Dripping in Diamonds--and Blood

An invisible but insidious thread connects the left hands of some Western brides to the severed arms of toddlers in Sierra Leone: the diamond trade.

A brutal rebel band in the West African nation finances its insurgency by selling uncut gems mined in areas that its fighters control. The Revolutionary United Front earns an estimated $200 million a year from a trade that the world considers illicit but seems powerless to stop.

In Washington, there is growing demand to do something to curtail the diamond wealth of the RUF. The rebels spend the profits on guns, beans and boots, and on the narcotics they use to goad teenage fighters into committing murder and the RUF’s signature atrocity: hacking off the arms and legs of civilians, including children as young as a year old.

The rebels also pay mercenary cadres in diamonds.

But while there is agreement across the board in the United States, Europe and elsewhere to combat the illegal trade, there is no consensus about how to go about it. Rough diamonds are small and easy to conceal, smuggling routes seem to be open across the continent, and, perhaps most daunting, reputable governments in South Africa, Botswana and Namibia earn much of their foreign exchange from diamond sales that could be undercut by a consumer boycott or other sanctions aimed at the rebels.

“Intellectually we are all signed up to do this, but no one knows how to do it practically,” a State Department official said. “It sounds wonderful and simple, but it sure isn’t.”

Sierra Leone is not the only African country where mineral wealth has been perverted to pay for war instead of the welfare of the people. Angola has both oil and diamonds, but in contrast with Sierra Leone, its mineral deposits are split between the government and the rebels. In Congo, where a confusing multinational war has been raging, diamonds are a potentially rich spoil of the conflict.

But, as one Clinton administration official remarked, Sierra Leone is the poster child of the illegal diamond business.

The rebels and their leader, Foday Sankoh, control the eastern part of the country, where some of the world’s best gemstones lie in shallow mines. Using the diamonds and the hard currency the RUF commands, Sankoh has built a rag-tag band of several hundred fighters into a formidable force of perhaps 25,000 rebels.

Military observers agree that the army of Sierra Leone’s democratically elected government is no match for the RUF. And, in recent days, the rebels have humiliated a U.N. force by kidnapping about 500 of its troops, killing at least four peacekeepers and seizing their equipment, including armored personnel carriers.

On Capitol Hill, Rep. Tony P. Hall (D-Ohio) introduced a “sense of the Congress” resolution Thursday calling on the administration to urge the U.N. Security Council to impose an embargo on diamonds from Sierra Leone. Rep. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton), chairman of the Africa subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee, endorsed the measure.

In a statement marking the introduction of the legislation, Hall said that if the public realized the full extent of the horrors committed by the rebels, “they would recoil from all diamonds.” But, he added, that would be unfortunate because nations such as South Africa depend on legal diamond sales.

Hall earlier introduced legislation requiring that all diamonds sold in the United States be identified by country of origin. That measure seems stalled in the House Commerce Committee.

Experts on Africa’s politics said it is unlikely that a certificate or origin plan would work. “This will have minimal results,” said Herbert M. Howe, a professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. “The leaders of a number of neighboring countries are engaged in smuggling.”

Howe said Charles Taylor, president of Liberia and a close ally of Sankoh, has turned his country into a freeway for smuggled diamonds. In addition, he said, troops of the elite presidential guard in Guinea are implicated in smuggling RUF’s diamonds, even though the Guinea government ostensibly is an ally of Sierra Leone’s government and an enemy of the rebels.

Although Liberia has minimal diamond deposits of its own, it has been exporting as much as $300 million worth of gems--perhaps 60 times the capacity of its own mines.

International diamond merchants have endorsed efforts to rid the system of gems from countries in conflict. The Diamond Dealers Club, which controls the wholesale shops along New York’s 47th Street, endorsed the resolution urging a U.N. embargo. DeBeers Consolidated Mines, the South African company that controls up to 70% of the world’s uncut diamonds, has announced that it will not buy gems from the continent except those produced by mines with which the company has long done business.

Hall complained that the DeBeers plan--if carried out--would amount to overkill because it also would block stones from some legitimate sources.

Nevertheless, it is virtually impossible at this time to determine the origin of diamonds once they have been cut. The Clinton administration has provided $1 million to help finance a Canadian project studying whether diamonds have “fingerprints” that could be used to determine the origin of stones. But that research has not yet produced results.