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Bling-a-ling Naomi’s whine

MUCKETY-MUCKS: Campbell beams at the 1997 gala honoring Nelson Mandela, during which thuggish Liberian strongman Charles Taylor (center) slipped her some stones. (AFP/Getty)

(AFP/Getty Images)

Poor Naomi!

Whining about the “big inconvenience” she was suffering, supermodel Naomi Campbell testified yesterday at the war-crimes trial of the former president of Liberia — who’s charged with murder, rape, sexual enslavement and recruiting child soldiers.

“This is a big inconvenience for me. I didn’t really want to be here. I was made to be here,” Campbell moaned on the witness stand in The Hague, the Netherlands, after arriving fashionably late. She sported a silver “evil eye” pendant, which is supposed to ward off trouble.

Sounding very much like the president of BP, she added, “Obviously, I want to get this over with and get on with my life.”

She had spent the last year dodging prosecutors’ requests that she appear as a witness against Charles Taylor, who met her at a dinner party. He was so enchanted that he lavished her with a handful of “blood diamonds,” stones traded to Taylor in exchange for weapons he supplied to warlords in a brutal civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone, prosecutors charged.

Under questioning from Brenda Hollis, chief prosecutor for the Special Court for Sierra Leone — and facing a threat of seven years in prison if she did not cooperate — Campbell finally acknowledged that she had received a pouch of “small, dirty-looking stones” in the middle of the night. The gift came after she attended a charity dinner at Nelson Mandela’s presidential palace in South Africa, in 1997, at which Taylor was also present.

But she insisted that she could not be 100 percent certain from whom the gift came because it contained “no explanation, no note” and that receiving gifts from strangers was no big deal for her.

“It is not abnormal for me to get gifts,” she bragged. “I get gifts all the time, sometimes in the middle of the night.”

On that night in September 1997, Campbell, a British citizen, said she was asleep when two men knocked on her door and “gave me a pouch and said, ‘A gift for you.’

“I opened the pouch the next morning when I woke up. I saw a few stones in there,” she said. “They were very small, dirty-looking stones. There was no explanation, no note.”

At breakfast the following morning, Campbell told her then-agent Carole White and actress Mia Farrow — a fellow guest at Mandela’s dinner — what had transpired.

Campbell said she wasn’t even sure what the pouch contained until her table mates explained to her they were rough diamonds.

“They were kind of dirty-looking pebbles. They were dirty,” she said. “I don’t know, when I’m used to seeing diamonds, I am used to seeing diamonds shiny and in a box.

“One of the two [White or Farrow] said, ‘That’s obviously Charles Taylor,’ and I said, ‘I guess that was.’ ”

Taylor, who was in court yesterday, allegedly had arranged arms purchases for his murderous Sierra Leone allies, the allied Revolutionary United Front and Armed Forces Revolutionary Council.

White and Farrow are scheduled to testify next week that Campbell and Taylor were sitting next to each other during the dinner and had been “mildly flirtatious.”

“That’s not true,” Campbell testified, referring to the allegation about flirting and knowingly accepting a gift from Taylor. “I spoke in general. I was interested in Liberia.

“I had never heard of it before.

“When I am with Nelson Mandela — and I think everyone in the world feels the same way — my focus and attention is on him,” she added.

“I had never heard of Charles Taylor before, never heard of the country Liberia before, had never heard the term ‘blood diamonds’ before.”

In an interview with ABC News in April, Campbell became irate when asked about the subject and denied ever receiving the diamonds. But she later told Oprah Winfrey that she did so out of fear for her life.

She alluded to that yesterday.

“This is someone who, I read on the Internet, has killed thousands of people. I don’t want my family endangered in any way,” she said.

Campbell testified that she turned the rough stones over to a friend, Jeremy Ratcliffe, then-director of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, and told him to “do something good with them.”

But she added that Ratcliffe told her a year ago that he still had them. The charity backed this assertion in a letter presented by Taylor’s defense team, saying that it “never received a diamond or diamonds from Ms Campbell or from anyone else. It would have been improper and illegal to have done so.”

A flack for Campbell said that she could not answer any questions regarding the scandalous stones.

“I’m afraid this is not something we would be able to help with and suggest you perhaps try to speak with Jeremy Ratcliffe, who I’m sure will be able to help,” the spokesman said.

“As it was highlighted in court today, this incident happened 13 years ago and Naomi has been very cooperative in the case to date.”

Calls to Ratcliffe’s homes in South Africa were unanswered, and a message on his cellphone was not returned.

But The Guardian reported that Ratcliffe did not deny receiving the diamonds, claiming that legal restrictions prevented him from saying anything.

The British paper quoted Ratcliffe as saying the Children’s Fund “is correct” in denying that it ever received any diamonds via Campbell.

Campbell’s testimony lasted a few hours but did not include any glamour shots. The cranky catwalker convinced the court she needed special “protective measures” and won an order forbidding photographers to shoot her entering or leaving the court — or even while she was waiting in the lobby.