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Tuesday, 18 July, 2000, 12:31 GMT 13:31 UK
Liberia's diamond links
BBC West Africa correspondent Mark Doyle reports from Monrovia on the links between diamond smuggling and Liberia's backing of Sierra Leone's rebels.
Liberia has close relations with rebels in neighbouring Sierra Leone trying to overthrow the internationally-recognised government in Freetown.
So if Liberia is smuggling diamonds and running guns to the Sierra Leone rebels, a diamond dealer seemed a good place to start looking. Riad Shour is a fully licensed, legal trader in Liberian diamonds. He believes that if Sierra Leonean gems are being smuggled, they are leaving via Sierra Leone's other neighbour, Guinea.
"In Liberia, they are always greenish-yellowish diamonds." However, there is a problem. The world's main importer of diamonds is Belgium, and the trade body there, the Diamond High Council says Liberia exports millions of dollars worth of diamonds every year, stones which experts say it could not possibly produce and must, logically, come from neighbouring Sierra Leone. The general's view I met, in Liberia, with one of the main figures in the Sierra Leone rebel movement, Major General Sam Bokarie.
Coincidentally, he was listening to the British Foreign Office Minister, Peter Hain, speaking on the BBC World Service radio about his campaign to ban blood diamonds. I asked Mr Bokarie about illegal diamond mining during his time as the rebels' military commander. "That is wrong because I was in charge up to the moment that they became convinced that Liberia was receiving diamonds selling them for arms and ammunition," he said.
"We were restricting it because the leadership had believed that if that happens then everybody would concentrate on mining and would not concentrate on war," he said. "It would be difficult for us to gain military victory over the enemy." Proof hard to get I watched a helicopter fly into Monrovia from the Sierra Leone border. This particular flight was uncontroversial, but Liberia's critics, including the British Government, say the border is regularly breached by air and by land for diamond smuggling and gun running.
However, I have obtained secret Sierra Leonean police files which record detailed allegations of the movement of guns and diamonds between Liberia and Sierra Leone. The files were obtained directly from Sierra Leonean police intelligence officers and did not appear to be part of any political propaganda effort against Liberia. However, these interesting documents remain allegations, not proof. Click here to see the first document Click here to see the second document
What is curious is that if Britain or the United States do have evidence to prove Liberia's involvement, why do they not publish it? A question I have put to Walter Greenfield, the charge d'affaires of the United States embassy in Liberia. "What we have said is that there are many reports out there that allege that the government of Liberia is involved through illicit diamonds and the flow of weapons and were concerned by them," he says. "We think that if they are not involved in this activity, they have a real public relations problem on their hands because they have to dispel this notion." Some powerful countries believe that Liberia may be gun running and smuggling diamonds. Liberian president defiant However, the Liberian President, Charles Taylor, remains his usual, confident self, challenging the west to publish evidence of any arms or diamond convoys crossing the border.
"But what we have said is, with all of the western intelligence - for God's sake. These people have satellites focused on Sierra Leone." "Could somebody please bring me one photograph of a convoy going." The Liberian president may well be doing what Britain says, but on the current available evidence, he may well, get away with it.
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