Blood Diamonds Greg Campbell: Tracing the Deadly

Blood Diamonds

Greg Campbell: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World's Most Precious Stones. New York: Basic Books, 2004. 251 pp., notes, index.

Greg Campbell is a freelance journalist and the editor of the Fort Collins Weekly, whose works have previously appeared in Christian Science Monitor, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a number of other magazines and newspapers. Campbell made several visits to a war-torn African country of Sierra Leone to trace the path of the most visible symbols of love and marriage: diamonds. What Campbell uncovered was the story of human greed, civil wars, brutality, amputations, mutilations, illegal arms trade, shattered lives, millions murdered and tortured, governments overthrown over and again, children forced to become cold-blooded soldiers, terrorist organizations funded by the gemstone trade, and other dark sides of the diamond industry in the horn of Africa. Campbell argues that the little shiny precious stones we so love to wear or present to our loved ones as gifts are not as pure as they seem to be. The jewelry worn by many people in the world, he argues, "was brought at the expense of innocent and mutilated Africans who will never be able to wear jewelry of their own" because many of them had their limbs and arms amputated in the process of horrendous diamond mining and selling (p. xxv).

Sierra Leone is around the size of the Colorado state and is located in West Africa. The government in the country has become so dysfunctional that other than carrying a geographic name, Campbell writes, Sierra Leone can hardly be called a country. Poverty and misery are endemic in the country, warlords and other armed gangs set their own rules, severely punishing anyone who dares to oppose them. The country comes at the very end of the United Nations' Human Development Report. Life expectancies in the country are among the lowest in the world: forty three for men and forty eight for women. The infant mortality rate is one of the highest in the world: 146 deaths per 1,000 live births. The governments have gone through repeated coups and political assassinations, and the never-ending armed conflict has displaced eighty percent of the country's five million people. In the midst of such lawlessness and human misery, Campbell explains in the book, it has become easy for warlords, both local and from neighboring countries, to exploit the defenseless citizens in brutal working conditions, while plundering the wealth of the country.

Blood Diamonds begins with the story of a villager named Dalramy whom Campbell had a chance to interview in 2001. Dalramy had his both arms amputated by a machete-wielding teenage soldiers employed by the Revolutionary United Front [RUF] in 1996. The RUF is an armed group that in early 1990s began as a peasant revolutionary movement but after invading Sierra Leona from the neighboring Liberia, began to control the illegal diamond mining and trading. The RUF wrecked havoc in the country, instilling terror and fear to the people of Sierra Leone. In 1996, the RUF conducted its "Operation Clean Sweep" in which Dalramy and hundreds of other villagers had their arms and limbs amputated by RUF soldiers whose purpose was two-fold: pacify the villagers in order to secure workforce who would work in slave-like conditions, and scare away the villagers who lived close to diamond-rich territories. In response to Sierra Leone President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah's plea for peace in the same year, the RUF started dumping dismembered body parts of their victims on steps of Tejan's presidential palace. The RUF, however, is not alone in inflicting so much pain on Sierra Leoneans, but one among other three groups who have been almost "indistinguishable in their tactics of atrocities" (p. xx).

Campbell argues that the story of "blood diamonds" does not end in Sierra Leone and its neighboring countries. The list of participants in this illegal business include corrupt customs officials, Russian and Israeli businessmen who supply smuggled Soviet weaponry to all warring factions in Sierra Leone, Lebanese and South African merchants involved in the trade, De Beers Group (the diamond mining company that controls most of the diamond industry and uses all kinds of deviousness to make an impression that the diamond industry is clean and pure), members of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah as well as Al-Qaeda who used their revenues from illegal gemstone trade to finance September 11 attacks on the United States, and a host of willing -- and largely uncaring -- customers of the finished products eighty percent of whom happen to be American citizens. Once the diamond is mined in Sierra Leone, the product is illegally smuggled into neighboring Guinea, Liberia, or Gambia, and with bribery the products get certificates indicating that they were locally mined. Then they are shipped to Belgium for cutting, polishing, and preparing for Western European and Northern American customers. The data that Campbell unearthed on diamond exports from Liberia, Guinea, and Gambia to Belgium illustrates well how corrupt the business is. For instance, it is estimated that Liberia's diamond mining capacity is around 100,000-150,000 carats annually, but Antwerp Diamond High Council records show that between 1994 and 1998, Liberia exported 31 million carats to Belgium -- over six million on average annually. Campbell charges that many governments and companies are complicit in this illegal trade as they issue diplomatic immunity and passports to those who facilitate the smooth continuation of the business.