Blood Diamonds by Greg Campbell
Andersen, Robert
HELL ON EARTH Blood Diamonds Tracing the Deadly Path of the World's Most Precious Stones Greg Campbell Westview Press, $26,251 pp. Robert Andersen West Africa is a netherworld of diamonds and...
...Campbell's book is an excellent place to start if you want to understand what has been happening in West Africa...
...Although he experiences his own Conradian epiphany-stranded for several days in a RUF field hospital, he flees on the first available helicopter to the relative safety of Freetown, only to land in "a writhing hive of killers, villains, and wretched victims"-Campbell remains both resolute and resourceful in tracking down the lair of the "blood diamond...
...As a result, some hundred thousand Sierra Leoneans lost their lives, twenty thousand their limbs (and other various body parts), and several million fled...
...In so doing, he brings the reader to another unsettling discovery: how Al Qaeda used blood diamonds to finance its terrorism...
...Now it, too, is on the way to joining bottom-of-the-barrel nations like Liberia and Sierra Leone in becoming hell on earth...
...Campbell skillfully recounts the market-cornering saga of DeBeers, its nearly inscrutable governance practices, and how it turned a cold eye on the source of one of its most profitable pipelines as West Africa descended into anarchy...
...Geophysically, Sierra Leone may be "diamondiferous," but such a curse of plenitude has not saved it from rising to number one on the UN's index of human misery...
...Robert Andersen West Africa is a netherworld of diamonds and charnel houses, a gruesome place from which to report...
...There are still nearly twenty thousand UN troops stationed there...
...Campbell, no stranger to other war zones (a freelancer whose first book was on the conflict in Kosovo), clearly found harrowing what he witnessed in West Africa in 2001...
...Although the RUF had by then retreated into oblivion, its henchmen and handiwork were still everywhere evident...
...Robert Andersen, a freelance writer who lives in Kittery Point, Maine, is at work on Dark Matter: The Meaning of Vietnam (Basic Books).(Basic Books...
...The Ivory Coast, sporadically in the news these days for its civil war, was, until recently, one of the few havens of stability in the region...
...In answering, Campbell punctures the myth that West Africa's descent into hell flows solely from the hands of its warlords and juvenile killers...
...Greg Campbell makes clear why...
...Campbell records what he found: "a vacuum of violence, poverty, warlords, and misery" that was a case study in human depravity dwarfed only by the genocide in Rwanda...
...The reader should be prepared as well: this book is extreme journalism at its hairiest, bringing one face to face with the living dead of Sierra Leone...
...He locates the sources in London, Amsterdam, and New York, as well as in Freetown and Monrovia...
...Now, as prime enforcer of the "Kim-berley Process," a self-certification endorsed by forty nations that diamonds are "conflict-free," the syndicate has reclaimed its status as the arbiter of diamond magic and the unchallenged titan of the industry...
...Now that Ivory Coast is taking its place under the sword, its children-who literally slave on that nation's cocoa farms-are becoming the fodder for another children's army of the damned...
...In neighboring Liberia, the notorious Charles Taylor was to finance his reign of terror through Lebanese middlemen, as all the while the fabled DeBeers diamond cartel (the Syndicate) reaped windfall profits...
...He recounts the saga of misery in fluent, tough-minded prose, but he spares readers the "heart of darkness" rites of passage that can otherwise turn covering Africa into safaris of the individual psyche...
...The nation's lucrative mines,worked by slave labor, allowed four armed groups (including Nigerian "peacekeepers") to prolong the bloodletting...
...Finally, the UN intervened, mounting the largest peacekeeping operation in its history...
...While the conflagration spread, armies of juvenile killers like Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front (RUF), decked out with gruesome noms de guerre and zoned out on drugs, kept the diamond traders well stocked...
...In so doing, he makes the reader fully aware of West Africa's dead-last nations, their hellholes and hecatombs...
...He also insures that the news from that part of the world will never read quite the same...
...That the "blood diamonds" of Sierra Leone turned up on the fingers of many American brides should not come as a surprise-the American market accounts for almost 80 percent of global diamond sales...
...It was only after Global Witness, a small, London-based NGO, began publicizing one DeBeers source (Angola) and raising the specter of a boycott that the syndicate-always content to buy from whoever turned up in Monrovia or Guinea, no questions asked-altered its policy...
...For nearly all of the 1990s, Sierra Leone was a killing field out of the Khmer Rouge handbook-except that it financed most of the carnage through the diamond trade...
...So the question becomes: Are diamonds and chocolate-the fruits of West Africa-moral luxuries the West can no longer afford...
Vol. 130 • August 2003 • No. 14
