Free Blood Diamonds by Greg Campbell Page B

You’re fucked, you’re told, because you bought a diamond without having a license to do so. And then, amid the panic in your mind, a bubble of desperate lucidity comes to the surface: Can I buy a license now?
    Ah, yes . . . postures ease . . . of course you can. It will be a license just to get out of their hands and onto the nearest plane out of Sierra Leone, though. How much money do you have? Six hundred dollars? But a license costs a thousand (unless you have a thousand, in which case it costs two), resulting in more whacks to the head. Okay, today’s your lucky day; we’ll take the $600, but you’d better leave the country immediately.
    Indeed. What a scene: Dumped on the streets without even cab fare back to the room you now can’t pay for, where all your possessions are being kept hostage by the innkeeper, reduced to begging to the U.S. ambassador or your friends in the press corps.
    People like Singer were invaluable because they’d already screened such riffraff.
    â€œYou’ve got to have good contacts and fortunately I’ve been doing this long enough that I’ve got them. That’s why he needs me.” He pointed to Valdy, whose Polish diamond-cutting company hired Singer to acquire cheap quality stones from the rebels.
    â€œSay, you want to meet one of them? Name’s Jango. He can tell you all about RUF mining,” he said.
    â€œWhy not?”
    We headed into the night, the sound of UN helicopters carried to us on the ocean breeze that moved the leaves overhead like bored hand-waving from a local parade. There are few functional streetlights in Freetown and the short walk to Jango’s compound took us
through an eerie collage of shadowy figures lit by the greasy flames of oil-lamps at sheet-plastic-and-timber roadside kiosks. Glaring headlights from UN Expeditions and Land Rovers speeding their occupants to Paddy’s periodically blinded us; when we finally arrived, we were seeing stars and tripping over our own feet.
    Jango’s neighborhood was typical of most squatter housing in Freetown. Crumbling concrete housing blocks waved colorful laundry like Tibetan prayer flags. Black cauldrons bubbled with rice and cassava, creating a mist of cook-smoke that caught the firelight in a medieval light show. Streams of sewage and rainwater mingled underfoot in the pasty mud. From the shadows, the only thing visible of the people slumped on the porches and tree stumps were the whites of their eyes. Community activity centered around a slapdash kiosk composed of tree branches and UNHCR plastic sheeting. About a half dozen hard-eyed teens lurked inside around a battered boom box that was playing The Spice Girls at deafening volume, sipping tea. Naked children stopped in midstride to stare at the spectacle of two white men arriving unannounced on their doorstep after dark.
    â€œHa de body?” Singer said cheerfully. “Run get Jango for us.”
    At the mention of Jango’s name, the spell was broken and two of the teens broke off to be absorbed into the night in search of him. Jango apparently carried some weight among his neighbors.
    It’s not hard to see why. Though physically unremarkable—at 29, he has a typical African physique born of backbreaking labor, a wide friendly face, and a collection of scars from shrapnel and bullet wounds—his history as a longtime prisoner of the RUF has afforded him a certain degree of respect among his peers. And the fact that he now helps the RUF sell their diamonds to people like Singer has only added to his mystique, now seen as a man willing
to overlook the atrocities of the war to become a businessman. The only business worth doing in a place like Freetown, as everyone knew, was brokering illegal diamonds. If those diamonds came from people who beat and tortured him for 18 months in the bush, well . . . the money to be earned was well worth putting that aside.
    Singer introduced me and soon left to