Blood Diamonds by Greg Campbell Page A

immobilized traffic, and 100-degree heat.
    Freetown is truly something to behold, a writhing hive of killers, villains, and wretched victims. Refugees and RUF fighters—both former and current—wander the same roadsides. UN officials have beers with con men trying to sell diamonds. Kamajor fighters have taken over a downtown hotel for reasons no one seems sure of, while disarmed RUF fighters stage demonstrations downtown over perceived injustices of the peace agreement. A bar in Aberdeen—Freetown’s beach district—is the vortex for this contradictory reality: Every type of human flotsam and do-gooder can be found rubbing elbows at Paddy’s on any weekend night. The place is actually a huge bamboo and palm leaf tent, featuring two bars, a TV, and a stage. The parking lot is the domain of beggars and robbers, as former RUF fighters and their amputated victims jostle for the attention of the paying crowd, itself a mix of diamond smugglers, mercenaries, UN personnel, prostitutes, businessmen, journalists, workers from some 120 nongovernmental organizations with headquarters in Freetown, and other assorted riffraff. The strange population of Freetown results in some equally strange encounters.
    Among the most disconcerting, especially for those unfamiliar with daily life in Freetown, are those with diamond smugglers,
men whose thoughts are not about the ever-present tragedy of Sierra Leone’s diamond war visible on every street corner, but only about the profits to be made selling illicit stones. They are as ruthless and barbaric as any drug dealer in South America, a point that was driven home one day by a phone call I got from a Senegalese man named Kahn who had been trying for weeks to sell us diamonds. He was in the car, he said, en route to our room at the Solar Hotel near the beach, and in the passenger seat was an overweight RUF officer I’d met briefly in a downtown café.
    â€œHe’s got a lot of good, good diamonds,” said Kahn, who handed the phone to the man before I could protest.
    â€œListen, I’m sorry for the mix-up,” I began, “but I’ve told Kahn over and over that we’re not interested in buying any diamonds.”
    The RUF man began to squeal. He told me I was a dead man for backing out on a deal that was never made. “RUF gon’ fuck you up!” he screeched before the line went dead.
    This was not the first run-in Hondros and I had with RUF smugglers in Freetown, but we were determined to do our best to make it our last. As soon as word had gotten out that two white men purporting to be journalists were interested in looking at some rebel goods, our room at the Solar had become something of a magnet for anyone trying to sell anything. We had visitors at all hours of the day and night: If not diamond traffickers, then certainly drug-dealers and prostitutes. The most avid salesmen were a hulking bodybuilder of a man who carried with him a backpack of wares—everything from thick bags of marijuana to carved wooden gimcracks—and Kahn, a skinny, crooked-standing man with a wandering eye.
    A few weeks before, Kahn had picked up me and New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks on the side of the road as we were waiting
for a cab downtown. One of us made the mistake of thinking out loud that it might be worth the investment to buy a known conflict diamond or two and test how easily we could smuggle it out of the country and try to sell it, with full disclosure of its sources, in New York. No sooner was the thought verbalized than Kahn produced a hand-printed list of the RUF diamonds he had for sale. We made it clear—or so we thought—that we really didn’t want to buy anything, especially from a cabbie we’d met only four minutes earlier, but that it might be nice to have some photos of rough goods for the archives. Kahn agreed to bring one of his sellers to meet us later at the Solar.
    It was the beginning of the end,