MERERANI, Tanzania - The young miners here are known as wanapollo, Swahili for spacemen. Several times a day, they emerge from half a mile below the earth, their bodies coated in glittering graphite dust.
They are searching for tanzanite, a gem found only under a 5-square-mile patch of scrub near the base of Mount Kilimanjaro.
A few months ago, Mohammed Abubakar supported his mother and eight siblings with money earned from mining the blue-violet stone. But since Sept. 11, reports that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network controlled a chunk of the tanzanite trade have sent the price of the gemstone down about 70 percent, slashing his earnings.
U.S. retailers Tiffany & Co. and Zale Corp. and the QVC television shopping channel, which together sold about 80 percent of the tanzanite, have suspended sales, saying they didn't want to be associated with bin Laden if allegations regarding his links to the stone are true.
Tanzanite had become one of the most popular colored gemstones in the United States, thanks to jewelers who promoted it as less expensive and bluer than sapphire.
"Soon, these stones are going to be as valuable as concrete," Abubakar grumbled to a reporter.
Abubakar's economic pain demonstrates how the U.S. war on terrorism is being felt across the globe - from travelers at international airports to poor miners in Tanzania's hinterlands.
Mererani has become a town filled with recrimination and questions: Did an influential Muslim cleric urge believers to sell stones to people now suspected of links to bin Laden? What role, if any, did a wealthy tanzanite dealer play in funding al-Qaida? And most important, can tanzanite survive the taint of bin Laden?
Tanzanite's links to bin Laden were suspected long before Sept. 11 but drew little attention. During the trial last year of four men accused of bombing the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 1998, a prosecution witness testified that al-Qaida operatives fattened the terror network's coffers by trading in commodities including animal hides, sugar and tanzanite.
Federal prosecutors alleged that "Tanzanite" was a code name for bin Laden's personal secretary, Wadih el-Hage, who was convicted by a New York federal jury for his role in running bin Laden businesses that were used as fronts for terrorist activities during the mid-1990s.
