Last
Friday, a 64-year old Belgian citizen, Michel Desaedeleer, was waiting to board
a flight from Malaga in southern Spain to New York. But his name registered on
a Europe-wide database of arrest warrants and he was detained by police at the
airport, according to Spain's Interior Ministry.
The accusation
against Desaedeleer, who also holds U.S. citizenship, is that he profited from
the illicit trade of "blood diamonds" during the civil war that
ravaged Sierra Leone between 1991 and 2002. But it's only in recent years that
a case against him has been put together by Belgian authorities, and it's
largely based on eyewitness testimony.
Desaedeleer is
suspected of having participated with former Liberian President Charles Taylor
and the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) led by Foday Sankoh in
Sierra Leone in a scheme to mine diamonds illegally in the district of Kono in
eastern Sierra Leone.
The warrant
for Desaedeleer's arrest was based on testimony gathered by a Swiss-based NGO,
Civitas Maxima from witnesses who were in Kono between 1999 and 2001. According
to a statement from Spanish police, the allegation is that Desaedeleer
"would have been one of the supervisors in charge of overseeing the
extraction works on site" at the end of 1999 and the beginning of 2000.
Previous
trials in international courts have established that the RUF ran an horrific
regime of enslavement and brutality at mines it controlled in Kono and
elsewhere, including amputation, rape and forced conscription of civilians and
suspected rebels, according to Human Rights Watch. But also according to
hundreds of pages of judgments issued in the Special Court.
Alain Werner,
the lawyer who helped prepare the victims' case, was previously one of the
prosecuting attorneys in the Special Court that tried Taylor for war crimes and
crimes against humanity, and was also involved in the trial of prominent RUF
members. He told CNN he had first come across Desaedeleer's name in 2006.
Werner told
CNN that Sankoh and others needed "external actors to market the diamonds
they were smuggling out to the Liberian capital, Monrovia." He said the
critical element in the complaint presented against Desaedeleer, which runs to
some 50 pages, was that former members of the RUF had sworn that he was in
Kono.
Werner said
there was no suggestion that Desaedeleer had been personally involved in any
abuses. But the complaint held that Desaedeleer was complicit in pillage as a
war crime and enslavement through his involvement in the Kono diamond mining.
Money used for weapons
A U.N. panel of experts that investigated the trade in blood
diamonds reported in 2000 that Desaedeleer first made contact with the RUF
while in Togo during the summer of 1999. Within months, according to the U.N.
panel, he and an associate had "worked up an arrangement with Foday Sankoh
which would give them authority to broker rights to all of Sierra Leone's
diamond and gold resources for a 10-year period."
The
U.N. report also said that
a letter, signed by a "Michel," "proposed that his Belgian
partner 'Charles' could hire a private jet to take the diamonds out directly
from Kono" without having to pass through the capital, Freetown.
In October
1999, a deal was reached between Desaedeleer's company, BECA, and Sankoh. At
the time Sankoh had been given the position of Chairman of the Commission for
the Management of Strategic Mineral Resources as part of an ill-fated attempt
to broker a peace deal in Sierra Leone. He was in essence Minister of Mines.
Documents
later recovered from his compound in Freetown showed that even while in
government Sankoh had been trading hundreds of diamonds illicitly. Another
document found, and cited by the U.N. experts, was purportedly a fax from
Desaedeleer to Sankoh, which mentioned a meeting with his wife, Fatou, in the
U.S.
"I
finally explained to Fatou that everything was possible, moneywise, if I could
finally meet my partners with some decent inventory," the fax read.
In an
interview with Newsweek in July 2000, Desaedeleer maintained that the contract
he signed with Sankoh was legitimate -- because at the time it had been signed
Sankoh was a member of the government.
The sums
involved in the blood diamonds trade were huge. The U.N. experts estimated that
the RUF was responsible for illegally exporting diamonds amounting to a total
value of between $25 and $125 million each year. Much of that money was used to
buy weapons on the black market -- weapons that were flown from Ukraine and
elsewhere into the neighboring countries of Liberia and Burkina Faso in
violation of international law.
It will now be
up to Belgian prosecutors to show -- if the case comes to trial -- that the
eyewitness testimony from survivors of enslavement in Kono is credible by
itself or can be corroborated by other evidence showing Desaedeleer's
complicity in the trade of illicit diamonds. The full indictment itself has not
yet been released.
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