On 29 and 30 October 2010 in The Hague, hundreds of experts, lawyers and academics met for a conference held by Open Society and the International Criminal Court on Pillage of Natural Resources. All the participants stressed the importance of punishing perpetrators who committed pillage, which is recognized as a distinct crime by the Geneva Conventions, the Statute of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), the International Court for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Court (ICC).
While the world witnessed the tragic visible consequences of the other many war crimes in Sierra Leone, whether it was the child soldiers, the bush wives and victims of sexual slavery, the amputees or those forced into slavery to mine for diamonds, the crime of pillage was also prevalent and the country is still suffering the consequences of thousands of rough diamonds that were stolen from the mines of Sierra Leone and sold abroad. Sierra Leone and its citizens still pay the price of this pillage, which fuelled the war and allowed the rebels to continually remain well armed as late as mid-2001. In short, a country and its people were stolen from.
Therefore it was legitimate to expect that the Prosecutors of the SCSL would prosecute specifically the exploitation of Mineral Resources from the diamond mines in Sierra Leone and indict not only those who extracted and smuggled the diamonds out of Sierra Leone, but also those who sold them in Europe and made their fortune with them.
Today, as we are only months away from a verdict in the last case of the SCSL, we are forced to make this bitter assessment: While the SCSL Prosecutors based one of their theories of joint criminal enterprise (which is not a crime but a mode of liability) on the exploitation of diamonds, they never indicted anyone specifically for the pillage of mineral resources, and none of the ones who were in charge of selling the stones outside Sierra Leone and Liberia were ever indicted. The only form of pillage which has been prosecuted by the SCSL has been the theft of private property of civilians. Of course there are many explanations for this, not least of which was an international community that was supportive in rhetoric of comprehensive justice but put few resources or effort into supporting prosecutions of the economic actors involved in the conflict including diamond traders and certain arms traffickers.
What can still be done to remedy this regrettable state of affairs? As the international court in charge failed on that regard, our hope now lies with national courts. Many National authorities in the Western world have jurisdiction, and therefore could, and should prosecute some of the foreign perpetrators who smuggled the stones out of this continent. Likewise, the criminal courts in Sierra Leone should start thinking about prosecuting some of the foreign actors who are responsible for pillage in the districts of this country.
Even if it is unlikely that these proceedings would give back to the State of Sierra Leone the thousands of rough diamonds stolen, it would be an important step against impunity in Western Africa and the continent as a whole. Punishing those who acted sometimes behind the scenes, in the shadow of economical transactions, is as important as punishing those who pulled the trigger or wielded a machete. For whether it was a civilian’s private property or the riches of this country, Sierra Leone was stolen from and this injustice remains. Sierra Leone today still bears many scars of the war. The international community has acted to address some of these. But this great theft of the country’s natural resources shamefully remains unaccounted for.