Murdering for diamonds

It was at Freetown Airport, which even before the civil war could be reached only with some difficulty, that I learnt that there was such a product as Johnny Walker Blue Label, about ten times as expensive as the Black Label variety. Since Sierra Leone was conspicuously impoverished and broken-down, I would have guessed from the offer for sale of this ostentatiously expensive luxury (if I hadn’t already known it by other experiences) that the country was in the hands of a rapacious and vulgar elite.

The civil war broke out soon afterwards. It seemed that the participants were determined to prove that Gerard Manley Hopkins’ line,’ No worse, there is none’, could have no application in human affairs. The spectacle of mass amputation of legs, hands and arms, often carried out by drugged, psychotic children, briefly caught the horrified attention of the world. At the time I thought — on purely general principles — that Mr Blair’s military intervention was mistaken, that what was happening in Sierra Leone was none of our business; but I now think that it was he, not I, who was right. A few hundred British troops put an almost instant end to a war that had lasted nearly ten years, and thus prevented incalculable suffering at small cost. What happens in the long run, of course, is another matter.

The author of this book, a journalist from Sierra Leone, tries to explain a conflict that, from a distance, seemed meaningless. The rebel group, the Revolutionary United Front, led by an embittered, semi-literate ex-soldier called Foday Sankoh, had no discernible political programme beyond hatred of the regime in power and a desire to take over. It committed terrible atrocities against the very people it was claiming to liberate, often with the connivance and participation of the country’s official but utterly disorganised and corrupt army.