Free Blood Diamonds by Greg Campbell

Liberia before being exported to Belgium was recorded as being filled with Liberian diamonds. This is how Liberia can defy the laws of nature and outproduce South Africa by exporting 6 million carats of gemstones a year, when it can actually produce, at best, 200,000 carats of industrial diamonds from its
existing mines. 6 And this is also how the entire issue of conflict diamonds has remained in the dark for so long, allowing the RUF to launder Sierra Leone diamonds under a cover provided by the diamond industry itself.
    â€œI’ve been doing this in Sierra Leone since 1995,” said Singer. “It’s not hard. In fact, it’s almost impossible to get caught.”
    If he has any moral qualms about buying diamonds from people who are going to use the money for weapons to kill innocent civilians and kidnap children into their ranks, he doesn’t show it. In fact, he’s never strayed from Freetown during all of his years doing illicit business in Sierra Leone, so he has no first-hand knowledge of what upcountry conditions are like.
    But that’s not to say he doesn’t know what the rebels are capable of; in fact, he carries a small photo album of corpses that have been mutilated by the rebels to show to anyone unfamiliar with the horrors of the war. He squirreled it out one night, sliding it conspiratorially across the tiled tabletop at me. Four nude female corpses laying in the highway, hands and feet chopped off and laying nearby, genitals mutilated with a tree branch. A disembodied head laying on a table. A corpse minus its head and arms, which were arranged in a macabre pose some feet away.
    â€œListen here,” he said, wagging a finger for emphasis, “if the government made it easier to buy legitimate diamonds, people like me wouldn’t have to deal with these savages. But I’m a businessman. What else can I do?”
    Unmentioned, but widely understood in these circles, is that rebel diamonds are far less expensive than diamonds that go through official channels. RUF diamonds normally sell in the bush for 10 percent of what the same stones would otherwise cost through a licensed exporter, making them highly liquid and prized
by people like Singer who can sell them at a large markup in Europe’s diamond centers. 7
    The way it should work is through the Fawaz model. The government issues mining and exporting licenses good for a year to people who apply for them and pass a rudimentary background inspection. The license holder is allowed to employ a certain number of upcountry miners, diggers, and buyers who are also licensed by the government. In theory, the exporter will bring diamonds to Freetown that have been dug up legitimately, and he’ll provide proof of that through a series of receipts and invoices detailing the discovery of every gem he wishes to export. The package is valued, taxed, and sealed in a box at the Government Gold and Diamond Office (GGDO) in town with a numbered certificate of origin printed on security paper, the government’s official stamp of approval that the package is “clean.” The parcel is also photographed with a digital camera and recorded in an electronic database, which is updated when the parcel is delivered to its stated destination. Once leaving the GGDO, the exporter is then free to leave the country without having to open the package again at the airport for inspection.
    This is the system that was put in place as a result of UN Security Council Resolution 1306, an embargo on diamond imports from Sierra Leone adopted in July 2000 until such a scheme for certifying official diamond exports was adopted. But it’s not likely that this action did much, if anything, to help stem trafficking in conflict diamonds. Clearly, the RUF didn’t use official channels to sell its stones. For example, between 1997 and 1999, a mere 36,000 carats were officially exported from Sierra Leone, from a high of 2 million in the late