Blood Diamonds Essay

Blood diamonds made a profound contribution to the rising tensions within Sierra Leone, establishing the foundation upon which civil war would thrive. These diamonds may be defined as a rough diamond traded illicitly to finance an armed struggle. For Sierra Leoneans who have lived, and survived, through the Sierra Leone Civil War (1991 – 2001) they may be remembered by the loss of limbs, constant displacement and fatality. In combination with other external factors, these diamonds triggered social, political and economic factors that may all be attributed to rise of civil conflict in Sierra before the turn of the 20th century.

The presence and sheer abundance of valuable, easily extractable diamonds, that required neither vast financial investment nor excessively advanced mining techniques, provided an incentive for the control of diamond fields, leading to increased violence in the West African state of Sierra Leone. In 1991, ex-soldier and radicalist Foday Sankoh catalysed the rise of extremist violence by exploiting Sierra Leone’s amplitude of highly sought after diamonds, with their value one of the most significant on the market in the 1990’s . With the assistance of Charles Taylor, corrupt President of Liberia, the duo established a rebel army to overthrow Sierra Leone’s government – The Revolutionary United Front – but instead, capitalized on the ease of extraction of the greatly valuable resource. The release of RUF’s pamphlet “Footpaths to Democracy” revealed its initial goals to “no longer leave the destiny of [Sierra Leone] in the hands of a generation of crooked politicians and military adventurists.” However, the years following falsified majority of the promises of ‘democracy’ in Sierra Leone as RUF forces became ...

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