Liberia History & Information

Three weeks before Christmas, a couple walk through London’s Hatton Garden diamond district looking for a diamond engagement ring.

Three weeks before Christmas in Angola it’s a different story. The International Day of the Disabled is taking place. Many of those taking part are the victims of civil war. A war that has horrendously disfigured combatants and non-combatants alike, a war financed by diamonds.

Diamonds maybe a girl’s best friend, but diamonds are paid for in blood. In the mines of Koidu, Sierra Leone, “a mixture of RUF militants, adult and child conscripts and local miners has turned every possible diamond site into a pile of mud”. The illicit diamond trade has led to war, suffering and violence in Angola, the Congo and Liberia. In Sierra Leone this trade has left a trail of summary execution, torture and indiscriminate machete attacks.

Diamonds are hard to track and easy to smuggle. Once hidden they are undetectable by airport sniffer-dogs, maintain their value in the market and are hard to identify, making it extremely difficult to know where your diamond earrings, ring or necklace were mined. In the UK, diamonds often name Switzerland as their country of origin – diamond mines in Switzerland?

A rebel’s best friend?

“Diamonds are forever” it is often said, but lives are not. We must spare people the ordeal of war, mutilations and death for the sake of conflict diamonds” Martin Chungong Ayafor, Chairman of the Sierra Leone Panel of Experts

Angola was once the plaything of superpowers. Gaining independence from Portugal in 1975, a vicious civil war engulfed it for 26 years. The conflict between the Marxist government, the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) rebels killed an estimated 500,000 people in the last decade and displaced half a million Angolans in the last few years.

Whenever the UN has tried to stem the flow of aid to the rebels the greed for diamonds has always defeated them. For example, the 1993 UN arms and petroleum embargo was ignored by Zaire’s former president Mobutu Sese Seko. Zaire continued to channel arms to UNITA (from 1994-1997), using the profit from diamond sales. In 1997 Mobutu was overthrown and the UN Security Council imposed a ban on the export and buying of UNITA diamonds, but they continued to end up on high street.

Global Witness, an NGO, revealed in ‘A Rough Trade: The Role of Companies and Governments in the Angolan Conflict’, that UNITA had earned $3.7 billion from the diamond trade in the 1990’s. A UN report in October 2001 stated $1 million of diamonds were smuggled out of Angola every day, a quarter of which went to fund UNITA’s war effort.

In February 2002, Jonas Sambivi was killed and a ceasefire agreement put in place, although the severe humanitarian crises caused by drought and years of war still threaten this fragile peace. In April 2002 it was reported that large amounts of diamond production still involved UNITA.

The lost children of Sierra Leone

Between January and August 2001 4,000 children were registered as missing in Sierra Leone In 1999 the civil war between the Revolutionary Front (RUF) and government of Sierra Leone ended. The respite was brief, in May 2000 the UN Security Council’s disarmament force was taken hostage and hostilities resumed. In July 2000, after international concern that diamonds were funding the war the UN banned all imports of rough diamonds from Sierra Leone.

Despite sanctions, attacks on civilians escalated. Forced labour within the diamond mining areas of Kono continued, as did extortion of food and money by the RUF. Women and girls were tortured and raped, children were abducted for use as sexual slaves and work in the mines, while men and boys were forced to fight.

In January 2002, the ten year civil war officially ended. The recent elections saw the people of the war torn state flocking to the polls to support the re-election of the President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah. While the diamond certificate scheme, introduced in 2000, has stemmed the flow of smuggled gems and created a boom in legal exports, a trickle of illegal diamonds continues to find its way to Antwerp. In 2001, the Sierra Leone Mineral Resource Minister said the country’s export of diamonds, helped by the clamp down on rebel trade through the certificate scheme, had gone up 150%, over $26 million dollars. He claimed 25% of the money would go directly to develop local areas and hoped future exports will exceed $30 million. Even so the Sierra Leone Finance Minister, on 25 March 2002, claimed the certificate scheme had not been effective and that the government could not control the illegal diamond trade.

The Al Qaida Connection

Osama bin Laden has also benefited from conflict diamonds, according to the Washington Post. The Liberian government were indirectly funding the Al Qa’ida network with the proceeds from conflict diamonds. A Global Witness letter to Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, stated, Al-Qaida has derived millions of US dollars from diamonds mined by the RUF and carried out in the co-operation of the Liberian government with President Charles Taylor receiving commission on these transactions”.

Although, in 1992, an arms embargo was set up to curb arms trafficking to RUF rebels via Liberia, a recent UN report exposed huge illegal arms shipments to Liberia in the past two years. The UN response is muddled, for example, Kofi Annan, in his October 11th report to the UN Security Council, insisted sanctions would hurt ordinary Liberians, yet later that month a panel of ‘experts’ recommended additional sanctions, stating that while the flow of illicit diamonds from Sierra Leone to Liberia had stopped, RUF rebels had found alternative smuggling routes.

U.S. officials are also investigating Al Qaidas links with Congos diamond, gold and uranium trade and the trade of diamonds in neighbouring Tanzania. “We are beginning to understand how easy it is to move money through commodities like diamonds, which can’t be traced and can be easily stored,” said a U.S. official. “One thing we are learning is not to ignore the obvious.”

It is not only Al Qada exploiting the Congo’s diamond resources. All the belligerents in one way or another are benefiting from the conflict,” said UN panel chairman, Safiatou Ba-N’Daw, at a recent news conference. “The only losers are the Congolese people.

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Laura Tovey, Assistant Country Manager in Ghana tells us about a new project in which our journalism volunteers are getting involved.

A new partnership has been formed between Projects Abroad and The Vision – a newspaper published for the people of Buduburam Liberian Refugee Camp.

Since the last print edition in October 2005, The Vision has been available online only, at www.thevisiononline.net. But now Projects Abroad has secured funding, the paper goes to print once again. With an initial print-run of 1000 copies, The Vision will become available to those who don’t have regular internet access. All journalism volunteers in Ghana now have the chance to spend one or two days a week working for The Vision.

More than 42,000 people live at Buduburam camp, established in 1990 to accommodate a segment of the Liberian population displaced by the civil war that began in Liberia on December 24th 1989. To serve the needs of this population, The Vision was founded in May 2004 by Jos Garneo Cephas and Semantics King Jr., two journalists from Liberia. With its focus on human rights stories, King Jr. says the purpose of The Vision is to provide “information for the purpose of educating, raising social consciousness and assisting the emerging democratic process in Liberia. This is accomplished by providing a forum for setting the agenda on matters affecting the refugees’ interests, even holding refugee public officials accountable.”

Several Projects Abroad volunteers have already visited the camp and made contacts there to enable them to hunt out the most crucial news stories. The volunteers can also get involved with other stages of production, including editing, proof-reading and providing training for the current staff.

Projects Abroad already funds and works with newspapers in India, Bolivia and Romania. Mircea Samoila, Director of Ghana, edited our magazine in Romania for a year and helped to set up the journalism project in India. Asked why he wanted to get involved with The Vision, Mircea explained, “access to information is a right, and an especially pressing one for the Liberian refugees at the moment. They also have the right for their situation to be presented to their host country [Ghana] in an unbiased and truthful way, unclouded by prejudice and ignorance. Projects Abroad will sponsor the printing of The Vision, so that it can provide these rights to the Liberian refugees in Ghana. The involvement of our own journalism volunteers in the production of the newspaper will ensure that the plight of the Liberian refugees is known outside Ghana as well, and that their story is told also from a Western perspective.”

Already the editorial team is looking to the future. Once The Vision is re-established in print form, King Jr. has plans for expansion. He aims for new standards of professionalism, something volunteers can help with by using their skills and experience to help train a permanent staff. The founders also plan to take the newspaper back to Liberia. Each day more refugees return to their homeland, spurred by the hope for peace brought by the election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as President and it is important for The Vision to go with them.

King Jr. said, “My exact plans for the Vision for Liberia include establishing it as the only national paper that would exclusively deal with human rights issues, educating and informing the Liberian citizenry of their basic human rights, which would in turn enable them to protect their rights and those of others. This knowledge will help to easily identify violations of rights not just by government but by other political leaders. That’s my…vision for The Vision.”

Find Out About Our Journalism Placements in Ghana

www.projects-abroad.co.uk

Lest some people use the excuse of not being affected by blood diamonds for being complacent, we should be reminded that there is no such thing as an isolated incident. Everything is interconnected and eventually at some point, repercussions will affect everyone. Even if this were not to happen, being unaffected by a horrifying activity is not an excuse for not doing anything to help when you have the power to do so. It is simply not acceptable. Still, for the hardhearted, these findings may stir up some life in you.

Right after the unbelievable attacks in New York by the terrorist group al-Quaida, countless probes and intelligence activities were launched. The American nation was united in their effort to find out how this happened. The international community was aghast and did what they could do to lend a helping hand. No one could believe that such a thing could happen in American soil. Yet happen it did.

Who would have thought, though, that blood diamonds were part of al-Quaida’s activities. Initial reports showed that prior to the September 11 attacks, the terrorist group was able to convert about $10 million into diamonds. This was crucial to their terrorist activities as after their attacks on US Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania in 1998, the al-Quaida’s assets were frozen by the Clinton administration. That reportedly amounted to about $240 million. Yet despite this, the al-Quaida was able to have enough funds to carry out one of the largest terrorist attacks in the history of the world.

How did al-Quaida do this? Bin Laden and his cohorts focused their activities in Liberia which was then led by the infamous Charles Taylor. blood diamonds mined in Sierra Leone and other African countries more often than not found their way into Liberia, where anyone could do almost anything as long as he had connections with Taylor. Money and arms were the players here, and the plight of the people did not count one bit.

Al-Quaida was not alone in using blood diamonds to fund their terrorist activities. The now household name Hezbollah was also known to have raised funds through blood diamonds. Reports showed that Hezbollah made use of the countless Lebanese in Africa to carry out their activities. Even Israel realized this and tried to shut down Lebanese networks in Sierra Leone.

Aside from these well-known terrorist groups, there are numerous big time criminals who operated in Liberia, exchanging weapons for diamonds. Victor Bout was one of them, one of the worst illegal arms dealers. Then there was Lenoid Menin of a Russian crime family.

These people are in it for only one thing – money. As others are suffering and dying, we simply cannot look away and pretend that nothing has happened or that nothing is happening at present. We cannot say that it is none of our business. It is everybody’s business! Atrocities happen only because the rest of the world chooses to avert its eyes.