Blood and Diamond

Diamonds are forever" it is often said. But lives are not.We must spare people the ordeal of war, mutilations and death for the sake of conflict diamonds." (Martin Chungong Ayafor, Chairman of the Sierra Leone Panel of Experts)

Dear my beloved readers, have you ever seen watching a Blood Diamonds movie? the great movie that is played by Leonardo Dicaprio as a main actor.

Blood Diamond movie particullary tells about the bad condition and situation in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone become one of the most of emergency area in Africa. The existence of internal conflict in Sierra Leone has fuelled by the combination of their richness of its natural resources, mismanagement and the greedy who is control it.

Diamond: Blessing and Curse in Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone becomes one of country which diamond is abundant, and these diamonds has create a great conflict and human rights violation where over 50.000 people havebeen killed, and over one million people having beem displaced. It has made United Nations General Assembly taking up this problem into their agenda and and adopted a resolution on the role of diamonds in fuelling conflict, breaking the link between the illicit transaction of rough diamonds and armed conflict, as a contribution to prevention and settlement of conflict (A/RES/55/56)

According to definition of Conflict Diamonds from United Nations, conflict diamonds are diamonds that originate from from areas controlled by forces or factions opposed to legitimate and internationally recognized governments, and are used to fund military action in opposition to those governments, or in contravention of the decisions of Security Council.

While the conflict diamonds in the Sierra Leone, at the first time is happen when the rebel group ( Revolutionary United Front/RUF) have called the various government corrups and accused them do the mismanagement of diamond and mineral reseources. The Rebel themselves, then have commited abuses at civilians. People have been raped, amputated, torture, and more. At the first time, RUF may have started from respectable aims, but time after time, they themselves have been corrupted and attracted others who see the RUF as a way to get at the diamonds an profit from it.

In the other hand, this conflict has been escalated by the involvement of multinational corporation that had concession to mine diamonds offshore. In its attempt to mop up supplies everywhere in the world, it is virtually inconceivable that the company is not, in the way or another, purchasing diamonds that have been smuggled out of Sierra Leone.

Africa, the area that actually can be welfare because of its nature become failed to build natural resources for their society. The problem of Sierra Leone Conflict is not the only one. The problem of mismanagement oil in Nigeria and the other African country, Timber in Liberia has created a mass human right violation. That is there is a perception that oil and natural resources is tichker that blood.