Conflict Diamond - Speech or Presentation Example

In the late 1990s, this trade caught the attention of the world as the protracted conflict in Sierra Leone reached its devastating climax. It is not just Sierra Leone that has suffered – diamonds have fuelled or exacerbated conflicts in Angola, Liberia, Ivory Coast, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo. These diamonds are regularly produced through the forced labor of men, women and children, or stolen during violent attacks on legitimate mining operations (geology.com).

They have, on several occasions, been the main source of funding for brutal rebel groups. Due to the huge amount of money at stake in the illegal diamond trade, bribes, threats and torture often accompany the mining. In Liberia, between 1989 and 2003, there were two civil wars which killed perhaps 250,000 people, while displacing a further 1.3 million (globalwitness.org). Former Liberian President Charles Taylor has used his diamond mines to fund a military campaign against civilians in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and is currently on trial in the International Court of Human Rights.

In Ivory Coast, a civil war was sparked off in 2002, and even now, the country remains divided, with widespread human rights violations. Sierra Leone is perhaps the worst example of what blood diamonds can do to a country. Legitimate diamonds once provided the mainstay of the government’s revenues. Gradually, as rebel groups in the east of the country gained control over the mines, these revenues were reduced to nothing. By August 1993, even before the civil war had escalated, the total revenues reaching the government in Freetown amounted to some $8,000 (Dowden, 294).

Meanwhile, in the mines, children were being sent down into tiny tunnels, while soft gravel above them regularly collapsed and buried them. The greed engendered by the illegitimate trade in diamonds led to a breakdown of traditional society. Visiting a village in 1993, Richard Dowden spoke to a local doctor who commented, ‘There is no trust – not even between these brothers who dig together. We have many killings. A lot of people disappear’ (296). Once Civil War broke out, all this worsened.

The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) ruined the country’s interior. Bankrolled by diamonds, it raided villages, killing the inhabitants or cutting off their hands. Children were forced to become soldiers, and to kill their families and take drugs. They murdered and raped their way through the country, so that, by the end of the war, it was at the bottom of the United Nations Development Index. Let us consider the alternative. If diamonds are mined legitimately, under license from a popularly-elected and accountable government, and processed legitimately, and sold legitimately, to Western jewelers who insist upon certificates confirming the provenance of the diamonds, the revenues from these sales will be fed back into the revenues of the resource-rich states.

A country currently reeling from decades of devastating war can use such revenues to build and rebuild schools, hospitals, roads, railways, and even to rebuild lives, by offering those scarred by the conflict a second chance. By taking the diamonds out of the hands of brutal militias, and into the hands of legitimate governments, we can promote sustainable development in a troubled and impoverished region. For confirmation of this, we need only look to those African countries which have managed their