Africa's Gems: Warfare's Best Friend
By BLAINE HARDEN
This article was reported by Alan Cowell in Zambia and Belgium, Ian Fisher in Congo, Blaine Harden in Angola and New York, Norimitsu Onishi in Sierra Leone and Congo, and Rachel L. Swarns in Botswana.
he rough stone emerges from the African soil at fortress-like mines in the war zones of Angola or straight from the muck of a dammed-up river in Congo. After journeying across continents and oceans, after being graded, cut, polished and set in gold along the way, a diamond lands in a display window in Manhattan, transformed into a pricey symbol of eternal love and beckoning to brides-to-be.
The journey can take months or even years. To enforce the myth that diamonds are rare and valuable, most of the world's rough stones are hoarded in London and then carefully fed back into the world market.
Radhika Chalasani / Sipa, for the New York Times
Steve Berman / The New York Times
Above: Mati Balemo, who claws through Congolese stream beds for diamonds, lost this $20 find to a soldier. Below: A shop window in New York City's "diamond district."
De Beers, the South African conglomerate that controls two-thirds of the world's rough diamonds, decides how many will be sold, when, to whom and at what price.
Where they are mined responsibly, as in Botswana, South Africa or Namibia, diamonds can contribute to development and stability. But where governments are corrupt, rebels are pitiless and borders are porous, as in Angola, Congo or Sierra Leone, the glittering stones have become agents of slave labor, murder, dismemberment, mass homelessness and wholesale economic collapse.
While market manipulation guarantees their price in world markets, the portability and anonymity of diamonds — millions of dollars worth can be smuggled in a sock, and identifying where they came out of the ground is often impossible — have made them the currency of choice for predators with guns in modern Africa.
"You can't wage war without money, and diamonds are money," said Willy Kingombe Idi, who buys diamonds from diggers in Congo. "People are fighting for money. Everything that happens, it's about money."
Cedric Galbe / Saba
A diamond dealer in Kisangani inspects a diamond brought in by a Congolese digger.
De Beers estimates that only 3 percent of global rough diamonds now come from conflict areas in Africa, according to Andrew Lamont, a company spokesman who repeatedly said it was difficult to define a conflict area.
But Christine Gordon, a London-based journalist and independent diamond expert who has been critical of De Beers, said that as recently as the mid-1990's, diamonds from African war zones accounted for 10 to 15 percent of world supply.
In any case, violent goings-on in diamond-rich Africa have done nothing, thus far, to change the consuming habits of Americans, who buy more than half the world's diamond jewelry. Sales jumped about 11 percent last year. Diamond sales are also booming around the world, with De Beers showing record sales last year of more than $5 billion.
Digging in the Mud
At the bottom rung of the international diamond trade, the need to scrap together enough money to eat sends Africans like Mati Balemo clawing through the mud of a Congolese stream bed. Mr. Balemo is a digger.
On a recent morning, he and six other diggers set off from Kisangani, in north-central Congo, traveling first by bicycle taxi and then on foot. Along the way, a soldier armed with a stubby machine gun demanded to come along. But he hired another bicycle taxi, which took a spill on a hill, pleasing the diggers.
Radhika Chalasani / Sipa,
for the New York Times
Mati Balemo, a diamond digger, looks for diamonds in Lubunga stream, 20km from Kisangani.
They arrived after three hours at a small stream where the thick canopy of bamboo and vines made the early afternoon as dark as twilight. The diggers had been working this site for a month and had found only a few diamonds. They used shovels to dam off small sections of the stream. Then they heaped mounds of mud onto the bank. They picked out big rocks from the mud and sifted through what was left with metal screens nailed to wooden frames.
Diggers like Mr. Balemo are driven by the dream of one stone that will change their lives. For weeks or months they work bent over in shallow rivers or in pits. In three years as a digger, the biggest diamond Mr. Balemo ever found was a stone of 2.16 carats worth $800. That diamond, if it were of flawless color and clarity, could retail for as much as $10,000 in New York, experts say. Mr. Balemo split his $800 with five fellow diggers.
Miki Galedem, 30, another digger who started when he was 16, once found a monstrous stone of nine carats. He was paid $4,800. But he was young then, in 1993, and the money disappeared, he said, on "beer and women."
Standing in a pool of water stilled by mounds of mud, the diggers professed not to think much about their business — where the diamonds go, who wears them and at what price. "Diamonds are beautiful," Mr. Balemo said. "Everyone wants to be beautiful. That is normal."
He was knee-deep in the stream, and had been sifting mud — a brown stew with pebbles and quartz — for an hour. Suddenly, he found a diamond. He popped it in his mouth to clean it and then showed off a shiny white stone half the size of a raisin. His friends clapped, and one digger guessed that traders back in Kisangani would pay $20 at most for the stone.
"I'm very glad," Mr. Balemo said, not smiling much. This was the first diamond in nearly a week. "It's not much money for all that work."
The soldier with the stubby machine gun, who had been watching closely from the river bank, then came over and took the diamond. He folded it into a scrap of paper backed with gold foil and stuffed the packet into his chest pocket.
By the rules of Congo, the guy with the gun got the diamond. Even when the stones are taken from the ground using the most sophisticated equipment, the game is roughly the same.
Financing the Arms
In northeast Angola, the Catoca diamond mine — one of a half dozen such sites in that Texas-sized country — is an island of modernity in a sea of civil war. Huge earthmovers gouge out the diamond-bearing earth and feed it into a sorting plant, where water, electric vibrators and X-rays separate out about $8 million worth of diamonds a month, an amount expected to quadruple as the mine expands.
The diamonds are stored in a high-security sorting room before they are flown to Europe. As technicians grade the uncut stones, Israeli-trained security guards watch from every angle to make sure that no one slips a rock into his pocket. The mine has satellite TV and 24-hour Internet access, but the only way in or out is by air. To protect employees from attack, they are locked inside the mine's gates every night by guards with automatic weapons.
Thembe Hadebe / The Associated Press
An excavator digs for diamonds at the Catoca Diamond Mine, located in Angola's northeastern Lunda Sul province.
Until four years ago, the men with guns were rebel soldiers working for Unita, the Angolan rebel group led by Jonas Savimbi. Delfi Rui, a 39-year-old digger, recalled seeing rebels whip an elderly man who refused to dig. He said they had threatened to shoot those who would not give them at least half the diamonds they found.
The Angolan military took Catoca from Unita in 1996, and within two years modern mining began atop one of the planet's largest veins of diamonds. The mine now employs 1,100 Angolans and has the potential to anchor an economic revival in a part of the country where there are no other industries, no money for war reconstruction and no government services. Jobs at the mine are expected to last for at least four decades.
But the persistence of fighting in the area means that men with guns still find ways to milk the diamond business. A private security force controlled by the chief of staff of the Angolan Army, Gen. João de Matos, protects Catoca. About 300 armed guards, most of them former Angolan soldiers, have staked out a fortified perimeter around the mine. They charge $500,000 a month to protect the mine from Unita.
Joao Silva / Sygma
Unita leader Jonas Savimbi in 1995.
Since they were chased away from the mine, Unita soldiers have stayed in the area and terrorized the local citizenry with hit-and-run guerrilla raids. They have forced about 56,000 nearby civilians from their homes. Most are destitute. Land mines have maimed many. Without international food aid, they would starve.
Unita's behavior led the United Nations to impose a diamond embargo on the group in 1998, making it the only African rebel force subjected to such action.
For years, the United States and the white government of South Africa supported Unita, an acronym in Portuguese for the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, as a counter to the Moscow-backed government in Luanda. But with the end of the cold war and of apartheid, Unita lost its military patrons. International isolation deepened when Mr. Savimbi, its leader, lost an election in Angola 1992.
Rather than accept a vote foreign observers judged free and fair, Mr. Savimbi returned to the bush and resumed war against the Angolan government. His fighters seized control of the Cuango River valley, Angola's richest diamond territory, and began a major mining operation that more than compensated for the lost cold-war aid, and made them the richest rebels in Africa.
Diamond money paid for Unita offensives that in the 1990's elevated Angola's civil war to a new plateau of savagery. Highland cities like Cuito and Huambo were all but flattened by artillery shells. More than half a million Angolans were killed. Land mines maimed about 90,000. Fighting displaced 4 million Angolans, and about 1 million continue to depend on foreign food aid. The United Nations Children's Fund now ranks Angola as the worst place on earth to be a child.
Joao Silva / Sygma, for The New York Times
An Angolan child bathes in the courtyard of a slum building in the Angolan capital of Luanda that is occupied by homeless people. The never-completed building has sixteen floors with no running water or electricity.
At Andulo, Unita's headquarters in the central highlands of Angola, Mr. Savimbi personally haggled with arms merchants and diamond traders who flew in from Europe. The rebel boss bargained using small bags of diamonds, each of which contained several million dollars worth of gems, according to Robert R. Fowler, the Canadian ambassador to the United Nations and chairman of a committee that investigated violations of the embargo against Unita.
"If the price was $22 million, Savimbi would reach down for four of those bags and two of those," Mr. Fowler said. "The arms dealers had their diamond experts, and Savimbi had his, and they would inspect the diamonds to see if they really were worth $22 million. And then they haggled some more and somebody would throw in an extra bag of diamonds, and off the arms dealers flew."
Mr. Savimbi became a major buyer on the international arms scene. Giant Russian-made Il-76 cargo planes made as many as 22 deliveries a night at Andulo, said Mr. Fowler. The primary source for most of the arms was Bulgaria, the report said, although Bulgarian officials deny it.
The United Nations waited nearly six years before imposing an embargo on Unita diamonds, even though there was never any doubt what Mr. Savimbi was doing with his little bags. With an estimated $3 billion in legal diamond sales, he built Unita into a highly mobile war machine with 35,000 well-armed troops. By the early summer of last year, Unita seemed on the verge of toppling the government in Angola.
The rebels were turned back only because the government went on a $500-million weapons-buying spree of its own, financed by Western oil companies that paid the government more than $900 million for rights to new offshore oil finds.
Although Unita's sales of diamonds are down sharply from the mid-1990's, the United Nations report said gems continued to play a "uniquely important role" for the rebels.
Making a Wasteland
There is no United Nations embargo on diamonds from Congo or Sierra Leone.
Hunger for looted diamonds is a major reason why six other countries have sent soldiers into Congo. Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe have sent troops to protect the government of Laurent Kabila, while Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda have sent soldiers to assist rebels trying to overthrow him.
Altogether, they have succeeded in shattering much of the economy of eastern Congo, transforming Kisangani, the major city of eastern Congo, into a gaudy and ghostly ruin.
The streets of Kisangani are nearly empty of cars. The textile plant is closed, and the once-thriving port on the Congo River is quiet. Apart from spotty electricity from a hydroelectric dam, there are hardly any public services left. Public salaries go unpaid. Prices have soared.
The only businesses that seem alive are those buying diamonds from diggers coming in from the dense forest that encircles Kisangani. To catch their eye, storefronts have been dressed in garish paint that shouts the names of diamond buyers like Mr. Cash, Jihad the King of Diamonds and Jehovah Ire, run by one Papa Samuel, "in connection with Jesus Christ." One store is painted with an image of Rambo, his machine gun replaced with a shovel.
Inside the diamond shops it is possible to see hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stones. Shop owners say the diamonds are often flown out of Congo to Rwanda or Uganda, as commanders from those countries reward themselves for their revolutionary efforts.
"What do you think is the reason for this war?" asked a diamond buyer named Papa Ben, who plies his trade in Kisangani. "It's only about the riches of this country."
Only about a third of Congo's annual diamond production is being sold through the country's official market, according to diamond experts in Antwerp. They say the rest is being smuggled away for sale in bordering countries.
By far the biggest diamond prize in the Congo is more than 1,000 miles to the southwest of Kisangani, near the city of Mbuji Mayi. Diamond experts say President Kabila has allocated a substantial percentage of that huge diamond complex to Zimbabwe, which has sent 11,000 troops to prop up Mr. Kabila's wobbly government.
So Zimbabwe has recently become a major diamond exporter, although it has a negligible local industry.
With their eyes on the prize at Mbuji Mayi, large numbers of Congolese rebels and supporting troops from Rwanda began massing about a year ago to the north and east of the city. If they take the diamond mines there, many military experts believe, Zimbabwe would lose its will to fight and Mr. Kabila's government would probably fall.
Allying With Smugglers
In Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, the surgeons were frantic. Scores of men, women and children, their hands partly chopped off by machetes, had flooded the main hospital. Amputating as quickly as they could, doctors tossed severed hands into a communal bucket.
The Revolutionary United Front, a rebel outfit that barters diamonds for weapons, was trying early last year to conquer Freetown. Chopping off limbs was their trademark strategy, as it greatly simplified conquest in the diamond fields of eastern Sierra Leone. When word got out that rebels were moving in, tens of thousands of terrified people would take off. The rebels chased half the country's population of 4.5 million out of their homes in the 1990's. Half a million people fled the country.
Brennan Linsley / The Associated Press
Abas Sesay, 4, a victim of rebel atrocity in Sierra Leone, sits with his friend Isatu Kaigbo at a camp for amputees and the war-wounded in Freetown.
One day during last year's carnage in Freetown, a diamond trader approached a reporter at the Cape Sierra Hotel. He stuck out his tongue and from beneath it plucked out a stone, which he offered to sell. When the sale did not happen, the trader popped the diamond back in his mouth and moved on.
In fact, most of Sierra Leone's diamonds were — and still are — smuggled into neighboring Liberia for sale, according to several human rights groups and diamond industry experts.
The leader of the Sierra Leone rebels, Foday Sankoh, has established a lucrative partnership with his longtime Liberian friend, Charles Taylor, the rebel-boss-turned-president. Both had training in Libya, both their rebellions began in the late 1980's, and their armies have helped each other fight.
Mr. Sankoh's access to the world's diamond bourses and to arms was secured when Mr. Taylor was elected president of Liberia in 1997. The Liberian government denies this trade, as does Mr. Sankoh.
But a number of diplomats, international relief officials and mining experts say there is persuasive evidence. Liberia was a marginal exporter of diamonds until the mid-1990's. Since then it has it exported some 31 million carats — more than 200 years' worth of its own national capacity, according to trading records in Antwerp.
After Mr. Sankoh failed to take Freetown last year, he signed a peace deal granting his rebels amnesty for war crimes. The deal, which was brokered by the United Nations, also gave him a government job — chairman of the Strategic Minerals Commission, which controls diamond mining.
Go to Next Part
