World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [78]
Sierra Leone attained independence in 1961. By that time the Lebanese already controlled most of the country’s modern commerce, including the diamond trade, and were the objects of enormous popular resentment. In a familiar pattern, there followed a period of anti-Lebanese, anti-market policies in the name of the indigenous African majority. Restrictions were placed on Lebanese economic activity, and persons of “European or Asiatic origin,” which included Lebanese, were denied citizenship. “Africanization” and nationalization were in the air, and both markets and the Lebanese, less than 1 percent of the population, were in trouble.
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The decisive backlash against democracy came in the 1970s, when the populist president Siaka Stevens, a mild socialist in his early years, did an about-face. He decided that capitalism—more specifically, piggybacking on Lebanese wealth and entrepreneurialism—was the best way to outmaneuver his political rivals and cash in on his country’s enormous diamond resources. An alliance with the Lebanese, however, was not an option democratically available. In 1971, therefore, Stevens declared a “state of emergency,” stamped out political competition, and formed a shadow alliance with five economically powerful but politically vulnerable Lebanese diamond dealers who had extensive access to international markets. Stevens also invited Guinean troops into the country to protect his government from political opposition. In 1978, Stevens officially turned Sierra Leone into a one-party state.
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The most powerful of Stevens’s Lebanese cronies was Jamil Said Mohammed. Technically “Afro-Lebanese”—his father was Lebanese, his mother was African—the wily Mohammed has always been seen as “basically Lebanese,” perhaps because he was educated in Lebanon, married to a Lebanese wife, and steeped in Lebanese contacts. Mohammed began his climb to multimillions by buying a truck for $500 and transporting rice, ginger, and groundnuts to the country’s commercial centers. During Sierra Leone’s 1955 diamond boom, Mohammed, along with a handful of other Lebanese, won the race for instant riches, eventually operating as a dealer in the “diamond towns” of Sefadu, Yengema, Nimikoro, and Njaiama. By the late 1970s, after a brief jail sentence for diamond smuggling, Mohammed was one of the five wealthiest men in the country. His business interests included not just diamonds but also gold, fishing, salt, soap, cement, banking and financing, construction, import-export, and, last but not least, explosives.
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The deal struck between President Stevens and Mohammed and four other Lebanese businessmen was classic. Stevens protected the Lebanese politically, and in exchange the Lebanese—who had business networks in Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States—worked economic wonders, generating enormous profits and kicking back handsome portions to Stevens and other high-ranking indigenous officials. Stevens and key cabinet ministers also made sure that the most valuable government contracts were awarded to the Lebanese, who of course returned the favors. (Mohammed’s plush London office was decorated with a life-size photograph of President Stevens.) By the early 1980s the influence wielded by the five Lebanese was so great that they were referred to as Sierra Leone’s “invisible government.” Indeed, according to a recent Canadian study, Mohammed was in effect the country’s “co-President” during the seventies and eighties. Virtually nothing from the country’s vast diamond wealth went to Sierra Leone’s indigenous majority.
Needless to say, these policies did not endear President Stevens or the Lebanese to the Sierra Leonean people, who saw a handful of “outsiders” siphoning off the wealth of the nation at the expense of the country’s development. After Stevens, other autocrats followed, each one in turn complying with Western advisers, courting foreign investment, and allying themselves flagrantly with the Lebanese plutocrats. It was widely known that these plutocrats paid no taxes and lived opulent