Word: diamonders
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...maiming and torture that has gripped Sierra Leone for the past decade is a portly, ebullient former army corporal and wedding photographer. But Foday Sankoh doesn't personally hack the hands off children or slaughter their parents in his drive for political power and control over Sierra Leone's diamond fields; for that he relies on an army of abducted teenagers, forced at gunpoint to rape or kill loved ones - a brutal measure designed to cut off the road home - before being dragged into the bush, where Sankoh's drug-addled legions become their only family. Now, his band...
...deal for a man who'd been bound for the firing squad a few short months earlier: Clinton and Jackson were urging a war criminal to agree to order his men to lay down their arms, in exchange for his country's vice presidency and ministerial control over the diamond fields that had financed his rebellion. And in a failed and lawless state such as Sierra Leone, ministerial control meant a lot more than majority shareholding...
...hired a South African mercenary firm, Executive Outcomes, which was composed primarily of apartheid-era special forces officers who'd had plenty of experience in southern Africa's brutal wars of the '80s, to deal with the rebels. The mercenaries' price included a substantial share of the country's diamond mines. Although their 21-month sojourn in Sierra Leone cost the country $35 million, they got the job done. The rebels were smashed and confined to small pockets of the country, the diamond fields secured and Foday Sankoh forced to the negotiating table to discuss allowing free elections. (By contrast...
...good books by playing sheriff in West Africa. And the West was offering nothing by way of finance, weapons or logistical support to maintain the mission. Britain and the U.S., embroiled in Kosovo, simply wanted the Sierra Leone problem to go away. But the rebels' control over the diamond fields gave them a long-term source of funding that made them both a more formidable force and a more intractable foe. And the long-suffering people of Sierra Leone simply wanted peace, even if the price was sacrificing justice for the criminals of the RUF. Thus was born the Lome...
...warned the U.N. troops who'd come to disarm them to keep their distance. Sankoh fired Bockarie late last year, but the commander fled to Liberia, where he began to organize a new insurgency that would ensure continued access by the RUF - and its Liberian backers - to the diamond fields. But Sankoh's own commitment to peace was equally dubious. Despite having signed the agreement authorizing their peacekeeping role, Sankoh warned in January that the U.N. "has no business in Sierra Leone." Yet despite these warning signs and continuing rebel attacks, the U.N. continued to assemble a poorly equipped, poorly...