African Nations Threatened With Sanctions

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post
1 August 2000, p. A19

UNITED NATIONS, July 31 --The United States and Britain threatened today to impose sanctions on Liberia and Burkina Faso unless those West African countries cut off military assistance to rebels in neighboring Sierra Leone.

The threat came as the U.N. Security Council began a two-day hearing on the smuggling of diamonds, the rebels' main source of revenue. The council voted July 5 to impose an embargo on diamond exports that do not go through Sierra Leone's elected government.

"The governments of Liberia and Burkina Faso . . . are fueling the war in Sierra Leone and profiting from the arms-for-diamonds trade," said Richard C. Holbrooke, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "The United States intends to support measures against Burkina Faso and Liberia unless they cease their support for the war in Sierra Leone."

Although Holbrooke did not identify the specific sanctions under consideration, U.S. and British officials said they could include denying entry visas to senior government officials, freezing assets in
the United States, blocking foreign aid and pressing for wider sanctions in the U.N. Security Council.

Senior U.S. and British diplomats accused the Liberian president, Charles Taylor, and his counterpart in Burkina Faso, Blaise Compaore, of orchestrating the rebels' strategy to preserve their own access to
Sierra Leone's diamond wealth. They said the two African leaders have supplied arms, food, fuel, ammunition and medical supplies to the rebel Revolutionary United Front, which is notorious for gang rapes and chopping off the limbs of civilians.

Stephen Pattison, head of U.N. affairs in Britain's Foreign Office, said RUF commanders regularly meet with Taylor to discuss strategy. "These meetings are either chaired by him or co-hosted in Burkina Faso with President Blaise Compaore," he said.

The accusations against the two African leaders are part of an increasingly aggressive U.S.-British diplomatic campaign to restore stability to Sierra Leone. In recent months, the rebels have challenged
the authority of a U.N. peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone, at one point holding more than 500 U.N. hostages and battling U.N. troops throughout the country.

Representatives of Liberia and Burkina Faso denied the allegations. But outside experts testified at the hearing that Liberia exports at least 40 times more diamonds than it is capable of producing domestically.

According to U.S. officials, most of Sierra Leone's diamonds are smuggled through Liberia, Burkina Faso, Guinea and Ivory Coast. The region has also become a center for Russian diamond smugglers seeking to launder illicit Russian diamonds, the officials said.

About $600 million worth of diamonds was shipped from Sierra Leone's rebel-controlled diamond region to Liberia in the last half of 1999, yielding the rebels an estimated $30 million to $125 million a year, which they have used to purchase weapons, the officials said.

"A year ago, the RUF were machete-wielding thugs," Holbrooke said. "They are now acquiring machine guns, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles and the means to shoot down aircraft. This is extraordinarily dangerous, not only for the region but for the United Nations."