LESSON 11 OUTLINE

The Diamond Story in Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone has seen serious and grotesque human rights violations since 1991 when the civil war erupted. According to human rights groups, over 50,000 people have been killed to date, with over one million people having been displaced. What does this have to do with diamonds?

Conflict diamonds

Sadly, while the rebel force the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) have called the various governments corrupt and accused them of mismanagement of diamond and mineral resources, they themselves have committed horrendous abuses. People have been raped, had limbs amputated, and more. While the RUF may have started from respectable aims, they themselves have been corrupted and attracted others who see the RUF as a way to get at the diamonds and profit from it.

So how did this situation get to this point? Let's go back to the beginnings of diamond mining in Sierra Leone.

The first Sierra Leonean diamond was found in 1930, and significant production of top-quality diamond gemstones began in 1935. The Star of Sierra Leone, a magnificent 969-carat diamond, was discovered in the Koidu area. By 1937 Sierra Leone was mining one million carats annually, reaching a peak of 2 million carats in 1960. From 1930 to 1998, approximately 55 million carats were mined (officially) in Sierra Leone. At an average price in 1996 dollars of US $270 per carat, the total value is close to US $15 billion.

In 1935, the colonial authorities gave De Beers’ Sierra Leone Selection Trust (SLST) exclusive mining and prospecting rights over the entire country for 99 years. By 1956, however, there were an estimated 75,000 illicit miners in Kono District, the heart of the diamond area, leading to smuggling on a vast scale, and causing a general breakdown of law and order. The buyers and smugglers at that time were mainly Madingo and Lebanese traders. With the tightening of security between Kono and Freetown in the early 1950s, Lebanese smugglers began moving their goods to Liberia. Antwerp, and then Israeli-based diamond merchants, soon noticed the booming diamond trade in Monrovia, and many established offices there. De Beers set up a buying office in Monrovia in 1954, in order to keep as much of the trade under its control as possible.

In 1955, the colonial authorities scrapped SLST’s nation-wide monopoly, confining its operations to Yengema and Tongo Field, an area of about 450 square miles. In 1956, they introduced the Alluvial Mining Scheme, under which both mining and buying licenses were granted to indigenous miners. Many of these licenses came to be held by Lebanese traders who had begun to settle in Sierra Leone at the turn of the century.

Siaka Stevens became Prime Minister seven years after independence in 1968. A populist, he quickly turned diamonds and the presence of SLST into a political issue, tacitly encouraging illicit mining, and becoming involved himself in criminal or near-criminal activities. In 1971, Stevens created the National Diamond Mining Company (NDMC) which effectively nationalized SLST. All important decisions were now made by the prime minister and his right hand man, a Lebanese businessman named Jamil Mohammed. From a high of over two million carats in 1970, legitimate diamond exports dropped to 595,000 carats in 1980 and then to only 48,000 in 1988. In 1984, SLST sold its remaining shares to the Precious Metals Mining Company (PMMC), a company controlled by Mohammed. Stevens retired in 1985, handing over power to Joseph Momoh, who placed even greater responsibility in the hands of Mohammed.

From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, aspects of Lebanon’s civil war were played out in miniature in Sierra Leone. Various Lebanese militia sought financial assistance from their compatriots in Sierra Leone, and the country’s diamonds became an important informal tax base for one faction or the other. This was of great interest to Israel, in part because the leader of the important Amal faction, Nabih Berri, had been born in Sierra Leone and was a boyhood friend of Mohammed. Following a failed (and probably phoney) 1987 coup attempt in Sierra Leone, Mohammed went into exile, opening the way for a number of Israeli ‘investors’ with close connections to Russian and American crime families, and with ties to the Antwerp diamond trade.

The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebel war began in 1991 and soon after, Momoh was replaced by a military government - the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC). Despite the change in government, however, RUF attacks continued. From the outset of the war, Liberia acted as banker, trainer and mentor to the RUF, although the Liberian connection was hardly new. With a negligible diamond potential of its own, Liberia’s dealings in stolen Sierra Leone diamonds have been a major concern to successive Sierra Leone governments since the great diamond rush of the 1950s.

What was different and more sinister after 1991 was the active involvement of official Liberian interests in Sierra Leone’s brutal war—for the purpose of pillage rather than politics. By the end of the 1990s, Liberia had become a major centre for massive diamond-related criminal activity, with connections to guns, drugs and money laundering throughout Africa and considerably further afield. In return for weapons, it provided the RUF with an outlet for diamonds, and has done the same for other diamond producing countries, fueling war and providing a safe haven for organized crime of all sorts.

The government is slowly reestablishing its authority after the 1991 to 2002 civil war that resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and the displacement of more than 2 million people (about one-third of the population). Over 45,000 combatants were confirmed to be disarmed. Elections held in May 2002 were generally peaceful and were declared free and fair by a number of independent monitoring organizations. President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah defeated eight other candidates, including former RUF rebels. The last UN peacekeepers withdrew in December 2005, leaving full responsibility for security with domestic forces, but a new civilian UN office remains to support the government. Mounting tensions related to planned 2007 elections, deteriorating political and economic conditions in Guinea, and the tenuous security situation in neighboring Liberia may present challenges to continuing progress in Sierra Leone's stability.

Unfortunately, the battles over conflict diamonds are not finished...