UN OCHA Integrated Regional Information Network for West Africa (IRIN-WA)
Date: 24 May 2000

FREETOWN, 24 May (IRIN) - UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has threatened possible action against diamond smuggling by Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front (RUF) to force the release of UN peacekeepers held by the rebels and to help end the country's renewed civil war.

In a report to the UN Security Council on Monday, Annan said: "Of immediate concern is the safe return of all those United Nations personnel currently being detained by the RUF, and an end to the hostile acts of the RUF fighters." He added that the Council "may also wish to consider" measures that would "prevent RUF commanders from reaping the benefits of their illegal exploitation of mineral resources, in particular diamonds".

Diamonds and war

The control of alluvial diamond fields and the revenues generated by smuggling are the key to Sierra Leone's nine-year civil war, analysts argue. When the RUF is not fighting it is digging, and the diamond areas of the Eastern Province - particularly Kono and Tongo - have been repeatedly battled over.

A report this year by Partnership Africa-Canada (PAC) into the connection between diamonds and the Sierra Leone conflict concluded: "The point of the war may not actually have been to win it, but to engage in profitable crime under the cover of warfare." It is estimated that over the past decade, 85 percent of Sierra Leone's diamond output has been smuggled onto the international market.

In clear recognition of the link between control of the diamond fields and the civil war, the peace and power-sharing agreement signed last year in Lome, Togo, awarded RUF leader Foday Sankoh the post of chairman of the Commission for Strategic Mineral Resources and Development - with the status of vice president - and an amnesty for all crimes committed before the peace deal.

Under significant international pressure to accept the Lome terms, the government concluded that "a little peace is better than no peace," one analyst observed. But Sierra Leone's shaky truce this month gave way to renewed fighting.

The politics of smuggling

The history of diamonds in Sierra Leone since their commercial discovery in 1930 has been about the struggle between the state and private interests over the political control of gem production, the role of international business, and the regional political economy of diamond smuggling, the CAP report claims.

In 1960, official diamond production peaked at two million carats. In 1998, the government recorded exports of only 8,500 carats, but Belgium's High Diamond Council (HRD) - the world's trading centre for rough diamonds - registered imports of 777,000 carats from Sierra Leone.

Annual mining capacity in neighbouring Liberia is estimated at between 100,000 and 150,000 carats, but the HRD received an annual average of over six million carats from the country. The PAC report adds that Cote d'Ivoire, where the small diamond industry was closed in the mid-1980s, apparently exported an average of more than 1.5 million carats to Belgium between 1995 and 1997.

Diamonds and poverty

Since the 1950s, Sierra Leone governments have only been able to assert limited control over the country's diamond-producing areas. The nine-year civil war has turned the Eastern Province into a free-for-all zone. Although the bulk of the RUF's recruits are believed to have been abducted children, it has also found some willing followers among young bands of miners - known as 'san-san boys' - and refugees in Liberia lured back home with the promise of diamond wealth.

"Sierra Leoneans in Liberia are really suffering in terms of living conditions and security. They can easily be convinced with a little money to go to Sierra Leone to dig diamonds, but once there they are forced to fight with the RUF," a local aid worker from the border area told IRIN. "If the RUF are not cleared from Tongo and Kono, this war will never end."

He added: "There must be a mechanism for control of diamond production. There is no revenue, no income in this country except from the donors, and Sierra Leone has the potential to destabilise the whole region."

Diamonds have not been Sierra Leoneans' best friend. Instead, they have helped to create a dire state of poverty. In 1960 the country was producing two-thirds of the world's diamonds. Today, according to UN figures, it has the world's highest maternal mortality rate. Eighty percent of its people are illiterate, the bulk of the staple, rice, is imported, and by the end of 1999, 2.6 million of the 4.5 million Sierra Leoneans were either refugees, displaced or demobilising soldiers.

The CAP report lists a series of recommendations aimed at transparency and better regulation of the international diamond trade to end the flow of unofficial diamonds. In the short term it also calls for UN security forces to be deployed in the diamond producing regions, and block known smuggling routes.

[ENDS]

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