Editor’s Note: This story contains descriptions of graphic violence that may not be suitable for some readers.
The main French-language Belgian newspaper, Le Soir, headlined “Taylor is rich… thanks to Antwerp” on the front page of its January 12, 2008, issue, adding that “The trial highlights the advantages gained from diamonds.”
Hearings in the trial of former Liberian president and tyrant Charles Taylor started on January 7 before the International Penal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. The 11 charges against Taylor are a summary list of almost everything one man could do to another in the category of crimes against humanity, including:
• Personally terrorizing the civilian population,
• Committing murders,
• Raping,
• Sexual enslavement,
• Causing people to undergo inhuman acts,
• Mutilating,
• Enlisting children of less than 15 years old in his armed forces,
• Kidnapping people,
• Burying people alive,
• Condemning people to forced work,
• Scavenging,
• Engraving on prisoners’ chests and backs with knives the initials RUF for Revolutionary United Front,
• Plus all possible trafficking.
To indicate the scope of Taylor’s butchery, the Flemish newspaper Gazet van Antwerpen reports that during Taylor’s reign of terror from 1989 to1999, 400,000 people were killed.
No Mercy for Antwerp“It’s thanks to the traffic of diamonds that Taylor built a great deal of his fortune and found the necessary means to set up his totalitarian regime,” says Le Soir. During the first days of the hearings, a report released in April 2007 by Ian Smillie, a Canadian diamond expert long associated with the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Partnership Africa Canada (PAC), was added to the evidentiary files by the Dutch Court. A representative excerpt of Smillie’s report said: “Between 1990 and 1999, Belgian imports of rough diamonds from Liberia totaled 5 million carats a year, which is equivalent to 24 times the country’s yearly output. It’s obvious that almost none of the diamonds declared as Liberian and exported in vast quantities to Belgium during the 1990 to 1999 period were of Liberian origin….During the 1990s, the import of massive volumes of so-called ‘Liberian’ diamonds constituted a major case of fraud.”
A week into the hearings, the court concluded that the import figures from Belgium and the export figures from Liberia were not reliable. Smillie told the court, “The Belgian figures are worthless as an indication of diamonds mined in Liberia or Sierra Leone.” When the defense attorney asked Smillie, “How many of these diamonds actually arrived in Antwerp and Tel Aviv through Liberia, or were only listed as coming through Liberia?” he just answered, “We can’t know. Before the Kimberley Process (KP), the diamond industry was confused about the terms‘country of origin’ and ‘country of provenance.’”
In either case, the bottom line is that Antwerp was wrong. Either the city was housing a huge fraud, or it was incompetent to such an extent that a 2,400 percent mistake was possible. Smillie added that Mr. Dunbar, the Liberian minister of mines, agreed that the Liberian figures couldn’t be accurate because “there was barely any legal mining taking place in Liberia.”
By 2000, Smillie, together with Antwerp diamond expert Johan Peleman, was reporting that between 1994 and 1999, Belgian imports of diamonds from the Ivory Coast and Guinea were respectively thirteen times and twice as big as each country’s average yearly outputs. In other trial testimony, another witness, Abu Keita, described links between Taylor’s inner circle, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), and diamonds. The witness said there were four strategic diamond areas in Kono that the RUF controlled in Sierra Leone where full-scale mining, alluvial mining and mining with divers were conducted.
Furthermore, Smillie suggested back in 2000 on the internet site of the Canadian International Development Research Centre that the “issue raised doesn’t concern only diamonds, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take care of diamonds.” This suggests that all natural resources were used to finance Taylor’s crimes, not just diamonds and not only diamonds through Antwerp.
Being a Diamantaire TodayEven if some aspects of the issue are quite different from that suggested by the Belgian press, what about the moral issue? How could diamantaires react to Alex Tamba Teh’s story recounting how his Commanding Officer Rocky, after he personally shot 101 defenseless adults with a machine gun, instructed his Small Boys Unit (SBU) — all boys 15 years old or younger — to behead all the corpses. One of the youngest members of the unit would not comply and began crying. “They just put him on a beam of wood, cut off his left arm, then his right arm, then his left foot, then his right foot and only then did they throw him in the toilet hole, while he was still screaming and asking why,” Tamba The testified.
In response to the news coverage of the trial and the mention of Antwerp in trial testimony, André Gumuchdjian, president of the Belgian Association of Traders of Polished (BVGD), comments: “We’re obviously shocked by the revelations that are coming out of Charles Taylor’s trial. We cannot tolerate any act that might allow such horrors to happen. However, these events date back approximately ten years, and are a thing of the past now. Antwerp initiated and implemented drastic measures to stop the infiltration of conflict diamonds. One should remember that 99 percent of diamonds today bring, in well-governed countries, real wealth to the populations. Thanks to diamonds, schools, roads and hospitals are being built in Botswana and Namibia, for example.”
Kurt Einhorn, president of the VHRD (Belgian Association of Traders of Rough), says: “Accusing Antwerp alone is pure unfounded allegations. Taylor, a first-hand thief, has most probably been stealing over and over, and there’s no doubt that he has been selling to the highest bidder, regardless of origin — be that Antwerp, Mumbai, Tel Aviv or New York– based companies. Globally, the industry didn’t know what was happening. In any case, we’re against blood diamonds, and we were among those who founded the Kimberley Process. Thanks to the KP, the percentage of blood diamonds in the trade has dropped from 4 percent to not even 0.5 percent.”
In a Le Soir article, Johan Van Hecke, a member of the Flemish Liberal Democrats in Belgium, was quoted as saying, “This diamond fraud belongs to the past and Belgium has since then played a leading role in the KP implementation. However, one could go further in that [positive] direction and use the evidence that will be gathered during the trial to improve KP’s efficiency.”
“This is just one single article,” says Philip Claes, spokesman of the Antwerp World Diamond Centre (AWDC). “Fortunately, the trial and the role of diamonds don’t get that much attention in the media. As an exception to this, Le Soir wrote this without even verifying the content of it by talking to AWDC. The journalist who wrote the article was immediately invited to Antwerp to see for himself the way Antwerp diamond dealers do business and to see all the control mechanisms that are in place. After his visit, things will be put in the right perspective. The entire diamond industry has put a lot of effort into the KP, and Antwerp has, too. It cannot be that the media keeps blaming the diamond industry for these pre-KP events, and never even mention other natural resources that were abused. After all, we were the only industry that really acted to prevent further abuse.”
Article from the Rapaport Magazine - February 2008. To subscribe click here.