TITLE: Africa Diamond Hub Defies Smuggling Rules

AUTHOR: Norimitsu Onishi

PUB: New York Times

DATE: January 2, 2001

Just off the diamond road, at 9 Koroma Street, the big diamond dealer went into his innermost office, noisily locked the door behind him and switched on the air-conditioner to keep out West Africa's swelter.With a closed-circuit television on his desk giving him a view of anyone who landed on his front porch peddling gemstones, the dealer, Kenda Sowe, began telling his story. He said he was Sierra Leonean, though everyone in Kenema says he is Guinean and though he frequently inserts French, the language of neighboring Guinea, into his English. Mr. Sowe said he followed to the letter the new diamond-trading rules backed by the United Nations to curb the smuggling that has sustained this country's nine-year civil war. But he added that the rules were so flawed that smuggling would never stop. Under those rules, dealers can buy only from licensed diggers, but few diggers actually have licenses. And while the regulations call for rigid enforcement, neither the government nor the United Nations has taken any steps to make the new rules stick. And so the system to prevent smuggling breaks down at the start, here in Kenema, the heart of Sierra Leone's diamond business. From here, dealers sell the gems to licensed exporters, and though the exporters can claim that their diamonds were mined in accordance with the laws, in practice there is really no way to know. "Beaucoup miners come to me every day," Mr. Sowe said. "They all have licenses. I will buy only from licensed miners. But where did they get the diamonds? I don't go in the bush. I don't mine. I don't know how they got the diamond." If the price is right, Mr. Sowe is not one to ask unnecessary questions. "I ask only one question," he said. "You want leones or you want dollars?" Sellers prefer dollars. Few people are really who they appear to be in Kenema. But interviews here make clear how difficult, if not impossible, it will be to stanch the smuggling of diamonds: the authorities do not have the resources to prevent smuggling, nor have they ever shown the will to reform a corrupt system that has enriched successive governments. As for the United Nations, Sierra Leone stands more than ever as a test of whether the organization is serious about constraining the illicit diamond trade, a $700-million-a-year business that has also aided the ravaging of Congo and Angola. So far in Sierra Leone, the United Nations has done little beyond backing stricter regulations on exports from government-held mines. A three-month Security Council ban on exporting Sierra Leone's diamonds was lifted in October. There has never been a ban on Liberia, whose president, Charles Taylor, has played a leading role in diamond smuggling here, feeding rebels arms for diamonds. But even if the Liberian conduit is closed, smuggling will continue to cripple Sierra Leone unless it is snuffed out in this town. Kenema is Sierra Leone's wild, wild east. The main street, Hangha Road, cuts through the middle of town with infinite promise, like West Africa's version of the Las Vegas Strip.Young men and old walk out of dealers' storefronts holding picks, shovels and sifters and heading north. The road - paved once, ground down now to reddish dust - makes a bend at the northern edge of town, an outpost of three-digit phone numbers that exists only because the nearby soil yields some of the world's finest diamonds: Tongo fields, 35 miles north, and Kono, 50 miles up. The biggest shops belong to about 40 Lebanese dealers. Smaller shops of Guineans, Gambians and other Africans dot the side streets. Down the food chain, Sierra Leonean middlemen roam the town. Out in the diamond fields are the diggers: rebels of the Revolutionary United Front; Kamajors, a pro-government militia of tribal hunters; or ordinary Sierra Leoneans. Sometimes, according to diggers interviewed here, the dealers send men, called julahs, into the fields. "The julahs go to Tongo or Kono with food, medication and physical cash," said Peter Wundu, 27, a senior Kamajor official. "They support the miners, the R.U.F. or the Kamajors. They pay for the diamonds, or it's a kind of barter system." But often, rebels simply come here to sell their diamonds - a given among residents, including Randolf Fillie-Faboe, the minister of Sierra Leone's eastern region and the highest-ranking government official in Kenema. "They come surreptitiously at night and stay with their relatives," Mr. Fillie-Faboe said. "I know them. I know their relatives. I know their wives. Some of their children go to our schools." Few diggers have the licenses the law now requires, conceded Ken F. Gegbai, the executive director of the Indigenous Miners Movement, a group to protect miners. Only middlemen can afford mining licenses. For decades, similar rules were never enforced, Mohamed A. Deen, the minister of mineral resources, acknowledged during an interview in Freetown, the capital. And while the new regulations seek tougher enforcement, there are few inspectors, Mr. Deen added. "This is our big problem - the implementation of the regulations," he said. "We are quite handicapped. There are so many ways of smuggling." But Mr. Deen argued that the new rules would curtail some smuggling by focusing on the point where the stones are exported. Under the new rules, diamonds for export must be accompanied by tamper-proof certificates of origin, signed by officials of four government departments. The information is then e-mailed to the importers, most of them in Belgium or Israel. Buying Sierra Leonean diamonds without certificates is illegal. In half a century of diamond trading, Sierra Leone's rulers never tried to reform a corrupt system that has benefited foreigners and government officials, while leaving the country one of the poorest. The injustice lay behind the rallying cry of the R.U.F. and its leader, Foday Sankoh, a cashiered corporal who began this war in 1991 by drawing frustrated young men from the poorest rural areas. A series of governments, including the current one, led by President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, dismissed Mr. Sankoh as a lunatic, but it was a measure of his message's power that his group was able to draw thousands of followers and still occupies two-thirds of Sierra Leone. On the diamond road in Kenema, a 48-year-old Lebanese dealer with 10 years here - "No name, I beg" - sat at a table on his front porch, where he had a side view of anyone entering his front gate. With a stack of cards, a pack of Marlboros and a pot of tea before him, he waited for business. And over the next hour, Sierra Leoneans trickled in. "Sir," one said, "how much?" "One hundred and forty dollars," he said, showing a tiny stone glittering in his palm. "You do not know if he is a rebel or Kamajor," the dealer said. "They're all black, they are all wearing civilian clothes. I don't know. They are all the same." Asked whether he ever inquired about a seller's identity - so that he would not break the law and buy a diamond from a rebel - the dealer looked dismayed. "One hundred percent you cannot ask," he said. "It's not your business." Outside the house of A. Y. Barada, another Lebanese dealer, there hangs a sign with the picture of an eagle clutching a diamond. "Me, in my office, I won't buy illicit diamonds," said Mr. Barada, born 53 years ago in Sierra Leone of Lebanese immigrants. "I buy only from licensed miners. If you don't have a license, I'll say, `I'm sorry, I won't buy from you.' " The Lebanese dealers are all clean, he added. But as for the Guineans - did they deal in illicit diamonds? "Of course!" Mr. Barada said. Down the diamond road, at the store of Hadi Jallow of Guinea, a different view was offered. "A Lebanese man is a crook," Mr. Jallow said. "They don't want you or I to get money. If you and a Lebanese man join together, and if he gets a good diamond, he will never show you. He will show you only the small ones." Mr. Fillie-Faboe, the government official, presented yet another view: "The Lebanese, the Guineans, the Nigerians, the Gambians - they have always supported illicit diamond mining. They work together. They are in collusion with the rebels. They have people mining with the rebels."They are leeches sucking our economic blood." All foreigners, including United Nations officials here, are profiting from Sierra Leone's misery, the minister said. "It's a big picnic," he said. "The U.N., they drive around town, only one man in a big car. If the U.N. gave our government money, we could finish this war quickly." "What is all the money for?" the minister asked. And, mentioning a restaurant popular among United Nations officials, he answered, "Is it to go to the Capitol and to drink?" A few hours later, at 1:45 p.m., a white sport utility vehicle pulled up to the Capitol restaurant and out stepped Mr. Fillie-Faboe. The minister, studiously avoiding the gaze of the reporter who had just interviewed him and was sitting outside, made a beeline for the air-conditioned dining room. "He comes once a week," a waitress said. Dealers also complain that business is slow, showing the official booklets they are now required to fill out for a purchase. The booklets list records of tiny gemstones. Critics of the system say it is easy to omit registering the bigger diamonds and smuggle them out of the country. Dealers acknowledged the system's flaw, but said they would never commit that offense, while accusing others of doing precisely that. During two visits, one Lebanese dealer showed a visitor tiny stones he kept inside a money belt that also contained rolls of $100 bills. But later, the increasingly talkative dealer reached into a pocket and pulled out a piece of white paper wrapped around a diamond nearly as big as the tip of his forefinger. It was worth $17,000, he said. Back in town, at the police barracks soccer field, the Kenda Sowe Diamond House team was practicing. Lebanese and Africans alike wore the dealer's jerseys, all playing the same game. Next to the Capitol restaurant, school children clustered before a video store, devouring the poster for a Nigerian release. Asked to name Kenema's biggest non-Lebanese dealer, Amara Kamara, 15, answered without hesitation: "Kenda Sowe, 9 Koroma Street. He's Guinean." Guinean or Sierra Leonean, Mr. Sowe walks unchallenged on the diamond road. On one recent day, he entered a travel agency and, half playfully, began smacking the workers on the forehead. Reaching across their desks, his big belly swaying beneath his white robe, Mr. Sowe then tried to stitch their lips together with a stapler. It was the dealer's way of making the point that for the holiday at the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting, he needed plenty of seats on one of those irregular flights to Freetown. "I have to take care of beaucoup people," he said. END top