Three Canadian diamond mining companies have been accused of fuelling the bloody war in Sierra Leone by providing military supplies or acting as go-between with mercenaries in order to get at the country's rich diamond resources.
The accusation was levelled yesterday in a report on the role diamonds have played in the war-torn West African country.
The report, The Heart of the Matter: Sierra Leone, Diamonds and Human Security, was funded in part by the federal government and sponsored by Partnership Africa Canada.
The three companies -- DiamondWorks Ltd., Rex Diamond Mining Corp. and AmCan Minerals Ltd. -- all strenuously deny any wrongdoing.
But Ralph Hazelton, one of the report's authors, was adamant that the Canadian companies were involved, directly or indirectly, in activities that go far beyond the diamond industry.
The companies were lumped in with the warlords and gangsters whose activities the report said are fuelling the war.
Even by the standards of African wars, the conflict in Sierra Leone has been particularly brutal. The rebels, who have been fighting the government on and off since 1991, are known for chopping off the arms of children in an effort to terrorize the local populace. At least 75,000 people have died and hundreds of thousands have been displaced. There has been a series of coups since the war started. Right now, a fragile peace has been established with the help of United Nations peacekeepers.
The accusations have been made just as the Canadian government is investigating the involvement of Calgary-based Talisman Energy Inc. in Sudan in an effort to determine whether it has helped fuel the conflict in that northeastern African country. A report by special envoy John Harker is due any day and Ottawa has threatened sanctions if it is negative.
Mr. Hazelton said DiamondWorks was connected through a key shareholder, Tony Buckingham, to the South African mercenary company Executive Outcomes and to a British private military company, Sandline. Mr. Buckingham has acknowledged he acted as a liaison between South African mercenaries and African governments who wanted their services.
The report said Rex Mining president Serge Muller negotiated the purchase of engines for a military helicopter for the Sierra Leone government in November.
And it said that AmCan Minerals bought ArmSec International of South Africa, another security firm, whose owner was involved with the security industry in South Africa. He now sits on the AmCan board.
Despite their activities, none of the companies has been able to mine in Sierra Leone for some time because of the war. The report hinted that they had taken advantage of generous Canadian listing requirements to raise money on Canadian stock exchanges despite their lack of success in the field.
"We are not there now. We are not going there. And we are not going to hire a private army to get in there," said Allan McCaffrey, vice-president of AmCan Minerals. He said he hadn't seen the report so couldn't comment on the contents, but rejected the idea there had been any wrongdoing on the company's part.
Mr. Muller of Rex Diamond said he had been asked to buy the helicopter engines by Sierra Leonean President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah and had letters from the President and the UN Security Council, to prove it. "They asked us because they knew we were outside of the mercenary sphere," he said in an interview from Antwerp. "I would do it again."
He said he insisted on the letters after seeing what happened in 1997 when Thai banker Rakesh Saxena contracted with Sandline to send men, arms and equipment to restore the elected Mr. Kabbah to office after he had been toppled in a coup. That transaction, first revealed in The Globe and Mail, resulted in a parliamentary inquiry in Britain over whether a UN arms embargo had been broken.
Bill Trenaman, spokesman for DiamondWorks in Vancouver, said he had not seen the report and therefore could not comment.
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