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Blood from Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror - Hardcover

Farah, Douglas

 
9780767915625: Blood from Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0767915623 ISBN 13: 9780767915625
Verlag: Broadway Books, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Identifies an underground network of financial supporters who support Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, describing the ways in which terrorists have obtained money, false credentials, and safe passage for decades through a web of commodities, transfer systems, charities, and sympathetic bankers around the world.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DOUGLAS FARAH spent seventeen years working as a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post and other publications and served as the Post’s West Africa bureau chief. Currently a member of the Post's investigative reporting team, he lives in Takoma Park, Maryland.

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CHAPTER ONE: Blood from Stones

I was doing my monthly expense reports at the Washington Post's West Africa bureau, based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, on September 11, 2001. From Abidjan I covered some twenty countries in Western and Central Africa, traveling and writing stories on everything from wars to HIV/AIDS to politics and human interest stories. A friend called in the middle of the afternoon and asked if I was watching television. No, I laughed, I was doing my bookkeeping so I could get to my 5 p.m. tennis date. She urged me to watch, saying something very bad had happened. Stunned, I turned on CNN and watched as events unfolded.

In the following days the foreign desk at the Post was interested in anything and everything related to terrorism, but I didn't see how my beat, covering largely poor and obscure West African countries, fit into that. I knew thousands of Lebanese lived in West Africa, controlling much of the commerce and monopolizing the diamond trade. I also knew that most of the Lebanese community was Shi'ite Muslim but that there was also a sprinkling of Christians. My grandfather, a Christian born in Damascus, Syria, had migrated to the United States in the early 1900s. He was part of the same exodus from what was called Greater Syria that landed many Lebanese on the coast of West Africa.

From the beginning of my time on the beat I had heard rumors that radical groups from the Middle East used diamonds to fund their activities. But I had no idea that my beat was at the center of some of al Qaeda's most vital financial operations and that my story would land me there too.


In June 2001, all around the gutted town of Kono in eastern Sierra Leone, thousands of young men, dressed only in tiny strips of underwear and tattered T-shirts and armed with buckets and shovels, swarmed into streams and over hills of mud in search of diamonds. Working in teams, one group would dig up mounds of earth and gravel. Another group would move the mud to the round screen sifters held by others. Carefully, the gravel was washed in rivers and streams and examined for the precious stones. The difference between a piece of gravel and a rough diamond is invisible to the untrained eye.

In a frenzy of barely harnessed labor, some worked in narrow, deep pits surrounded by twenty feet of mud. Deaths from cave-ins were frequent. In the mad scramble, workers dug under the foundations of abandoned, burned-out houses, causing collapses. The intervention of recently arrived United Nations peacekeepers prevented a greater tragedy by halting the digging under the pylons supporting the only bridge that connected the region to the outside world. At the end of each day the miners, watched by heavily armed guards of the Revolutionary United Front, had to strip and wash every body cavity where a stone could be hidden.

The RUF had been founded in 1991 as part of the strategy of Libyan leader Mu'ammar Gadhafi to spread revolution across Africa. While claiming to fight to end to Sierra Leone's notorious corruption, the rebels had quickly degenerated into a brutal occupation force in parts of the tiny nation. It was an army that had neither a coherent ideology nor a revolutionary credo.

The rush on one of the world's richest diamond fields in the steaming West African tropics was spurred by strangers offering exorbitant prices for the better-quality stones. Few knew who the buyers were. The remote mining region had been under the control of the hermetic and brutal RUF since 1997, and few outsiders had been there in the previous four years. Long used to selling diamonds to outside buyers chosen by their secretive leadership, the rebel commanders on the ground didn't ask many questions. They just dubbed the new patrons "bad Lebanese," believing them to be part of the Lebanese diamond-buying network that had controlled diamond sales in that country for decades. The buyers were thought to be "bad" because they seemed to wield inordinate power and provided the rebels with large quantities of weapons in exchange for the stones.

Most of the miners were illiterate peasants, either combatants for the RUF or young men held as RUF slaves, a fate marginally better than that of their countrymen who had the misfortune to run into the rebels. Thousands of people, ranging from two-year-old children to grandmothers, had had their arms and legs hacked off by the rebels in the spasm of brutality that had rocked the impoverished nation for twelve years. Women were systematically raped and towns razed to the ground. Water tanks, electrical plants, hospitals, and schools were destroyed. The miners, handling diamonds worth tens of millions of dollars, were lucky to eke out enough rice for themselves and their families. The RUF claimed to want to build a rural, agrarian utopia and end the power of the small, ruling, urban elite. The rebels promised an end to corruption. But they were incapable of winning large-scale military victories or the backing of the people, so the RUF turned to terror to maintain order in the areas it controlled.


The RUF supervisors were not happy to see me and my driver, Issa, that June day when our Land Rover appeared in the warm tropical drizzle. It had been a long eight-hour trek from the capital of Freetown, over once-paved highways that were now overgrown by jungle, littered with burned-out vehicles, and cratered from bombing. Once the nation's main artery, the road ran through what had been Sierra Leone's breadbasket, past the abandoned fields and destroyed homes, the acres of derelict palm tree stands, grown for their palm nut oil, and overgrown rubber tree lots.

Just as the road emerged from the lush green hills onto a flat plain, we stopped beside a large group of miners near the town of Koidu. Stunned by the swarming laborers, I got out and began taking pictures.

I was among the first foreign journalists to travel by road into the diamond fields as a fragile UN-brokered peace agreement was taking hold in Sierra Leone. The agreement was monitored by 16,500 UN troops on the ground, the biggest such peacekeeping force in history. While the UN troops were fanning out across the country, a Pakistani unit had helicoptered into Kono just a few days ahead of me and was still setting up its camp.

Vehicles of any sort were rare on the strip of potholes turned to mud that passed for a road to Kono. As we ground our way through the low hills and broad, shrub-covered savannah, the sight of our mud-covered jeep brought all activity to a halt. Children would point and shriek in amazement "Oputu," meaning "white man," at me as we passed. Hardly a house had been left standing, and the few people who remained in the area during the war looked gaunt and haunted.

I barely had time to take off the lens cap after we stopped when a young man in wraparound shades and an AK-47 assault rifle slung over his shoulder yelled at me to stop. Yelling in Krio, the patois spoken across Sierra Leone, the boy kept pointing and grabbing my arm. My driver Issa translated. Just down the road an RUF officer calling himself Major Nikol, wearing a denim vest and red baseball cap, sat at the foot of one of the few trees still standing. One of his young bodyguards held an umbrella over his head. The major had ordered us brought to him. He demanded to know who I was and why I was taking pictures. He scowled when I told him I was a reporter for the Washington Post. "During the war we took journalists like you into the bush and they did not come back," he said in a heavily accented English laced with Krio. As he spoke in a rumbling, deep voice, he drew one of his enormous, callused fingers across his throat with a thin smile. "But now that we are having peace, you are welcome." However, he said, pictures were not.

He proudly...

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Verlag
Broadway Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767915623
ISBN 13 
9780767915625
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
288
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