DIAMONDS AND WAR.

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 big rocks, and sift through what's left. They are driven by the dream of one stone that will change their lives. In three years as a digger, the biggest diamond Balemo has ever found weighed 2.16 carats. In the U.S., it could have sold for as much as $10,000. Balemo got $800, which he split with five fellow diggers.

After Balemo has been sifting for an hour, he finds a diamond, the first in nearly a week. He pops it in his mouth to clean it and then shows off a shiny white stone half the size of a raisin. A friend guesses it will fetch $20. Then the soldier with the machine gun comes over and takes it. He folds the stone into a scrap of paper and stuffs it into his chest pocket.

In Congo, the guy with the gun gets the diamond.

Elsewhere, even in more sophisticated operations, the rules are roughly the same. In 1996, the Angolan army captured the rich Catoca diamond mine from Savimbi's Unita guerrillas. Today, about 300 armed guards, most of them former Angolan soldiers, stake out a fortified perimeter around the mine.

Although Unita soldiers had been chased away from the mine, they remain in the area, terrorizing the local citizens with hit-and-run attacks. The United Nations finally banned the sale of Unita diamonds in 1998, but with limited success. Experts estimate that the rebels still sell $80 to $150 million worth of stones a year.

There is no UN embargo on diamonds from Congo, where the hunger for looted diamonds is a major reason why six neighboring countries have sent soldiers to fight in the civil war there. Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe have sent troops to protect the government of President Laurent Kabila. The rebels trying to overthrow him can count on Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda.

Together, the armies have shattered much of the economy of eastern Congo. Kisangani, once a thriving port on the Congo River, has become a ghostly ruin. The streets are empty of cars, the textile plant is closed, and there is hardly any water or electricity left.

But the diamond business is thriving. Garishly painted storefronts shout the names of diamond buyers like Mr. Cash, and Jihad the King of Diamonds. One store bears an image of Rambo, his machine gun replaced by a shovel. Inside the shops are hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of stones. The war swirling through the region, says one diamond buyer named Papa Ben, is "only about the riches of this country."

In Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, the surgeons are frantic. Scores of men, women, and children, their hands partly chopped off by machetes, have flooded the main hospital. Amputating as quickly as they can, doctors toss severed hands into a communal bucket.

The Revolutionary United Front, a rebel group, was trying early last year to conquer Freetown and the surrounding diamond fields. Chopping off limbs was their trademark strategy. As word got out of their approach, people fled. In the 1990s, the rebels chased half the country's population of 4.5 million out of their homes. Half a million fled the country.

According to several human rights groups and diamond experts, most of Sierra Leone's diamonds are smuggled into neighboring Liberia, where they can then be sold in the international diamond market.

Diamonds need not lead to horror. Botswana, the world's largest diamond producer, is one of the most stable and prosperous countries in Africa. The diamond industry there accounts for two thirds of government income. Botswana has a long tradition of democratic decision making, and its leaders have built a nation devoted to improving the lives of its people, investing in roads, schools, and clinics.

"Diamonds are not devils," says Terry Lynn Karl, a Stanford University expert on developing countries. "What matters is that there be a tradition of good government and compromise in place prior to the exploitation of these resources."

Putting an end to diamond smuggling and the war it breeds will not be easy. Officials at De Beers, a South African company that controls two thirds of the world's wholesale diamond business, declared in March that none of its diamonds would come from rebels. But about a third of the diamonds imported into the U.S. don't come from De Beers.

A bill now in the U.S. Congress calls for banning the sale of diamonds unless they have verifiable documents proving their country of origin. "The world looked the other way in Angola for most of the 1990s, while revenues from diamond sales were used to butcher innocent civilians," says U.S. Representative Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), one of the bill's sponsors. "We should not stand by as the same thing happens in Sierra Leone and Congo."

But the diamond industry calls the proposal unenforceable. "There is no way to tell where a diamond comes from," says Eli Haas, president of the Diamond Dealers Club of New York. And although De Beers is "actively pursuing" new laser technology that would in effect fingerprint diamonds, the system could take years to develop.

Few Americans are likely to be influenced by Africa's misery as they prepare to buy the stone that is considered essential to an engagement. On a recent Sunday afternoon, Tracy Scholl, of Suffolk County, New York, stands with her fiance, Mike Sabatino, at an engagement-ring counter in New York City's diamond district.

"I want to say that I would not want a diamond because of that stuff in Africa, but I guess that's not really true," Scholl says. "My not buying a diamond is not going to stop what is going on over there."

A LEGACY OF WAR

Emerging from the shadow of often brutal rule by European countries in the decades following World War II, Congo, Angola, and Sierra Leone have been more or less embroiled in war and dictatorship ever since. Here's the current situation in each:

CONGO: In 1997, rebel leader Laurent Kabila drove the corrupt Mobuto Sese Seko from power with the help of Rwanda and Uganda, but Kabila quickly turned repressive like his predecessor. His alliance with Hutu rebels responsible for massacres of Tutsis in neighboring Rwanda led Rwanda and Uganda to send troops to overthrow him. Angola, Chad, Namibia, and Zimbabwe have entered the fray in support of Kabila. The UN voted in February to send a peacekeeping force, but so far no troops have actually arrived.

ANGOLA: During the Cold War, Angola allied itself with the Soviet Union; a rebel group called the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) with the U.S. With the Cold War over, former Communist leader Jose Eduardo dos Santos won national elections, but Unita forces rejected the results and attacked the government. A 1994 peace treaty has been violated repeatedly.

SIERRA LEONE: A rebel group called the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) ousted the country's elected president, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, in 1997. Nigeria and other countries restored Kabbah to power in 1998. The war has mostly been a battle for money and power. At one point during its rule, the RUF offered to give up power for a payment of $46 million. A 1999 peace treaty ended fighting for now, but the RUF still controls about half of the country. A UN peacekeeping force is slowly taking control of rebel areas.

With reporting by New York Times reporters ALAN COWELL in Zambia and Belgium, 1AN FISHER in Congo, BLAINE HARDEN in Angola and New York, NORIMITSU ONISHI in Sierra Leone, and RACHEL L. SWARNS in Botswana.