The Story of “Blood Diamond”

The Story of “Blood Diamond”

August 13, 2003—Eastern Sierra Leone, West Africa—Everywhere in Sierra Leone one finds evidence of their brutal civil war. It is not uncommon to see limbless grown men and children in the burned out and blown-up buildings in the capital of Freetown and throughout the countryside. Thousands of people died in Freetown alone, while up country the suffering was much worse.
Eastern Sierra Leone was totally devastated. This part of the country was the home territory of the Revolutionary United Front, the RUF. This group of armed men, women and children fought a 10-year civil war in Sierra Leone and invaded the capital of Freetown twice. It was some of the most brutal and vicious fighting seen in Africa in recent memory. Sierra Leone gained the deserved reputation as “the most dangerous country on earth.” Several foreign journalists were killed here during the war.
Though much of their agenda was certainly legitimate at the start of the rebellion, the RUF quickly gained a reputation for brutality against the very people they pledged to help. Soon stories of the amputation of limbs, drugged children killing their entire families and the destruction of entire villages began trickling out west.
Two men played important roles in the RUF. Foday Sankoh, the leader of the RUF, is said to be the man most responsible for the fanaticism of the RUF. He died while awaiting trial in August 2003. Liberian President Charles Taylor was complicit in fueling the war in Sierra Leone. He ironically went into exile in Nigeria the same month that Foday Sankoh died. Taylor, who has been charged and indicted for war crimes in Sierra Leone, is said to have gone to Nigeria with hundreds of thousands of dollars, gained from the sale of arms and ammunition to rebels in exchange for Sierra Leone diamonds.
Diamonds were discovered in Sierra Leone in the 1930s. Since then, diamonds have been a blessing and a curse for the country. On one side, diamonds have been one of the only sources of hard currency in a land of extreme poverty. On the other side, unfortunately, very little of the money made from selling diamonds in Sierra Leone is legal, and almost none of it has been used to improve the lives of ordinary people. Diamonds, gold and any other valuable natural resource that can buy guns have, in some way, fueled every war in West Africa in the last quarter century.
These diamonds, known throughout the world as “conflict diamonds” or the more descriptive “blood diamonds,” are supposedly blacklisted by the major diamond firms in capitals around the world. De Beers has recently defined conflict diamonds as “diamonds that originate from areas in Africa controlled by forces fighting the legitimate and internationally recognized government of the relevant country.” The reality is that once these diamonds are smuggled onto the market there is almost no way to know where they came from or whether they were used to buy guns to kill people.
In the diamond fields here in Sierra Leone, which are extensive and spread out over thousands of square miles of the country, tens of thousands of impoverished men and children risk their lives and health in the dream of finding “the big one.” Most of the people working in these mines have no idea what the diamonds are really worth, as they sell to middle men and therefore gain little more than a temporary monetary benefit for their families. All of them are ex-combatants of some sort—rebels, government soldiers and paramilitary fighters who once fought each other. They are now united in the diamond fields in the hopes of getting rich.
The RUF is finished now, having lost their economic base in the diamond-mining areas. Charles Taylor is gone, Foday Sankoh is dead, and the government of Sierra Leone is just as corrupt now as when the war started.
The people of Sierra Leone are a hundred times more impoverished than before the war, and the atrocities Foday Sankoh and the RUF committed will haunt this land forever.