DIAMONDS AND WAR.

• Author: Harden, Blaine

DIAMONDS MAY SYMBOLIZE ETERNAL LOVE, BUT IN AFRICA THEY MEAN DEATH AND DESTRUCTION

At his heavily guarded headquarters in t the central highlands of Angola, rebel leader Jonas Savimbi stockpiled billions of dollars' worth of raw, uncut diamonds. At the height of Angola's civil war in the 1990s, arms dealers would fly in from Europe, and he would bargain with them using various-sized bags of glittering gems. "If the price was $22 million, Savimbi would reach down for four of those bags and two of those," says Robert R. Fowler, the Canadian ambassador to the United Nations and chairman of a UN committee that investigated Savimbi. "The arms dealers had their diamond experts, and Savimbi had his, and they would inspect the diamonds to see if they were really worth $22 million. And then they would haggle some more, and somebody would throw in an extra bag of diamonds, and off the arms dealers flew."

Savimbi used his control of one of the world's richest diamond veins to build one of the largest and best-supplied armies in Africa. Diamond money led to a sharp escalation of the Angolan civil war, which killed more than half a million people in the 1990s, and forced 4 million from their homes. Last year, Savimbi's forces nearly toppled the elected government.

In the United States, diamonds are a symbol of eternal love, the sparkle on an engagement ring. But in Africa, where 45 percent of the world's diamonds are mined, they have become tools of murder and mayhem. The stones are valuable, difficult to trace, and portable--millions of dollars worth can be smuggled in a sock without triggering an airport metal detector. In countries like Angola, Congo, and Sierra Leone, diamonds have added fuel to the fires of long-existing conflicts, and in many cases have become the very thing that armies are fighting over.

"You can't wage war without money, and diamonds are money," says Willy Kingombe Idi, who buys diamonds from diggers in Congo. "People are fighting for money."

At the bottom rung of the international diamond trade, the need to scrape up enough money to eat sends Africans like Mati Balemo clawing through the mud of a Congolese streambed. One recent morning, Balemo and six other diggers travel for three hours, first by bicycle, then on foot, to a small stream thickly canopied in bamboo and vines. On the way, a soldier armed with a machine gun demands to come along.

While the soldier watches, the diggers heap mounds of mud onto the bank, pick out the...