leone, which spilled over into neighboring Guinea, a country that for the past decade had been an "island of stability" in the region. This time, however, fighters from bases inside Liberia also took part. Tensions were eased by the beginning of the summer of 2001 thanks to the deployment of Guinean troops along the whole border with Sierra Leone and Liberia, the decisive actions of UNAMSL and tougher international pressure on the Liberian government and the RUF leadership. In Freetown, Sankoh and a number of other key rebel figures holding government posts under the Lome treaty were arrested for trying to disrupt the peace process. Issa Sesay, a more tractable former field commander, was elected the official acting leader of the Front.
Amid this backdrop, a positive development in the peace process that could turn it around is that UNAMSL, despite resistance from the RUF, managed to station its forces in the main diamond mining regions of the country. This measure, combined with the Sierra Leone government's introduction of certification of diamonds, has reduced the illicit trade and made it possible to open demobilization stations in eastern Sierra Leone. By the way, UNAMSL is the UN's largest peacekeeping force, numbering 12,700 (and set to increase to 17,500), including 115 Russian citizens maintaining four Mi-24 helicopters.
It is hoped that the international sanctions imposed against Liberia and the Sierra Leonean rebels, which among other things entail an arms embargo and control over the sale of Sierra Leonean diamonds, will in the end do what they are intended to do. The problem of international certification of conflict diamonds is also at the center of discussion in the context of the so-called Kimberly process, of which Russia and Sierra Leone are active participants.
One might add that certain representatives of the RUF's political wing are actually showing a desire to end this war, which they themselves no longer know what to make of. A sluggish disarmament process is nonetheless underway, though its main participants remain the kamajors and the supporters of the AFRC. However, despite the positive development in the peace process, a final solution to the conflict in Sierra Leone remains a distant prospect. And the problem of conflict diamonds also plagues Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and other African countries.
1 The Sierra Leonean press repeatedly published reports alleging that the mercenaries provided by Executive Outcomes were financed by De Beers, which thus supposedly ensured security for its diamond mining subsidiaries in Sierra Leone from 1994 to 1997.
2 Data on production of diamonds are taken from a December 2000 report by a group of UN experts appointed by the Security Council to establish instances of violations of resolution 1171, regarding Sierra Leonean conflict diamonds.
3 Data on delivery channels and the amount of weapons in Sierra Leone are based on the report "Re-Armament in Sierra Leone: One Year after Lome Peace Agreement," which was published in December 2000 by the Small Arms Survey at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.
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