Liberia, Sierra Leone and Conflict Diamonds

Sierra Leone’s civil war, from 1991 to 2002, became the defining conflict-diamond case. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) funded itself largely from alluvial diamonds, and a UN expert panel found that most of those stones left the country through neighboring Liberia, whose government under Charles Taylor it said was actively supporting the rebels. The UN banned all Liberian rough diamonds from 2001 until 2007, and in 2012 the Special Court for Sierra Leone convicted Taylor of planning and of aiding and abetting crimes committed by rebel forces.

The RUF and Sierra Leone’s diamond fields

Sierra Leone’s richest deposits lie in Kono District and around Tongo Field. They are alluvial: diamonds weathered out of their host rock and redeposited in river gravels, where they can be recovered by diggers with shovels and sieves. In the late 1960s the country officially exported about 2 million carats a year. By the late 1990s the official trade had almost disappeared; between 1997 and 1999 only 36,384 carats were exported through legal channels.

According to the UN Panel of Experts that reported in December 2000, the RUF started the war in 1991. Until about 1995 its diamond digging was sporadic. That year the private military company Executive Outcomes forced the RUF out of the Kono fields, and from then on the movement’s interest became more focused. By the late 1990s Kono and Tongo Field were a primary military objective, and mining had become a major fund-raising operation.

The Lomé Peace Agreement of 1999 appointed the RUF’s leader, Foday Sankoh, chairman of a new commission for the management of strategic mineral resources. The panel reported that the commission never actually met. Fighting resumed in May 2000.

The panel’s estimates of RUF diamond income ranged from as little as US$25 million a year to as much as $125 million, and it noted that De Beers had put the 1999 figure at about $70 million. Small by world standards, the panel said, but more than enough to sustain the RUF’s military activities. The Special Court later found that civilians in RUF-held areas were forced to work in the diamond mines.

Liberia’s role

The panel’s most serious findings concerned Liberia. It found that the bulk of RUF diamonds left Sierra Leone through Liberia, and that this trade could not happen without the permission and involvement of Liberian government officials at the highest levels. It reported that President Taylor was actively involved in fueling the violence in Sierra Leone. Taylor told the panel he was a close friend of Sankoh but denied unequivocally that he or his government had given the RUF training, weapons, territory for staging attacks or a safe haven.

The trade statistics were hard to explain. The panel estimated Liberia’s own production capacity at 100,000 to 150,000 carats a year, yet Belgian import records showed far larger volumes arriving from Liberia:

Year	Official Liberian exports	Belgian imports recorded from Liberia
1998	8,000 carats, about $800,000	2.56 million carats, about $217 million
1999	8,500 carats, about $105 per carat	1.75 million carats, about $247 million

Over 1995 to 1999, the panel counted 33.6 million carats said to be of Liberian origin entering Belgium. The gap illustrated a basic weakness of the trade at the time: import records captured where a parcel was shipped from, not where its diamonds were mined. Partnership Africa Canada’s study The Heart of the Matter, published in January 2000, had already set out the centrality of diamonds to Sierra Leone’s war and its links to the international trade. IMPACT, as the organization is now called, says that study led to the Kimberley Process.

UN sanctions on Sierra Leonean and Liberian diamonds

The Security Council acted first on Sierra Leone, then on Liberia:

1. Resolution 1306 (July 5, 2000) required all states to prohibit the direct or indirect import of rough diamonds from Sierra Leone, while exempting stones controlled by the government through a new Certificate of Origin regime. It also created the panel of experts. The Council renewed the ban through 2002 and into 2003, keeping the exemption for certified exports.
2. Resolution 1343 (March 7, 2001) cited the panel’s findings and determined that Liberia’s support for armed rebel groups, particularly the RUF, threatened international peace and security. Alongside an arms embargo and a travel ban on senior officials, it required states to prevent the direct or indirect import of all rough diamonds from Liberia, whether or not they were mined there. These measures took effect two months after adoption, in May 2001.
3. Resolution 1521 (December 22, 2003), adopted after Taylor left office, replaced the earlier regime but kept a ban on Liberian rough. It called on Liberia’s transitional government to build a transparent, internationally verifiable certificate-of-origin system with a view to joining the Kimberley Process.
4. Resolution 1753 (April 27, 2007) ended the diamond measures. The Council noted Liberia’s cooperation with the Kimberley Process and its progress toward meeting the scheme’s minimum requirements.

Charles Taylor and the Special Court

Taylor formed the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) in 1986, led it into Liberia in 1989 and was elected president in 1997. The Special Court for Sierra Leone was set up under an agreement between the United Nations and the government of Sierra Leone, signed on January 16, 2002, to try those bearing the greatest responsibility for serious crimes committed in Sierra Leone since November 30, 1996.

The key dates in his case, from the court’s own records:

• March 7, 2003: A sealed indictment was approved. It was made public in June 2003 while Taylor was attending peace talks in Ghana.
• August 11, 2003: Taylor stepped down and went into exile in Nigeria.
• March 29, 2006: He was arrested by Nigerian authorities and transferred to the court’s custody the same day. He pleaded not guilty to all charges.
• June 2006: The trial was moved to The Hague after the Security Council found that his presence in the region was a threat to peace.
• April 26, 2012: The Trial Chamber found him guilty on all eleven counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and other serious violations of international humanitarian law, under the modes of liability of planning and of aiding and abetting crimes committed by rebel forces.
• May 30, 2012: He was sentenced to 50 years in prison.
• September 26, 2013: The Appeals Chamber upheld the conviction and the sentence.

Diamonds ran through the evidence. The Appeals Chamber’s judgment describes how an RUF guesthouse in Monrovia enhanced the rebels’ capacity to obtain arms and ammunition from Taylor in exchange for diamonds, and it found that the RUF/AFRC’s diamond mining involved the systematic commission of crimes.

Liberia in the Kimberley Process

Liberia was admitted to the Kimberley Process in 2007, after Resolution 1753. Sierra Leone had been a participant since the scheme began in 2003. Liberia’s recorded output is now modest: Kimberley Process statistics show 47,812 carats worth about $16.7 million in 2024.

The Kimberley Process itself, which grew out of the Angolan and Sierra Leonean cases (see Angola, UNITA and the Origins of the Conflict-Diamond Problem), certifies shipments of rough only. Polished goods and jewelry move under the industry’s voluntary System of Warranties. Some of the civil-society groups that helped create the scheme have since left it. Global Witness withdrew in 2011, and IMPACT, formerly Partnership Africa Canada, withdrew in 2017, both arguing that controls and accountability were too weak.

Questions

Was Taylor convicted of diamond smuggling?

No. He was convicted of planning and of aiding and abetting crimes such as murder, rape, terrorizing civilians and the use of child soldiers. The diamonds-for-arms trade formed part of the evidence of the support he provided to the rebels.

Are diamonds from Liberia or Sierra Leone conflict diamonds today?

There have been no UN diamond sanctions on Liberia since April 2007, and both countries export rough under Kimberley Process certificates. Buyers who want more than that assurance can ask suppliers about the specific source of a stone and the warranty statement on its invoice.