In Sierra Leone, still a tough dig for diamonds

By Lydia Polgreen Sunday, March 25, 2007 found at International Herald Tribune

KOIDU, Sierra Leone: The tiny stone settled into the calloused grooves of Tambaki Kamanda's palm, its dull yellow glint almost indiscernible, even in the noontime glare.

It was the first stone he had found in days, and he expected to get little more than a dollar for it. It hardly seemed worth it, he said, after days spent up to his haunches in mud, digging, washing, searching the gravel for diamonds.

But farming had brought no money for clothes or schoolbooks for his two wives and five children. He could find no work as a mason.

"I don't have choice," Kamanda said, standing calf-deep in brown muddy water here at the Bondobush mine, where he works every day. "This is my only hope, really."

Diamond miners in Sierra Leone using sieves to search through gravel for possible, but still highly elusive, riches. (Candace Feit for The New York Times)

Diamond mining in Sierra Leone is no longer the bloody affair made infamous by the nation's decadelong civil war, in which diamonds played a starring role.

The conflict - begun by rebels who claimed to be ridding the mines of foreign control - killed 50,000 people, forced millions to flee their homes, destroyed the country's economy and shocked the world with its images of amputated limbs and drug-addled boy soldiers.

An international regulatory system created after the war has prevented diamonds from fueling conflicts and financing terrorist networks.

Even so, diamond mining in Sierra Leone remains a grim business that brings the government far too little revenue to right the devastated country, yet feeds off the desperation of some of the world's poorest people.

"The process is more to sanitize the industry from the market side rather than the supply side," said John Kanu, a policy adviser to the Integrated Diamond Management Program, a U.S.-backed effort to improve the government's handling of diamond money.

"To make it so people could go to buy a diamond ring and to say, 'Yes, because of this system, there are no longer any blood diamonds. So my love, and my conscience, can sleep easily.'

"But that doesn't mean that there is justice," he said. "That will take a lot, lot longer to change."

In many cases, the vilified foreign mine owners have simply been replaced by local elites with a firm grip on the industry's profits.

At the losing end are the miners here in Kono district, who work for little or no pay, hoping to strike it rich but caught in a net of semifeudal relationships that make it all but impossible that they ever will.

The vast majority of Sierra Leone's diamonds are mined by hand from alluvial deposits near the earth's surface, so anyone with a shovel, bucket and sieve can go into business; in a country with few formal jobs, at least 150,000 people work as diggers, government officials said.

Most days, diggers like Charles Kabia, a 25-year-old grade-school dropout who has been digging since the rebels forced him to mine as a teenager, come up empty - he has not found a stone in two months. That last diamond, a half-carat stone, went for about $65, which he split with his three partners.

"From all my years of mining I don't even have one bicycle," said Kabia, his hands trembling. "I really get nothing out of it."

The struggle to reform Sierra Leone's troubled mining industry is emblematic of many of the difficulties faced by this small, impoverished nation as it tries to heal.

Some countries, like Botswana, whose diamonds lie locked deep underground, have been able to make their deposits a source of wealth through careful management and control. But countries such as Sierra Leone, Congo, Angola and Ivory Coast, where diamonds wash up in rivers and often sit just a few feet below the surface, have struggled to manage what may be the world's worst resource curse.

The sprawling mining business here includes about 2,500 small operations. Unlike oil, iron ore and even gold, diamonds are so easy to transport that if regulations are too onerous and taxes too high, miners and exporters will simply turn to smuggling.

In 2005, Sierra Leone officially exported $141 million worth of diamonds, government records show. That is a vast improvement over the $24 million officially exported in 2001, before stringent new rules known as the Kimberley Process required diamond deals to be certified by the authorities. Before that, most diamonds were smuggled out of the country through Liberia and Guinea and sold for weapons.

But even now, the government's share of the revenue is modest, just 3 percent. In 2006, the government's take was only $3.7 million. Licensing fees add to that total, but it is hardly enough to rebuild a nation of six million people.

Usman Boie Kamara, the deputy director of the government's mining office, noted that new laws requiring permits for dealers, mine owners and exporters have forced out shadowy operators, smugglers and money launderers. Laws also set minimum standards for the pay and benefits of diggers - though they are scarcely enforced, miners and experts say.

At the Bondobush mine here, the grim routine of mining is on daily display - hundreds of diggers sifting through tons of gravel. The mine is divided into areas of 200 square meters, or 2,150 square feet with each controlled by a license holder. By law that person must be Sierra Leonean, but in practice the licensees are often fronts for foreign backers.

Yet even with the laws requiring local control, working conditions have not improved much.

The mine where Kabia works is operated by a chief who functions as a kind of local government executive. The chief, Paul Saquee, 46, is a former truck driver who spent the last two decades in the United States, most recently around Atlanta. Saquee's brother Prince is the chairman of the local diamond dealers' association, the first Sierra Leonean to hold that position.

Paul Saquee employs two kinds of diggers. Some are paid about a dollar a day and 30 percent of the value of their stones, which they must hand over to Paul Saquee's representative, another of the chief's brothers, named Tamba. He watches the miners with hawklike vigilance as they dig.

Others, like Kabia, work for a percentage of the gravel they extract and own any stones they find. In theory, this means they should get a fair sale price, but dealers often exploit their ignorance.

Prince Saquee, the chief's diamond-dealing brother, bankrolls several mines and scoffs at the notion of selling his stones to only one buyer.

"If you are working for an exporter, he will dictate the price," he said. "To me that is indirect slavery."

But he has no qualms about demanding precisely that arrangement from those below him on the diamond food chain. The mine owners and workers he bankrolls must sell only to him.

"For the miners, it is different," he argued. A digger, "he depends on you. He doesn't know the value so you as the dealer have to tell him."