Diamonds wars of Sierra Leone A British colony since the late 18 th

century, Sierra Leone is rich in
coffee, bauxite and diamonds, which were found there in 1930. By
1937 one million carats had been extracted and exported to Europe.
According to a recent study by the Canadian government, between

1937 and 1996 $15 billion worth of diamonds have been exported and
sold from Sierra Leone. Yet the people of Sierra Leone live on about 30
cents a day.
The DeBeers group of diamond companies have controlled the
diamond interests of Sierra Leone since 1935. Sierra Leone was
granted nominal independence in 1961. Ten years later Sierra Leone
nationalized the diamond mines—again nominally. Since DeBeers
controls the world diamond market, the national diamond industry of
Sierra Leone still had to sell its diamonds through DeBeers.
Since the 1970s rebel armies, most of them backed by the U.S. or
other European powers, have fought for control of Sierra Leone. Since
the 1990s the rebel armies have inflicted terroristic violence against
the people of Sierra Leone, cutting off limbs, raping women, killing and
displacing thousands and forcing tens of thousand of young children to
fight as soldiers.
During this period the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) took over
some of the diamond mines and used smuggled diamonds to fund their
violence. Although the actions of the RUF are no different than the
hundred year legacy of DeBeers’ violence against African people,
DeBeers calls these the “blood” diamonds—i.e., diamonds they can’t
control.
In the end who profited from the so-called blood diamonds?
The U.S. most certainly did. It enabled them to flood the diamond
market and to poke holes in the long-standing diamond monopoly held
by DeBeers, which even the U.S. had never successfully controlled. It
destabilized the entire West Africa region, making it difficult for any
genuinely progressive force to rise up in the interest of the people. The
diamond wars left West Africa wide open for another long orgy of
Western expropriation of all of Africa’s vast resources.