Blood Diamonds (1 of 2 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Blood Diamonds by Greg Campbell. Copyright 2004 by Basic Books
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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DEDICATION For My Parents

O my mountain in the field,
I will give thy substance and all thy treasures to the spoil,
and thy high places for sin,
throughout all thy borders.

-- JEREMIAH 17:1


CYMBELINE: That diamond upon your finger, say
How came it yours?
IACHIMO: Thou'lt torture me to leave unspoken that
Which to be spoke would torture thee.

-- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Cymbeline


PROLOGUE

IMPACT: THE PRICE OF DIAMONDS

Médecins Sans Frontières Camp for Amputees and War Wounded, Freetown, Sierra Leone, Summer 2001

ISMAEL DALRAMY lost his hands in 1996 with two quick blows of an ax. He didn't--or couldn't--recall the pain of the blows. But he remembered being ordered at gunpoint to place his wrists on a wooden stump dripping with the blood of his neighbors who were writhing on the ground around him trying to stem the flow of blood from their arms or staggering away.

Dalramy does recall that it was quick and methodical--the victim in line in front of him was swiftly kicked away and suddenly he faced a bloody wooden block and an impatient gang of heavily armed teens eager to be done with their day's orders. He didn't fight his captors or beg for mercy. Instead, he removed a crude metal ring made by his son from one of the fingers on his left hand and put it in his pocket, one of the last acts his hands performed for him.

Until that morning, when the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) attacked the town with rockets and rifles, speeding through the streets in pickup trucks whose cab roofs had been sawed off to convert them into roofless killing vehicles, it had been easy to think that there would be plenty of time to escape if the need arose. The humid jungle village of Koidu, where Dalramy's family had lived for generations, is an epicenter of raw diamond production in eastern Sierra Leone. In the months leading up to the day that Dalramy's hands were amputated by the RUF, Koidu had been increasingly surrounded by rebel forces who crept through the jungle's dense mesh of palm trees and banana bushes. RUF bandits would enter the town sporadically to steal food and supplies and menace its inhabitants, but an all-out assault seemed unlikely.
Though you would never know by looking at it--Koidu is like many bush villages in Sierra Leone, composed of brown shacks and red-dirt streets--the area around the village had long been fiercely coveted in the war that has torn apart this West African nation since 1991. Ever since British geologists first discovered diamonds in Sierra Leone's jungles in the 1930s, miners had been extracting some of the most valuable diamond wealth in the world from small muddy pits scattered throughout the surrounding rain forest. These small chunks and bits of milky-white carbon crystals are transformed into precious jewelry displayed on the hands, wrists, necks, and ears of people around the world, many of whom have probably never heard of Sierra Leone. During the RUF war, people like Dalramy paid for this distant luxury with their own hands.

The RUF wasn't the only armed group around Koidu at the time Dalramy was captured. Both Sierra Leonean government soldiers and West African peacekeepers from a regional security force called the ECOWAS Cease-Fire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) fought to keep the diamond mines out of the RUF's control. A fourth group--a tribal militia of Mende warriors called Kamajors--added to the confusion and bloodshed, fighting the RUF's assault rifles and rocket launchers with machetes, spears, and ancient mystical battle rituals that they hoped would make them invisible to their enemies and impervious to bullets. Koidu was at the center of these variously disciplined forces, and constant skirmishes and full-out assaults among them were common.

But the RUF had terror on its side. Composed almost entirely of illiterate and drugged teenagers, the rebels respected no boundaries in conducting the war. Mass rape, torture, random executions, looting, and cannibalism were among their strategic resources. But their signature war crime was amputation. In response to Sierra Leone president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah's 1996 plea for his countrymen to "join hands" for peace, the RUF began dismembering their victims and dumping the body parts on the steps of the presidential palace. Although hands were the most common limb severed, the RUF also sliced off civilians' lips, ears, legs, breasts, and tongues to inspire terror. Their battle-group names--General Babykiller, Queen Chop Hands--seem to have been plucked from poorly written and unimaginative comic books, and commanders named their missions to leave little doubt of their intentions.
From Operation Pay Yourself, a looting spree, to the chillingly self-explanatory Operation No Living Thing, rebel assaults were as effectively terrorizing in their descriptions as they were in their executions. Though he didn't know it at the time, Dalramy was a victim of Operation Clean Sweep, a plan to exert brutal dominion over the Kono region, a district that included Koidu. RUF soldiers cut a bloody swath through the forest, murdering and mutilating anyone in the way, all so they could control the millions of dollars waiting to be mined from the diamond fields; it was the only thing the RUF has ever wanted--gems to sell for guns and retirement funds.

Like the others who stayed in their cinder block and zinc-roofed homes, Dalramy thought the RUF would be content to occupy the town, using its menacing presence to keep both government soldiers and the Kamajor fighters at bay. The RUF had captured Kono years before, but a private mercenary force hired from South Africa by the Sierra Leone government had won the town back in exchange for the right to mine and sell diamonds. As a result, many families had returned to their homes.

But on that particular morning, instead of awakening to a typical scene of bustling traffic weaving through the crowds growing around the market, Dalramy saw the streets begin to fill with the splayed bodies of his dead neighbors amid a rising chorus of the "pop" of small-arms fire ricocheting off hardened mud walls. He raced out the back of his house and, instead of slipping into the relative safety of the jungle as he'd planned, ran right into the arms of a squad of RUF soldiers dressed in camouflage T-shirts and flipflops, their crude bayonets aimed at him from under the barrels of battle-worn AK-47s. He was taken to the village police station, which had been commandeered by RUF soldiers, and thrown in with a group of frantic civilians being held at gunpoint. As the sound of gunshots outside slowed, the prisoners--about eight men and women--were taken behind the building and told to form a line facing a man with an ax.
The powerful-looking rebel wore no shirt, Dalramy remembers, only black jeans, a black scarf wrapped around his bare skull, and mirrored plastic sunglasses. He twirled the ax in his hands. The first victim was dragged forward and forced to kneel before a stump. As the man screamed, he severed first one limb, then the next.

GLOSSARY AND NOTES (please bookmark)
http://www.dailylit.com/books/blood-diamonds/glossary
http://www.dailylit.com/books/blood-diamonds/notes

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