After all, diamonds are forever. Aren't they?

[Marines 0]

Did that rock on your significant others finger cost someone their hands, or perhaps, someones life?

Quote[/b] ]Blood Diamonds

Illicit diamonds make fabulous profits for terrorists and corporarations alike. The trade illustrates with the hard clarity of the gem itself that no matter where human rights violations occur, the world ignores them at its peril.

In April 2001, when Jusu Lahia was 15 years old, he was wounded by an exploding rocket-propelled grenade. A lieutenant in Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front (RUF), Lahia was picked off during a battle in one of the most remote corners of the planet. He was among thousands of victims of a war fought for control of one of the world's most precious commodities: a fortune in raw diamonds that have made their way from the deadly jungles of Sierra Leone onto the rings and necklaces of happy lovers the world over.

Arms merchants, feeding on the diamond trade, bankrolled local armies and made fortunes for transnational corporations. The profits also filled the coffers of Al Qaeda, and possibly Hezbollah–terrorist organizations notorious for committing human rights violations, including crimes against humanity.

When Lahia sprawled to the earth–shards of hot metal ripped his body from face to groin, destroying his left eye– few who eventually wore the gems he fought over could even locate Sierra Leone. And fewer still could find the Parrot's Beak, a small wedge of land that juts between the borders of neighboring Liberia and Guinea, directly into the line of fire between warring rebel factions in those countries. Rebel forces of all three nations were shooting it out with one another, as well as with the legitimate governments of all three countries and with an unknown number of local indigenous militias that were fighting for reasons of their own. The baffling and intense crossfire made the Parrot's Beak one of the deadliest 50-square-mile plots of land on the planet in 2001, and when Lahia went down in a hail of exlpoding schrapnel, he likely knew that he was far from the type of medical help that could save his life.

The RUF child soldier did not suffer alone. In the Parrot's Beak in mid-2001, some 50,000 refugees from Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea were steadily dying from starvation, disease, and war wounds. The region was too hot for even the most daredevil humanitarian relief organizations.

Lahia was carried to a bare, fire-blackened hospital room in Kailahun, the RUF's stronghold in the Parrot's Beak, and dumped on a pile of hay that served as a bed. When I first saw him there, surrounded by chaos, heat, and filth, I found it hard to remember that the cause of all this suffering– thousands of doomed refugees, well-armed but illiterate and drugged combatants, fallen wounded like Lahia, and injured civilian children– was brutally simple: the greed for diamonds. Certainly, there was nothing nearly as lustrous or awe-inspiring as a diamond in the blood-stained room where Lahia was dying of a tetanus infection, next to another felled 15 year-old. Powerless to treat him, the RUF field medics had simply taped his wounds shut and left him wracked with sweats and shivers.

AMPUTATION IS FOREVER

Sadly, Kailahun wasn't the worst of it. The RUF began its jewelry heist in 1991, using the support of neighboring Liberia to capture Sierra Leone's vast wealth of diamond mines. Since then, the rebels have carried out one of the most brutal military campaigns in recent history, to enrich themselves as well as the genteel captains of the diamond industry living far removed from the killing fields. The RUF's signature tactic was amputation of civilians: Over the course of the decade-long war, the rebels have mutilated some 20,000 people, hacking off their arms, legs, lips, and ears with machetes and axes. This campaign was the RUF's grotesquely ironic response to Sierra Leone President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah's 1996 plea for citizens to “join hands for peace.†Another 50,000 to 75,000 have been killed. The RUF's goal was to terrorize the population and enjoy uncontested dominion over the diamond fields.

While the RUF terrorized and looted the countryside, thousands of prisoner-laborers, worked to exhaustion, digging up the gems from muddy open-pit mines. Many ended up in shallow graves, executed for suspected theft, for lack of production, or simply for sport.

The international diamond industry's trading centers in Europe funded this horror by buying up to $125 million worth of diamonds a year from the RUF, according to U.N. estimates. Few cared where the gems originated, or calculated the cost in lives lost rather than carats gained. The RUF used its profits to open foreign bank accounts for rebel leaders and to finance a complicated network of gunrunners who kept the rebels well-equipped with the modern military hardware they used to control Sierra Leone's diamonds. The weapons—and the gems the rebels sold unimpeded to terrorist and corporate trader alike—allowed the RUF to fight off government soldiers, hired mercenaries, peacekeepers from a regional West African reaction force, British paratroopers, and, until recently, the most expansive and expensive peacekeeping mission the U.N. has ever deployed.

Throughout most of the war from 1991 to January 2002, this drama played itself out in obscurity. During the RUF's worst assaults, international media pulled journalists out of the country in fear for their safety. Local citizens were left to fend for themselves against bloodthirsty and drugged child soldiers. Commanders often cut the children's arms and packed the wounds with cocaine; marijuana was everywhere.

Until the deployment of the U.N. mission in 1999, the developed countries also washed their hands of the situation, doing little more than imposing sanctions on diamond exports and weapons sales to the small country. These efforts did nothing to end the RUF's diamonds-for-guns trade because most of the RUF'S goods were smuggled out of Sierra Leone and sold into the mainstream from neighboring countries.

As of 2005, conflict diamonds continue to play a major role in funding terrorism, civil war, and regional conflicts throughout the world. And while various domestic and international laws prohibiting the trade and sale of blood diamonds exist, most major corporations such as De Beers, continue using back channel and third party initiatives to obtain illicit diamonds.

[mrj-fin 0]

I dont take much notion to ur post but in times there will be not nothing forever exaple the material behind of diamonds a coal atoms include nucleans that will be not forever stay on stable the time on quant physicsian calculation tells that the living time to those particles is 5.23x10^27 s.

[Sc@tterbrain 0]

I will remember both of these points as my girlfriends birthday is coming

[Dwarden 1125]

one of main reasons why industrial diamonds should ruin natural diamonds as tender ...

in moment diamonds ends with no useful price they stop use them

but thats not gunna happen anytime soon

btw. about EU ... this is just top of Iceberg of what EU screwed up, but sadly it's not just EU but rest of world too ...

[Average Joe 0]

Still dont like Kanye west

[redpride 0]

Greed and lust is mankind's hell.

[Medicare 0]

Yeah, the diamond industry is pretty full on. The price of those rocks is so heavily inflated. If all the stockpiled diamonds in the world were released into the market, they would be worth about as much as marbles. But still plenty of people fight and die over them.

Don't forget, diamonds are forever untill a housefire.. They still burn like any carbon based material.

[Daddl 10]

So what's so new about that? Many 'rebel armies' are financed by drugs, blood diamonds (or other valuable resources), and/or simply extortion and kidnapping - some are even founded with just that goal in mind: to make money.

As for Africa, Mr. Taylor and other niceties, I'd like to recommend a good book by Martin Meredith: "The State of Africa - A History of Fifty Years of Independence".